Читать книгу Before We Say Goodbye: Preparing for a Good Death - Ray Simpson - Страница 37

My aged friend Neville was resigned to dying, but he was not ready to die well. Fortunately for him, the first time he seemed at death’s door he had a dream which presaged a recovery. This gave him another opportunity to get into a right state to die.

He dreamed he was in a large airport departure lounge. He began walking out to the runway with his pile of black suitcases, but the cases proved to be too heavy. He had to wheel them back into the airport lounge and unpack them. There was one suitcase inside another, each slightly smaller. Eventually, when the suitcases were all unpacked, he left them behind in the departure lounge, and walked nobly to the runway with nothing but a leotard.

It is good to depart life in the beauty of simplicity. We can take nothing with us, and there is nothing worse, either for ourselves or for our loved ones, than to leave behind a mess. The time to learn simplicity is now.

Jesus advises us to be like someone who has to look after a house for the owner. We must be ready for the owner to summon us at any time to give an account (see Matthew 24:44–6).

Here are three things to help us live like this:

1 Get rid of clutter and things we do not need.

2 Make a will.

3 Keep in one place, in a tidy form, all the information our next of kin would need if we suddenly died.

This is a way of being unselfish, so that we do not leave an unnecessary burden for someone else to carry.