On Death and Dying

(reprinted from original publication on April, 2009)

Despite the recurring theme in this column, I don’t dwell on death and dying. I have many interests and activities – music, travel, biking, hiking, etc. But there are times when we all have had to deal with death and dying, and I am going through one of them now, with the final illness of a loved one. I find it helpful to write about what I am feeling, as it helps to clarify my thoughts. I have lost a mother, a father and a fiancé to cancer, and so I have been down this path before. It does not get easier, but the path becomes more familiar. Years ago I had read the seminal book on the subject, "On Death and Dying" by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. She posits five stages in the process of dealing with terminal loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Not everyone goes though these stages in the same order, at the same pace, or with the same result. The variety of the human condition is infinite – and so everyone must find their own way through it all. And acceptance for the survivors, for those who have lost a loved one, does not mean the loss goes away or somehow becomes less important; it simply can mean that you have made some peace with your loss that allows you to resume the routines of life without dwelling unnecessarily on what you have lost.

My mother, at age 18, lost her brother Sam, age 21, during World War II. She told me years later on what would have been his 75th birthday “Not a day goes by when I don’t think of Sam.” Acceptance for her did not mean burying his memory, but honoring his life and their relationship by making peace with the daily thoughts that she had about him. I have tried to learn from her experience, but with each new loss, the old wounds are re-opened. I still have the anger that my father died at age 62, and never met any of his 7 grandchildren. But he had a loving family, a wife and four children, and he came home intact from World War II and had a career that he loved, a wide range of friends, was active in the community, attended our school events, and in short had all of the things that Sam never had. That is how I have made peace with his loss.

For my fiancé, I bargained long and hard with God – I really wanted that miracle to occur, and I was offering whatever it took to make that deal. Georgette and I had dated in college, had lost touch after graduation when we went our separate ways, and then had come back together 23 years later - even though she was in Houston and I was in Philadelphia. She was recovering from her bout with cancer, and she amazed me with her attitude. She said that it was the best thing that ever happened to her, because it made her focus on what was important in life, and on making the most of every single day. In our three years together, we made that Houston-Philadelphia relationship work – but the cancer recurred, off and on, and I became familiar with chemo and radiation and the various tools used in that war. Ultimately, a brain tumor trumps them all. There was no miracle. After she died, her oncologist called me and told me “It was wonderful that you came into Georgette’s life. She would bubble when she spoke about you and your visits with each other. You gave her hope, and you gave her joy. We were amazed at the change in her condition. You gave her several additional years of life.” And she had given me much as well: she had taught me a better way to live, I had changed as a result, left my law firm, became self employed, and took control of my life. We traveled together – on a shoestring – and it showed me what could be done with just a little effort. We made the most of our time together. I realized that I had been given the miracle that I had bargained for. And that is how I have made peace with that loss.

My mother had been thrilled for me that I had found someone who made me so happy. She loved to travel and do things herself, and so we would compare notes on what we were each doing, where we were going and what we were seeing. We actually enjoyed seeing each other’s “vacation pictures” and hearing the stories behind them. She was devastated by my loss. And then six months later she was diagnosed with cancer. My mother was 80, and had lived a good long life, but she was more active and engaged with the world at 80 than people half her age. And so I went down the path again. Anger, check. Bargaining, check. Depression – that was still creeping around my door from the previous loss. In dealing with her loss, I came to recognize the traits that she had that live on in me. In considering her life and how she overcame the adversity she faced, I have found her sources of strength, and they have become my sources of strength. I have not fully made peace with her loss. I am not fully at “acceptance” with any of these losses. But they have given me tools to help deal with the next loss.

And now I need to teach my children about these tools, and how to use them, even though I have not fully mastered them myself. It is another time of supreme heartache, which is for all of us a mandatory stop on the journey through life. It is not a path I would choose, but that is not an option. We all must travel that path at times in our life. So I take that first step again, angrily searching for a reason when none is apparent, hoping for miracles, and knowing it is a long road to “acceptance” that has more downs than ups. But I am here on earth today on a beautiful spring day, and each drop of life is precious. I am grateful for that. And so I put one foot in front of the other and move forward down that path.

"Go to Meeting Clothes"

The Sunday when I cross-country skied to Meeting was the one where I fell furthest below the sartorial bar set by my Episcopalian upbringing.  I had worked up a good sweat over about two miles, and the snow was still falling, so I was soaked inside and out.  The noisy gas heater was on when I arrived, and the empty Meeting House - the heated half - was warm and welcoming.  I peeled off my layers, hat, gloves, boots, scarf, winter parka, snow pants, and sweater, and arrived at the bare minimum - running tights, socks and a long sleeved t shirt.  I had brought a dry shirt in my backpack, and so changed in to that, and then sat down at the piano.  From there I could look out the window and see the snow continuing to fall.  Alone in the Meeting, I was not much concerned about being caught in the equivalent of my underwear.  The snow had been falling all night.  There was no life on the roads during my ski over.  Who would be nutty enough to fight their way through it?  Other than me, of course. 

Ten minutes later, the door opened, and several people arrived in good cheer.  They had seen my skis outside and wondered who had skied to Meeting.  They were little concerned with my garb, and while I was slightly embarrassed to be so casually dressed, I was not going to put on my ski overalls for Meeting, and so after playing a little more while the meeting settled into silence, I found a seat on the bench closest to the heater, closed my eyes and settled in as well.  Quakers have many wonderful qualities, and one that I find appealing is that they don't give a fig about clothing and dressing up.  Simplicity in dress was one of their early guiding principles, and remains so today.  I have had people ask whether the Quakers at my Meeting wear plain grey and black clothes like the Amish or the Mennonites.  No, the modern Quaker is not obligated to choose from a smaller palette of colors.  Simplicity of dress is I think more of an attitude.  I don't worry about being fashionable and having a new suit and tie for my Quaker Meeting.  Khakis and a sport shirt will do.  I have seen George, a birthright Quaker, looking dapper in a checked sport coat, and so I have picked up several similar coats at Green Street, the Bryn Mawr consignment shop where clothes go when they are weeded out of the Main Line closets.  I like the comfortable casual look that George has, and I love the prices at Green Street.  So yes, I don't mind wearing a jacket to Meeting.  But a tie - a hated tie - a rope to wrap around my neck for decorative purposes?  Never!  When I bike to Meeting, I will bring a dry shirt and sit in my shirt and biking shorts.  I know that there will be no small knot of people after Meeting talking about my fashion failures.  The Quakers will not measure me with that yardstick.  And while others may feel the need to dress up when they go to God's house for an hour a week, the Quakers believe that God is within each of us, that he goes where we go and does what we do, all week long.  And so perhaps he judges us on our ethic and our accomplishments, and not on what we choose to wear for an hour on Sunday mornings. 

God on Piano

There is a small spinet piano in the far corner of Newtown Square Friends Meeting House. No one knows how long it has been there. It was slightly sour the first time I played it, but the keys all worked, and it was otherwise in good shape. When the friends found out that I played, they had the piano tuned for me. I am self taught, don't read music, but play by ear. I have a gift in this area - to be able to sit down at a piano and make music. It is a simple gift - I am not a virtuoso, not a genius, not a savant - just a person who can play a little piano. But at this ancient Quaker meeting house, I have found the performance hall that suits my gift.

I typically arrive early, sit down and put my fingers to the keyboard, and just let whatever is inside flow out. Sometimes it is hymn-like - sometimes New Agey - sometimes an improvisation over a familiar theme. A tune will come into my head, and so I play it, then repeat it with variations, or slow it down or change it and morph it into something else. That is much like I do when I sit at home and play. But there are certain times at the meeting house where something else happens, when I am no longer as conscious of what I am actually playing, and what is coming out is some unique thing that I have never encountered before. It is that last category that is wondrous - when the music is simply passing through me, and I am not as much the player as part of the instrument.

While I am playing, our small congregation trickles in to the Meeting. The process of adjusting yourself to the silence of a Quaker meeting is called "settling in". I continue to play quietly as people settle in. After about ten minutes, I leave the piano, the last few notes left ringing in the silence, and take a place on an old bench and join in the settled meeting.

In the traditional unprogrammed silent Quaker meeting, there is no minister to take charge of the service, no prayer book to follow, no printed program to tell you what to do and when to do it. Quakers have no minister who leads the service. Quakers believe there is God in everyone, and so there is no one person who has been chosen to lead the rest. In the silence of the meeting, some people will feel called to share a thought, a message, a lesson, with the rest of the Meeting. This is not a prepared text, but a message that comes to you, that percolates inside you in the silence, and that perhaps quickens you to share it with the Meeting. You have been called to minister to the Meeting. The person who feels that call will stand and share their message, and then sit back down. In the silence, each person decides whether that message speaks to them.

I rarely get that call to stand and share that type of message. There is still inside of me that boyhood shyness, that wish not to stand out in the crowd, that fear of public speaking that I have moved past in the rest of my life, but that is still present at certain times. But, after attending Quaker meetings over my first year, what I realized is that in fact I do get that call. When I sit at the piano in the corner, when I warm up and get lost in the history of the old Meeting House, with all of the people who have come for worship there over almost three hundred years, when I am no longer thinking about what I am playing, but looking out the window at the sky, and the music is simply flowing out of me, through the old piano, and filling up the silence … that is the message I am being led to share. When I am no longer creating the music, but instead the music is simply flowing through me, then I am the instrument, and God is the pianist.

A Patchwork Quilt at the Funeral

My first Quaker funeral was the experience that led me to attend a regular Quaker Meeting.  The man being remembered that day, Steve, was not a close friend.  He was the top executive in the office where I worked, and I was attending as much out of curiosity for the Quaker service as out of respect for the man.  The service was held at Radnor Meeting, an old meeting house, like so many of them in this area, in continuous use since 1718.  There was no body, no coffin, no box of ashes.  We were there to remember a man's life and how it influenced those he came in contact with on his journey through it.  His family was there - wife, children, brothers and sisters. The rest of the Meeting House was filled to overflowing with friends and business associates.  A Quaker elder rose to briefly explain the Quaker service - beginning with silent worship, and then followed by an open invitation to anyone so moved to stand up and share a particular memory that they had of the man.  

The silence starts loudly in a sense - the meeting becomes silent enough to hear the ambient noise - the clearing of throats, the movement on the old wooden benches, the traffic noise outside, and the hustle and bustle of your own thoughts.  But if you let yourself settle in to the silence, then you begin to lose awareness of the background noise.  You bring into focus your thoughts:  your prayers for the family, your relationship with the departed, and a sorting through of your memories to see if something is suitable for sharing, and to see whether you believe that it is something that you are called to share.  

Finally someone broke the silence, his brother, recounting some recent events but then sharing stories from their childhood:  the admiration of a younger brother for the eldest son who was the first to do everything, and did it all so well.  College friends spoke of those days - stories that made us smile or laugh.  Business associates told of tales from the office - of early days sharing rides on the commute, of things that they discovered about him on the way - that he served in the military, was the author of several books, that he was a gourmet chef.  The man did not suffer fools easily, and you did not want to be unprepared at a meeting he was chairing.  His boss had flown up from Atlanta to attend the service, and spoke about how he hired Steve - the track record of previous success, the intelligence, blunt honesty, but also a devilish sense of humor.  And people from Radnor Meeting spoke about how Steve had initially attended their meeting, but found it to be too noisy (a Quaker joke greeted with a ripple of smiles), and so left them for the quieter confines of Newtown Square Meeting.  I lived in Newtown Square at the time, and had passed that old meeting house many times, but never realized that it was still in active use.  I filed that information away for later.  

Between each speaker, there was a period of silence, as we each turned over in our minds the words of the most recent speaker.  The meeting continued for a little over an hour.  A Quaker elder brought the memorial service to a close with a last period of focused silence, to examine what we had created that day.  We had come together from all parts of Steve's life, and we had each brought pieces of memory.  We had each contributed our best ones - the ones we had examined in the silence and found to be most representative of the man we knew.  Like an old fashioned quilting bee, we had each brought a favorite part of his life with us, and one by one in the shared silence we had added our piece to the colorful quilt of his life.  

Society does not let any death pass unremarked, and through church services and memorials, we seek in some way to honor that person, to draw lessons from the life we are remembering, and to try to give some comfort to his family.  Church funeral services tend to be strings of archaic prayers and death liturgy, heavy on formula, and giving a glimmer of life only if the family or friends share a eulogy.  When the only one who speaks at a funeral is a priest or minister who did not really know the person being remembered, the main subject - the life of the departed - seems to be missing.  

The Quaker way is in my mind a more suitable and more loving service.  I did not know Steve well when I walked in that day, but I walked out with a much fuller portrait of who he was, where he came from, his journey through life, the hurdles he faced, and the love and respect he had gained along the way. His death was still untimely and tragic, and no funeral, no memorial, can take away the immediate pain of such a loss.  But by the end of the service,   the family had been given something special to take with them, a folded up quilt containing the love and respect and cherished memories of those who shared in the life of their loved one and who with them mourned his loss.  

Undying life: Prayers and readings for use at Quaker funerals, cremations and memorial meetings and for private reading

The One True Church

How many millions of people throughout history have died on the altar of the " One True Church": The church or religion with the exclusive relationship with God, and where all others are cast into whatever passes for Hell or unpleasant eternity in that religion.  The Quakers as a group don't claim that kind of monopoly on God.  Because they believe that there is God in each of us, no one group of believers can ever have that type of lock on God where only certain wise men have the combination.  There are no priests in a Quaker Meeting, no one with the exclusive right and authority to translate God's words and wishes to the rest of us.  Of course that means that we are not spoon fed a specific set of beliefs, and so must work it out for ourselves, sitting in silence for an hour and sorting through the many thoughts we have, listening intently for what stands out when we have winnowed out the external and internal noise and distractions, have settled deeply into the silence and tried to find some basic truth about our conception of God, about ourselves and our beliefs, our loved ones, our Meeting, our community, our world.  We don't have the distractions of the more structured worship - no kneeling, standing, turning pages in the hymnal and prayer book, no program to follow, no public prayers to recite, no pausing to pass the collection plate or exchange greetings of peace.  No homily, no sermon.  Just our own thoughts in the silence.

In that silence, as far as I know, none of us ever comes to the conclusion that everyone who does not believe as we do must die, or must be tortured for a bit so that they see the light and make the necessary changes to convert to our way of thinking.  No prophet has ever arisen from a Quaker meeting to announce that the Quakers are the chosen people.  There is no Quaker Pope to announce that the Protestants cannot rightly be called a "church" because "they do not accept the theological notion of the Church in the Catholic sense and that they lack elements considered essential to the Catholic Church."  Quakers do not have holy books and holy men urging them to make war on the non-believers, to strike off their heads, or to pile them one on top of another in a heap and cast them into hell.  No Quaker has ever blown himself up in a public space in order to help God to move those darned non-believers off towards hell.  While sitting in silent expectation for the voice of God, those subjects just never seem to come up. 

I was not raised Quaker - not a "birthright" Quaker as they are called.  I was raised in the Episcopal church, was a choir boy, an altar boy, and then when I went away to college, I left my religion and my spirituality behind.  Only years later, after marrying and beginning to raise children, did I feel called to begin to fill the spiritual void in my life.  I still attend services from time to time in a beautiful old Episcopal Church, with all of the ornate accoutrements of that worship:  the stained glass windows, the wood carvings, the silver chalices, the choir and hymns.  When I travel, I am attracted to the old and the unusual churches that I find along the way, and will pick one to attend on a Sunday morning away from home, without regard to its denomination.  I read the holy books of all religions - wisdom is wisdom wherever you find it.  Not only do I think that is a good idea, but in my perfect world order, I would mandate it:  every person must be educated in the principal religions of the world and their history, and must be able to compare and contrast them, before being able to "choose" a particular religion (or none at all) to identify themselves with.  For me, religion should be the product of a thought process and a spiritual nurturing, and not the happenstance of birth and geography. 

When I return from my wanderings, no one in my home meeting ever suggests the need to put me on the rack, or lecture me or excommunicate me, or condemn me to death, because I choose to explore other religions, other churches, other forms of worship.  The Quakers are not committed to a lot of rigid theology.  There is no catechism to memorize, no saints to venerate, no feast days to observe.  The great Quaker theologians and writers have never wondered how many angels fit on the point of a pin or whether the soul has an actual weight.  When God is within each of us, this is who we listen to.  He does not tell us that we are the chosen few.  He does not call us to put to the sword the non-believers.  He does not condemn to a fiery eternity those fools who do not believe as we do.  He tells us instead to go forth and serve, to live simply, to be honest in our dealings, and to work for peace.