Dying Well: Chaplain Offers ‘Perfect Place’ to Have a ‘Good Death’
I loved reading the above article. Also loved this hospice chaplain’s peripatetic history!
I’ve been fascinated with death since I was a small child. Always wanted my doctor daddy to let me attend an autopsy, but he never would.
What was my fascination about? Well, it probably had to do with attempting to come to terms with my single overriding F.E.A.R. (False Evidence Appearing Real), that the world would not only end in my lifetime, but that it’s liable to blow up any minute now! Yes, the ongoing nuclear scare paralyzed me very early on, thanks to conscious awareness of Hiroshima, when I was two years and nine months old.
A childhood crippled by fear of death. Facing and embracing death would be the antidote, though I didn’t know it. All I knew was I walked around the world with a nuclear blast going off in my mind.
Many decades later I learned to re-interpret the nuclear blast as an explosion of creativity.
Join me!
Okay, back to death and dying. Cradling puppy Shadow on the table as first the anesthetic, and then the killer drug were gently but firmly inserted into the port on his arm, by a wonderful vet whose empathy for us both embraced the moment, truly did feel like a sacred ceremony. In those few seconds, the primal life force which had inhabited his soft, sensuous body for so many years, and which we all take so much for granted, quieted into stillness.
Where did Shadow go? My cat Tiger sits in my lap, looks at me, wants to know. He’s not there to chase Tiger across the room any more. He’s not there to lie next to, purring, content. My emotional body echoes Tiger’s perplexity. No matter what I do, all day long, I am reminded of Shadow, not lying near me, not licking my dinner bowl, not greeting me at the door, not lying around snoring, or sitting, looking at me, staring, asking for a treat. On and on. Every second holds memories which I must both treasure and release.
Chart for the moment when Shadow exited his body.
Notice what’s exactly on the Midheaven path – and BTW, the Midheaven moves one degree every four minutes, so the timing could not have been more exacting: Uranus, in Taurus, which happens, during this time, to sit exactly on my 23° natal Taurus Moon. Shadow himself was a Taurus. Notice that at 12:23 PM on June 4th, the transit Moon was also in Taurus, approaching my Moon.
I knew ahead of time that these two years (starting last August, when son Colin almost died and is now paraplegic, and ending in May 2025), that due to eruptive Uranus’s transit back and forth over my natal Taurus Moon I would undergo a series of abrupt, shocking, emotional events.
I may have known ahead of time; but I must grieve, just the same.
