When Death Comes

For the last eight days, I've spent hours talking and hearing about death.  How to legally frame death.  How to ethically frame death.  How rites and rituals can aid the transition of death for a patient and their family and friends.

Today, I walked through the units and found in front of a simple painting, one that matched light and dark.  It reminded me how much light depends on darkness - a place with no darkness never appears light.

Jesus came here - God with us - God pitched tent.  I am often tempted to see this as only light, to miss the temptations and pain Jesus experienced - did not simply observe - but experienced.  Somehow his death makes the whole of his life have a depth, a meaning that transcends his teaching and his acts.

Next week will be my first full one on the units, with patients.  No doubt death will come.  As usual, Mary Oliver helps me make some meaning in the midts of this:

When Death Comes

By Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up having simply visited this world.