The View From Here Series: Positive Thought and Dying
Sunday, January 03, 2010
A while back I had written some posts about positive thought, and stated that I thought, that “positive thought”, wasn’t a necessarily a good thing for those in the position of dying.
It was a great place for those that weren’t sick to be. Yes, positive thought was a good thing to pass along to someone living, but not someone that was dying. Whether it be next week or within a few years.
Now think about this for a moment: Let’s say you know someone dying, of some terminal cancer. A parent, close friend, someone you’re “in tight” with, someone you know and have known for some time. You want to visit them often, and you want to express the idea of hope, and survival.
You go and visit them, they are happy to see you. The relationship between the two of you appears to be a good thing, strong bounds. You express the desire and need for them to “hang in there”, “fight”, “think positive”, “survive”. “You can beat this, I know you can … think positive”.
You need to get back to work, or home to make dinner for the family, and leave. They thank you for the visit and away you go. Now what’s happened here?
An intense sadness enters the dying person, they might sit alone and cry as you leave … but why?
As the visitor, you have completely refused to except the inevitability of their death. You spent the entire time encouraging the “think positive” attitude, and hoping that by this, the cancer would be miraculously cured.
In reality, all that happened is that the sick person had to keep their deepest thoughts, fears, panics and grief to themselves, with no one to share them with, no one to help explore them, no one to help look for the deeper meaning of their life.
This was certainly not the intent of the visit … but it is often the result.
There is a “thing” about dying, dying people often reserve their thoughts, they’re unsure of the visitor’s intentions. Especially the first or early visits, and truth be told, it doesn’t need to be a real visitor … it can be within your own household, your mate for example, or a child. Are they coming to tell me I’m going to live? Are they coming to say goodbye? Do they know something I don’t know?.
No one has practice or previous experience with dying, so it leaves a void of knowledge for all parties involved. I believe dying people don’t always know what they’re saying or trying to say, they’re new at this too. I know from personal experience that the thoughts in your mind arrive at similar conclusions like they always have, but in a different way then they used too. You’re looking at things in a different light. Coming from a different angle.
In my case, I see a heightened appreciation of art and artful things. Now I always had an appreciation of such … but it’s been increased to a driving force. I can’t help thinking about it. I can’t walk past an artful object and not think about it. I can no longer hear a song without deciphering the meaning. Even the writing you’re reading here, is in a sense, an artful experience.
I also see a heightened sense of focus. The ability to stay focused on a subject until I’m satisfied with the results, whatever they may be. In a lot of situations, it’s the focus of the reality of dying, that the dying are focused on, and probably rightfully so.
What used to be important to you, can often be no longer of any concern. Here’s the gist of it, often, by the time you reach a dying person, they are no longer thinking about the “positive thought” thing. They’ve already gone there in their mind and have accepted that death is inevitable and are now looking at a way to find acceptance and clear their plate of any thing they feel left undone or unsettled.
So, you might ask, “well what the hell do we talk about then?”.
It’s a shame that our society is so “bent” on teaching our children how to live … and only how to live. My parents never really spoke to me about dying and how they felt about it, what they were worried about, what they needed to complete, in order to be relaxed and satisfied at the time of their death. In order to accept the idea of death, we need to “clear our plate” of whatever items remain incomplete.
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