For Reflection:
Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.
—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”
I have always had a terrible fear of death. It often grips me in the middle of the night. At those times, I wake seized with the anxiety that I will one day no longer occupy the chair at my work desk, my place at the kitchen table, or my side of the bed.
This fear began at an early age. It may have something to do with having parents who were older when I was born. They looked like my friends’ grandparents. Grandparents had the unfortunate habit of dying. I feared my parents would die and I’d be left alone.
I was also haunted early on by a sense of life’s brevity. One New Year’s Eve as I watched Guy Lombardo’s orchestra on TV with my parents, a band member sang, “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).” When he got to the line about how the years go by “as quickly as a wink!” I began to weep uncontrollably. I was four years old at the time.
No wonder, then, that when I first began reading The Rule, few passages leaped out at me more than Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. As an adolescent, I liked characters in literature who refused to sleepwalk through life: Larry Darrell, the spiritual seeker in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge; Eugene Gant, who yearns to leave the emotional confines of his small town and fractured family in Look Homeward, Angel; and of course, the insouciant Zorba the Greek. In a notebook where I kept all my favorite quotations, I dutifully copied Zorba’s observation that, “All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time, don’t live them. Do you see?” Yes, I saw. I vowed to both live the mysteries and write.
For a time, as I focused on my writing career, I was able to put aside my fear of death, like a book I’d read and put back on its shelf. Then something happened. My mother died suddenly of a stroke. Death, my old adversary, reannounced itself as the fundamental struggle of my life. It was an adversary my life-loving mother could not overcome, and one I knew no measure of my own will could vanquish either.
What haunted me most about my mother’s death was its suddenness. How could a person who was talking, joking, and enjoying a meal of eggplant parmesan one Sunday no longer exist the next? Walking into my parents’ living room for the first time after my mother’s death, I was overwhelmed by the stillness. The house reeked of silence.
I wondered if her death—or any death—might be easier to cope with if there had been some warning that it was imminent. Or is it better we don’t know it’s the last year, the last week, the last day, and we simply live our lives and love who we love right up to the end?
Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you wherever you may be.
—FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE TOOLS FOR GOOD WORKS”
Around the time my mother died, I had another extraordinary experience. I was walking in downtown Chicago when I noticed a police cordon in front of an office tower. I asked a bystander what had happened, and he told me a window had fallen out of the twenty-first floor of the building. It struck a woman who had been walking with her daughter, killing the young mother instantly—as unpredictable a death as you can imagine. Once again, death seemed like some maniacal sharp shooter, randomly picking its targets. I could not stop thinking about that woman. One minute she was walking along Wabash Avenue holding her little girl’s hand, and the next barreling through to the afterlife. It reminded me of a line in “For the Anniversary of My Death” a poem by W.S. Merwin. “Every year without knowing it, we pass the date of our death.”
I thought about the possibility of my own death. How I hoped it would not just show up at my door, a discourteous guest, but drop a note in the mail instead, months or weeks before, as polite company would do. I remembered a character Ben Gazzara played in an old TV drama called Run for Your Life, a lawyer who is told he has six months to live. He spends that time driving across the country, helping complete strangers wherever he stops to find their purpose in life. Maybe I could be like that. I hoped I would have time to tear up my journals, press the clothes in the laundry basket, finish the crossword puzzles on my nightstand, toss out my torn underpants, and apologize for decades of bad behavior before removing the robe of life.
A few years after my mother’s death, when I began spending extended periods at Mount St. Scholastica Monastery, one of the first friends I made was then eighty-nine-year-old Sister Lillian Harrington. I got to know Sister Lillian very well, and felt comfortable enough with her to share my intense fear of dying. One day, I asked her if she ever thought about the moment of death. She drilled her steely blue eyes into mine and told me something I’ve never forgotten. “I don’t think about dying,” she said, “I think about living.”
Living mindfully, looking beyond the obvious—these were things Sister Lillian did, along with drinking strawberry daiquiris and enjoying birthday cake just a few days before she died at the age of ninety-six.
Witnessing the dying, death, and burial of a sister at the Mount was another profound experience. The sisters confront death not begrudgingly, but rather lovingly, tenderly. Unless a sister dies suddenly, or away from the monastery, no one dies alone. The sisters keep a twenty-four hour vigil at the bedside of the dying. They call it “sitting with” the person. As a woman without children of my own and a husband who is nine years older, I sometimes wonder who will be sitting with me.
When the casket returns from the funeral home bearing a sister’s body, every member of the community lines up to meet it, as a bell tolls in the monastery tower. The night before the burial is for storytelling—a time for the community to remember the sister they lost—her gifts, shortcomings, eccentricities, and all.
With one sister carrying high a crucifix, community members march behind the casket the next morning to the cemetery. They stride with purpose and abandon to the gravesite. The first time I witnessed this, I remember thinking, these must be the only truly free people in America.
I don’t think that their fearlessness in the face