Living Well: A Lesson About Death

If one wants to mature as a man, he must keep death in mind at all times. David DeAngelo talks about this in his “On Being a Man” program, which I highly recommend. This week, I made friends with death and the lesson will change my life forever.

My father in law passed away last week. My wife and I have been trying to help him as he was dying from a terminal illness for months, so this has been the closest I’ve observed someone’s death. I actually saw and felt his dead body while it was still warm. He was laying in his bed and looked quite peaceful.

I’ve spent the last several months helping my wife take care of him, move him to nursing home after nursing home, dealing with insurance people and trying to help him find a comfortable, enjoyable place during his final days. I made it my mission to give him as good an exit as possible and give my wife strength and comfort during the process. I did good on the first part, a mixed bag on the second, and learned a lot of lessons.

I didn’t know him as well as I would have liked. I know that I left him with the comfort that his daughter was in good hands and that I did all I could to make his transition into the next life a smooth one.

Although I didn’t know him very well, I learned a lot from him. I learned about life and I learned about death. Observing his death made me realize that it is not scary or something bad in and of itself. Death is a natural process. Dying well can in fact be something beautiful. His time here is over and he is in the next life, one much easier than this one. We will miss him, but he is okay now.

What is scary is not the prospect of death, but the prospect of an unfulfilled life, the missed opportunity to get the most out of life and to fully shine your light into the world. I never saw the man who was a teacher, a mentor, an adventurer, a strong father and great man. I know he existed at one time and that spirit lives in his daughter and grandson. I saw the broken, lost, sad, weak man who married a neglectful woman and convinced himself it was a wonderful arrangement. A man who mortgaged his home and his future to the hilt, leaving himself virtually penniless and in terrible health and quality of life at the end of his days. A man who long ago had given away his power to a horrible woman, had lost much of the respect of his own daughter and left her with a huge mess to clean up at the end of his life.

But before that, he was a man who had students come back years later to thank him for his mentoring and discipline. Everywhere he’s been, people who knew him spoke of his optimism, warmth, intelligence and grace. As I see it, his life was two parts joy, presence and personal power and one part misery, denial, illness and a reversion to childlike thinking. So overall he lived a good life, but he left a lot of cards on the table.

His gifts to me are his daughter, his grandson and the lesson of living life well. This third gift is the one I just got this week, and it’s a wonderful gift. Because of him, I can hold death with me and not feel fear or revulsion. I can embrace it at a natural part of life, like the changing of the seasons or the tides, integrate it into my being, and appreciate life so much more deeply and from a far more grounded and mature perspective. I get what it means to “keep death in mind.”

And because of him, I see both the joy of living life well and the pitfalls of not taking responsibility for your life. Personal power isn’t just something to get chicks, it’s the way to living the best life. Taking responsibility for your life and being proactive isn’t just self-improvement BS, it’s giving yourself the best chance to enjoy and appreciate life. And thinking about death and the lost opportunities inspires me to want to shine my light brighter and to focus on living a life that is mine, that is fulfilling, that is rewarding, that I can fully share with the universe.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to integrate this lesson into my life. There are going to be some profound changes in the way I think and act.