Psychotherapist Malcolm Stern writes on coming to terms with embracing death.
We live in a death-phobic society. We talk about death in hushed and euphemistic terms. People ‘pass on’ and ‘transition’. Talk about death for too long and the conversation is labelled ‘depressing’. Doctors are sworn to prolong a person’s life even when death is screaming at them to let go. Many believe that existing longer in a seriously ill body is better than dying earlier in a healthier one.
Our culture says that the number of years we live matters far more than the quality of our life. Getting old is seen as a tragedy in that it brings us closer to death, which is viewed as an enemy of life, not part of it.
It is beyond dispute that, from the moment we are born, every one of us is dying. Death is inevitable. As long as we deny it, we cannot experience life in its fullness. It is imperative we befriend it before it creeps up on us, looming large and overwhelming us with fear.
There are many theories and religious truisms about what happens to us after we die, but almost certainly no one really knows. My thinking has ranged from the naivety of my youth, when I thought death was final, to the semi-maturity of my twenties and thirties, when I believed that each of us comes back and reincarnates in another body, to the place of maturity as I approach my seventies, where my ever-deepening sense is that death is not real and we return to the source in some way; that consciousness survives, that life is continuous.
Death once whispered to me in my dreams. After my daughter Melissa died, I had a feeling that her consciousness was still a part of the universe, and I longed for a dream to tell me how she was. For two years the only dream I had was a recurring one in which I was looking for her, and someone handed me a telephone number which I promptly used. A woman answered the phone. I said “hello, can I speak to Melissa please?” The woman passed the phone to Melissa and Melissa said in a very flat voice, “Hello, Mum”. I said, “It’s not Mum, it’s Dad”, and she hung up the phone. I felt the pain of rejection and the inability to communicate with the soul of my daughter.
I pretty much gave up on having a meaningful dream, until one day, two years after her death, I dreamt that I was going to a party, and there I saw Melissa restored to full colour, sending me love and happily engaged with those around her. I didn’t feel the need to come close. Rather I felt I had been given a gift in its proper time. I felt that wherever Melissa was, she was okay, and we were okay. I called my youngest daughter Alix and told her about the dream. She shouted back “I don’t believe it! I had the same dream last night!”
Was Melissa communicating from the beyond? I have no idea. But it underscored my sense that something in her lived on, and that she was at peace.
However, obsessing too much over ‘what happens after’ can distract us from reaping the rewards of facing death, now, here, in the present. We can find many stories about life after death, intended as a comfort to help us believe that we will survive. That is not the remit of this article. Making death an integral part of our life brings our life’s meaning into focus.
A friend of mine was caught in a bomb scare in a central London department store. The announcement told them the store had gone into lockdown as something was happening outside. The wave of collective panic was so strong that people genuinely though they were about to die. My friend’s first thoughts were “But I haven’t done what I am supposed to do. I’m not in the job I’m supposed to be in. There’s a million things still left to do.”
The stories in Slay Your Dragons with Compassionillustrate some of the many gifts the process of death can bestow to those dying and the people around them. As we gradually unravel and return to the essence of who we are, remarkable changes and transformation can take place. Ultimately, the more intimate we become with death, the more we have to answer the question, “What aren’t we living?”
Article by Malcolm Stern
Psychotherapist and Author of Slay Your Dragons with Compassion: Ten Ways to Thrive Even When It Feels Impossible.
£12.99 Watkins Publishing
