With What Will You Die?

Over 30 years ago, Bev and I bought a piece of land on Hornby Island, a very small rock located off the west coast of Canada. Our place faces east, back toward the mainland, and morning comes as the sun crests over the coastal mountains. Every evening, a procession of illuminated layer cakes sails by – cruise ships heading to Alaska – carrying thousands of revellers past our little oasis of eagles, hummingbirds and trees.

There are only 800 full time residents on Hornby, who are served by a basic medical clinic. Bev is a (now retired) palliative care physician, and over the years, the nurses and doctors of the clinic have called on her for help with patients who were reaching the end of their lives. This summer, they asked her to give a talk on end-of-life issues and this past week she offered a large gathering her practical wisdom and wise spiritual insight, under the title “Living to Die and Dying to Live.”

Drawing on her decades of experience and basing her teaching in first-person stories of deathbed spiritual awakenings, she shared her experience of seeing people who were facing death come to recognize essential truths about life that tend to remain hidden from us in our hectic, earthly, seemingly unending lives. Dying people offer us those lessons and we can enrich our lives by choosing to apply them to our own lives, even before we find ourselves facing our own end of days.

I was reminded of a classic story that is told about Yosef Yozel Horwitz who was the founder of the Novardok school of Mussar but who, prior to that, involved himself in commerce to support his family. On a business trip in eastern Europe, he ran into Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, founder of the 19^th century Mussar movement, and his disciple, Rabbi Yitzchak Blazer, known as Itzele Peterburger. The two rabbis challenged him about why he was not devoting himself more fully to his Jewish life.

Horwitz responded:

“Doesn’t a person need with what to live?”

And they answered:

“And doesn’t a person also need with what to die?”

That response pushed him into his decision to leave business and devote himself to Torah and Mussar. His first step toward becoming the Alter of Novardok was to have himself bricked into a small room where he devoted himself to study, prayer and meditation for two full years.

The truth is that throughout our lives, we are given many opportunities to develop “with what to die.” From one perspective, life can be framed as a battle against death, as Dylan Thomas captures so well:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But from another perspective, the end of earthly life is just one in a series of transitions we got through, beginning with our own birth and continuing through the many births and deaths we experience all throughout our lives.

Every new relationship, new business or career change, project or development, and new home is a birth. The birth of a child creates a parent; your child’s child births a grandparent.

And on the flip side, every loss, disappointment, betrayal, failure, bereavement and the like is a death. Even decisions we make can be seen to embody the same phenomenon: the word “decide” shares a Latin root with words like “homicide” and “suicide” because when you make a “decision,” one or more other options need to be cut off, to die.

The essential lesson is that we have the opportunity to cultivate “with what to die” by looking for the lesson in every circumstance that life delivers us into. This is the attitude that Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe called (drawing on earlier teachers, back at least to the Rambam) hitlamdut, or as he would have said it, hislamdus, which he saw to be a central tool of Mussar.

Hitlamdut is a stance of approaching yourself, other people and all life experiences with an attitude of curiosity, openness, and a willingness to grow – and this literally until one’s last day. Rav Wolbe wrote: “When one reaches the day of death, one won’t be dying—one will be learning how to die.” And he concluded: “This is the way of one who toils in the work of Mussar.”

It’s ironic that this focus on death – the final one as well as all the ones we experience along the way – turns out to be the path to thriving in life. That was the point Bev emphasized in her talk. When we truly internalize the conviction that our time is finite, and when we bring that curious, learning attitude to all the births and deaths we go through in life, we will find ourselves living like there is no tomorrow. And maybe there won’t be. Maybe today is all we’ve got.

I usually end my blog with a question. This time, I welcome your comments and reflections.