How beautifully the legendary vision-impaired Helen Keller (whose life story inspired the classic Hollywood film The Miracle Worker, starring Patty Duke as Keller and Anne Bancroft as the teacher) defined the Final Journey that each of us will eventually take, sooner or later.
It’s a food for thought this weekend as we once again indulge in intimations of our mortality – and our fear of death. I remember a wag whose tongue-in-cheek view of death is laced with wit and humor, "Don’t take life too seriously. After all, you won’t get out of it alive." He’s right, too, like Helen Keller.
I’m again freely printing a relevant piece (about fear of death) from You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought by Peter McWilliams, described as "a book for people with any life-threatening illness – including life."
Read on:
If you think about it, the fear of death is one of the most useless fears we have. Dying is one of the few things that all of us will, sooner or later, do.
If we’re going to be afraid of death, we might as well be afraid of breathing or gravity or I Love Lucy reruns or any of the other inevitabilities of life.
Unless we fully accept the inevitability of death, it’s hard to enjoy this interval called life. ("This strange interlude," as Eugene O’Neill called it.) In other words, unless we get over our fear of death, we’ll never really appreciate life. Unless it’s okay to die, we’ll never really live.
Someone I know was captured during a war and sentenced to death. He was put in a cell with a window facing the execution ground. Day after day, hour after hour, he watched his comrades marched before a wall and shot. He had no idea when his turn would come. It went on for six weeks. The war ended and he was released. Although he’s one of the busiest people I know, he’s also one of the calmest. He knows that, no matter what, the worst thing that can happen to him is that he’ll die, and he’s already faced that fear and come to terms with it.
Take a good look at your fear of death. Let yourself experience the fear. Find out what the fear’s all about. Explore the many beliefs humans have about what happens after death. Are these really so terrible? There are, in fact, only three primary beliefs in our culture about what happens to us after death. Let’s explore each of them.
Death Is It, The End, Finito. As soon as the blood stops flowing to the brain, we have no more experience. Our time here on Earth – which is wholly biological and nothing else – is over.
If this is what happens after death, we have nothing to worry about. Everything we experience is bioelectrical-chemical reactions, and when it stops, it stops. Our fear of death makes no more sense than the glow in a light bulb worrying about when the power is switched off. When the light is out, the light is out. Period. The end. Nothing.
It’s Heaven or Hell (Or Maybe Purgatory) Forever. When we die, we are judged by God and placed in one of three places: heaven (good), hell (bad), or (in at least one popular belief) purgatory (certainly not as good as heaven, but not as bad as hell).
If this is your belief, then you might consider life-threatening illness as a loving message from God: "Prepare yourself for Paradise." You may prepare yourself so well, in fact, and become so close to God, that God might ask, "Do me a favor?" and you’ll say, "Sure. What?" and God may say, "Stick around another 80 years and continue to share the joy of Spirit with everyone."
We Keep Coming Back Until We Learn What We Need to Know. The Soul (who we really are) never dies; only the physical body dies. If the Soul has not learned all it needed to learn in one body, it picks up another (at birth) and continues with its education. This is generally known as "reincarnation" and is the most popular belief about life and death worldwide – although not so popular in the United States.
If this is the way things are, we have nothing to worry about. Death is like going from one room to another in a house, or taking off a suit and putting on a bathrobe (silk, with Alfred E. Newman’s and my personal motto, "What? Me Worry?" embroidered on the pocket). Death is then a rest stop, a changing room, a summer vacation between semesters.
Some say death is such a wonderful experience that the news must be kept from us or we’d all be killing ourselves just to get there. Of course, if we could fully perceive the joys of The Other Side, then we’d also know why we’re here in the first place, so we wouldn’t kill ourselves after all.
Take the time to conquer your fear of death. You can still live to be a hundred, and the years between now and then will be happier, healthier, and more exciting. And when it comes time to die, well, bon voyage.