Transition – Life’s Biggest Transition
Every day we go through transitions, most of the time completely unaware. It is easy to spot and experience the big ones, such as graduation, moving from home, changing a job, a birthday, or any number of equally large and easily marked transitional moments in our lives. Also people frequently are repeating the phrase “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Yet life itself is a transition from birth to death. From the moment we are born we are in a transitional moment as we move unstopping towards what is perhaps the greatest change moment in our wonderful lives, and that moment is death. The biggest obstacle that faces us daily and most of us ignore it completely, or if we do think of it, we do so in fear and worry.
I find this rather strange. Yet some would say that my talking about death is strange.
At the present time I am in a personal transition during this summer of 2011, I am on a break from Clinical Pastoral Education, CPE. I’ll take a second unit in the fall of 2011, as I work to become a Board Certified Chaplain. I’ll probably be writing a lot about death sharing things I learn and observe as I transition through both my training and my own life journey toward death.
I have written previously about my views on death and life and the concept of rebirth so I won’t go into that again here but you may follow the link by clicking on this sentence and it will take you to that article. In this writing I would like to talk about an interesting read that talks about the transition from life to death or the moments just preceding death and on into that period of time immediately after death that our society has almost completely ignored and eliminated.
In one of the books I am reading, “Making Friends with Death; A Buddhist Guide to Encountering Mortality” by Judith Lief there is an interesting chapter on the Tibetan beliefs about the moment of death and those moments as the body and spirit make the transition from a physical life to a life after physical.
In our culture while we may allow for and accept a presence or a lingering time with the deceased, generally though the person is taken to a funeral home almost immediately after the person has been declared dead. Then at some point a day or so later there might be a wake or a viewing depending upon the wishes of family or friends. And so we have become disconnected with the death process, viewing it almost entirely in terms of there is nothing left after the physical body no longer registers the clinical indicators of life.
Yet in reality, no matter what your religious views about soul or such, the body isn’t still really dead. Cells continue to have an existence, there is still biology continuing, even if they are continuing toward decay. In Tibetan belief the transition from life to death takes place over several days, there is a process that is still going on that isn’t complete at our traditional moment of death.
In the first phase, something that people have reported experiencing, the presence of the person may linger, perhaps experienced as hovering around the body, or even the presence of a negative type space.
At the time of death a journey begins though this journey is a disembodied one, or a mental-emotional journey, perhaps similar to our experiences of dreams which do not depend upon the physical body to take action. However unlike a dream there is no physical body to ground the life force to. It is at this time that it is believed the person gains a clarity of understanding which their physical body prevented them from understanding or seeing possibly.
“The moment of death is a profound experience of dissolution. It comes at a point when the elements holding our current existence together have dissolved and gone their separate ways. We have literally come apart.” Lief, “Making Friends With Death”, page 25
It is believed that at the moment of death our state of mind has a powerful significant effect on the journey as it unfolds. The author compares or uses as an example of this how we handle transitions in our daily life. How do we process changes, hassles and so forth, do we have a difficult time thinking clearly or even thinking of others when we get so wrapped up in ourselves?
“When death occurs, our old strategies no longer apply, so we are disoriented and frightened. How can we work with this? How can we better prepare ourselves to deal with death? The best preparation is working with our state of mind now rather than thinking about exotic things we might do later when we are looking death in the eyes.” Page 26
So, as I have learned and am still learning in my further training as a hospital Chaplain, the time to prepare for and consider death is this very moment. In this moment is where death exists and faces us head on, though we like to think it isn’t. There is no certainty that the next inhale will occur after we exhale this breath.
We may fear death, and we may not know exactly what death holds for us, but we can be certain trying to avoid it will not make its approach any slower or less vivid when it finally comes. Life marches ever towards death, there is no stopping it, no resting place to take a break, no detours to avoid it. I believe that when we can face death as a natural progression of this life we can begin to appreciate a certain beauty in this process of living which includes dying.
We tend to want to separate the two; thinking there is life and there is this other thing called death. But in reality the two are inseparable and attempts to see it otherwise only increase our insecurity and cause us greater suffering in the long run.
