by Taido
60-year-old LP used to be a highly successful professional and a very independent person. She had stomach cancer that had disseminated throughout her abdomen, and the latest scans showed disease progressing in the lungs and bones. She was still trying for cancer treatment when she developed a stroke-like left-sided weakness due to the spread of the cancer to the brain. During that hospital admission for the weakness, she decided she had enough.
She asked for a meeting with her oncologist to discuss the cancer treatment outlook. At the end, she concluded that treatment was not going to get her what she wanted, and she asked to discontinue her cancer treatment. She then went further to ask for the parenteral nutrition to be stopped. “I am going to die,” she said in the presence of her family, “and there is no point in all these things. I just want to get on with it; just make sure I pass on peacefully.”
After slightly over a week, she became weaker and sleepier, but peace was what she could not find – she plainly did not like the feeling of weakness and lack of energy, and was getting irritable. She struggled with having others tend to her basic needs. She was venting her frustration on her family when they could not position her properly, or get things to be exactly the way she wanted.
Her initial hopefulness for emancipation had turned into abject despair. She started moaning and sighing during periods of awareness. Repeatedly, she would ask: “How long more?”
“I have LET GO of everything! I am all ready to go. So why am I still alive?” she cried plaintively. LP found herself in an existential blind alley, and she had no idea how to get out.
Locally, “letting go” is often invoked as an antidote to fix the painful or difficult dying process. It is cited by patients and admonished by well-meaning families or friends, usually when nothing else can be done. But true letting go in dying is never like this.
When we die, we ultimately relinquish everything whether we are willing or not. Letting go is merely releasing our grip on all these things that we will inevitably separate from. From dying, we begin to realise and understand that we can NEVER hold on forever to our wealth, property, intelligence, appearance, titles, identities, roles, achievements, relationships… none of these things that we often hold as defining of our good standing as an individual, and demanding of our focus and energies, will ever matter when we die. But what we also let go of can be our animosity, delusions, conflicts, greed, vanity, avarice, sorrow, grief, trauma… the weighty accretions of a whole lifetime that shaped us into who we think we are or are expected to be. In other words, by letting go, we liberate ourselves from the compulsive entanglement with a body that now ails us; from thoughts, ideas, scripts and stories that imprisons us; and from emotional baggage that drains us.
In the midst of some many things that seem to be inadequate and defective in dying, we may discover (if we try) that there can still be things that are adequate and functional enough, just to meet THIS moment. Meeting each moment fully, living fully, moment by moment. And thus, we let go of the incessant compulsiveness to chase down things to fix in our lives… and in our dying and death.
And when the defensive shells of pretense and delusions have been stripped away, we may humbly realise that at the very core of our being, like everyone before us and all who will follow, we are essentially not so different from one another. We are all inherently dignified, when we stop tying dignity down to mundane and bodily circumstances. We let go of all the obsession with the “selfness” that separates and isolates us – all of us have always been “comrades”.
Letting go therefore opens the door to ask: “Who am I really?”, and “Who can I be when liberated from these mundane encumbrances?” And for those with the good fortune of pondering and finding the answers before they die (like TK in Do People Actually Overcome the Fear of Death?), the experience may be transformative.
So, letting go is never the nifty hack for our mortal predicament, especially when it had resulted from decades of conditioning. And that’s why responding to LP was not easy.
“It won’t be that long now, LP,” I finally said, in the hope that this can be a temporary “balm”.
But she persisted woefully: “How long? How many days?”
“Yes, just a few more… a few more days”, I cooed.
By now, she was drowsier – the morsels of energy that’s left in her siphoned away by the emotional struggles.
“It’s OK to rest when you feel tired… You can even let go of letting go… just for a change”, I added.
Still frowning, she paused for a while, as if trying to grasp what I had just said. But perhaps more sensibly, she surrendered to the wisdom of the body and slipped once more into a gentle slumber.
Facing our deaths with some measure of ease often involves the willingness and capacity for deep and honest inquiry into, and eventually coming to terms with the truth of our life, whatever that truth may be. This is hard work; for many of us, it is the work of a lifetime, and even so, we will probably never feel fully prepared for that final moment, and that is only NORMAL. But as Frank Ostaseski, author of “Five Invitations: What Death Can Teach About Living” puts it: To imagine that at the time of our dying we will have the physical strength, emotional stability, and mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime is a ridiculous gamble.
We need to start looking at our lives now.
The modern narrative on the end of life is often crowded and even fore-grounded by a profusion of medical details — of distressing symptoms, unrelenting diseases, futility and hopelessness. But the end of life is never merely a medical event; it is a human experience that reaffirms the inescapable human condition and what it means to really live, if only we choose to turn towards it. “Ending Notes” is a series of anecdotes depicting these human experiences, from which may be aspects that moves, inspires or edifies us about life. While the stories are based on true events, the characters and background have been fictionalised, so that any resemblance to real person(s) is purely coincidental and perhaps reflect how we can as easily identify with the human conditions portrayed.
Taido
