end-of-life

I haven__ been out driving at this time of night in many years, much less in an unfamiliar area. These are the things that scare you as you get older. You understand night all too well, all its attendant meanings. You try to avoid it, work around it, keep it from entering your house. Your weary, ornery body tells you to stay up late, sleep less, keep the lights on, don__ go into the bedroom__f you have to sleep, sleep in your chair, at the table. Everything is about avoiding the night. Because of that, I suppose that I should be scared out here in the dark, but I am finally past that, I think.(p.204)

By acknowledging my impermanence, I can consider if there is anything I can do now to help my loved ones who will be left behind cope with losing me and to facilitate healing.

Life is a simple straight line between birth and death. The problem is you only realize it at the end of the line.

At the end of my life I want to say, __ lived every moment of it.

Surrendering to the best of my abilities when the price of life has outweighed its benefit may be a compassionate choice for me and those around me.

The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of colored light down to the buildings, way longer than I__e ever seen for fireworks_ I linger on this slide. I study that blue castle and those fireworks and realize that this is the image I__e had in my head of Disneyland for all these years. Just like the beginning of the Wonderful World of Disney TV show. Maybe that__ why I wanted to head here this time. I know it__ ridiculous, but part of me wants to think that the world after this one could look like that.Like I said before, I stopped having notions about religion and heaven long ago__ngels and harps and clouds and all that malarkey. Yet some silly, childish side of me still wants to believe in something like this. A gleaming world of energy and light, where nothing is quite the same color as it is on earth__verything bluer, greener, redder. Or maybe we just become the colors, that light spilling from the sky over the castle. Perhaps it would be somewhere we__e already been, the place we were before we were born, so dying is simply a return. I guess is that were true then somehow we__ remember it. Maybe that__ what I__ doing with this whole trip__ooking for somewhere that I remember, deep in some crevice of my soul. Who knows? Maybe Disneyland is heaven. Isn__ that the damnedest, craziest thing you__e ever heard? Must be the dope talking.(pp.253-254)

At the end of life, your reward in heaven will not be proportional to the role you played on earth, but how faithful you played it. Be faithful in every little role you are to play; it'll lead you to a greater reward! Faithfulness is key!

Death is the final destination of every man.

In the kitchen, her family nibbled Helen__ lemon squares. Melanie urged brownies on the nurses. __ake these,_ she told Lorraine. __e can__ eat them all, but Helen won__ stop baking.___weetheart,_ Lorraine said, __verybody mourns in her own way.__elen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars were awful, sticky-sweet and hard enough to break your teeth. They remained untouched in the dining room, because Helen never threw good food away.

Everyone for whom I would have cried has already died.

I entered the picture in the eleventh hour as a guide to the exit of his life. I navigated as best I could the role of end-of-life shepherd__ journey that I had never taken before. I have to forgive myself for what I did not know. And I have to forgive him for the times that he felt unequipped to deal with the unknown.

By seizing every opportunity for kindness, forgiveness, healing, and love that crosses my path each day, I hope that my death, although perhaps sad for some, will be gracefully concluded.

In the end, if we don't have God we don't have anything other than an end.

My life will end someday, but it will end at my convenience.

Of course, it__ now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don__ move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him__hat sandwich was the last meal he ate in our Haight-Ashbury apartment, our one true home.

Hi lover," he says to me, completely forgetting what happened before.He knows who I am. He knows that I am the one person who he loves, has always loved. No disease, no person can take that away.(p.205)

It doesn__ upset me to think about dying. What upsets me is the idea of John being alone after his spell passes. The idea of one of us without the other. (p.127)

I knew then why I had to suffer. The older we get, the more reasons God gives us to seek His comfort. In the end, He sends us just enough pain and suffering so that we will want to leave. If everything were perfect, we would never choose to go. He wants us to seek an end to our suffering because He wants us to want to come Home.