Intimations of Mortality

Herbert Anderson

Being finite is a condition that pervades human life as we know it. Mortality is a more specific way of thinking about finitude that follows the constraints of our biology. Finitude is about learning to live with limits. Mortality is recognizing decline. Because we are mortal, there is a beginning and an end to life. Within the boundaries of birth and death, however, there are many endings and beginnings for finite beings. Clocks and calendars and fences and stop signs and school bells are signs of finitude that become intimations of mortality. Living with finiteness includes accepting uncertainty and vulnerability as unavoidable and acknowledging interdependence as fundamental to human fullness. In that way, the acceptance of human finitude is prelude to both responsible decision-making and faithful care at life’s end.

We are reminded of our mortality when we recognize limits in the nature of things. Genes and cells are limiting. Body parts wear out. All living beings die. If we resist the claims of creaky knees or faulty memory or a shrinking bladder or faulty hips or other physical signs of mortality that accompany growing older and aging, it will be even more difficult to embrace the definitive mortality moment of death. The inability to embrace finitude and mark what I call “mortality moments” hinders our awareness of dying while living and diminishes our capacity to live well while dying. My aim in this article is to identify intimations of finitude and mortality in ordinary living as prelude to living well up until life’s end.1 Moreover, people who acknowledge their mortality while fully living are more likely to make appropriate and necessary end-of-life preparations.

Even though being finite and being mortal are distinguishable understandings of the human condition, they are both intimations of mortality that point to the definitive moment of death. In this article, I will follow Atul Gawande’s definition of mortality: “Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone.”2 Although signs of finitude are everywhere, they are often easily overlooked. The limits imposed on us by biology are more difficult to avoid. Perhaps the best we can hope for are inklings of the inescapability of finiteness and intimations of mortality. We begin with experiences of finitude because they are our first intimations of mortality.

Facing Finitude

Living with limits or facing finitude is more encompassing than mortality. It includes the recognition that not everything is possible, and that nothing is forever. If we have eyes to see, signs of finitude are everywhere in very common activities. “Ice cream melts in the cone.” “Summer camp ends before the first kiss.” “My favorite baseball glove wears out.” “Fresh fruit spoils.” “Children leave home.” “Friendships fade when people move away.” The experience of limits is personal as well as pervasive. The human dilemma is that we are aware of our limits; the human capacity for self-transcendence—for thinking of ourselves as creatures who die—generates anxiety about both life and death. The sad truth is that, in order to flee from death or signs of finitude or decay or aging, we flee from life and shrink from being fully alive.

According to Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death, awareness of being finite and being mortal is the central problem for humans and a source of considerable anxiety. Here is how Becker says it: “The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”3 We try to flee from life to avoid death, but there is no escape. Becker again: “We saw that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality…. He has to go the way of the grasshopper even though it takes longer.”4 To deny our finiteness, we seek to be bigger and stronger and richer and more powerful than others so we do not feel so small. By contrast, embracing finitude—bringing death into life—is an essential dimension of human wisdom that enhances our living and our dying when we can see ourselves as finite creatures kept safe in God.

In a poem entitled “Up Against It,” Eamon Grennan uses “the fact of glass” to illustrate what a bee discovers when it hits a glass window again and again. It keeps trying to fly through “the fact of glass.” Bees do not know about finitude, so, as Grennan puts it, “they must fling their bodies against the one unalterable law of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on making the sound that tethers their electric fury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting of it.”5 The “fact of glass” is the bee’s encounter with finitude it can neither fathom nor accept because it lacks the capacity for self-transcendence. It is problematic for the human creature, however, because we are aware that “the fact of glass,” limits, and mortality await us all.

Like Grennan’s bee, we cannot penetrate glass or be in more than one place at a time. Even so, we push against spatial limits. Time is also limited. To be finite in time should be no more problematic than being finite in space. Moreover, temporal finitude can be a good thing, because it prevents monotony and provides a rounding off time so that an event or an adventure or a life can be evaluated in its totality.

Instances of Finitude

Attending to the mysteries of being finite is both a challenge and a gift. We will not see all the signs of finitude, partly because they are often hidden, and partly because we do not want to see the evidence that limits are unavoidable and that human possibilities are not endless. There will never be enough time to pursue every dream or follow every passion. Even so, the willingness to embrace finitude does not diminish dreaming or silence our passions. Instead, we practice the art of loving and losing and living on. Here are four very ordinary instances of being finite.

Making Decisions. Because agency is the generative force that prompts us to choose and act, it needs to be regarded and supported as a cherished value. Humans act. We go here and there, now or later, fast or slow. Every choice we make, however, every road we take, every dream we forsake is a reminder that we are finite. Each decision eliminates other choices we might have made. “I travel only one path at the time,” a friend once wrote to me. “When I do, I neglect other paths I might have chosen. I am so many, and yet I may be only one.” Sometimes these simple decisions to “go here and not there” are the occasion for the loss of a dream.

The gap between dreams we have and the choices we make is one reason why we fear incompleteness as much as death in human life. The end of an event is the occasion for critical review; in a similar way, death prompts a rehearsal of life. When dying individuals are disappointed with their lives or embarrassed by failure or unhappy because of unrealized expectations, the end of life becomes an occasion for fear and shame. “Even when people feel that their lives are incomplete or full of empty memories, it is important for family and friends and caregivers to help the dying person tell what they can.”6 It may be a moment of unexpected grace.

Even though options narrow as we come closer to death, deciding and deciding again and again is the work dying people can and must do. It is the task of caregivers to support deciding as long as it is possible. Here is what Karen Speerstra wrote in her hospice journal in The Divine Art of Dying:

I daily decide what to eat and how much. I listen to my body for clues. What am I thirsty for that won’t be too acidic? So far, I can decide what to wear. How much to sleep. When to nap. What to read. Which Netflix to watch. And how to spend my time with my friends…. I choose active dying just as I’ve chosen active living. I want to die as I have lived—a full participant in all life has to offer.7

Making it possible for someone who is dying to have limited but significant acts of freedom is, or least should be, a priority for family and friends and caregivers. Finite choices matter. However, honoring agency and helping people live as fully as possible until they die depends on the willingness of all caregivers to make sacrifices, to relinquish their own freedom or at least set aside their own agendas in order to be attentive to a patient’s wishes at the end. For dying individuals, these simple choices keep them as active participants in living fully to life’s end.

Finitude and Grief. Human beings attach themselves to people and things knowing all along that nothing is forever. Letting go of what we love is unavoidable because we are finite, but so are the people and things we love. In this sense, grief is an inevitable function of both attachment and finitude. Because we are finite creatures, there is no life without loss, and there is no loss without grief; hence, there is no living without grieving. It is quite simply the cost of loving. Grieving our losses helps us practice the spirituality of living with limits. No one has said this better than the poet Mary Oliver in these lines from “In Blackwater Woods”:

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the times comes to let it go, to let it go.8

We grieve what we have lost, remember what is important, affirm what is meaningful, and preserve valuable memories while at the same time letting the past become the past. This process of relinquishing or letting go is the occasion for sadness and an intimation of mortality.

A Crisis of the Middle Years. Because we are finite creatures, it is not really possible to live without disappointment or regret. “There will always be something more we could have done or should have done or would have done if only we had more courage, better luck, or more enduring trust in the goodness of God who holds the future.”9 In a review of Elia Kazan’s book The Arrangement, James Baldwin wrote the following reflection on one crisis of the middle years:

Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. When more time stretches behind than stretches before one, some assessments, however reluctantly and incompletely, begin to be made. Between what one wishes to become and what one has become there is a momentous gap, which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one’s final margin, one’s last opportunity, for creation.10

The awareness of this baffling geography is another intimation of mortality. Not everything is possible or even necessary. Our achievements are limited, that is certain, but so are our failures. Seeing failure as well as success through the lens of finite completeness is a constructive alternative to disappointment and despair.

Aging. Aging is a biological process that is relentless and seldom grants favors. “Old age is a continuous series of losses,” Philip Roth wrote in Everyman. “Old age is not a battle. It is a massacre.” Yet, as Sherwin Nuland reminds us, a person in later years should not be hemmed in by chronology even though one should never forget chronology. Both are true. That is the wonderful paradox of aging that comes from facing finitude. “Adapting brings with it the opportunity for far greater benisons and for brightening the later decades with a light not yet visible to the young.”11 The whole of a life, including growing old and dying, is a gift to be received with gratitude and worked on with courage.

Living with limits or facing finitude or marking our mortality is a central dimension of the wisdom of aging. Each of us will have our own laundry list of things we used to do and cannot do as well or at all anymore. Not a day goes by when I do not say “everything takes longer than I think it will.” I try to live with an awareness that not everything is possible.

Malcolm was taking a walk when he saw a frog on the sidewalk. He was startled to hear the frog speak. “Hey, old man, if you kiss me I will turn into a beautiful princess. I will be yours forever and we could make mad passionate love every day.” Malcolm put the frog in his jacket pocket and kept walking. “Hey, Old man, I don’t think you heard me. If you kiss me, I will turn into a beautiful princess and we can make passionate love every day.” “I heard you,” Malcolm said, “but at my age I’d rather have a talking frog.”

Life would be a lot simpler, aging a lot easier, and dying less complex if we were all a little more accepting of finitude like Malcolm. But learning to live as finite creatures is never simple; it requires courage, in part because with finitude comes contingency and the unexpected suddenness with which things happen. “The courage to accept suffering as an element of finitude and affirm finitude in spite of the suffering that accompanies” is a characteristic of authentic spirituality.12 To avoid suffering, we will seek to limit our losses to escape the grief that follows losing whom or what we love. Becker wisely observes that the human one “is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.”13 There is no way to avoid the dilemma of being a mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his or her mortality. This is the fundamental human paradox that accompanies every intimation of mortality.

Instances of Mortality

Mortality is a specific instance of finitude. As with finitude, we often miss the signs of mortality in ordinary daily activities. Mortality becomes personal when I can admit that I will die. But arriving at that realization takes time, even for those who spend their working days with people near death. It is, as Gawande puts it, “a process, not an epiphany.” One of the ways to enhance that process, I propose, is to mark mortality moments when they occur and pay attention to the times or situations or moments in our lives when we are more keenly aware that we are mortal—that we will die.

Our lives are made up of summers and winters, joy and sorrow, breathtakingly beautiful sunsets and degenerative diseases. The challenge for each of us throughout life is to have the courage to face the knowledge of both what is feared and what is hoped.

At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped…. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage—the courage to act on the truth we find.14

In order to live fully as finite creatures, we need to acknowledge our limits, take death into our life, celebrate aging, and live toward death with courage and freedom. One has to decide, as Gawande wisely observes, “whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most.”

Incidental Mortality. The initial awareness that we are mortal is usually internal and could happen at any time in the life journey. A mortality moment may be prompted by an experience of loss, by the retirement or death of a same-age friend, or by purchasing a cane. It may also simply happen in conversation as we reflect on life. A friend of mine in her late 60s was telling her husband and daughter about what she wanted “if I die.” After listening to all her requests prefaced by “if,” her husband asked quietly, “‘If’, not ‘when’?” This “if-when” moment makes death personal rather than abstract.

An internally prompted mortality moment occurs when we make decisions about the end of a life. We are encouraged to make a will or establish a trust early in life. I suspect many people avoid making these important decisions precisely because they do not want to face the reality of mortality. Or, making these decisions may become a mortality moment in the doing. People who have established a trust and determined advance directives are often still reluctant to share that information with adult children. The decisions we make in preparation for the end of a life are usually initiated from within and not in response to a medical diagnosis. They are the result of a being aware of our mortality because we are human, not because we are seriously sick or terminally ill. Marking mortality moments is a choice from within.

Life Cycle Mortality. There are predictable moments in the life cycle when bodily changes accompany an identifiable moment in the cycle of a life. I am certainly more aware of my mortality at eighty-six than I was at sixty-six or forty-six or twenty-six. When I was thirty, I needed glasses; at forty, bifocals were necessary. At fifty, a friend game me a poem about doing one thing well rather than “scattering wide seeds in many fields.” At sixty, my wife gave me a heating pad to take the edge off painful joints. By seventy I was recovering from prostate cancer, and by eighty I had a couple new artificial hips. When he turned eighty, a college classmate sent around this reflection:

Life is like a funnel. As we near the narrow end of the funnel, we are aware that our options are fewer and we don’t know how long the narrow part will last. For me that day of realization happened when I turned 80. Why 80? There is nothing magic about 80 but, unexpectedly I heard this voice saying “you have fewer years left. What will you do with them?”

Gawande has it just right: being mortal is about coping with the constraints of our biology. Many years ago, I received a Christmas letter that included a little ditty of unknown origin. “My eyeglasses are dandy, / My hearing aid is fine. / My dentures come in handy / But how I miss my mind.” Part of the complexity of aging is the incremental nature of change. For some, because of a stroke or heart attack or surgery or some other crisis, the functional loss is sudden. For others, it happens very slowly over time, and we may not recognize those changes until we are on the other side of new limits. Mortality recognition does not happen automatically.

The Death of a Parent for Middle-Aged Children. I am the oldest of eighteen cousins on my mother’s side. Even after both of my parents had died, I looked to their surviving siblings or their spouses to keep mortality awareness at bay. It was not until my Aunt Marian died at 104 that I was aware that my last buffer had gone. I am now the next generation scheduled to die. “The loss of a parent means that the penetration of death is aimed undeflected at the middle-aged children who remain…. The agedness of one’s parents, the movement into middle age and finally the death of parents all contribute to an emerging sense of one’s own finitude.15 While it is possible to preserve an unreal denial of mortality well into the middle years through manic activity, the accumulation of wealth, or emotionally impoverishing patterns of denial, the death of a parent often strains those maneuvers beyond repair. The sense that it is now my turn to grow old and die was a critical awareness for me in late mid-life when Aunt Marian died.

Impediments to Mortality Awareness

Advances in medicine, nutrition, and public health over the last two hundred years have increased the life span in advanced societies. The discovery of longevity genes in invertebrates in the 1990s “unleashed a small tsumani of startup activity” presuming that the life span could be modified by genetic changes.16 The independent National Academy of Medicine has launched an effort dedicated to “ending aging forever.” Whether through stem cell research or cryobiological preservation or cloning (again and again) or some other life-prolonging miracle measure, microbiological immortalists believe it is possible to conquer disease, cure aging, and eliminate death. While we applaud scientific advances that expand health and extend life, they may have the effect of circumventing mortality awareness. Molecular biologists promise to lengthen our days, and in modest ways they already do. Science will continue to extend the limits of human life, and new stories of aging will be written. Nonetheless we remain mortal creatures, bound by birth and death. Death is not an add-on. It is part of the creation that God declared good.

The impulse to extend life is not new. The longing for long life has been a common theme in religion, mythology, and medicine for centuries. The Hebrew Bible, for example, includes specific promises of long life for those who keep the commandants of God: “If you walk in my ways then I will lengthen your days” (1 Kings 3:14; cf. Psalm 34:12, 13; Proverbs 4:10; 10:27). The biblical commandment to honor mother and father comes with a promise of longevity (Deuteronomy 5:16). The assumption behind these promises is that long life will be satisfying because it will include good health and a sound mind. At the same time, the Bible is clear that there is no life without death.

Struggles against old age, mortality, and death will undoubtedly continue. Yuval Noah Harari suggests in Homo Deus that efforts to lengthen our days are more likely now because famine, plague, and war “have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature to manageable challenges.”17 We applaud efforts to diminish the discomforts of aging. The possibility of living longer is not without peril, however. With longer life expectancy there is a greater likelihood of acquiring a debilitating disease that would diminish the quality of life in later years. People are glad to live longer as long as they are healthy. If a healthy, long life is regarded as a fundamental human right, death remains an enemy because it violates that right. If, however, death is not the enemy but part of creation that God intended and declared to be good, then human life is better served by learning to live with mortality and sickness and death rather than railing against them.

Paying Attention to Mortality’s Inevitability

Marking mortality is important because it makes it possible for us to see death as an inevitable and necessary part of life. Paul Tillich, a widely respected Christian theologian of the twentieth century, is reported to have offered this prayer in the Harvard University chapel: “Lord, help me to bring my death into my life, lest death take my life from me.” If death is part of my life, then it—death—cannot “take” my life—my living—from me. For that reason, we can say that the dying are still living, and that death is part of my life. When we say that “death took” Sam Jones or “cancer took” Jessica Riley much too young, we suggest the opposite—namely, that death or cancer has agency outside us and can take life from us.

In some religious perspectives, God decides when people die, so it might be said that “God took Bernie” as if God were an outside agent acting on the human body to cause death. Although we may have outgrown the boogieman or the grim reaper as the agent of death, death is still regarded as a force or agent that acts on us from outside. If, however, death happens from within, sometimes even as an act of self-completion or self-fulfillment, it is easier to think of death as part of my life.

Each death, like each life, is personal and paradoxical. It is personal because no one can die for me. Whether by accident or cancer or a stroke or heart failure or old age or choice or hidden determination, it is personal. And it is paradoxical because death and life, dying and living, are bound together from the very beginning. In order to avoid glamorizing a good death or demonizing a brutal death, it is necessary to keep insisting that death is a contradiction or a paradox—a friend and an enemy, a moment and a process, a fate and an act, a disruptive end and the gracious fulfillment of a life.

Death is both moment and process. It is a definable instant when breath ceases and the bodily systems shut down, and it is a process of dying while living, during which our genetically programmed resources are diminishing. Death is also both a problem to be solved and a mystery to be experienced. Because death is a problem, we keep asking what must be done about this medical situation or that. Because death is also a mystery to be experienced, we ask a different question: How shall I behave toward this situation?

The ultimate aim of this article should be clear by now. Recognizing mortality moments in the midst of living is good preparation for making difficult decisions at life’s end. Embracing finitude and marking mortality throughout life are preparation for the definitive mortality moment that is not by choice and carries the weight of finality.18 It occurs, for example, when surgery determines that it is not possible to stop the spread of cancer. A definitive mortality moment could also be the result of a stroke or an accident that permanently limits physical movement or sets in motion physical deterioration that leads to death. It may also occur when a patient whose treatment may even have been successful for a time decides to discontinue it in order to live more fully while dying. Earlier decisions we might make in preparation for life’s end are usually initiated from within because we are mortal, not because we are irreversibly sick or terminally ill.

Karen Speerstra: A Definitive Mortality Moment

Karen Speerstra and I had been friends since 1977, when we lived together in Dubuque, Iowa. Shortly after retiring from a remarkable career as an editor and moving to Vermont, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Karen lived for ten years with ovarian cancer, during which time she wrote three books and traveled extensively. The treatment was successful, and she tolerated chemotherapy well, but by Christmas 2012 she had lost her appetite and her nails were turning black. If her nails were falling out, Karen wondered, what was happening to her stomach. Karen made the decision to discontinue all treatment. She called this “a moment of blessed recognition.” Some time later, Karen and I determined to write about her experience of living while dying in the book referred to earlier in this essay called The Divine Art of Dying: Living Well to Life’s End. Here is what Karen wrote about the decision to discontinue treatment:

I will consciously trade the treatment not only for more physical stamina, but also for what I hope will be a more wide-awake brain. I want to participate fully in my living until I die. And I want to be conscious enough to grasp some of the finer points of this whole mysterious “dying thing.”19

In the book, we call this definitive mortality moment “taking the turn toward death.” This action embodies the prayer cited earlier: “Help me bring my death into my life lest death take my life from me.” Karen and I wrote the book to encourage people facing a life-limiting illness to consider foregoing further curative treatment sooner rather than later and take the turn toward death so that they will have time and resources and emotional energy to live as fully as possible until they die.

This decision to suspend treatment or discontinue medical procedures designed to prolong life is never made easily. People who have ignored ordinary mortality moments or postponed hard choices throughout their lives are likely to avoid making choices at life’s end. If no planning has been done before, no advance directives agreed on, that final discernment process will take abundant time and care navigating unpredictably powerful emotions. In this process, the decision-making agent is always the one with the life-limiting illness. Taking the turn toward death is a life-affirming decision in the interest of living more fully in the time that is left. It makes it possible to garner our resources and harness our energies to live as fully as we can until we die.

We live and die and make choices in the midst of meaningful communities and the constraints of ethnic or religious traditions, insurance companies, and the government. Our choices are always limited. Nonetheless, the dying person is free to turn toward death and choose to participate fully in living to life’s end. Honoring that choice is a gracious gift that a family can give a loved person who is dying. Karen was fortunate that her decision was hers to make, and she never looked back. She was able to live fully for ten more months after that decision to take the turn toward death. Because our impulse is to hold on to those we love—to do whatever it takes to keep them alive—often at great sacrifice, it will take time for family and friends to honor the choice made. If the person facing a life-ending situation is unable to choose and has no advance directives, the process of deciding a treatment0 plan is even more emotionally and ethically complex.

More Defining Mortality Moments

Once an individual has decided to discontinue further curative treatment and take the turn toward death, other actions follow. Palliative care and new hospice criteria make it possible to enter hospice long before one is actively dying. Once a person enters hospice, curative treatment is no longer possible, although that decision can be reversed. Entering hospice may be an emotionally charged mortality moment, especially for people who want to keep their dying private. Hospice makes a private decision public. One’s dying becomes a public event even if the public beyond family and close friends is only the hospice team. Anyone who visits the kitchen will see the “Do Not Resuscitate” sign on the refrigerator door.

Of all the decisions Karen made, her determination to be transparent about dying was one of most important. She lived without hiding her dying so that she might harness her increasingly limited energy for creative quality living up to the end. Here is what she wrote in “Karen’s Hospice Journal”:

Since I tell everyone that Herbert and I are writing this book about dying, I don’t have to worry about who knows what about my current state. It takes a lot of energy to figure out whom you can safely talk to, so I’ve decided on full disclosure even though it’s hard for some of my friends to accept my candor about death. Nevertheless, transparency is what I have chosen. 20

Secret-keeping and withholding the truth about a diagnosis or a treatment plan isolates. Transparency makes it easier for communities of compassionate care to evolve. Of course, truth-telling is not an absolute and not everyone was glad for Karen’s openness, but deciding to be transparent made it possible for Karen to harness her energies for quality living to the end. Being transparent is one of those gifts that keep giving.

The decision to take the turn toward death is not the last decision a dying person will make and may not even be the most difficult. “The choices don’t stop,” Gawande has observed. “Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.”21 They will include relinquishing or handing over what we value, waiting, tolerating ambiguity, trusting the kindness of strangers, making preferences clear, telling stories, sharing memories, giving gifts, waiting some more, and grieving all our losses. Because these are often ordinary choices people make when they are living but not dying, it is easy for friends and family and other caregivers to overlook the significance or the weightiness of these simple choices when we do not know if it will be the last time.

The Final Mortal Moment

Taking the turn toward death—the final mortal moment—sooner rather than later makes it possible for everyone—patient, family, friends, medical professionals, and hospice caregivers—to work toward preserving continuity for someone who is living toward death. Finally, however, there is a final mortal moment. The awareness of death reminds everyone that human beings are finite, limited, vulnerable mortal creatures. Death is also mystery because it is both the end and not the end. There is finality to death, but there is also life hidden in God. We live in that mystery that cannot be domesticated either by medical technology or by end-of-life strategies.

The task of family and friends and other caregivers is both simple and sacred: to help the dying walk with lighter footprints lest they fall. We do that in many ways. We stay present. Honor agency when we can. Eliminate secrets when possible. Bear witness to their story. Eradicate isolation and eliminate loneliness. Translate mute pain into suffering that can be shared. Practice powerlessness and embody hopefulness. And, most of all, live in their mystery. They know what we do not know. Karen wrote these words near the end of her life:

As I view my planet now from my upstairs hospice room, sharper colors outline the mountains in the distance. Two words come to mind: intensity and perfection…. Everything is mystery! It’s all so much more than I thought. All this is not easy, but it is, at some mysterious level, perfect.22

Living fully into that mystery is both active and passive, both something we do and something that happens to us. We can choose how to live until we die, and in that choosing we may influence when and how the final mortal moment occurs. Yet, death happens to us. It happens to me. That is mystery. Yet it is something I do. Death is a human act. That is also a mystery. Activity and passivity are both essential qualities of being human. The human creature is both subject and object, both actor and acted upon.

Although agency and active participation in living while dying are central, passivity and waiting are not far behind. In a culture that prizes autonomy, promotes agency, abhors dependence, and idolizes independence and self-sufficiency, we may need to remind ourselves that living and dying are always a contradiction of acting and waiting, activity and passivity. And both sides of the paradox are true. We are simultaneously choosing and deciding about living while dying and waiting for a mystery. A poem Karen wrote shortly before her death, entitled “We Wait: Notaries of Time,” includes these lines: “So, we wait. Watch. Touch / memories and share stories. / We watch planets and stars / dance to velvet rhyme. / For we are notaries of time.”23 If death is a mystery to be experienced as well as a problem to be solved, then we need to ask: How shall I live toward that moment? Living fully and actively toward that moment includes waiting. We are, after all, notaries of time.

The Rev. Dr. Herbert Anderson is a Lutheran pastor and retired professor of pastoral care. He has taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry, two Lutheran seminaries, and is Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. An internationally known authority on bereavement, family, care of the dying, and pastoral and practical theology, he wrote his dissertation at Drew University under the supervision of Will Herberg.

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