Sunset with birds

The end may not be so bad if it's a new beginning

In nature and popular fiction metaphors, the end of the day is marked by sunsets and twilight. It’s often portrayed as beautiful, a great time to reflect on life’s wonders, miracles, and pleasures.

Photographers love to take sunset and twilight photos for the quality of the light and the vivid colors. Artists love to paint end of day scenes, too. People like to gather in their favorite spots in nature to watch the show.

But what about the sunset and twilight that are end of life for people? Are they held with sweet regard for a life lived or does the scene become a rush to revive the body at all costs–literally and figuratively?

Reality of the end

My mother and father are both 92, so I am thinking about these issues more. What is end of life like? And under more ideal circumstances, what could it or would it be like?

In much of the world view, of the view we usually call Reality, death is still considered the end of things. Fade to black. Even when millions of people believe in a religious model of an afterlife, the idea of dying still brings on sadness. Sometimes it brings on a sense of tragedy. You’ll often hear the term “tragic death” in the news. We grieve, we weep, we miss.

As someone who has heard and read a lot about near-death and other mystical experiences, the idea of dying is not so disturbing to me. I will be quite surprised if I die and don’t wake up somewhere else. Of course if I don’t wake up I won’t care anyway.I’ll be dead.

But then there’s this

I’ve had conversations with people who experienced NDEs and for most of them dying was a piece of cake. Returning was the hard part.

One person who “died” in a car crash told me that she was out of her body and hovering over the roof of the car before her head hit the windshield. Another woman said that when she realized that the bus was going to smash into her car, she instantly popped out of her body.

Several people who “died” during medical emergencies found themselves hovering over their bodies or appearing in an entirely different environment without at first realizing what was going on. It took them awhile to figure out that they were out of their bodies.

As I talked with these people, I began to conclude that most of the deaths I had ever seen in the movies or on TV were probably inaccurate. They were clearly one-sided depictions because we rarely saw “death” from the point of view of the person who died. We just assumed that dead means most sincerely dead.

Social relevance

My interest in near-death experiences is not just about what happens to us beyond material living. It’s also socially relevant, at least to me. If death is really a transformation instead of a termination, then much of what we encounter at end of life may be wildly misleading. You may disagree, but I believe that there exists a possibility that dying won’t kill me. I might wake up. Consciousness may live on. And if that happens, I will not be pleased with a legal, medical, and sometimes even religious system that doesn’t prepare people for their next life.

Some people are faced with having to make trying medical choices near end of life. Imagine being an elderly housebound person dependent on a walker for your stability and mobility after a long and fruitful life. Then say that you got diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. The medical community would want you to undergo radiation and/or chemotherapy in an attempt to cure the cancer. These therapies are not fun. There can be serious side effects. Would you put yourself through that ordeal to buy a few months of physical life, or would you elect to coast as comfortably as you could through hospice care?

Most social institutions would say go for the cancer treatment. After all, they reason, if there’s a chance for recovery, you should go for it. It usually does not enter into the dialogue that the person can choose to let nature take its course. Choosing to die is usually viewed as giving up or even failing.

What’s also not usually brought up in the conversation is how expensive these treatments are.  If you don’t have the right kind of insurance, medical treatments can break the bank. If the treatments are not guaranteed to restore health, and if the person is realistically close to death, is medical intervention the right course to take?

What if there’s more?

Human life at any age is precious, yet if we had more of a grasp on what may exist beyond the boundaries of a physical life, we might think differently about the end of life. I already do.

If it were absolutely, positively proven that death is transformation instead of termination, would medical science insist on trying to “cure” people of life-threatening diseases when they were old and frail? Would social pressure be so intense on “trying to do everything we can to save” someone if strong evidence suggested that consciousness survives death?

Of course, medical science is not very interested in pursuing the question of soul survival. It’s all about the physical body and business as usual. They maintain that breathing is better than not breathing under nearly any circumstance.

Clearly if a person wants to fight a disease and prolong life, that should be an available option. But if a person chooses not to pursue medical intervention on the grounds that living a few months more is not worth the pain and suffering, that should be honored, too.

End of life celebration

One of my friends (ironically, one who’d had a near-death experience) seemed to sense just under the radar of consciousness that she was due for a real-death experience soon. She threw a party with some good friends attending and celebrated her life, relationships, and friendships. This gave her the opportunity to feel the love while she was still living physically, love that too frequently gets expressed abstractly in funerals rather than directly expressed to the person at tail’s end.

If death is actually like graduating from one school and moving to a new life, then miss people as we might, we would feel less angst and more hope.

That’s the way I would like my sunset to be. Colorfully filled with hope.

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