Anam Cara

by John O'Donohue

  WHEN DEATH VISITS…

  Death is a lonely visitor. After it visits your home, nothing is ever the same again. There is an empty place at the table; there is an absence in the house. Having someone close to you die is an incredibly strange and desolate experience. Something breaks within you then that will never come together again. Gone is the person whom you loved, whose face and hands and body you knew so well. This body, for the first time, is completely empty. This is very frightening and strange. After the death many questions come into your mind concerning where the person has gone, what they see and feel now. The death of a loved one is bitterly lonely. When you really love someone, you would be willing to die in their place. Yet no one can take another’s place when that time comes. Each one of us has to go alone. It is so strange that when someone dies, they literally disappear. Human experience includes all kinds of continuity and discontinuity, closeness and distance. In death, experience reaches the ultimate frontier. The deceased literally falls out of the visible world of form and presence. At birth you appear out of nowhere, at death you disappear to nowhere. If you have a row with someone you love and she goes away, and if you then desperately need to meet again, regardless of the distance, you can travel to where she is to find her. The terrible moment of loneliness in grief comes when you realize that you will never see the deceased again. The absence of their life, the absence of their voice, face, and presence become something that, as Sylvia Plath says, begins to grow beside you like a tree.

  THE CAOINEADH: THE IRISH MOURNING TRADITION

  One of the lovely things about the Irish tradition is its great hospitality to death. When someone in the village dies, everyone goes to the funeral. First everyone comes to the house to sympathize. All the neighbors gather around to support the family and to help them. It is a lovely gift. When you are really desperate and lonely, you need neighbors to help you, support you, and bring you through that broken time. In Ireland there was a tradition known as the caoineadh. These were people, women mainly, who came in and keened the deceased. It was a kind of high-pitched wailing cry full of incredible loneliness. The narrative of the caoineadh was actually the history of the person’s life as these women had known him or her. A sad liturgy, beautifully woven of narrative, was gradually put into the place of the person’s new absence from the world. The caoineadh gathered all the key events of the person’s life. It was certainly heartbreakingly lonely, but it made a hospitable, ritual space for the mourning and sadness of the bereaved family. The caoineadh helped people to let the emotion of loneliness and grief flow in a natural way.

  We have a tradition in Ireland known as the wake. This ensures that the person who has died is not left on their own the night after death. Neighbors, family members, and friends accompany the body through the early hours of its eternal change. Some drinks and tobacco are usually provided. Again, the conversation of the friends weaves a narrative of remembrance from the different elements of that person’s life.

  THE SOUL THAT KISSED THE BODY

  It takes a good while to really die. For some people, it can be quick, yet the way the soul leaves the body is different for each individual. For some people, it may take a couple of days before the final withdrawal of soul is completed. There is a lovely anecdote from the Munster region about a man who had died. As the soul left the body, it went to the door of the house to begin its journey back to the eternal place. But the soul looked back at the now-empty body and lingered at the door. Then it went back and kissed the body and talked to it. The soul thanked the body for being such a hospitable place for its life journey and remembered the kindnesses the body had shown it during life.

  In the Celtic tradition, there is a great sense that the dead do not live far away. In Ireland there are always places, fields, and old ruins where the ghosts of people were seen. That kind of folk memory recognizes that people who have lived in a place, even when they move to invisible form, somehow still remain attached to that place. There is also the tradition known as the Coiste Bodhar, or the Deaf Coach. Living in a little village on the side of a mountain, my aunt as a young woman heard that coach late one night. This was a small village of houses all close together. She was at home on her own, and she heard what sounded like barrels crashing against each other. This fairy coach came right down along the street beside her house and continued along a mountain path. All the dogs in the village heard the noise and followed the coach. The story suggests that the invisible world has secret pathways where funerals travel.

  THE BEAN SÍ

  In the Irish tradition, there is also a very interesting figure called the Bean Sí. Sí is another word for fairies, and Bean Sí is the word for Fairy Woman. This is a spirit who cries for someone who is about to die. My father heard her crying one evening. Two days later a neighbor, from a family for whom the Bean Sí always cried, died. In this, the Celtic Irish tradition recognizes that the eternal and the transient worlds are woven in and through each other. Very often at death, the inhabitants of the eternal world come out toward the visible world. It can take a person days or hours to die, and then often preceding the moment of death, that person might see their deceased mother, grandmother, grandfather, or some relation, spouse, or friend. When a person is close to death, the veil between this world and the eternal world is very thin. In some cases, the veil is actually removed for a moment so that you can indeed be given a glimpse into the eternal world. Your friends who now live in the eternal world come to meet you, to bring you home. Usually, for people who are dying to see their own friends gives them great strength, support, and encouragement. This elevated perception shows the incredible energy that surrounds the moment of death. The Irish tradition shows great hospitality to the possibilities of this moment. When a person dies, holy water is sprinkled in a circle around the person. This helps to keep dark forces away and to keep the presence of light with the newly dead as they go on their final journey.

  Sometimes people are very worried about dying. There is no need to be afraid. When the moment of your dying comes, you will be given everything that you need to make that journey in a graceful, elegant, and trusting way.

  A BEAUTIFUL DEATH

  I was once present at the deathbed of a friend. She was a lovely young woman, a mother of two children. The priest who helped her to die was also a friend. He knew her soul and spirit. As it became apparent that she would die that night, she became frightened. He took her hand and prayed hard into his own heart, asking to receive the words to make a little bridge for her journey. He knew her life very deeply, so he began to unfold her memories. He told her of her goodness, beauty, and kindness. She was a woman who had never harmed anyone. She always helped everyone. He recalled the key events of her life. He told her there was no need for her to be afraid. She was going home, and there would be a welcome for her there. God, who had sent her here, would welcome her and embrace her and take her so gently and lovingly home. Of this, she could be completely assured. Gradually, an incredible serenity and calmness came over her. All of her panic was transfigured into a serenity that I have rarely met in this world. All her anxiousness, worry, and fear had completely vanished. Now she was totally in rhythm with herself, attuned and completely tranquil. He told her that she had to do the most difficult thing in her life. She had to say farewell to each member of her family. This was extremely lonely and difficult.

  He went out and gathered her family. He told them that each of them could go in for five or ten minutes. They were to go in and talk to her, tell her how much they loved her and to tell her what she meant to them. They were not to cry or burden her. They could cry afterward, but now they were to concentrate completely on making her journey easy. Each one of them went in and talked to her, consoled her, and blessed her. Each of them came out shattered, but they had brought her the gifts of acknowledgment, recognition, and love, beautiful gifts to help her on her journey. She herself was wonderful. Then he went to her and anointed her with the holy oil, and we all said the prayers
together. Smiling and serene, she went absolutely happily and beautifully on the journey that she had to make alone. It was a great privilege for me to be there. For the first time my own fear of death was transfigured. It showed me that if you live in this world with kindness, if you do not add to other people’s burdens, but if you try to serve love, when the time comes for you to make the journey, you will receive a serenity, peace, and a welcoming freedom that will enable you to go to the other world with great elegance, grace, and acceptance.

  It is an incredible privilege to be with someone who is making this journey into the eternal world. When you are present at the sacrament of someone’s death, you should be very mindful of their situation. In other words, you should not concentrate so much on your own grief. You should rather strive to be fully present to, with, and for the person who is going on the journey. Everything should be done to completely facilitate the dying person, and to make the transition as easy and as comfortable as possible.

  I love the Irish tradition of the wake. Its ritual affords the soul plenty of time to take its leave. The soul does not leave the body abruptly; this is a slow leave-taking. You will notice how the body changes in its first stages of death. The person does not really leave life for a while. It is very important not to leave the dead person on his own. Funeral homes are cold, clinical places. If at all possible, when the person dies, they should be left in their familiar surroundings so that they can make this deeper transition in a comfortable, easy, and secure way. The first few weeks after a person dies, that person’s soul and memory should be minded and protected. One should say many prayers for the deceased to help the person make the journey home. Death is a threshold into the unknown, and everyone needs much shelter as they go on that journey.

  Death is pushed to the margins in modern life. There is much drama about the funeral, but this often remains external and superficial. Our consumerist society has lost the sense of ritual and wisdom necessary to acknowledge this rite of passage. The person who has entered the voyage of death needs more in-depth care.

  THE DEAD ARE OUR NEAREST NEIGHBORS

  The dead are not far away; they are very, very near us. Each one of us someday will have to face our own appointment with death. I like to think of this as an encounter with your deepest nature and most hidden self. It is a journey toward a new horizon. As a child, when I looked up at the mountain near my village, I used to dream of the day when I would be old enough to go with my uncle up to the top of the mountain. I thought that I would be able to see the whole world on the horizon. I remember that I was very excited when the day finally came. My uncle was bringing sheep over the mountain, and he told me that I could come with him. As we climbed up the mountain and came to where I thought the horizon would be, it had disappeared. Not only was I not able to see everything when I got there, but another horizon was waiting, farther on. I was disappointed but also excited in an unfamiliar way. Each new level revealed a new world. Hans Georg Gadamer, a wonderful German philosopher, has a lovely phrase: “A horizon is something toward which we journey, but it is also something that journeys along with us.” This is an illuminating metaphor for understanding the different horizons of your own growth. If you are striving to be equal to your destiny and worthy of the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart, then you should be regularly reaching new horizons. Against this perspective, death can be understood as the final horizon. Beyond there, the deepest well of your identity awaits you. In that well, you will behold the beauty and light of your eternal face.

  THE EGO AND THE SOUL

  In our struggle with the silent and secret companion, death, the crucial battle is the one between the ego and the soul. The ego is the defensive shell we pull around our lives. It is afraid; it is threatened and grasping. It acts in an overly protective way and is very competitive. The soul, on the other hand, has no barriers. As the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “The soul has no limits.” The soul is a pilgrim journeying toward endless horizons. There are no exclusion areas; the soul suffuses everything. Furthermore, the soul is in touch with the eternal dimension of time and is never afraid of what is yet to come. In a certain sense, the meeting with your own death in the daily forms of failure, pathos, negativity, fear, or destructiveness are actually opportunities to transfigure your ego. These are invitations to move out of that protective, controlling way of being toward an art of being that allows openness and hospitality. To practice this art of being is to come into your soul-rhythm. If you come into your soul-rhythm, then the final meeting with your physical death need not be threatening or destructive. That final meeting will be the encounter with your own deepest identity, namely, your soul.

  Physical death, then, is not about the approach of a dark destructive monster that cuts off your life and drags you away to an unknown place. Masquerading behind the face of your physical death is the image and presence of your deepest self, which is waiting to meet and embrace you. Deep down, you hunger to meet your soul. All during the course of our lives we struggle to catch up with ourselves. We are so taken up, so busy and distracted, that we cannot dedicate enough time or recognition to the depths within us. We endeavor to see ourselves and meet ourselves; yet there is such complexity in us and so many layers to the human heart that we rarely ever encounter ourselves. The philosopher Husserl is very good on this subject. He talks about the Ur-Präsenz, the primal presence of a thing, an object, or a person. In our day-to-day experience, we can only glimpse the fullness of presence that is in us; we can never meet our own presence face-to-face. At our death, all the defensive barriers that separate and exclude us from our presence fall away; the full embrace of the soul gathers around us. For that reason, death need not be a negative or destructive event. Your death can be a wonderfully creative event opening you up to embrace the divine that always lived secretly inside you.

  DEATH AS AN INVITATION TO FREEDOM

  When you think about it, you should not let yourself be pressurized by life. You should never give away your power to a system or to other people. You should hold the poise, balance, and power of your soul within yourself. If no one can keep death away from you, then no one has ultimate power. All power is pretension. No one avoids death. Therefore, the world should never persuade you of its power over you, since it has no power whatever to keep death away from you. Yet it is within your own power to transfigure your fear of death. If you learn not to be afraid of your death, then you realize that you do not need to fear anything else either.

  A glimpse at the face of your death can bring immense freedom to your life. It can make you aware of the urgency of the time you have here. The waste of time is one of the greatest areas of loss in life. So many people are, as Patrick Kavanagh put it, “preparing for life rather than living it.” You only get one chance. You have one journey through life; you cannot repeat even one moment or retrace one footstep. It seems that we are meant to inhabit and live everything that comes toward us. In the underside of life there is the presence of our death. If you really live your life to the full, death will never have power over you. It will never seem like a destructive, negative event. It can become, for you, the moment of release into the deepest treasures of your own nature; it can be your full entry into the temple of your soul. If you are able to let go of things, you learn to die spiritually in little ways during your life. When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you to a completely new divine belonging.

  NOTHINGNESS: A FACE OF DEATH

  Everything that we do in the world is bordered by nothingness. This nothingness is one of the ways that death appears to us. Nothingness is one of the faces of death. The life of the soul is about the transfiguration of nothingness. In a certain sense, nothing new can emerge if there is not a space for it. That empty space is the space that we called nothingness. R. D. Laing, the wonderful Scottish psyc
hiatrist, used to say, “There is nothing to be afraid of.” This means not only that there is no need to be afraid of anything, but also that there is nothing there to be afraid of, namely, that the nothingness is everywhere, all around us. Because we shrink from this terrain, emptiness and nothingness are undervalued. From a spiritual perspective, they can be recognized as modes of presence of the eternal. The eternal comes to us mainly in terms of nothingness and emptiness. Where there is no space, the eternal cannot awaken. Where there is no space, the soul cannot awaken. This is summed up beautifully in a wonderful poem by the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig:

  PRESENTS

  I give you an emptiness,

  I give you a plenitude,

  unwrap them carefully.

  —one’s as fragile as the other—

  and when you thank me

  I’ll pretend not to notice the doubt in your voice

  when you say they’re just what you wanted.

  Put them on the table by your bed.

  When you wake in the morning

  they’ll have gone through the door of sleep

  into your head. Wherever you go

  they’ll go with you and

  wherever you are you’ll wonder,

  smiling about the fullness

  you can’t add to and the emptiness

  that you can fill.

  This beautiful poem suggests the dual rhythm of emptiness and plenitude at the heart of the life of the soul. Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected. When you feel nothingness and emptiness gnawing at your life, there is no need to despair. This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities. It is also a sign that your soul longs to transfigure the nothingness of your death into the fullness of a life eternal, which no death can ever touch.