Get on your deathbed

A number of years ago when I was working with psychotherapist

Devers Branden, she put me through her "deathbed" exercise.

I was asked to clearly imagine myself lying on my own deathbed, and to

fully realize the feelings connected with dying and saying good-bye.

Then she asked me to mentally invite the people in my life who were

important to me to visit my bedside, one at a time. As I visualized each

friend and relative coming in to visit me, I had to speak to them out

loud. I had to say to them what I wanted them to know as I was dying.

As I spoke to each person, I could feel my voice breaking. Somehow I

couldn't help breaking down. My eyes were filled with tears. I

experienced such a sense of loss. It was not my own life I was

mourning; it was the love I was losing. To be more exact, it was a

communication of love that had never been there.

During this difficult exercise, I really got to see how much I'd left out of

my life. How many wonderful feelings I had about my children, for

example, that I'd never explicitly expressed. At the end of the exercise, I was an emotional mess. I had rarely cried

that hard in my life. But when those emotions cleared, a wonderful

thing happened. I was clear. I knew what was really important, and who

really mattered to me. I understood for the first time what George

Patton meant when he said, "Death can be more exciting than life."

From that day on I vowed not to leave anything to chance. I made up

my mind never to leave anything unsaid. I wanted to live as if I might

die any moment. The entire experience altered the way I've related to

people ever since. And the great point of the exercise wasn't lost on me:

We don't have to wait until we're actually near death to receive these

benefits of being mortal. We can create the experience anytime we

want.

A few years later when my mother lay dying in a hospital in Tucson, I

rushed to her side to hold her hand and repeat to her all the love and

gratitude I felt for who she had been for me. When she finally died, my

grieving was very intense, but very short. In a matter of days I felt that

everything great about my mother had entered into me and would live

there as a loving spirit forever.

A year and a half before my father's death, I began to send him letters

and poems about his contribution to my life. He lived his last months

and died in the grip of chronic illness, so communicating and getting

through to him in person wasn't always easy. But I always felt good that

he had those letters and poems to read. Once he called me after I'd sent

him a Father's Day poem, and he said, "Hey, I guess I wasn't such a bad

father after all."

Poet William Blake warned us about keeping our thoughts locked up

until we die. "When thought is closed in caves," he wrote, "then love will show its roots in deepest hell."

Pretending you aren't going to die is detrimental to your enjoyment of

life. It is detrimental in the same way that it would be detrimental for a

basketball player to pretend there was no end to the game he was

playing. That player would reduce his intensity, adopt a lazy playing

style, and, of course, end up not having any fun at all. Without an end,

there is no game. Without being conscious of death, you can't be fully

aware of the gift of life.

Yet many of us (including myself) keep pretending that our life's game

will have no end. We keep planning to do great things some day when

we feel like it. We assign our goals and dreams to that imaginary island

in the sea that Denis Waitley calls "Someday Isle." We find ourselves

saying, "Someday I'll do this," and "Someday I'll do that."