We’re all just walking each other home. ~ Ram Dass

I have never been anywhere but sick.
In a sense sickness is a place more instructive
than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place
where nobody can follow. Sickness before death
is a very appropriate thing and I think those
who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.

~ A Letter from Flannery O’Connor to a friend1

This is not a warning that death is coming, but a reminder that life is happening.
Now is the day of salvation. ~ Gregory Boyle

I met Mary some years ago when she started coming to the gatherings of The Human & the Holy (H&H) spiritual formation community I founded and led. I say “met,” but really I had not had much opportunity to get to know her until she came to see me one day one-to-one. Over time I became more acquainted with Mary and her story. She was as Irish as Guinness and a published author. She had been a Catholic Sister for eighteen years. She left her community, went back to school, got her Ph.D., married, and worked until her retirement at a nearby university which is when she joined H&H. Mary was a widow.

Although only with us for two years, Mary was a great addition to our community. Bright, witty, a gifted writer, down-to-earth, and spiritually mature. In my opinion, she gave one of the most appreciated compliments anyone had paid The Human & the Holy community which was that she appreciated that everyone was treated as an adult and welcomed how everyone acted like adults. Seems like a small thing. Something that should be expected. Something that could be taken for granted. You’d think. But the Church has done its fair share of infantalizing over the years.

The second compliment Mary paid was more directly to me, but not in the normal sense. It had less to do with anything I had done, and everything to do with what she wanted me to do. One early evening after an H&H gathering Mary came up to me and said, “You are a spiritual director. Is that right?” I told her “Yes.” And she asked if she could make an appointment to meet with me. So we scheduled an appointment for later that week.

We began with some small talk. She said how much she enjoyed the H&H gatherings. How she felt like she finally found a place where she belonged and fit in with like-minded and similarly committed people. We had not been seated long before the small talk took a sharp turn and became big talk. Mary told me the impetus and reason for her wanting to see me. She said that the week before she had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She explained her checkup, her conversation with the doctor, and what lay ahead for her. Then she spoke one of the most beautiful, unforeseen, and poignant lines that anyone has ever uttered to me. She said, “I was wondering if you would walk with me into my death.”

Thinking back, the naturalness and inflection with which she spoke her steep question to me was not noticeably different than if she had asked me after an H&H gathering, “Would you mind walking me to my car?” In the time between the last word of her question and the first word of my reply, I was invaded by a clandestine cluster of emotions and internal responses: I was taken by surprise not only by the sheer elegant simplicity and gravity of her request, but also by the way she spoke it—so direct and unaffected, and with that poetic turn of a phrase that the Irish bards have mastered. I felt humbled, awed, and a bit daunted.

I said it was a compliment directly spoken to me—but , of course, I had done little—if anything—to deserve the honor to be her walking partner on this final leg of her earthly journey. So the compliment was the opportunity, privilege, and gift Mary was giving me. This was a bit different than prior pastoral care and chaplaincy work because it was going to be more regular, ongoing, intimate, and focused—walk with me into my death. What I know of Ram Dass, I suspect tucked surreptitiously in his often-quoted wise witticism noted above was his awareness that the home we are walking each other toward each day, whether we are aware of it or not, is always our death lodge, since—as they say—no one gets out alive.

Mary blessed me simply by asking me to do something so wholly natural and so naturally holy: be along side her in her imminent and eminent diminishment as she moved toward her final and greatest giveaway. There is no false modesty when I say I know I received more in that walk from her than she received from me. But that was part of the blessing. Just to be there as companion, witness, and generous listener offering what seems so meager—attentive presence. I think Mary had a good death because she so faithfully and consciously engaged in the unsayable mystery of her dying and didn’t make the common mistake of putting off asking and living into the big questions her finiteness elicited from her. Questions that come along as walking companion as well. Questions that invite a response, yet have no answer.

Earlier this week another one of my directees died, a Sister of St. Joseph of Orange who had blessed me with the same privilege of companioning her toward—what I call The Great Undoing and The Grand Giveaway. This walk was different, longer than Mary’s, with less of a sense of urgency due to a period of remission. M.A. had been my directee for a couple of years when she told me that she had been diagnosed with a type of Leukemia that would—sooner than later—kill her.

For nearly three years our conversations always happened with an eye to the horizon and often directly included M.A.’s awareness of her impending death—not as some abstract reality—but as the one dance we do not want to sit out. Month after month, for over two years, we caught sight of the question that should be all of ours question, namely: “How do I live well, so that I might die well?” Or, asked another way, “In what ways today can I deliberately, consciously, and fully live so that—barring a sudden death—when my time comes I will know how to consciously participate in my own dying by letting go completely and giving myself away at death?”

M.A. was 90 years old when she gave herself away completely. She had been a Sister of St. Joseph of Orange for more than 72 years. It was such a gift to accompany M.A. And again, like Mary, she taught me so much about how to face into one of the greatest moments of our lives. Screenwriter, director, and comedian Woody Allen famously said, “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Ba-dum-tss! In reality, there are perhaps few greater tragedies in life than to opt out and not be fully present as we make our way to death’s door.

Through my accompaniment with Mary and M.A. I learned that in the spiritual life the more and more we grow, the less and less we become. St. Paul says as much in his letter to the Galatians: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” And yet, as we become less and less we become truer and truer who we already are in God. Mary brought with her to our conversations and reflection the word diminishment. She got it from the French Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin whom she loved. He wrote of “passive diminishment” by which he meant those afflictions we cannot get rid of and must bear. M.A. brought with her the image of the house, or more accurately, the home. I walked through her home with her for two years as she went through and closed up each room. And as she closed up each room, it disappeared. We spoke often of what it would mean and involve to let go of that last room. I believe M.A. died a good death. Each act of surrender was made freely and was a part of her Great Undoing and her Grand Giveaway.

In 2014-15, our theme for The Human & the Holy year together was Embracing Life, Engaging Death. I have long believed that embracing life fully helps us to engage death completely. Conversely, I believe that consciously engaging in the reality of our unavoidable dying long before we reach the near occasion of death will change and enhance the way we live. This mutually enhancing relationship between living and dying has long been an integral, and enacted spiritual insight among all the wisdom traditions.

Based on the formal and informal feedback, that year in H&H was considered by many—if not by most participants—to have been the most impactful and memorable year of our sixteen years together. It was also considered by the majority to be the most difficult and challenging year, and as the spiritual guide and primary teacher, I had the unique position to learn it was the year with the greatest resistance as well. For an ecumenical Christian community, it was noteworthy and more than a little humbling, that it caused such discomfort and urged so many of us to want to turn away from engaging death in favor of only embracing life, when the  core symbol of our faith is a man being executed on a wooden cross before being raised from the dead. An Easter we make our way to by bypassing Good Friday, is a rather quaint and anemic Easter. The Christian perspective is to live life fully in total awareness of the blessed tension that insists we hold our dying and living together in a sacred union.

Rabbi Heschel insists that “Life is in need of an all-embracing significant form which should have bearing directly or indirectly on every aspect of it.” For Christians, our “all-embracing significant form” that influences and colors every aspect of our life is the dying and rising of Christ. As Jesus put it, “Truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”2 The paradoxical path we are asked to walk together leads us toward Our Great Undoing and The Grand Giveaway. But we believe dying and death are the portal to new life just as the cold, stripped nature of winter eventually opens up to the fecund and flourishing nature of spring that is the harbinger of new life.

1 Flannery O’Connor suffered from and died of lupus when she was just thirty-nine.
2 John 12:24

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