What if:
What if some of our fear of death comes from assuming that we know what dying is?
We tend to imagine death from this side of the threshold. We picture absence, loss, separation, and the extinguishing of everything familiar. We imagine leaving behind the people we love, the life we know, our bodies, our identities, and all the unfinished business of being human.
Of course that can be frightening.
But every once in a while, someone approaching death seems to perceive something quite different.
I’d like to share three such stories with you. I offer them not because they tell us anything definitive about the experience of dying, and certainly not as proof of what happens after death. I share them because I am inspired by the mystery of what seemed to be perceived in each of these moments.
Steve Jobs:
Shortly before his death on October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and the man who helped build Pixar into a major animation studio, looked at his sister Patty, then at his children, then at his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, and finally, according to his sister Mona Simpson, seemed to look beyond them.
His final words were:
“OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”
Simpson described Steve’s final moments in the eulogy she delivered at his memorial service at Stanford University on October 16, 2011, which was later published in The New York Times.
We cannot know what Steve Jobs was seeing, experiencing, remembering, or perceiving in those final moments.
That is precisely the point.
We don’t know.
But I find myself fascinated by the fact that the final words of a man standing at the edge of death were not words of terror.
They were words of wonder.
Andrew:
One day in 1989, I was visiting my friend Steven in the hospital. He was dying of AIDS and was being cared for in a hospital unit for people with AIDS. He told me that his dear friend Andrew was just three rooms away and asked if I would visit him as well.
When I came to the doorway of Andrew’s room, I saw a gaunt and emaciated body with his head awkwardly propped at an angle on several pillows. Towering over him was a food tray that was far beyond his reach.
I entered the room and introduced myself. Andrew asked if I would reposition him so he could reach his food.
He was determined to force himself to eat because his friends were insisting that he had to eat to regain his strength and get better. They begged him to fight for his life. He didn’t want to let them down, so he tried very hard to eat.
From the beginning, I had the sense that somewhere inside himself Andrew knew that he was dying, while everyone around him, with the best of intentions, was urging him to keep fighting.
Over the next several weeks, I watched something remarkable happen. As Andrew gradually stopped fighting the reality that he was dying, something in him seemed to relax and open.
One day I walked into his room and stopped.
Andrew was absolutely radiant.
I knew somehow that he was having a direct and immediate awareness of something far beyond his ordinary experience of himself.
He told me that he had just seen 15 distinct layers of indescribable colors surrounding his body. It was, he said, the most magnificent thing he had ever seen.
Then he looked at me with pure innocence and said:
“If death is anything like that, I can’t wait!”
I have never forgotten the joy on his face.
My Mother:
About two weeks before my mother died, she was in a hospital about 20 minutes from my home. She was weak and bedridden but fully coherent.
Early one morning, I was sound asleep when the telephone rang.
Disoriented, I answered and heard my mother breathing heavily and struggling to speak. I immediately panicked. I was certain she was dying at that very moment, and I was overwhelmed with guilt that I wasn’t there with her.
One word at a time, she pushed out the words:
“Something wonderful just happened! Come.”
I scrambled into my clothes, stumbled down the stairs, grabbed my car keys and purse, and drove to the hospital in something of a stupor. I hurried down the hallway and into her room.
When I saw her, I stopped.
Like Andrew years before, she was radiant. Something about her seemed transformed.
Her entire being smiled as she grabbed my hand, looked deeply into my eyes, and simply said:
“I know!”
She explained that she had just had a breathing treatment and, in the midst of it, realized beyond the shadow of a doubt that God was, and always had been, breathing her.
“God is real!” she exclaimed.
She knew it not conceptually, but experientially, for the first time in her life.
Then, with considerable urgency, she began asking when they were going to make the announcement.
I needed a little help connecting the dots.
Who was making what announcement?
The three most important people in the world, she explained. The pope, the president of the United States, and, to this day, I cannot remember who the third person was.
But my mother was absolutely convinced that her discovery needed to be communicated immediately to everyone in the world.
She was astonished that something so important had apparently been overlooked. Someone needed to tell everybody.
“When are they going to make the announcement?” she wanted to know.
Then she explained why it mattered so much.
“They need to tell everybody that God is real. People will want to live their lives differently.”
Two weeks later, she died.
What Do These Stories Tell Us?
None of these stories proves what happens when we die.
Steve Jobs cannot tell us what inspired his final words. I cannot tell you what Andrew’s layers of color were or what happened in my mother’s consciousness that morning.
Nor do I need to turn these experiences into proof in order to allow them to affect me.
What interests me is that all three people, standing extraordinarily close to death, encountered something that seemed to evoke wonder rather than terror.
Perhaps there is something here worth contemplating.
Most of us imagine death while we are still very much alive. We imagine it through the consciousness of someone who does not want to lose the people we love, the world we know, our bodies, our identities, our plans, or the experience of being ourselves.
Of course we are frightened.
But perhaps there is a certain humility required when we think about death.
We are imagining from this side of the threshold something we have never experienced from the other side.
What if death is not what we think it is?
Perhaps our task is not to convince ourselves that there is nothing to fear. Fear of death is deeply human, and denying that fear serves no one.
Perhaps the invitation is simply to loosen our grip on the assumption that death must be terrible.
We don’t know.
And strangely enough, I find comfort in that.
There is room in “I don’t know” for mystery.
There is room for Andrew’s colors.
There is room for my mother’s astonished certainty.
And there is room for three final expressions of wonder:
Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!
