A Death of One’s Own

The following is an adapted excerpt from Judith Letting Go: Six Months in the World’s Smallest Death Cafe by Mark Dowie, to be published February 2024 by New Village Press.

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us;

mostly they are passed on unopened.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Part of grieving is not wanting to let go of feelings we had for someone when that person was alive. Despite our efforts to hold on, those feelings subside, of course, drifting gradually into the background. And our sadness comes from watching that happen, as grief works at it its own pace, which, of course, is different for everyone, in every situation, and with every death.

Unlike the story itself, that part of the process, the lethal bereavement, never seems to end. Nor does the love felt for the departed. In fact, it becomes the driving force of our lasting grief, and ultimately, it seems, a companion of death itself. 

Having lived a long life among many friends and relatives, who have since died, I’ve watched more than a few approach the end overwhelmed with tears, panic, longing, and a refusal to let go of anything. Some pleaded for mercy, others whined about the length of their unfinished bucket list, and many saw some sort of injustice in their fate. So it was refreshing to watch someone dive boldly into her final day without a single regret, while refusing to the very last hour to say that she was dying.

Of course she was both right and wrong about that. By one definition, we are all dying . . . always. Aware of the semantic ambiguity of the word dying, Judith believed that we are all living full-time until the true dying starts. And her true dying, she believed, wouldn’t start until she took that first breath of nitrogen. Semantic subterfuge? Perhaps. I saw it as unshakable composure.

After Judith left, I literally dove, though perhaps not quite so boldly, into death, which I realized by then had, as a subject, been shoved, by me and by Western civilization, into the sterile seclusion of nursing homes, intensive care units, and other places people are sent to die out of sight. While I had lost friends and relatives, and been with dying people to the end, I really hadn’t thought that much about death itself before I met and grew close to Judith. While grieving her absence, I began reading everything I could to learn about where she might be.¹

Reading too much about death, one comes away with a lot of sophistry, and many more questions than answers. Of course, questions are the lifeblood of philosophic inquiry (and journalism), and sometimes the best we can hope for from philosophers grappling with a difficult subject are more questions, such as the following.

• Can one be completely happy while fearing death? 
• Can life or death be understood alone, absent the other?
• Is fearing death simply fearing nonexistence?
• Does death give life a sense of urgency it would otherwise lack? 
• How much easier it is to imagine the death of another than it is of our own? And which death should I fear the most, that person’s or mine? 
• Is the experience of dying in any way the experience of death, or merely the final experience of a fading life? 
• Is it easier while living to conceive of existence before birth or after death? Or are they really the same thing? 
• Can one be a spectator of death while being dead? 
• Do people who are overattached to their own personality, as some analysts claim, really have the most trouble dying?
• Is my death generically different from anyone else’s?
• Is death deterministic? 
• If so, and it’s inevitable, and followed by nothing, why bother doing anything? 
• Is nothingness preferable to suffering?

Occasionally I stroll slowly through those questions, waiting a minute or two between each of them, with hopes of learning something from an answer. Aside from being left with a bunch of metaphysical quandaries, many of which can really be understood or solved only through contemplative practice, I really didn’t learn much of importance from the process, or from philosophers, pundits, or journalists, that my all too short friendship with Judith hadn’t already taught me. And I truly don’t think I need to know more than I learned in our six months together to finish this blessedly long life I’ve been given and accept its denouement with the grace and equanimity I witnessed as Judith let go. But I am still left with questions of my own:

• Do the dark and silent eternities on either side of birth and death both give meaning to life . . . and to time?
• If we don’t fear and despise the first spell of darkness, does it make sense to fear and despise the second?

(The difference, of course, between the abyss that exists before life and the abyss that comes after it is that during the first abyss nobody misses you.)

• If there were no beginning or end to life, would time not become unlimited and essentially meaningless?
• When someone close to us dies, do we all wonder about that person’s very last moment alive, or is it just me who envisions the oncoming truck, feels the sudden chest pain, follows the bullet through the brain, the terrorist’s blade, the lungful of nitrogen, all leading up or down to a slow, or fast, descent into silence?
• Does anyone else wonder if the light we hear so much about at the end is a vision of a higher power, or simply the last light of life, which will soon burn out and fade to eternal darkness?

So many mysteries.

It seems to be easier to explore and grasp the meaning of something when it’s heard in our own language. I learned this at a young age. Though I am now a roaring agnostic, I was raised a High Church Anglican. As a boy growing up in Canada, many of the Masses I attended were in Latin, as were some religious ceremonies, even funerals. 

So when I heard a graveside vicar chant “Media vita in morte sumus,” I knew what he was saying: “In the midst of life we are in death.” But because it was in Latin, and I don’t think, or dream, in Latin, I didn’t really think much about what I was hearing. During my six months with Judith, death was pretty much all I thought about, and I’m beginning to grasp its very direct and simple meaning. It is always with us. I am living in my corpse.

Judith grew to understand, even love those realities. I’m working on them as I watch life and death merge into that greatest of all mysteries.

*   *   *

One of my readers, Doris Ober, had recently lost her husband. She told me after reading a draft of this book that it made her aware that she and Richard had somehow missed out on this conversation. “Yes, we talked about his dying and what needed to be done. But we never talked about death itself.” She said she could see how my friendship with Judith had changed me.

I try to remember myself before I met Judith. I doubt anyone else would notice a difference, but the changes in me are very real and large. However, they are internal, personal, mostly spiritual, invisible, and almost impossible to describe, particularly by someone who breaks out in hives while writing in the first person. So I think I’ll leave them be and close by simply saying:

Thank you Judith.

Whenever the wind roars through the redwoods, I’ll remember you. And having known you, I’ll never be the same. Something new has emerged within me as I’ve gradually awakened, thanks to your example, from the all too comfortable habit of avoidance. As I told you near the end, “This was not something I sought out. It happened . . . a beautiful synchronicity, with which very few of us are ever blessed.” And rarely does synchronicity work out this well.

We have been student and teacher to each other, Judith, teacher and student. I have to confess that I felt helpless at times, at both roles. And no one likes to feel helpless in the face of another’s affliction, particularly when it’s so threatening. As guide, friend, and facilitator, we need to feel in control. And at times, I have to confess, I was losing control, not of you, but of myself, and my sanity. Then, even as you fought pain and confronted death, you put me back on track.

I may not be completely prepared, Judith, but much better now than before we met. I also feel kinder for having watched you with friends and family, wiser for having heard your thoughts, more poetic and wide open to new ways of seeing, simply for having been in your presence for six all too short months. And as Wendy told you about what was happening to me when you were still alive, my heart was being opened . . . by you, of course. You also taught me how to let go—not on death’s terms, but on your own. For that alone, I will never forget and will always love you.

Yes, it was idyllic, but I like to believe that somewhere in our lives we all deserve one perfect, innocent, grace-filled friendship, and this was mine. And for it my thanks are boundless. 

And, and as I promised you, never again will I take life for granted.

If this friendship had to close the way it did, I just wish it had happened when I was younger and Judith was older. Judith was simply too young to die, and I would be so much better prepared for old age, and death, had I experienced this encounter earlier in life. That in no way diminishes my admiration for the way she died, or my gratitude for the lesson she gave me on the fine art of leaving life gracefully . . . by simply letting go.

1. It began with the classics: Lucretius, Epicurus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Camus, Heidegger, Ariès, Sartre, Dostoyevsky. Then I moved on to the thanatologists—principally Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Stephen Levine, Sogyal Rinpoche, and Sherwin Nuland. And finally some modern classics: Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Christopher Hitchens’s Mortality, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, Stephen Jamison’s Final Acts of Love, Frank Ostaseski’s The Five Invitations, Michael Hebb’s delightful but somewhat schmaltzy Let’s Talk about Death (over Dinner), Carlos Castaneda’s TheTeachings of Don Juan, and, once again, Paul Kalanithi’s heart-stopper, When Breath Becomes Air, all with hopes I would understand what I had been going through the past six months as I watched someone subtract one of the great uncertainties from her life and learn more about the fate we all face, and how her lesson fit the various ways Western philosophers, Eastern mystics, and deep thinkers from other cultures have described and dealt with it. ↩︎