Cancer Blog
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #2:
August 2, 2021
“We have finished our years like a sigh.
As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years,
Or if due to strength, eighty years,
Yet their pride is but labor and sorrow;
For soon it is gone and we fly away.”
Psalm 90: 9-10
Why Surprised?
It is amazing to me how surprised I was to get a diagnosis of impending death. I am a Christian and have read the Psalm I quote above many times, but somehow the words apparently didn’t sink in. What part of “they contain seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years” didn’t I understand? (As mentioned in entry#1, I’m now 69, only 6 months from that 70 year mark).
Apparently, though, in our American culture, it’s a common problem now, but wasn’t always that way. I’m reading David McCullough’s “The Pioneers” (one of about 10 books as I love to read) and have been struck by the frequent occurrence of death in the lives of the people that he is chronicling, viz, the people who left the East Coast (especially Massachusetts) not long after the end of the war for independence (in the 1790’s) and traveled to what was to become Ohio. They and their children died of many causes, sometimes just on the trip out west: disease, accidents, attacks from the natives. Though they were obviously sad and grieved, I don’t get the impression that they were surprised or resentful (towards the world or God). For them, death was a constant though harsh companion and an event that was not a shock.
I Missed the Dying Part
My wife and I often pray from the Book of Common Prayer an evening prayer with this line: “And grant us grace always to live in such a state that we may never be afraid to die; so that, living and dying, we may be thine…” I think I caught the living part, but missed the dying part. Now when we read it, I practically catch my breath as I am suddenly faced with what it was telling me to prepare for. As I mentioned in the last entry, I worked in home health physical therapy for 6 years, and in all the hundreds of homes I entered, I encountered only the occasional person who didn’t seem to be surprised or resentful or upset that they had contracted a serious illness, or suffered a serious injury, or had received a diagnosis of a terminal illness. I think as a culture we have done what we can to isolate ourselves from death, both ours and those around us. We have lost the urgency of preparing to die.
In next entry, I’ll describe some of the cultural differences among people that I saw pretty consistently as families dealt with sickness/debility and dying.