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Near Death

I recently wrote an essay about Phyllis Tickle.  It came to my attention as a post in the Religion News Service.  Sadly, the article talks about the serious illness that now affects Tickle.  In her early 80s Tickle has been a perceptive observer and commentator on the American religion scene.  She is widely respected and when she dies, she will be missed.  But dying is the fate of all of us.  Apparently her time has been significantly shortened.

She has always been able to bring a certain wit to her observations and writings.  I am not surprised to see it even in her ponderings about the dying process.  Hearing her reflections is good for me to take in and know it will help me when I face the same fate.  It is not a morbid entertainment of death, but rather a healthy way to see life leading to its next phase.  Tickle puts it more eloquently.  She talks about it with a writer’s touch: “The dying is my next career.”

I appreciate how real she is in the process of learning and accepting her impending death.  Maybe it is easier at 81, but I am not very sure of that.  Again I want to let her be my teacher.  Listen to her words.  “At 81 you figure you’re going to die of something, and sooner rather than later,” she says, sitting at her kitchen table for her first interview about her diagnosis.”  I am sure this is true.  Unless we are totally out to lunch, every one of us knows that we are mortal.  We may not think about it, but it is not a foreign idea.

Her next sentence is one I need to hear and, hopefully, prepare to do my own version of living into it.  Tickle says, “I could almost embrace this, that, OK, now I know what it’s probably going to be, and probably how much time there is. So you can clean up some of the mess you’ve made and tie up some of the loose ends.”  Lord knows I have made some messes!  And there probably are too many loose ends than I know about.  It occurs to me that I don’t have to wait until the end to start this work!  Why not start cleaning now?  And what about not making any new messes!

One of the reasons that Tickle seems to be engaging her next chapter so well is she already has experienced a near death experience when she was twenty-one years old.  Since I have never had this kind of experience, I was fascinated with her account of it.  Let me share the highlights, which will explain her process.  She suffered from an experimental drug, collapsed in the middle of the night.  Sam, her husband who was at that time a medical student, managed to get her to the hospital.  Then her story begins.

“I was like a gargoyle up in the corner of the hospital room.  And I remember to this day looking down and watching Sam beat on me again and screaming for the nurses, and the nurses coming with the machines and the whole nine yards.  And then the ceiling opened and I just went out the corner and into a tunnel, which was grass all the way around.  Ceiling, sides, the whole thing.”  The details are fascinating.  This could happen to me, but I can’t imagine using the image of a gargoyle!

Going into a tunnel does not surprise me.  That is a great image for a passage from one arena to another.  But again, that there was grass seems oddly funny!  Why not a grassy tunnel?  But grass on the ceiling, sides---indeed, everywhere!  Here is a woman with a wry sense of human.  No doubt, she was on her way to another world.  Her story continues.

“And I went to the end of the tunnel to this incredible — people call it ‘the light.’ I guess that’s as good a name as any.  But an incredible peace, a reality, unity, whatever. The voice, which was fortunately speaking in English” — she laughs again — “said, ‘Do you want to come?’ And I heard myself saying, ‘No, I want to go back and have his baby,’ meaning Sam.”  This is a touching moment: her decision to come back and to give birth.  I wonder how many folks have a choice at that point?

I figure these experiences people like Tickle have are good for all of us.  I can learn from it; I don’t need to have one myself to believe it.  Of course, no one can prove it.  In fact, Tickle says that Sam, her husband, was quite doubtful that she had a spiritual experience.  He preferred using medical terms to interpret what happened.  I guess that is why we call it faith.

I remember an author I once read talked about the traditional prayer many people learn when they are little kids.  We are taught the one-line, “if I should die before I wake…”  That author suggested that we reverse it.  Instead, he says, pray, “if I should wake before I die!”  That makes perfect sense to me.  At one level, we are all nearing death.

The real spiritual question is whether we can wake before we die?  Can we awaken and become so aware of our presence in the Presence of God Itself?  Our prayer is to wake before we die and choose to come back and live the richest life possible.
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