In 1978, at the age of 40, I joined a group of people from my church to study and discuss various aspects of the subject of “Death and Dying.” Our primary teacher was Father Bill Wendt, an Episcopal priest, who founded an organization called The St. Francis Center in Washington, D.C. that supported folks in their dying and/or grieving processes. During the ten-week course, we studied and discussed issues around terminal illness, old age, and dying. We also looked at the grief process and investigated unhealed grief issues in our lives. I became aware of the wounds caused by my mother’s death when I was seventeen and my father’s death ten years later. No one at that time talked about such things as the anger, guilt, fear, and helplessness that accompany the loss of someone we love. At the end of the course, one of my friends in the group gave me a book called The Hospice Movement, A Better Way of Caring For the Dying, by Sandol Stoddard. After reading this book, which I loved, I joined a hospice in my community as a volunteer to visit, sit with, and support dying people in hospice and their families. I began a study of thanatology (the scientific study of death and the practices associated with it, including the study of the needs of the terminally ill and their families) and have continued to do that for the past fifty some years.
Recently I awoke one morning remembering my favorite grandmother—Edith Maria Scribner Skidmore, my mother’s mother. When I last saw her physically and mentally intact, she was 81 years old. At 81, she lived alone in her own little house in the small town of Tulare in the middle of the San Juaquin Valley of California, a very hot, dry place in the summer. Our family lived in the small town of Redding in the northern part of the state, and it was not easy to visit her, but I remember spending one summer with her when I was thirteen. She was lively then, energetic. We played Scrabble, and card games; I walked across town to play with my cousins; she made wonderful cookies; I ate well and gained teenage weight. It was a good summer and now a good memory.
Grandma Skidmore was born on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, one of three girls. She married Elwin Skidmore, and they moved to California where they raised five children. Grandfather Skidmore worked for years on the railroad. He died from complications of diabetes when I was 8 years old. Grandma Skidmore lived on in their little house in Tulare for the rest of her life, alone but seemingly happy. She was a faithful Presbyterian, had many friends, and was surrounded by children and grandchildren who also lived in Tulare and raised their families there.
In 1962, my new husband, Dick, and I were driving back to the Bay Area from Florida where we had visited his parents. We stopped in Tulare so that I could introduce him to my favorite grandmother. She was 81. We drove into Tulare, found my grandmother’s house, and parked in front. It was a hot, dry, summer day. Her front door stood open, but no one was home. We stood there wondering where she was and what we should do. I looked up the street and saw her walking towards us. We hugged, and I introduced her to Dick. She said she had had a visitor, an “older” woman of 70-something, and she had walked the woman home. I was struck by how vigorous my grandmother still was and the irony of her, being the older, making sure that her friend got home safely. Dick and I spent the night with her and went on our way the next morning.
Fourteen years later, in 1976, I saw my grandmother for the last time. She was 94. She had had several strokes and developed dementia. She had lived with her daughter for awhile but became too difficult to keep safe and was moved into a nursing home in Tulare. On one of my trips to California from Washington, D.C., where Dick and I lived, I stopped by the nursing home to introduce her to my two sons. She was sitting in a wheelchair, strapped in to prevent her from falling, and all alone in her room. As I approached, her eyes opened wide, and she tried to talk. I knew that she had dementia, her speech was garbled and unintelligible, but it seemed as though she recognized me and wanted me to know how happy she was to see me. We visited for a while, I did most of the talking. I told her about my life and the boys, and then I left. I don’t really know whether she knew who I was or not, probably not, probably just happy to see anyone come to talk to her, but it was significant for me anyway. A glimpse of my former grandmother. She died soon after that.
In 1978, while taking the course in death and dying I was asked to write an obituary as an exercise in beginning to look at my own mortality. In the obituary I said that I died at the age of 81, quietly in bed in my own home. In discussing it with the class, I realized that I chose that age because it was the last time I had seen my favorite grandmother when she was still physically active, living alone and taking care of herself, mentally sharp, and socially active with her friends and community. I hoped that for myself.
Now I realize that last year when I turned 80, I began to have physical health issues with high blood pressure and pain from frequent falls. I had begun a downward spiral of fear, depression and despair. I felt worthless and incapable of caring for myself or actively being in service as I had done for all of my adult life. Now I believe that my sub-conscious was reminding me of what I had wished for when I wrote that obituary. The mind is a strange and wonderful thing at times, and the sub-conscious is a powerful influencer of conscious thinking and subsequent behavior.
As the year progressed and I sought various physical and mental/emotional therapies to deal with my fear, I realized that I had allowed my sub-conscious belief about dying at age 81 to propel me into a time of fear, depression and despair. I knew that I had to bring that buried belief to the surface, work it out, and let it go. I was not my grandmother, and I was not obliged to follow her path of strokes and dementia. I could make other choices and seek to regain my health physically and mentally/emotionally.
Now as I read and work with the ideas in Stephen Levine’s book A Year to Live., I renew my interest in thanatology and begin to look at and heal old emotional wounds. And I took to heart the words on pg. 4: “All I had understood about death could be experienced at a yet deeper level.” This is true for me and I began to wonder what apparent unfinished business I need to work through.
On page 5, he states: “We don’t have to die feeling like a failure, full of shame and fear, unable to navigate by the clear light of our true heart. Indeed, that is what this book has to offer; a year to live as consciously as possible, a year to finish business, to catch up with our lives, to investigate and deal with our fear of death, to cultivate our true heart and find our essential wisdom and joy. A year to live as if that is all that remains.” Perhaps you would like to purchase the book and join me on this journey.
Self-Inquiry Questions:
1. Who in your life has influenced your view of death and dying? How?
2. Write an obituary for yourself as if you had just died? What does it tell you about yourself?
3. How will you incorporate Levine’s ideas into your current life in order to Face life as if you had only one year to live?
Comentarios