Would that we all die so abundantly.
Would that more humans connect the language of giftedness with death. In my daily installment of “thought provoking stories” that Firefox generates for me, I came across an article that does just this: My terminally ill mom taught me 5 life lessons before she died. She saw death as a gift to live to the fullest. “Death as a gift”—a profoundly important connection to make for those longing to live well.
While Courtney Warren’s mother’s final five lessons are certainly gifts to her daughter, perhaps the fact that she saw death as a gift was the most meaningful of all. We live in a time when we distance ourselves from physical death by way of hospitals and skilled nursing facilities. Few of us live in multigenerational families under one roof, so the aging process is more theoretical than lived. Even fewer ever care for their own dead, giving away such caretaking to funeral homes, and paying dearly for it! In just a little over 100 years, we Americans have lost the connection between death and the gifts it offers for how we might live.
In his 1983 book The Gift, Lewis Hyde offers an extensive construction of what makes a gift. Simply put at the beginning of the fourth chapter: “a gift makes a connection.” Earlier, Hyde points to Haida, Maori and ancient Israelite traditions to explain that in “gift economies” gifts are items that have a wide variety of forms, from bread to shell necklaces to blankets, that are passed on from one person or group to another, and then again from the second receiver to a third, and so on. Gifts are those things that increase as they are passed around. In a gift economy, it is not so much the substance of the gift as it is the movement of it. The movement of a gift from giver to receiver, then from this receiver to another builds connections among a community.
By contrast in a market economy, a commodity is purchased for a price by a buyer and the item remains static, and in many cases lies stagnant. Think of western houses full of items waiting to be packed away for Goodwill or of the storage unit market, which has exploded since the early 2000s—there is over 2.5 billion square feet (an area 3 times the size of Manhattan) of self-storage in the US. These items fill an immediate need, or they scratch an itch, but they do not always make a connection. Yes, we gift each other items of special significance, such as a bouquet of flowers or a unique wall hanging. Unless such a gift or an item of equivalent value is passed forward to another receiver, the item remains part of an exchange. However, say part of that bouquet went to a neighbor or the receiver of the wall hanging created something of similar unique value and gave it away, having been inspired by the original, then the gift is one that builds connections.
To think upon death as a gift in this sense provides us with a weighty wedge from the bedrock of human experience with which we can forge connection between people, be they family, friends and those unknown to us. Warren says, “The truth is that we're all going to die. And that's a reality that people don't like to think about because it's scary. But if we can be honest with ourselves about the fact that we're all mortal and we're all going to die, that's a gift we can utilize to create meaning in our lives.”
Showing up and paying attention to our mortality helps us tell valuable truths about living. Telling these truths to our surrounding community—family, friends, close acquaintances—this is the gift. There are myriad sources for these truths that you can read, including the article cited here and Bronnie Ware’s famous The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. But even more than these, there is no gift like exposure to the bond-forging intimacy of the dying time itself. Like bonds that form between newborn and parents in the first days and weeks after birth, the bonds that form between the one dying and their supporting communities only increase and deepen the living of their days, even if those days are very few.
I was fortunate to be priest to a grandmother whose dying process was unexpected and swift. In four months she went from vibrant to dying in her living room. Upon realizing that her unusual cancer was untreatable, she wanted to go home and be with her family. Their home was a veritable family reunion, complete with young grandkids running around. The night before she died, her two very young grandchildren got in bed with her and cuddled. They read her books and she talked as much with them as she could. After she died in the night, I arrived in the morning to say prayers over her and with the family. Her grandson was sitting on the couch quite aware of what was happening; he kissed his grandmother goodbye. I remember thinking how much of a gift this grandmother gave her children and grandchildren—the gift of experiencing death as a transition instead of something unknown and frightening. I later learned that this grandson said of his grandmother’s death, “Love never dies.” That sounds schmaltzy, but it really happened.
We have forgotten how to die well. Dying well is living well, not necessarily living long. Quality over quantity. We can gift one another with teachings for living well by showing up when death is present. The grandmother showed up to her dying time, as did her entire family. The gifts from this family’s season of death will get passed around as their family increases. Instead of dampening feelings by ignoring them, this family allowed, even chose, this grandmother’s death to deepen their bonds with one another by exposing their human fears and griefs and loves. Such bonds inform how we walk through our lives and how we interact with others.
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