Читать книгу Before We Say Goodbye: Preparing for a Good Death - Ray Simpson - Страница 14
Оглавление‘I don’t want to think about death,’ a 20-year-old friend told me. ‘I want to live all out and just go out in a twinkle.’
He thought he had no problem, but so do alcoholics who refuse help. They are in denial. A first step in the Alcoholics Anonymous rehabilitation programme is to recognize that there is a problem. It is like that with death.
Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer prize-winning book Denial of Death, asserts that the reality of our mortality constitutes the fundamental human terror, and our effort to come to terms with it ‘is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man’. In other words, if we don’t face this when we are young, we may spend the rest of our lives handcuffed to death rather than being truly free to be ourselves.
Another reason to start preparing for a good death when we are young is that we may die young. Millions of young people are killed through war, accident or illness each year.
WHY DO PEOPLE DIE YOUNG?
It is not a bad idea to start thinking about this: it begins to familiarize us with death. Here are some answers people give to this question:
• Good and evil happenings affect the whole human family, like the sun and the rain, without distinction.
• God wants a variety of people in heaven, so young as well as aged mortals need to enter it.
• In the words of a dying boy to his mother, ‘Don’t worry, Mum, my body’s only my reflection.’
A further reason for starting to prepare for death when we are young is that old habits die hard, but habits learned early come in handy later.
I met a couple who were dynamic leaders of a tough youth centre. They decided on a job change, and were shortly to become wardens of an old people’s home. I asked them why they were making such an unlikely change. ‘We have realized,’ they told me, ‘that in old age the negative habits that people display in youth come to the surface again. In the working years in between they have merely been covered up. We ourselves will be like those negative young people when we are aged, unless we work on it now. That is what we will now do.’
Good Pope John XXIII started to prepare for his death when he was a student. He used to play a kind of game, imagining that he was on his deathbed. Years later, he made a wonderful death which inspired the world.
You may, of course, be past youth or middle age. There is still hope. Research into the effects of smoking reveals that, although the highest health ratings go to those who gave up smoking from their youth, there is still a measurable improvement in health if lifelong smokers give up the habit as soon as they realize they have a life-threatening condition. It is like that with our preparations for our final goodbye.
