This is the basic talk I gave at The New Way People of Diversity (POD) in Cocoa, Florida, on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2013
(sing) “Some glad morning when this life is over,
you’ll fly away
You’ll fly away, O glory
You’ll fly away, In the morning
When you die, halleluiah, by and by
You’ll fly away.”
I’m sorry, I had to change the words to that song, from “I’ll fly away” to “you’ll fly away.”
Because you see, death always happens to someone else, not to me. My address book is like walking through a cemetery. I’m still here. I haven’t died.
And besides, if I think about my own death, I’ll draw it to me, and I’ll die sooner, faster.
If I don’t think about my own death, maybe, there’s a chance I’ll never die—I mean, miracles happen, right? What about all those monks on mountaintops who’ve lived hundreds of years, even without eating or drinking, I’ve heard tell!
I want to think only positive thoughts, and death is dark and negative. Even though, along with birth, death is the most significant event of a life, why do I want to upset myself by thinking about it now?
I like Somerset Maugham’s attitude. He wrote, “Death is a dull and dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”
So can you believe it? Florida Memorial Gardens had the nerve to send me this in the mail! (hold up the 9x5 stiff card with following words written in large letters on a black background)
“FACT: THE DEATH RATE IN BREVARD COUNTY IS 100%. ARE YOU PREPARED?”
Makes me want to move out of Brevard County!
Two years and seven months ago I was diagnosed with Stage 1 CLL leukemia. Now supposedly CLL doesn’t take you out, but I started believing that death might be a possibility, and I wanted to make sure I was leaving something behind--I never had children and won’t be a branch on a family tree. How would anyone remember me?
So I got busy writing down my stories, compiling and typing into a computer all of my thousands of pages of letters and journals written over the past 50 years—a never-ending task. And I recorded a few more of the dozens of songs I’ve written.
I was able to complete and self-publish Life with a Buckskinner, a memoir of my years as a singer on the road back in the 1970s and ‘80s with my show band and eccentric bandleader husband Whitey, along with a compilation of humorous stories that I’d published during those years. And I released my 5th album of original songs online, One-Way Conversations.
You can Google my name to find my music. My book, Life with a Buckskinner, is on the table for sale, or you can find it online in e-book for 99 cents, by the title and/or under my former name, Shari Wannemacher.
I was nowhere close to getting all of my projects done. In fact, I was getting more and more tired and less able to mentally function. Kathryn Flanagan even came in to help me.
I’d gotten to Chapter 7 in the novel I’d started writing (yes, I'd even started one of those, too!) when on June 21st, three months ago, I had a sudden wide-awake vision of my death. I saw that I was going to die of not being able to swallow, which has been an ongoing, increasingly serious problem for me over the past 18 months. This sudden, jarring flash of destiny flipped me into a different direction entirely.
Now I want to ask you, have you ever in your life received a phone call from a sobbing friend or loved one telling you she was going to die? I’m 69. I’ve known thousands of people in my lifetime, and I’ve never received a phone call like that, but two of my unfortunate friends have. I called each of them that evening, sobbing on the phone, “I’m gonna die and I haven’t even learned how to live life happily!”
A few days later, when I calmed down, I realized that I’d gone into a panic because, in addition to failing to capture a happy life by the tail, I hadn’t made any preparations to manage serious illness and death.
I saw that leaving something behind wasn’t as important as I’d thought.
I saw that the Girl Scout Motto I’d grown up with, “Be Prepared,” would bring me more peace of mind than all of my years of denying my eventual sickness and death.
I wrote down four steps to turning my life into a happy, fulfilled old age, and promised my sleepy self to accomplish at least one task towards getting my affairs in order each day until I was finished.
This different course is what I’m here to share with you today, a talk I’ve titled “Healing the Journey Home.”
The first two items on my list are about getting those affairs in order for peace of mind, and the second two have, almost immediately, plopped me right down into the middle of my happy place. Who knew!
First, Plan for After Your Death
The first peace-of-mind task is to plan for the disposal of your remains and the disposition of your worldly possessions after your demise. I’ve listed the tasks on your hand-out.
Garrison Keeler said, “They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I’m going to miss mine by just a few days.”
There are some things you can do to continue to control your circumstances even after you've died. I didn’t want to leave my funeral home arrangements to be someone else’s burden, but I’d been putting off doing that for years. When I finally walked into the office to find out the cost of cremation and to file paperwork with them, I was surprised that I wasn’t depressed or sad. Instead, I felt in control of something I could control.
You might think you’re too young to know what you want to have done with your body. But I think maybe you at least know what you don’t want.
I knew at a young age I wanted to be an organ donor, and it’s still on my driver license. With leukemia, that’s no longer a possibility, but I’ve ruled out a few other options, too:
- Naked in an open casket
- Naked cadaver curled up on a shelf in a teaching hospital
- Cremated and sitting in an urn in someone’s closet
- Cremated and sitting in an urn on a coffee table in someone’s living room, like my neighbor who, when I visited her, offered me a chair next to her husband Charlie's urn. “Would you like to sit next to Charlie?”
Second, Create a Plan for When You Can’t Manage On Your Own
If you already know you’re going to get smacked off this planet instantly, you can skip this step.
Almost all of us will encounter death in slow motion, a slow walk down the backside of the mountain. Like me, you’ll see the grim reaper coming from some way off. This is what you have to plan for.
Doctors keep patching us up and sending us back out the hospital doors on our walkers, in our wheelchairs, pushing our breathing machines attached to tubes in our noses. And we go on living.
Woody Allen once said, “I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
I suggest you don’t leave it up to your loved ones to have to guess what you want and don’t want in your days and hours before death. Give them a break. Write directives for them. Mine are seven pages long. By the time my friends finish reading them, I’ll be gone. I could have made my directives shorter and more entertaining with a simple list of “Shoot me when’s": "Shoot me when someone wants to stick a tube down my nose and make me swallow it to pass it into my stomach."
Third, Friend Yourself
Making peace with your Maker is the clichéd advice given to someone dying, but I believe as soon as you can in your life, make peace with yourself. I think they’re the same thing.
Find a way to establish a strong, loving, compassionate, tolerant, committed relationship with yourself. Whatever that takes, go there, if you haven’t already.
I figured out the necessity of this years ago when I was going bankrupt in Canton, Ohio. I realized there was a strong possibility that I would come out of this with nothing left except me and myself, and we’d damn well better be friends!
What is causing you to be intolerant with yourself? What do you regret? What are you blaming and shaming yourself for and feeling guilty about? Do you blame yourself for hurting others? For getting sick? For not being wealthy? For failed relationships? For not being able to manage your weight? For having addictions?
What have you expected from yourself that you couldn’t deliver?
What have you misunderstood about your ability to control other people and situations, and even yourself? We’re mostly out of control of our own behavior. Confess them to yourself. Admit to them and begin the healing process.
Lower your expectations. We’re only humans, with some disgusting traits that, incidentally, have allowed us to continue to evolve and thrive. I personally don’t believe any amount of spiritual practice or belief will allow us to completely step over our dishonest, critical, self-righteous, intolerant, judgmental, passive-aggressive, whiney, stressed-out, scared, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, addicted human-ness.
Taking responsibility for your choices is important, but it is only one side of the coin. In order to heal, I suggest you entertain these additional considerations:
- You are the strong, principled, compassionate, loving person you are today because of the millions of painful mistakes you’ve made along the way. You’ve learned from those mistakes. They were your teachers.
Here is one such unreconcilable event, described by 1987 Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel in his dark concentration camp memoir, Night. I can only imagine the person he became after being shaped at a young age by an experience like this.
Elie and his father were part of a forced march in the bitter, snowy winter. He writes, “When I woke up it was daylight. That is when I remembered that I had a father. During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet I had abandoned him. I went to look for him. Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn’t find him! If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength for my own survival, to take care only of myself. . .Instantly, I felt ashamed, ashamed of myself forever.”
- A stork did not drop you off in a tree where you lived out your life. You were born with your unique cocktail of genes and hormones, gifts and talents. As a member of a family, a community, a culture, a segment of society, you were born into a hot, bubbly mess of other people, events, and circumstances that you couldn’t control, that literally grew your brain as you matured, that gave you the perspectives and understandings buried deep in your unconscious mind.
Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Outliers” covers true stories of financially successful people. Gladwell says, “You have to look around them, at their culture and community and family and generation. We’ve been looking at the tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest."
So take a good look at your own forest. When I look at mine, I’m amazed at what I’ve been able to do. Against all odds!
- 80% or more of your behavior and decisions are from your unconscious mind. Moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, in his excellent work, “Righteous Mind,” describes humans as two parts: an elephant and a rider. The elephant is the unconscious mind, lumbering its way through relationships and life events without consulting with the rider. The rider becomes aware of events after the fact, like a newspaper, and struggles to make up reasons, justifications, for why the elephant did what it did. Your conscious mind, no matter how rationally sound and resolute, no matter how many brilliant concepts in its arsenal, is NOT I control of your behavior.
- And lastly, consider this. Most of the decisions we make are in the blind. We don’t have a crystal ball in our laps. We can’t predict what the outcome will be of our decision. Feed a baby. It’s either going to throw up the food or swallow and digest it. You can’t control that outcome. We can only do something with our best intentions. Are you blaming yourself for an unwanted outcome that you couldn’t have predicted?
Fourth, Create a Vision for a Happy, Fulfilling Old Age, and When You’re Ready, Begin It
I moved into the 17-story building known as Trinity Towers, a subsidy housing apartment building for still-independent seniors in May, 2012.
I weighed ten pounds more than I weigh now, my hair was long and dyed blonde, I wore hip-hugger blue jeans--young clothes, I was too busy racing to meet my own deadlines to sit on the benches with the others and watch the sunset. And when anyone saw me I was well-caffeinated, dashing out the door like a quarter horse in the Lexington Trots.
Although I was 68, I didn’t look like my slow-moving, obviously-elderly neighbors, many of whom are old enough to be my parents. They wanted to know whose daughter I was, and spoke loudly to each other in my presence that I was too young to live there. You have to be 62, to live here, after all.
By looking at me, they couldn’t have known the true color of my hair and the long list of diseases I already had, or how much I was sleeping, or how hard everything had become that used to be easy.
What a difference between then and now! I’ve gotten to know my neighbors through my free-of-charge Monday Night "Musical Memories" nights I started for them in the downstairs community room a year ago tomorrow night. I play the piano for them and we all sing along.
They’ve become my mentors; through their examples, they’ve shown me how to live. Without knowing it, they are living out the old age that Harvard graduate/philosopher Daniel Klein describes in his compelling memoir, “Travels with Epicurus; a Journey to a Greek Island in Search of an Authentic Old Age.”
Klein writes, “I keep thinking there are discreet stages of life, each with its own qualities, and that fudging these stages is to fudge the inherent value of each of them, that it feels more authentic to me to recognize that human desires and capabilities change from one period of life to the next, and to deny that they do is to miss out on what is most fulfilling about each stage.”
You know that saying, “We’re too soon old and too late smart.” By my stubborn resolve to stay forever-young, I damn-near missed this completely different, happiest, and most necessary phase of my life.
So what does this final stage of life look like, and why don’t you want to miss it by being forever young?
Before I go there—if you’re still in younger life phases, keep striving, keep accomplishing, keep doing what you’re motivated and driven to do, keep following your dreams and developing your talents and abilities. Because by the time you reach this final stage, all of that has to be over. You’ll be plum wore out.
First, in our final stage, we think a lot. Mental pleasures surpass physical pleasures. Klein writes that old age "gives us the chance for unbounded, wide-ranging thought in solitary contemplation and enlightening conversation."
“An old man does not have to fret about his next move," Klein writes, "because the chess game is over. He’s free to think anything he wants.”
Studies at universities show that older minds are more efficient than younger ones, and a slower brain in elderly people, which is less dopamine-dependent, is a wiser brain. Older people are less impulsive and controlled by emotion.
Second, in our final stage, we remember our past. Existentialist philosopher Erik Ericson labels the final stage of life “Maturity.” The fundamental task of this stage is to reflect back on one’s life with a “wise and considered sense of fulfillment, a philosophical acceptance of oneself in spite of serious mistakes and fumbles along the way. This stems from a matured capacity for love.”
Picking and choosing patterns and themes from our lives—-not facts, but experience-—how it felt, what it meant to us then, what it means to us now—is our way of finding coherence and meaning in our lives.
Third, in our final stage, we slow down and stop striving. This becomes a have-to: let go or be dragged.
In this final stage, we take ourselves off the razor edge of life. We stop jumping through our own and others’ hoops; we leave the “go-get-um” testosterone/Viagra/face-lift/hair dying stage and begin living in the wide, quiet, meditative spaces of life. In our final stage of life we can spend long hours roaming in these happy spaces.
The philosopher Epicurus, known as the world champion of pleasure, wrote, “Not what we have, but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance.” He believed that the ultimate purpose of life is to maximize life’s pleasures-—a care-free outlook and day-to-day gratefulness.
No matter what the movies, stories, and songs want you to believe, the bucket list is not for final-stagers. Klein writes, “There is no rest for the striver. Another bucket list is always looming. While the clock ticks loudly, my heart pounds and I’m breathless, stressed out. Do I want to live the rest of my years this way?”
People in their final stage of life have likely already gone skydiving and Rocky Mountain climbing and bull riding, and we won’t be doing THAT again, thank you very much!
A dear friend of mine in her late 50’s has recently received a well-deserved financial award that will keep her living comfortably for the rest of her life. When I asked her what she was going to do, she looked at me with eyes sparkling and said, “Well, I could set up my own company, or I could go back to school, or I could travel the world, or I could go fishin'. I’m goin’ fishin’!"
Fourth, we enjoy companionship. It’s at the top of Epicurus’ list of life’s pleasures. Unlike goal-oriented life stages, in this final stage, we enjoy companions without wanting anything from them, without the need to manipulate, exploit, or maneuver anyone to do anything for us.
An old Hasidic proverb says that God created man because he loves stories. With friends, we want to laugh, share conversation, play cards, and share silence and personal stories.
Fifth, Klein writes that for many philosophers, idleness is one of old age’s greatest gifts. It gives us time for that wondrous human activity, play.
In this stage, we play for the sake of play. We don’t play in order to have fun. We simply have fun playing. Pure play and joy are intimately connected.
Philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche wrote, “In every real man a child is hidden who wants to play.” Old people and little children are natural playmates.
Klein reminds us that play can be intellectual, too. "Pure and playful wonder are the foundation of all philosophical inquiry."
I invite you at whatever age you are to begin enjoying these things now. Get your affairs in order, friend yourself, and hold onto this vision of the final stage of life so you won’t miss it, like I almost have.
My friend Georgia Collins recently sent me this quote by Robert Louis Stevenson in A Child's Garden of Verse, that speaks to all phases of life:
“The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings."
And I hope when you start into your final stage of life, you’ll recognize it, lay your burdens down by the riverside, declare a truce with yourself, and commit to living this happiest final stage of life for all it’s worth. In a world still so full of so many things, we can still all be as happy as kings!
And I hope when you start getting near the end of the line, you’ll be a good sport about it. Sure, you’ll grieve the loss of your life, but you’ll take it on the chin without bitterness. Maybe you’ll hold onto the hope of being with loved ones in an afterlife.
And while you’re looking back over your shoulder and waving good-bye, you’ll say:
“Thank you, life. It’s been a wild, crazy, glorious ride. I wouldn’t change a nano-second of it! And world, you’ll go on spinning after I’m gone. I’m leaving you here, in the capable hands of loving, compassionate people who will do a great job of taking good care of the planet and humans and non-humans.
So cheerio, so long, and thanks for the memories. I’ve had a life to die for!”
Thank you for letting me speak to you this morning, and blessings to you on your sacred journeys winding through time.
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