Voices November 01, 2023
The death paradox: the more we try to eliminate suffering, the more we suffer
By Peter Nobes
During November we are exploring themes of death, remembrance, and eternal life.
The broad acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide in society represents the ultimate denial of death, theologians tell us. The root cause of much of the misery associated with dying today is the denial of death and the fact that our society has no positive vision with regard to life’s end. The Church offers a positive vision.
The Catholic Church affirms that every human life has value and that conscious living and dying is the path of human dignity. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ offer believers a positive vision for life’s end. But, like other areas, the Catholic community is affected by the secular culture we live in. It is, therefore, critical to inspire the community to enter into the mysteries of death and eternal life with a sense of wonder. The Church can continually proclaim what death can be – a transition - as opposed to what death is for those ruled by fear and anxiety.
In his 1999 encyclical Fides et Ratio, John Paul II quotes Aristotle: “all humans desire to know,” and those who inquire about the meaning of life and what happens after death can be pleasantly informed if they have faith. “Each of us has both the desire and the duty to know the truth of our destiny,” wrote John Paul. “We want to know if death will be the definitive end of our life or if there is something beyond – if it is possible to hope for an afterlife or not.”
In life, death is a point of limitation and becomes a focal point and opportunity to choose eternal life. It puts an end to human life “as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifested in Christ,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Truth, Beauty and the Good
In people’s natural curiosity for truth, beauty, and the good, there is a yearning for humanity and a search for meaning. Death can shift from being seen as the end to something with deeper meaning.
But faith is a gift of God, and before it can be exercised man must have the grace of God to move and assist him and the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind and makes it easy for all to accept and believe the truth.
Former Catholic Health Association of Canada CEO and author James W. Roche wrote an insightful book called Facing Death, Discovering Life in which he shares experiences from his career in Catholic health services covering the human experience of death as well as his awareness that every person’s death touched him and helped him with deeper questions about the meaning of life. Roche provides wisdom from those accepting dying and imminent death.
Final acceptance of one’s death, for example, often brings a peace that the person has never experienced before. Inner turmoil and outer unrest that are common during the dying process give way to a life-giving solitude. This sense of inner peace and harmony can also profoundly affect others, healing severed relationships and forging stronger family identities. In this way, people make their dying a gift for others. There is grace shared for the dying and from the dying towards the living.
Death is a passage into mystery, Roche says, and this passage somehow affirms how precious life is. During the dying process, transformations often occur. Even as they are dying, most people can complete meaningful tasks and grow in ways that are important to them. Dying can bring a human being to become what he or she was called to become.
Roche encourages the sharing of experiences of the dying to be shared with the living, exploring the paradox that facing death and entering into the anguish and suffering that accompany it can be an experience in discovering life. Death is not an encounter with meaninglessness; it is the fulfillment of life.
In Dr. David Kuhl’s work What Dying People Want, the palliative care physician turned psychologist shares important lessons in living learned from the experiences of patients living with a terminal illness. It is possible to find meaning and hope when facing death by recognizing death as part of our being. Difficult topics can be addressed with preparation and by embracing virtues such as courage and prudence. On the other hand, fear, silence, and avoidance of difficult topics can keep individuals from living fully.
“Just as people live unique lives, they die unique deaths,” says Kuhl. His key question to the reader is: “Do I embrace life, or do I prepare to die?” The last line in his book is poignant. Kuhl writes, “only in confronting the inevitability of death does one truly embrace life.” Living fully and dying well involves enhancing one’s sense of self, one’s relationships with others, and one’s understanding of the transcendent, the spiritual, and the supernatural.
In Kuhl’s experience, people who know they have a terminal illness speak about the spiritual, the transcendent, as though it were real. Believers and non-believers explore their connection to something greater than themselves. Patients pay greater attention to their inner voices, and dying patients enter a process of transition from outward journey to an inward one, moving away from the superficiality of routine to a deeper attention to the soul.
Life Review
Kuhl addresses the value of conducting a “life review,” which is a recurring theme in many psychology, palliative care, and other professional journals. In Restoring our Lives, gerontologists Gary Kenyon and William Randall say the material of our own life story is the richest resource for meaning and healing. Although a life review will likely include a component of grief, it also contains happy moments in life, including love, joy, gratitude, and other experiences. Reflection leads to a process of understanding and finding meaning in life and assists in addressing unresolved relationships, grief, and other aspects of life.
A 2008 Journal of Palliative Medicine article said tangible improvements are achieved in psychological well-being and life satisfaction through the life review process with themes of forgiveness as well as heritage and legacy among participants, many within weeks and sometimes days of death.
Another advocate for a life review is psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, known for her theory of five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. There are lessons to be learned from working with dying patients, who not only teach us about the dying process, “but also what we can learn about how to live in such a way that we have no unfinished business.”
The Dying help the Living
In his book Being Mortal, Dr. Atul Gawande addresses the current state of medicine and what matters in the end and concludes that treatment often fails the people it is supposed to help. His own medical school experience left him poorly prepared to talk about death. Because society avoids the topic of death, he has seen first-hand the grasping at life through expensive medical interventions when an acceptance of death and natural dying likely would have been much better for the patient and family.
He believes that patients with serious illnesses have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. He refers to the Christian tradition of ars moriendi, the art of dying with the belief that death should be accepted without fear, self-pity, or hope for anything more than the forgiveness of God.
Gawande counsels the embracing of courage as strength in the face of what might be feared or hoped. Technological society, he says, has forgotten what scholars call the “dying role” and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be all right.
The dying play a role in helping the living learn what matters most. Conversely, by better understanding the dying process and the needs of the dying, the living help the dying with their formation and appreciation of life and living.
Peter Nobes is Director of Catholic Cemeteries. This article is adapted from Nobes’ 2021 thesis Life Without End.