Blog#247-6/15/25
THE BIG SLEEP
By
Richard Davis
When I read obituaries of people of my own age they no longer use the phrase “he died so young”, but they may say “he lived a full life”. Of course I am reminded of my imminent demise, but it also is a way to learn to cherish the time left on this planet. All kinds of thoughts cross your mind when you reach this point in life.
I always had a fascination with the obituary page, but I now find myself reading almost every word of every obituary. I’m not sure what this means, but I suspect I am comparing my life to that of others my age who have passed on and trying to figure out what I would like to have said about me when I pass.
These are not morbid thoughts. If we accept the fact that we all die then we can embrace the last chapters of our lives and exploit the perspective that a lot of decades on the planet have given us. Some people prepare their own obituaries so they can know exactly what will be said about them. It seems like a reasonable thing to do and I tell myself I should do it but I keep putting it off. Does this mean I am afraid of death?
When it comes to the death and the process of dying I have had the privilege, as a nurse, of being with many people when they gasped their last breath. Some people are given the opportunity to experience their death on their own terms, while others have death thrust upon them unexpectedly.
I have learned a few things witnessing the end of a life. People who die peacefully tend to have very little, if any, unfinished business. They become serene as the end approaches. If someone has a lot of issues that have not been dealt with, especially in the area of family relations, they may not slip into death peacefully. These are generalizations based on my observations over 45 years.
There are also people who, while they are on their death bed, do not want to die while relatives and friends are in the room. I have seen this a number of times and experienced it in my own family.
My wife’s step-grandmother had just had her breathing tube removed, per her wishes, but she kept on breathing and her heart was beating regularly. We waited a couple of hours and she stayed the course. We had an errand to run that would take a few minutes and we left the hospital. When we returned we found that she had died minutes after we left the room.
Another death type issue is thinking about what it will feel like to die. Part of me believes it will be like going under general anesthesia. It is probably the deepest sleep possibly without being dead.
I don’t think it’s that simple. We have a soul and that has to play some part in dying.
I have noticed that when people die there is a period of a few minutes after death where their face goes through a change that is nearly impossible to explain in words; but there is a moment where I can tell if the soul has left the body. I may be delusional, but I believe this is a real phenomenon, perhaps this is a variation on the transmigration of the soul described by some religions.
Thinking about death is healthy. We all have some fear of the unknown and death is certainly something that is unknown to the living.
