Living Fully, Dying Gracefully

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Living Fully, Dying Gracefully

A very dear friend of mine is completely consumed with cancer, and she is very, very, very ill. Is there anything that I can do, or she can do, to come though this?

“Come through” means get cured?

Yes.

Or die peacefully?

Get better. Get better.

Hmm?

Get better, get well.

I’m not talking with any disregard to your friend, but I want you to understand, people need to die. When and how is the only question, isn’t it? If death comes to us, yes, we will do everything possible to save ourselves, but if it goes beyond that, let us learn to die gracefully. Let’s not fight with it and fight with it endlessly. It’s a horrible way to die. The way people are dying in Western countries is really a horrible way to die, even though they’re 85, 90, staying in a hospital with full of pipes and needles all over them. It’s okay if you die two years early. What’s the problem? You die peacefully and gracefully. That’s more important, isn’t it? Death is the last thing that you do in your life. Shouldn’t you do it gracefully?

We must learn to accept death as a part of our life. We are not wishing death, but when it comes, let us learn to go through it gracefully. If there is a possibility of saving ourselves, living beyond that, that is fine. What I see in all the geriatrics homes in United States, many people are living beyond their death just because of medical support, and it’s such a torture to themselves, and to everybody. You should see the way, in some of the homes, they’re being treated, not because of anything. The people who work there, after some time they get irritated because there’s dead bodies walking around. They don’t understand anything; they’ve forgotten everything. They’ve lost all their senses, because they’ve lived beyond their time.

If there was not too much medical input, they would have gracefully died at a certain point, isn’t it? There is no sense in stretching it one more month, one more month, one more month. It doesn’t make any sense, but life is not understood that way. We are thinking of always stretching it. If somebody’s body is broken beyond redemption, let’s learn to die gracefully. Let us make the person understand, “It’s okay. It’s all right.” We’re all in the queue, aren’t we?

Yes.

You’re ahead of me, isn’t that great? In any queue, you want to be ahead of everybody, isn’t it? I’m not trying to make fun of somebody’s illness, but we should understand where one thing stops, another thing begins, isn’t it?