I have had the privilege of being at the side of several people as they have passed away. One thing I have learned is that people die much the same way that they lived.
The selfish die afraid.
The fearful die alone.
The righteous die praising God.
The loving die happy.
A woman who selfishly lived her final days speaking only of what her children should/could/badly did for her clung to her life like a drowning man. A woman too frail to survive CPR insisted on it. Death called for her several times, and she fought it, clinging to the life that only made her sorry to live it, like it was all that she had.
The man who lived alone, had no friends, no close family due to fears of life change, died silently one day with no one at his side. There was no one to send a sympathy card to, for he had no one. He had lived his life afraid of change, afraid of owning or belonging to someone or anything.
A preacher tearfully asked me to play a hymn for him, and tears streamed down his face as he sang along in his weakened voice, able to raise his hands only inches over his face, he clasped them together, grateful. He praised the Lord, and reported feeling ready to meet his maker - excited for the journey that would soon be his.
A woman with many children died with them, and her grandchildren, at her side. She had told me of her life. She had been abused, nearly killed, by her former husband. She had had to save her children while holding a door back, to stop the man from entering and killing them. She had barely been saved herself. She had no money - she could barely make rent. There was no money for a funeral, or even for an obituary. And she knew that death was coming.
But she never ceased smiling. Her family never stopped talking about her, for the love that they had for this woman. Why she had no money was not important. The trauma or ghosts of her past held no sway. She was loved for the love that she gave, and I, a lowly social worker accustomed to the passing of patients, went to my office and wept when I heard she was gone. I wept for her again today, even a year later, because she taught me more about life and death than any patient I had worked with before, or since.
We die how we live. Not the lives that we’ve had, for living is much different than the situations of our existence. No, how we live is how we treat others, how we talk, how we hope, how we dream. How we live is how we hurt, how we think, how we laugh.
For you it may be car payments and broken bones. It may be the cold silence of family members, or dead end jobs, or lack of skill in cooking. (Okay, the cooking is me.) But these are not the things that define you.
You are defined by your ability to love. You are defined by your ability to pull through.
Today I’m thinking of her, and have determined, once again, that situations do not define me. It is my response to them that will lead the eventual course of my life.
