Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (33 page)

his hand. I was fifty-nine and had never before sat at a deathbed.

Once upon a time we knew how to die. We knew how to sit

at a deathbed. We knew how to sit and how to die because we

saw people we loved die all through infancy, childhood, youth,

middle age, and old age: deaths we could not make painless,

deaths no machine could postpone. The deaths of our ancestors

were not pretty. Some died roaring in pain. But through the cen-

turies we tutored ourselves in the art of dying by handing down

stories about how those we loved met their deaths.

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When St. Francis was in his forties in 1226, having suffered

years of illness and sensing his death was near, he “caused

himself to be stripped of all his clothing, and to be laid upon

the ground, that he might die in the arms of the Lady Poverty.”

Death did not come as quickly as he expected. He was taken

back into the house where he’d lain and lifted back to his bed.

He asked his monks to sing him his own “Canticle of the Sun.”

“Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars,

which He has set clear and lovely in heaven,” the monks sang,

and they added new lines that St. Francis had recently written.

“Praised be my Lord for our sister the death of the body, from

whom no man escapeth.” The next day, “when his pains were

some little abated,” St. Francis put his hand on the heads of

each of his monks, and gave his blessing “unto all the Order

present, absent, and to come, even unto the world’s end.

“Then as the sun was setting, there was a great silence,”

went one version of St. Francis’s death story, as recounted by a

Victorian essayist:

As the brethren were gazing on his face, desiring to see some

sign that he was still with them, behold a great multitude of

birds came about the house wherein he lay, and flying a little

way off did make a circle round the roof, and by their sweet

singing did seem to be praising the Lord with him.

Such holy deaths were not reserved for saints. In the fif-

teenth century, when Europe was so decimated by the Black

Death that there weren’t enough Catholic priests around to give

Last Rites, our ancestors created road maps for the deathbed.

The earliest Latin versions, written by priests, were called, sim-

ply,
Ars moriendi,
or
The Art of Dying.
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revised over time to fit Protestant theology, included
The Boke

of Crafte of Dyinge, The Art and Craft to Know Well to Die,
and
Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying.

The
Ars moriendi
did not sugarcoat the death agony, and they

described scenes foreign to us now. Relatives and friends gath-

ered at the bedside at home and followed the script of the
Ars

moriendi,
asking the right questions and saying the prescribed

prayers, giving the dying person reassurance and hope. The hall-

mark of a good death was not an absence of suffering but the

ability to meet it with faith, courage, and acceptance. Stoicism

was not required: in 1651, the Anglican theologian Jeremy Tay-

lor wrote in his
Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying
that it was

okay to groan on the deathbed.

The
Ars moriendi
texts did not pretend that dying was the

pinnacle of a lifetime of meaningful growth experiences. Their

authors lamented, even in 1491, that “men seek sooner and bus-

ier after medicine for the body than for the soul.” They portrayed

the deathbed not as a lowly place of helplessness and meaning-

less suffering but as a mighty, transcendent battleground where

angels and demons struggled for control of the soul. The dying

person, not the doctor, was the star of the show. Her anguish

was framed as a series of temptations to sin: wavering faith,

despair, impatience, regret for past misdeeds, reluctance to say

good-bye, and especially fear of death and hell. Dying was not

merely a physical agony; it was a spiritual ordeal. Its suffer-

ing had meaning. The brave person did not battle Death but

regarded dying as a test of one’s trust in God, an earthly puri-

fication to be followed by a heavenly reward, a sacred rite of

passage as profound and familial as a christening or a wedding.

The Good Death was marked by last words, treasured by the

survivors, expressing repentance for past misdeeds, acceptance

of God’s will, and confidence in his mercy.

My father did not die that way. He did not say three times,

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as the
Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge
recommended, “Into thine

hands, Lord, I commit my soul.” I did not ask him, as I would

later learn that the
Ars moriendi
recommended, if he asked for

God’s forgiveness, if he forgave those who’d harmed him, if he

forsook all the goods of the world, and if he thanked God for

Christ’s sacrifice. I held his hand and said almost nothing.

All I could see was his closed eyes and his labored breathing.

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her 1969 best seller, theorized

that dying people moved through stages of denial, anger, bar-

gaining, depression, and acceptance, though not necessarily

in that order. If anything, my father had moved backward over

time, from acceptance to depression and anger.

He was doing the long, hard work of his dying in a small,

windowless, interior room within his own body, his once-boom-

ing and argumentative voice stopped by dementia, deafness,

stroke and brain damage, pneumonia and morphine. If he cried

out inside that small interior room, if he yearned for reconcili-

ation with his estranged son Michael, if he desired Jonathan’s

forgiveness for having been a neglectful father, if he forgave my

mother, if he saw white light or his dead brother Guy welcoming

him to paradise, I will never know.

The well-known hospice and palliative care doctor Ira Byock

counsels the dying and those they love to say to each other some

version of these words:
I love you. Thank you. Please forgive me. I

forgive you. good-bye.
My father and I said none of those things.

My father just breathed, a terrible loud, ever-louder breath-

ing, like someone working very hard at something, at something

like someone building a wall, like someone delivering a baby. As

he breathed day and night, as his lungs filled with fluid, he was

washed and changed and kept clean by kind paid strangers, and

my mother cried and pled for forgiveness, and I came and went

and held his hand. There was nothing left for us to do. In word-

less ways, over seven years, I had already said,
I love you. Thank

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you. Please forgive me. I forgive you.
I comforted myself with the memory of waking him on the last morning of my last trip home,

when I’d said, “Good-bye. I love you. Go back to sleep.”

As my mother and I made our passages to and fro through the

quiet streets of Middletown, we looked like anyone else there,

shopping for a roasted chicken or opening a car window or just

walking dully along. In the evenings at Pine Street, we found

messages from some of my father’s old colleagues on the answer-

ing machine—the outward and visible sign of a community

which still loved him and had wanted to connect throughout

his long illness but often had not known how. My mother, in her

agony and shame, or in her émigré self-reliance, or her reflexive

drawing-in to her core, discouraged them from coming to the

hospital. He was unconscious, she said. What was the point?

No all-night lighted square of window signaled to our neigh-

bors, who could not see my parents’ carefully sited house from

the street in any case, that our ancient vigil was under way. My

two brothers were still on the West Coast, throwing clothes into

their suitcases and shopping for funeral clothes. I dreaded their

arrival. Brian pleaded with me to let him fly in and support me,

but I still had not learned how to say, “I need you,” and I said no.

My father was a guest in a hotel for the dying. The hospice

nurses, practiced at filling the spiritual vacuums of contem-

porary life, would minister to us unobtrusively, the way priests

and family members once did. I was grateful. One calm nurse

explained to me that nobody could say exactly when my father’s

death would come, but that it
would
come: thus she gently dis-

abused me of my fantasy that maybe my father would get better

somehow and come home. To the hospice nurse, death was not

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an emergency. It was part of the plan. She told me that as the

time got closer, my father’s feet and hands would turn blue, and

her map of the coming of death calmed me.

She told me that thanks to the morphine, my father wasn’t

suffering, but I didn’t believe her. I knew that if we gave the word

he’d be gurneyed immediately to intensive care, where he’d be

shot full of antibiotics and hooked up to intravenous lines and

perhaps a respirator, and perhaps survive to die another day. I

wanted my father to die as quickly as possible. I wanted him not

to die until my brothers got there. I felt as if we were killing him.

I did not want him to die at all.

I had prayed for his death, awaited his death, and expected

his death. And now that it was nearly here, I was surprised it

had come.

My ancestors often did not know what they were dying
of,
but

knew when they were dying. Sometimes they saw their deaths

coming, and comforted those they loved ahead of time. When

hope was pointless, they fell back on the ancient technology of

acceptance. “I do want you not to fret about me,” my Quaker

great-grandfather James wrote in 1876 to his mother, Mary

Watts Butler, from the farm where he was staying in the Eng-

lish countryside, stricken by the tuberculosis that a generation

earlier had deformed his father’s backbone and killed his grand-

father and his aunt. James was only in his early twenties when

he wrote, He was in his early twenties. “We all know even if

we don’t often think about it that we all must pass away & that

our happy family circle must inevitably gradually dissolve.” His

younger sister Mary had died suddenly of typhoid at the age

of thirteen in a Quaker boarding school, and her death, James

went on, “spoke forcibly to all of us. It told us of the uncertainty

of life & of the necessity of preparing for death. I trust that I

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may join my dear sister, & that as we all one by one quit this

earth we may one by one re-form the family circle in Heaven.”

James’s doctors could do nothing for his health beyond suggest-

ing that he move to a sunny climate. Soon after he wrote his

mother the letter, he sailed for South Africa, settled in the des-

ert, and to everyone’s surprise, recovered enough to start the

Midland News and Karoo Farmer,
marry a farm girl named Lettie

Collett, and sire seven healthy sons and daughters, all of whom

lived long lives.

At my father’s bedside, I drew no comfort from the notion that

our family circle would ever be reconstituted in heaven and

even less from the notion, held by some of my fellow Buddhists,

that my father would be reborn in another form. I believed that

rebirth and heaven were myths, comforting stories for chil-

dren afraid of the dark. I believed that my father existed only

as long as the material conditions supporting his life existed,

and that when those conditions disappeared, he would disap-

pear too, leaving behind only memory traces in our minds, like a

trail of bubbles in a cloud chamber. The molecules of his body

would become part of cells in other bodies: plants, lizards, vinca

minor, figs. His love for me would live on inside me, just as my

brother Jonathan’s sense of abandonment would live on inside

him. That was the limit of my belief in eternal life.

All I could see was his closed eyes and his labored breathing.

The pacemaker kept delivering its tiny pulses.

His breathing grew ragged and his feet, as the nurse had

warned me, slowly started to turn blue. Sometimes yellow phlegm

dribbled out of his mouth onto the cloth the nurses had placed by

his pillow. In the presence of his extreme helplessness and suffer-

ing, I felt horror and disgust. But I had no prayers to say.

I left my mother and went alone to the Wesleyan library,

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