Live As If You’re About to Die

by Bonnie O'Brien-Jonsson

Printed in Marin Independent Journal – Thursday, February 4, 1999

On Feb. 28, all 10 of us are going to “die.” The year we took to complete our lives will come to an end. We will spend the day together reading our wills and obituaries and sing our final good-byes. Of course, this will only be a rehearsal – an important rehearsal.

At the end of 1997 I had read Stephen Levine’s book “A Year To Live” and knew I wanted to follow the book’s guidelines: living as if it were my last year. I was inspired by the idea of living more deeply: investigating fear and letting go of patterns and habits that held me back from experiencing life as a joyful celebration, no matter what the circumstances. I thought death might be a good teacher.

At the time I was working at a job that required me to travel and I wasn’t working as often as I liked at the job I loved – teaching mindfulness-based stress reduction. My daughter was pregnant, and my husband and I were too often quibbling. Much of my life was involved with meditation: I had a daily practice and went on as many retreats each year as I could. I felt that spending a year with death looking over my shoulder, even if it wasn’t true, would help me understand the nature of death and dying and would clarify why I was alive. I didn’t know how much of an impact it would have.

I thought the process would be more effective if done in a group. I asked some friends if they would be interested and opened the idea up to members of the Wednesday morning meditation class I attended.

On Feb. 28 last year, we gathered in my living room in West Marin and committed to living the next years if it were our last. We introduced ourselves and talked about why we were attracted to looking at our deaths and bringing this intention to each day of the year. There were 10 women present; we all remain together.

Erin Carney told us she was not afraid of dying herself but here daughter had had cancer and she did fear for her daughter’s health and her young family. Jane Futcher told us two of her friends had recently died due to breast cancer, and felt a great sense of urgency about preparing for death, both spiritually and emotionally. Linda Graham was till in the first year of mourning the death of her father; two of her close friends had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and multiple sclerosis. She wanted a way to help her face the death and dying around her and not turn away out of fear.

Joyce Creswell had also been propelled into the group after a year of losses. Pamela
Turley was going through changes in her life and was having a difficult tie; she felt sad and vulnerable. Jo Button-Tait had been with her first husband of 23 years through his dying and death and had volunteered at the Center for Attitudinal Healing for some time afterwards. She said she had never forgotten how important it is to be with someone when they die; she thought the group would help her keep this in mind, prepare her for her own death and find spiritual friends.

Margaret MacKenzie, a professor with an open and inquisitive mind, was tired of intellectual solutions and was looking for more meaning. Carols O”Shaughnessey wanted to use the practice as a way to be more alive. Rose Saint-John joined because at 57, she decided to pause. She had always been goal-oriented, pursuing a Ph.D. and other accomplishments. Now she wanted to learn how to just be.

The group has had both psychological and spiritual dimensions. Linda Graham, one of our members who is a psychotherapist, has commented that the group has been safe from a psychological perspective. Each time we spend 20-30 minutes in meditation, an important part of the work. Sometimes, we explore topics such as gratitude, forgiveness, loving-kindness of body awareness. There is always a check-in, and each person tells what is going on in her life, especially how it involves opening to life, or being present.

Our guideline has been an 18th –century epitaph, quoted in Levine’s book: “Remember, friends, as you pass by/ As you are now so once was I/ As you are now, so you must be/ Prepare yourself to follow me.” We have set about preparing in that way and have looked deeply into our lives, sometimes making amends or asking for and granting forgiveness for past hurts.

In the early months we investigated fear - that strong pull downward that keeps us stuck. We discovered it was usually related to not living in the present: We were regretting the past or worrying about the future. We tried to open up to our fears, relaxing during meditation and purposely keeping our bellies soft. Pamela noticed her stomach always hardened and contracted when she was anxious; now she reminds herself to pay attention to her body signals, soften her belly. All of us began to realize how closely body tension was tied to fear.

This journey has brought many unexpected results and has bonded us together. Jane feels the group has become a safe, intimate and nurturing group where she can frankly discuss her fears, uncertainties and ideas about death and dying.

“In ordinary life, people sometimes think you’re weird or morbid if you talk too much about death and after-life. But with these nine women, all of whom bring a depth and breadth of intellectual and spiritual perspectives, I feel completely at ease and savor the growing closeness we enjoy as a group. I’ve always felt that deep and difficult problems only grow more daunting and terrifying if they’re buried or keep secret. By sharing my fears and thought about death with group, those fears diminish in size and become manageable. Besides, getting together once a month is a lot of fun.”

Joyce has rented a rowboat and rows in Tomales Bay twice a week, something she always wanted to do. She volunteers her time to bring disabled people ad horses together and has moved us all with her stories of connection and joy. She says, “Something about the focus of a year to life, living in that strange country even on a ‘what if’ level, has helped me to focus much more passionately on what’s meaningful, what’s important in this life. It doesn’t matter whether you have a year to live or a lifetime of years and years and more years, the call is always to dive into every moment to the fullest of your capabilities.”

We have all changed and grown this year. Early in the year, I traveled to New Jersey to visit relatives I hadn’t seen for 35 years, a trip that coincided with the life-review process we had undertaken. I spent time with my father’s only surviving brother, my uncle, and stayed with my aunt, my father’s other brother’s widow. For 45 years my father had been listed as ‘missing in action’: I shared the news of his finally confirmed death with his family.

For the first time in my life, I go to know my father. I saw his schools and his house and read letters he wrote before he met my mother. I know the meaning of this experience was deepened because of the work I was doing in the life-review process. It felt as though I learned my history for the first time. I wanted to come to terms with my life; with the decision I made, the directions I took, the road I traveled. When I reconnected with my father’s family, I felt I was connecting to the dirt beneath the pavement, the earth that holds the stuff of the road.

Experiencing a link with my father’s world healed many parts of me I didn’t even know needed healing. Reviewing his life helped me look at my own and gave me the base I had missed. No matter how long I really have left to live, I believe this experience has grounded me, allowed me to come to terms with the past, and provided me with stability and balance.

The life review process included making an altar to our lives. We made a group altar at one meeting. During this meeting Margaret told us that she had begun, without really planning to, to pick u road-kills as she commuted from West Marin to Oakland and San Francisco. She made a note of which animals she gathered, where and when. At first she would use a stick to lift the animals from the road but gradually made a decision to lift them with her hands. It had become a mark of reverence and connection to lift them gently and lay them on grass or leaves. She added a small prayer to bless their spirits.

To care for these animals made her see that she would have to change her life. She who was always over-committed, always late, always behind, always speeding would have to revolutionize how she lived to have the time to stop. As the group continued, she realized she sees herself as someone who cares for the dead.

She feels that it is a practice of atonement. She said,”As a nurse 30 years ago, I would go weekly to the post-mortems in the hospital in New Zealand where I worked. I was simply fascinated by the evidence of the bodies…I was not disturbed enough by the actions of the pathologist, who conducted these autopsies. Each day, he would prop up the cigarette pack he had, tilting its tiff cardboard covering open. Then he would leave a Bunsen burner going, a pair of forceps beside it. He smoked continuously, prying each cigarette from the pack with his forceps, lighting it by the Bunsen burner, leaving it in his mouth, and letting the ash drop into the abdomen of the dead person whose organs he would examine. It is the falling ash for which I atone. The falling ash of disrespect and disregard, of the loss of the sacred, the obliteration of the person, the oblivion of the soul. My own oblivion. I am someone who cares for the dead, atoning for the years of secular disregard.”

When one of Margaret’s colleagues died recently, she realized the care she gives to dead animals was going to extend to humans. She immediately volunteered to do anything that was needed, realizing she was someone who participated in the practical arrangements of the passage of the dead.

Linda Graham described her experience with equal passion and clarity. “The focus each month on literally one year to live-finishing unfinished business with family and friends, writing our obituaries, visualizing the letting go of possessions, identities, bodies, was difficult discipline. About halfway through the group year, I fractured my foot, and a month later, was in a car accident. Two separate incidents in the context of consciously exploring the certainty and immanence of our own deaths allowed me to profoundly and viscerally experience the fragility of my own life and deepen my gratitude and reverence for what I have in a way I will never lose or forget.”

Perhaps Carola’s experience exemplifies the most outwardly obvious changes. During our year together she opened to pain she had always kept buried. She had never been a person who cried in private and certainly not in public, but as we watched her deal with the end of a relationship and come to terms with her childhood, we saw the scars break, and comforted her as she grieved.

Although Carola has a beautiful singing voice, she had always been too afraid to sing in public. In the eighth month she announced she had joined a group called Performance Breakthrough that deals with fear of public performance and fear in general. She would be singing in public. We decided to go to support her, and though on the night of her performance she was sick and could not talk, she could sing and did. We watched her with joy and price as she shone on stage. When I asked her what she thought was her guiding light this year, she said, “I just kept repeating; What would I do if I had a one-year prognosis with no chance of changing it?”

One of our members has learned how to participate in and watch life with less angst and more joy. She has attended several meditation retreats this year and has visibly softened, becoming more accepting of life and her place in it. While once she would have been automatically annoyed by some of her husband’s attitudes, she now has more equanimity to accept what she cannot control. When we started out together and talked about cultivating gratitude for life and forgiveness towards ourselves and other she though t it would be possible to become more grateful but not more forgiving. But one day she forgave her mother for the past, realizing that she had done the best she could.

On Halloween we passed around sheets of paper with our names on them and wrote something good about each person. Then we went to a cemetery, stood together, and read our lists of praiseworthy qualities aloud. It was a powerful experience to stand there surrounded by tombstones with names of children, parents, families who lived and died, aware of the fragility of our lives. The next time we gathered together we read our eulogies as a funeral dirge played in the background. Some of us used the words that the others had written on Halloween to make up the eulogy. Without romanticizing in anyway, we said good-bye to the person we had been, feeling ourloss and the loss of each other.

On winter solstice we said good-bye to past habits and opinions and exchanged gifts. Each person gave a cherished possession; Joyce gave her favorite sculpture, a beautiful woman she had prized as her favorite. I gave my book called “Sisters” that I loved because it has been given to me by my close friend who had died. She had told me, “I feel you‘re one of my sisters.” Although it was hard to choose what to give away, we came to grips with the fact that when we die we would have to let go of everything.

As this “last” year of our lives draws to an end, each of us continues on our paths of discovery, commitment ad farewell. Erin, who has worked many years as a midwife, was burnt-out at the beginning of the year. She has remained true to her self by not returning to her profession because she cannot give 100 percent. Her relationship with her partner is stronger because she followed her intention to be open and less critical. Several of us have seen our relationships flourish with the combined intention and attention we have given them. We have come to terms with failed relationships and the choices we have made, forgiving others and ourselves.

Pamela said, “As I try to explain to someone, they gasp in horror at this richly rewarding, painful experience. Fears. We fight like warriors. But for what? Why not an irrevocable truce once and for all. All for one and one for all. Letting go. Let it go. Let it come and go. Fear of death. Fear of life.”

I quite the job that required so much travel and am pursuing my passion for teaching mindfulness. I devote time each day to exercise and feel that my body, mind and spirit are healthy, balanced and vital; I also have the time to babysit my grandson. Before the end of our year together, I will travel to India, the place I want to visit before I die.

On Feb. 28, we will be together in Sea Ranch. We will say good-bye to the lives we have lived, ready for what lies ahead. The preparations we have made have helped us come to terms with our deaths. Jo reminded me that an Eastern sage once said, “I find you Westerners very interesting. You treat death as though it were optional.” We have looked into this thing called death this year and it has enabled us to live our lives as if they mattered, right now.

Printed in Marin Independent Journal – Thursday, February 4, 1999