Art, I am so sorry to hear about your health situation.
Georg makes good sense, but as you observed, all the same, it's no fun.
You should not be surprised or concerned about your reaction, be it fear or frustration or whatever. Consider Ram Das (Richard Alpert), who spent decades as a close, even intimate, active disciple of Babaji (Neem Karoli Baba). As he writes about it, his relationship with Babaji was literally all-consuming, affecting every aspect of his life. Wherever he was, whatever he did, Babaji was always there, the presence always evident. And yet Ram Das reports that at the moment of suffering a stroke, it all vanished; none of it was there. He was alone. The “spiritual foundation” he had come to assume was permanent and indestructible, wasn't there. He reacted just as anyone else would to the physical crisis the stroke presented.
And I urge you not to feel badly about being angry or frustrated or disappointed or whatever is the right word here, at God. My experience has been that God much prefers our directing all our anger at Him or Her than directing it at others or holding it in or rationalizing it or whatever. Sometimes, we simply have to scream and shout, and whatever the issue, God is always the best target.
As for dying, please do not give up so easily. Although your situation, as you describe it, does sound serious, my experience has been that the body’s ability to stay alive can be surprisingly potent. It has its own survival mechanism, and it is often able to find a way to continue, even in the face of apparent starvation. Although in a very different circumstance than yours now, I undertook a very long, extended fast many years ago, and to my surprise, the body did not suffer. On the contrary, while of course I lost a lot of weight, I remained mentally alert and physically active, working in our vegetable garden, cutting and splitting firewood, and the like. At the time, I wondered why I wasn't feeling badly, even deathly; why I wasn't experiencing the symptoms of starvation. I concluded that the difference between fasting, which is not debilitating, and starving, which is life threatening, is that fasting is not eating while not wanting to eat, and starving is not eating while wanting to eat. Here, the body seems to take its signal from the mindset.
That said, I do not for a moment belittle the enormity of feeling which death, especially death apparently at hand, can engender. It is a very serious business. I was much younger then than you and I are now, and again, the circumstances were different. But the body’s ability to survive may be the same.
While of course death at any moment is a possibility throughout our lives – a lightning strike, a car accident, a chunk of junk from space – we tend not to see it or even consider it in youth. But the older we get, and the greater a reality it becomes statistically, the more evident it is.
I enjoy doing crossword puzzles. In our local newspaper, the weekly puzzle is often on the obituaries page. Years ago, I never took notice of that. And even if I had, virtually all of the listings would have been about people far older than I, rendering the notices essentially irrelevant to my situation. Now, I do notice them. What’s more, I observe how many of the listings are about people my age!
From the beginning, we have all known this phase of our lives was coming. Every human being who has ever been born has died or will die. And we all know it, and have always known it. Given that reality over the millennia, one would think that by now we would be far easier about death than we are.
Here’s an item I posted at
TZF’s Editor’s Desktop page some years ago. It still bounces around in my head:
There is a family of red foxes that lives in the woods nearby. Last evening, our neighbor saw one of the kits calmly trotting into her barn. This morning, she found the fox in an empty horse stall, curled up against one wall, as if asleep. But the fox was not asleep; the fox was dead. There is a wound on one leg that may have been the cause of death. The warden reports it is not unusual for foxes to select a barn as a place to die.
But here's the thing that's getting to me. All the evidence at the scene suggests this fox died calmly and easily, as if it considered death as natural a process of life as hunting field mice, feasting on wild blueberries, or prancing down a country road. There are no signs of frantic digging, scratching, wall climbing, or other desperate behavior. This fox was not trying to escape its fate, and it did not struggle against it. Instead, it seems that some time yesterday, this fox realized somewhere within that it was going to die last night, and so it found an appropriate site, and, without any fanfare, it simply did so.
Compare that performance with how any of us would have reacted to similar news. We would have fought tooth and nail! What is the difference between us and the fox? Is it perhaps that we perceive death as the opposite of life, and so we fear it terribly; and the fox recognizes death is the opposite of birth, and so takes it in stride.
For anyone in search of a meditation practice, permit me to suggest: Consider the foxes, and how they die.
As I said, although it occurred a long while ago, this incident remains present in my mind, for I still envy that fox’s apparent equanimity with death.
Please know that Nancy and I offer you and Peggy our very best wishes and love.