November 10, 2019
Many people have had one-time dramatic transformational experiences, and often their lives were changed forever by these moments. Other people have worked slowly and steadily to transform themselves over many years, with the results appearing gradually. There is another group that merits attention: those who have had transformative experiences in old age or as they approached death.
There are many examples of transformations late in life. Some are quite dramatic, and these breakthroughs have been happening for a long time. We know this through historical accounts and also because they have been portrayed by great writers for thousands of years. Powerful examples include Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (written almost 2500 years ago), Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. None of these towering literary figures meant to create only a fantasy; rather, each was trying to portray something profoundly real and true about human life that they had come to know.
Shakespeare and ultimate transformation
In the Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s last plays, Prospero has vanquished all his enemies—has them in his power and they are repentant—and he forgives everyone, even his brother who had tried to kill him. Through the character of Prospero, Shakespeare is conveying that victory is not enough; there must also be forgiveness. Even more is required; relinquishment of thinking one can find fulfillment through power. Prospero says toward the end of the play: “this rough magic I here abjure … I’ll break my staff“ (the staff that gave him power). And knowledge is not enough, “deeper than did ever plummet sound /I’ll drown my book” (the book that provided knowledge of how to acquire power). And according to Shakespeare, there are even more steps to the final transformation into freedom. In the epilogue, Prospero says:
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer;
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
Neither knowledge nor power is enough: one must ask for help and storm the ramparts of mercy in hopes of breaking through to the final transformation that is possible for us.
A similar theme is presented in Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which the old king (he is 80 years old) has been very powerful but has also made serious mistakes due to vanity. Now he has been brought low, having been defeated by an army organized by his two daughters who flattered his vanity and then betrayed him. He is about to be sent to prison or death, along with his youngest daughter Cordelia (who came to his aid even though he had mistreated her). Cordelia wants to confront the wrong-doing sisters, but Lear says:
No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds in’ th’ cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies.
Lear has finally found peace and so can sing and laugh in the face of the worst that might happen. He has recognized his arrogance and vanity and is ready to be humble, admit his mistakes, and ask for forgiveness from the daughter he has wronged. He will even kneel to her, which for a king to do is the ultimate blessing toward another. (I am much indebted to the Jungian writer and analyst Helen Luke for this understanding, in her book Old Age).
There is still more. Having reached deep self-understanding, seen the value of humility, and acquired the ability to forgive, there is one further step for Lear, which, in his words, is “to take upon’s the mystery of things/ As if we were God’s spies.” The final step Shakespeare foresees is the need to surrender to the mystery of existence and find harmony with it, because we are, in the final analysis, an intimate part of it—we are “God’s spies.”
Tolstoy and transformation at the very end
In the Death of Ivan Illyich, Tolstoy creates a character who has had a respectable middle-class life but who fell, became ill, and gradually became sicker and sicker. Everybody thought he would get better, but instead he keeps getting worse. Eventually, he can’t get out of bed. (He might have damaged a kidney, perhaps leading to an infection, but medicine at that time didn’t know what was happening, so it remains unclear in the story why he is getting worse.)
As he becomes weaker and weaker, he starts to review his life and begins to see how wasted it has been. The physical pain is terrible, and he screams for 3 whole days. During these days, “time did not exist for him. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles, knowing that he cannot save himself.” His physical pain is terrible, but the emotional pain is even worse, for his attempt to justify his life to himself is unsuccessful, which causes the “most torment of all.” So, despite all his efforts, he is being drawn “nearer and nearer to what terrified him”—the feeling that his life has been a complete failure and waste.
But all is not lost. “Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light.” Just at that point, as he was screaming and waving his arms, his young son came in, and “his hand fell on the boy’s head, and the boy caught it, pressed it to his lips, and began to cry.” This was the very moment he saw the light, and though he knew he was dying, “it was revealed to him that though his life had not been what it should have been, this could still be rectified.”
He felt his son kissing his hand, and he tried to say, “Forgive me,” but he was too weak. “And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once … and from all sides.”
“He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. ‘How good and how simple!’ he thought. ‘And the pain?’ he asked himself. ‘What has become of it? Where are you, pain?’”
“He turned his attention to it. ‘Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be. And death … where is it?’ He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ In place of death there was light. ‘So that’s what it is!’ he suddenly exclaimed aloud. ‘What joy!’” Then: “’Death is finished,’ he said to himself. ‘There is no more death.’”
What do these mysterious words mean. I do not think we can approach understanding with the thinking mind. We can, however, look to other of Tolstoy’s words for insight. In War and Peace, he says:
“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
Nearing death transformations
Lest these images from literature be seen as nothing but fables, similar experiences happen all the time to real, living people. One of the most famous involves the death of Socrates, who had prepared for his final transformation his whole adult life, through following his own advice to “Know Thyself.” Thus, he was continually examining his own mind, opinions, judgments, views, and values. Through this process, he came to the conclusion that the only way to live fully is to come to terms with death. Apparently he had done this himself, for when he was on trial, he was fearless. Rather than bow to his critics to escape the death sentence at a trial on false charges, he used his time to challenge his fellow citizens to change, insistently suggesting that they become more honest with themselves about who they were and how they were living. Many of these folks did not like that he was challenging their attitudes and way of life, however, so they sentenced him to death.
After the sentence, and while in prison awaiting his death, he received many visitors, made jokes with friends, and delivered some of his most profound teachings. He also refused to escape, which most everyone had assumed he would do—especially those who had sentenced him. (This sort of escape was common for citizens of Athens for the crimes for which he had been sentenced.) But he refused to run away, saying it would be a betrayal of what he had taught. So, on the day of his death, he drank the hemlock and then spent the next few hours teaching, joking, laughing, and sharing with his students at a profound level. His transformation was completed on the day of his death.
In a very different age and time, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the greatest Christian theologian and scholar of the Middle Ages (whose writings defined for centuries what it meant to be a Christian in Europe), had a mystical experience before the end of his life that led him to abandon his writing before he had completed his greatest work. He told his friend: “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” Thus, three months before his death, he seems to have had a final transformation resulting in a deep sense of fulfillment.
Nearing death transformations are common today
Moving to our own day and time, there is the short and cryptic story about the last moments of the life of Steve jobs, the great entrepreneur who led Apple to becoming the largest company in the world. Jobs died prematurely at the age of 56 of pancreatic cancer, and it is hard to know what to make of this, but his last words to his family were: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”
To better understand what he might have meant, it is valuable to examine the words and experiences of others nearing death. In her book, The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh records many such experiences. Singh grew up Catholic, added Buddhist meditation to her practices, and worked for many years in hospitals for the dying. In her book she gives a name to something that is commonly reported, “the Nearing Death Experience,” and Singh documents this occurrence as it happened to many, many people whom she was with.
“I began to see in people who were dying the same types of spiritual shifts you would see in longtime meditators. There is a really deep inner process going on for everyone at the end of life. People get deeper. People get real. Gratitude arises. Forgiveness arises.”
“I was with a woman once as she died. Her dying held everyone around her in rapt attention. She kept drifting in her consciousness, radiant and relaxed, to return to us periodically with eyes wide open and streaming with light. Each time, she repeated in a whisper, ‘I cannot tell you how beautiful this is.’”
Singh says the withdrawals of those close to death that she witnessed often had the distinct feeling of being positive, purposeful, and transforming.
“There is a brightening, a quality of radiance, in the person who is beginning to die. The brightening can be perceived in the relaxing of the facial muscles, and at times in the light streaming from the eyes. … Many people close to death have described an inner illumination, an experience of being filled with light.”
“The Nearing Death Experience often seems to confer a special kind of knowledge, a quality of knowing. The person in the dying process has entered the transforming field of a larger vision. One dying woman told me, ‘I feel I am becoming part of something vast.’ There is a recognition, almost universally expressed, of an inner momentum of deep unfolding.”
She says that there is often a sense of “opening, enlarging,” and those “in the dying process evidence the human capacity for radical transformation.” She feels there is often, in moments close to death, “the development of a consciousness beyond the identity of the personal self.”
“Many who work with the dying get a sense of the sacred as the dying person’s awareness moves closer and closer into the great mystery at the edge of life and death. The quality of the sacred begins to emerge because the last bond the dying person has to bodily life is love. Because they are of the same essence, the quality of the sacred and the quality of love arise simultaneously.”
Sounds a lot like what Tolstoy had discovered.
What does it all mean?
I do not think any of us can understand intellectually what all this means. What we can do is let go of preconceived notions and opinions and try to open as best we can to an ever-deepening experience of the mystery. The issue, to paraphrase Thoreau, is that we can’t see or experience (we are “blind” to) anything to which we have closed our minds and hearts. The opportunity in this moment is to do whatever you can to open into the fullest possible transformation you can reach, and then to be open to a further unfolding as you approach death. One thing more: you can be open to the possibilities of transformation in the people you care for as they approach death.
The process of transformation is most always a cumulative one. This is most obvious for those who work at it over time and gradually change, but it is also true for those who experience a dramatic transformational moment. From all the examples I have found, for a dramatic experience to have a lasting impact, for it to significantly affect one’s life, the person must spend a good bit of time before the experience preparing for it, or afterward, integrating what they have seen and learned.
It is harder to evaluate the importance of prior inner work for those approaching death, but there is a good chance that efforts we make toward transformation throughout our lives will be of value at the time of that last great transformation. (Steve Jobs had a lifetime interest in the spiritual journey and had engaged in many spiritual practices through the years.) There is no way to know for sure, but it seems to me that doing all we can to transform ourselves now will be worth the effort.
One other point: opening to the mystery of death is very different from denying or running away from life. Turning away from life because it is painful or hard is to move in the opposite direction from peace, love, and freedom; it is to miss the opportunity to find your way through to fulfilment. Thus, do your work, even if it is hard. The crucial thing is to learn to focus on what is important rather than wasting your life on anxieties, fears, shame, guilt, or shallow goals and ambitions—in Thoreau’s words, “petty fears and petty pleasures.”
Reflection: Without trying too hard to “understand,” just sit and be open to the possibilities the above essay suggests, both for you and for anyone you are close to who is approaching death. Be open to the possibility that “nearing death” can be a time of transformation that offers the possibility of love, peace, forgiveness, compassion, gratitude, and greater awareness, and that whatever you can do now to move toward those currents will be of benefit to you, and perhaps to those you care for as well.
David