What is dying like?

Although I don’t know if Tolstoy based his harrowing account of dying on observation or intuition or books, in my search I turned to three women, each of whom have spent considerable parts of their professional lives with dying people.I am grateful to Sarah Zimmerman, Nancy Gray and Vicky Cortese, who live and work in eastern Long Island as I do, for the generosity with which they gave me their time and shared their experiences and thoughts. Most of what we know about how dying feels is what we have inferred from the behavior of dying people: we can observe and describe the changes we witness in the dying person but can only guess whether that’s also what it feels like. Please tune to the podcast in which you will hear more about them and where you can listen to each of them as they help me answer my question: what is dying like?

Here is a summary of the insights and observations you will hear:  The enormity of it for some, the denial of it for others;  the subtle move to the interior, the beginning of withdrawal from the world;  the unpredictability of individual differences; dying as a process of divestment, which brings with it a distillation or purification.  The potential for misunderstanding what dying people are communicating because they may express themselves an obscure or unexpected way, sometimes in symbols or dreams or what we might describe as visitations, visions or hallucinations.  We hear about dying people who seem to have control over the timing or circumstances of their death–waiting for something or somebody or simply turning away to die;  the mysterious way in which a person dies at the very moment that family members have briefly left the bedside or the nurse has left the room.

Looking back on what I’ve learned, I see that Sarah, Nancy and Vicky were each reluctant at times to generalize when I pressed them for conclusive answers.  I realize now that much of their knowledge is intuitive, coming as it does from working with people on an individual, one-on-one level. They also share a willingness to acknowledge the mysterious,  to be comfortable with the unknown and with perhaps never knowing the answers.

Perhaps, I told myself more than once, it’s presumptive and intrusive to ask the question,  to enquire any more closely into it than I did. Maybe what it’s like to be dying is a question that can’t be answered and maybe that’s the answer.

Suggested reading:Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, The Revised edition: New Spiritual Classic from One of the Foremost Interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism  by Sogyal Rinpoche