by Elizabeth Gray Vining
To many of us comes the duty and the privilege of helping beloved person through the process of dying. It can be a rich experience for everyone when the dying one can talk openly and freely about it. When Bradford Smith knew that he had incurable cancer, he resolved that there would be, as he expressed it, “none of the usual pretense, false optimism and behind-the-back talk that usually goes on with such a situation.” He was a very articulate person, as well as an essayist and biographer, and he was able to write out his thoughts and feelings as the days went on, His wife, Marian, kept all the things that he wrote, and after his death they were published in one of Pendle Hill’s most beautiful pamphlets, Dear Gift of Life. I will read one short passage from it. “This relatedness of life as it binds us to all that is past, surely binds us to the future as well so the Divine spark kindled in us can never be really extinguished, for it is part of a universal flame. Once we have squarely faced the inescapable fact of our own death, we need never fear it but turn and live life to the hilt as we have seen that it should be lived. Then, whether that life be long or short, it will have been a full one.”
In Sybil Bedford’s recent biography of Aldous Huxley, we read how Huxley helped his wife, Maria, through the passage from this life to the next. This is the quotation: “I went and sat by Maria’s bed. I told her that she was surrounded by human love and that this love was the manifestation of a greater love by which she was enveloped and sustained. I told her to let go. She knew what love was and being capable of love as few human beings are capable, now she must go forward into love and she was to forget not only her poor body but the time in which that body had lived. Let her forget the past, leave her old memories behind. Regrets, nostalgias, remorses, apprehensions, all these were barriers between her and the light. Let her forget them. ‘Peace now,’ I kept repeating, ‘Peace, love, joy, now.”‘
For a friend of mine dying of cancer, I wrote this poem.
E.B.Y
Her light
has shone for us.
May she go confidently
into the source of light,
Her laughter
has delighted us.
May she discover joy
in new amazements.
Her strength
has undergirded us,
May she go
unfaltering
into the unknowable.
Her serenity
has steadied us.
May She enter sweetly
into the source of all peace.
Her love
has warmed us.
Welcome her
into the ever-living
company of the compassionate,
O Love Eternal.
—E.G.V.
Life is good. I have no doubt about that. It is a precious trust given into our hands to carry carefully, to cherish, to use generously, to enjoy and to return when the time comes. “Death is not the opposite of life,” Howard Brinton said.” The machine is the opposite of life. Death is a part of life.”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted at ninety the Eastern saying, “Death plucks my ear and says, ‘Live, I am coming. “‘
Henry James wrote a whole long novel, one of his best, The Ambassadors, on the theme, live while you live. Henry Cadbury in his late eighties had two wishes, not to live too long, and to live long enough. Both wishes were fulfilled and he was granted a good death in addition. There is a Gaelic proverb which I love. “Save when he comes too late, death is a friend,” At first one may wonder if one has heard it correctly. “Save when he comes too late, death is a friend.” Shouldn’t it be, “…too early”? But it is not the part of a friend to linger on the way, to dawdle, when he is wanted and needed. What I myself most dread is to live on too long in weariness and bodily suffering after my friends are gone. Anna Brinton said once, “I am growing enthusiastic about dying, so many people take so long to die.” And the poet Leonora Speyer wrote, “Let not my death be long, but light as a bird swinging, happy decision in the height of song, then flight from off the ultimate and let my wing be Strong and my last note the first of another’s theme. See to it, Thou,”
Thomas Bailey Aldrich said to Annie Fields, the widow of the well-known nineteenth-century Boston publisher, James Fields, that he would like to live 450 years, “Shouldn’t you?” “No,” she answered quickly. “I am on tiptoe for the flight.”
What of the fear of death of which speak and write? It is more prevalent among people who do not like life than among those who do, more acute among those Who believe that they go out like a candle than among those who believe however vaguely and tenuously that there is more of life than we can see now. The poet and preacher John Donne said in one of his sermons,” Where the devil imprints on a man, I care not though I were dead, it were but a candle blown out and there were an end of it all, will imprint a loathness to die and a fearful apprehension of his transmigration. Those who trust in the of love have least fear.”
Whittier wrote after his seventy-second birthday, “I realize more and more that fame and notoriety can avail little in our situation, that love is the one essential thing, always welcome, outliving time and change and going with us into the unguessed possibilities of death.”
What is a good death? I think William Penn defined it when he said Of George Fox, “He had the of a short illness and the blessing of a clear sense to the last,” Whittier’s own death was a beautiful one. He was eighty-four. He was staying with a friend in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, when he suffered a stroke. For the three days that he lived, he was full of acceptance. “It is all right. Everybody is so kind.” And of love; over and over he said, “Love, love to all the world.” On September 6 as the sun was rising, he died.
Teilhard de Chardin prayed for a good end and died swiftly of a heart attack. When I read of this I thought I would like to make such a prayer for myself, and shortly before my seventieth birthday I wrote one. This is it.
Oh God, our Father, spirit of the universe, I am old in years and in the sight of others but I do not feel old within myself. I have hopes and purposes, things I wish to do before I die. A surging of life within me cries, “Not yet, not yet,” more strongly than it did ten years ago, perhaps because the nearer approach of death a defensive strength of the instinct to cling to life. Help me to loosen fiber by fiber the instinctive strings that bind me to the life I know. Infuse me with spirit so that it is Thee I turn to, not the old ropes of habit and thought. Make me poised and free, ready when the intimation comes to go forward eagerly and joyously into the new of life that we call death. Help me to bring my work each day to an orderly state so that it will not be a burden to those who must fold it up and put it away when I am gone. Keep me ever aware and ever prepared for the summons. If pain comes before the end, help me not to fear it or struggle against it but to welcome it as a hastening of the process by which the strings that bind me to life are untied. Give me joy in awaiting the great change that comes after this life of many changes, grant that my self be merged in Thy self as a candle’s wavering light is caught up into the sun.
This prayer, like all long prayers, is really addressed as much to myself as to God. And I am not at all sure that by the time one has reached seventy-one can do anything very much about the manner of one’s dying, Whittier and Teilhard de Chardin, Anna and Howard Brinton, and Henry Cadbury had won their way of dying by their way of living over the years before. But of this I am quite, quite certain, and I find it best expressed in the words of that wonderful fourteenth-century English mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich. “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
About the Author
Elizabeth Gray Vining was born and grew up in Philadelphia, and graduated from Bryn Mawr College. As Elizabeth Janet Gray and Elizabeth Gray Vining she has written many books for adults and children, one of them the Newbery Award-winning Adam of the Road.
During and after World War II, Elizabeth Vining was a writer for the American Friends Service Committee. In 1946 she was appointed tutor to Crown Prince Akihito of Japan and later wrote Windows for the Crown Prince and Return to Japan. In addition to several novels and biographies (including that of Rufus Jones), she has written Quiet Pilgrimage, an autobiography, and its sequel, Being Seventy (The Measure of a Year).
Facing One’s Own Death and its companion piece Beauty from Ashes, Strength and Joy from Sorrow are two spoken essays recorded by Elizabeth Vining for the Committee on Worship and Ministry of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. They were first printed by the Books and Publications Committee of the Yearly Meeting in July 1979, With her permission.
Reprinted 1994
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