In 1993 I was inspired by a television series produced by Bill Moyers entitled Healing and the Mind. The sixth episode described a weeklong retreat for people with cancer in Bolinas, California, run by Michael Lerner and Rachel Naomi Remen. I phoned Commonweal the following day and asked how I could learn more about their retreats. They happened to be offering their first workshop two months later to teach healthcare professionals how to run a cancer retreat programme and I registered.
After the Commonweal workshop, I gathered together a team of healthcare professionals who were interested in running cancer retreats, and the following year the Callanish Society was born in Vancouver. As I write this preface, Callanish has run almost one hundred weeklong retreats and has become a thriving centre for families with cancer to heal and strengthen into life, and for some, into death. It is a place dedicated to people who have been irrevocably changed by cancer, offering them retreats and programmes to reconnect to the essentials of life. We are committed to helping people talk about dying with those in their close relationships, to resolve past hurts and traumas, and to prepare themselves to die with peace and acceptance.
I hope Radical Acts of Love will give readers an increased understanding of the processes of dying, whether it be around one’s own death, or the death of a loved one. Just as we carefully prepare for a birth, so too can we openly and consciously make preparations for dying, and therein provide some comfort and reassurance about what is, after all, a certainty for all of us. My wish is for this book to inspire hope for families who want to live and love as best they can in the period of time between learning of a poor prognosis and the moment of death itself.
The families in this book represent a small sector of the population and hence their experiences cannot be described in any way as universal. I am cognisant that some readers may not find their own experiences with death and dying represented in these stories and for that I am regretful.
I have tried to protect the privacy of the people in these stories by changing identifying features, or writing composite stories. I have sent stories to surviving family members to read for accuracy and comment. These communications have been deeply touching and have reassured me that love most certainly abides.
I have organised the book into four sections. Each one contains four to seven stories which will illuminate the experience of opening up to death, preparing for it, healing the past, dealing with unfinished business or accepting what is unresolved, making choices about dying on one’s own terms, and learning to draw comfort from nature and the universality of death.
My Cree friend Maureen Kennedy told me that in her tradition, elders collect ‘teaching stories’ from their many years of life experiences.
‘There comes a time,’ she said, ‘when the elders must release those stories into the world. You will know, Janie, when that time comes for you. You have many teaching stories by now, don’t you?’
‘Thirty years’ worth, at least,’ I said, nodding my head.
I believe the time for releasing these stories is now.
Preparing for death is a radical act of love for ourselves, and for those close to us who live on after we’re gone. My hope is that these stories will reassure you, the reader, by providing a roadmap through one of the most important and least discussed experiences of our lives. May these teaching stories, gifted to me by others, heal, nourish and strengthen your hearts and reveal the terrible beauty inherent in living and dying that is your birthright.
I.
OPENING THE HEART TO DYING
‘Peace comes when our hearts are open like the sky, vast as the ocean.’
—JACK KORNFIELD
At a retreat I attended a few years ago, Zoketsu Norman Fischer, a Soto Zen priest, offered a teaching that has stayed with me. He described how at the end of our life, when the body loses its functions, the heart continues to have an endless capacity to express and receive love. His statement comforts me, to know that even without a healthy body, we still have a worthy function: to give and receive love, opening our hearts in our living and dying so that our beloveds can be sustained by that love, long after we are gone.
I have learned that it is easier to open my heart in the presence of other people, than to do it on my own. Perhaps being open-hearted about any aspect of our life is dependent on our connection with other people. Maybe it is that very connection, especially in difficult times, that activates our compassion and care towards one another and keeps us from feeling isolated and lonely.
I meet people every day who open their hearts to death, their own or another’s; they show us how to remain open to the heartbreaks of life. They encourage us not to close up to pain and loss but to risk opening up to connection.
Opening the Heart to Dying contains five stories about what can happen to your life, and to the lives of those you love, when you open up to your own dying. Each of the five people in these stories made choices about dying that were congruent with the ways they had approached living. By opening their hearts to death, each person became more deeply connected and loving towards themselves and the people they cared about, and consequently more present in life itself.
1
KAREN: Golden Love
‘Karen might be dying,’ Kathy said on the phone one evening in early December, out of the blue.
‘What do you mean?’ I said, a wave of nausea rising from my gut. The three of us had been friends for twenty-five years. Eight years after we met, we co-founded the Callanish Society, a charity offering weeklong retreats for people living with cancer.
Kathy’s voice was trembling. ‘This past two weeks we both thought she had the flu, but every day she’s weaker and she hasn’t been off the couch for two days.’
My take-charge nursing voice kicked in. ‘Has she seen a doctor?’
‘You know what she’s like, Janie. She’d rather not see a doctor,’ Kathy said.
This was one of the sticking points in their twenty-three-year common-law relationship. Kathy was a nutritionist and preferred herbal potions over pharmaceuticals, like Karen, but they disagreed about the role of Western medicine in health and healing. Karen told me once how scared she was of doctors and hospitals because her father had died in a cancer hospital, after just one dose of chemotherapy, when she was in her twenties. She told me she believed it was the medicine, and not the cancer, that killed him.
‘Kathy, you need to take her to the hospital,’ I said.
The following morning, Kathy bundled Karen up in blankets and drove the eight miles to their doctor’s office in town. They loved living in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, six hours north of Vancouver, with its big, snowy winters, swathes of grassland dotted with green lakes, and a multitude of wildlife. Kathy and Karen met in the Cariboo in their early twenties, when they both attended a conference held by the Emissaries of Divine Light, an intentional community with seven spiritual centres around the world. Several years after Karen and Kathy moved to live in the Emissary commune in the town of 100 Mile House, British Columbia, they fell in love.
The visit to the hospital confirmed Karen’s liver was failing. An ultrasound revealed widespread metastases from breast cancer. We knew what that meant: she likely wouldn’t last long. We had worked with people with cancer for eighteen years by then and knew there was no rhyme nor reason for who gets it, what type or stage they are diagnosed