Dr. Remen writes of dying: Tim, a cardiologist, looked around the room at the group of doctors mesmerized by this story. “Because he died unexpectedly at home, the law required that we have an autopsy,” he told us quietly. “My father’s brain was almost entirely destroyed by this disease. For many years, I have asked myself, ‘Who spoke?’ I have never found even the slightest help from any medical textbook. I am no close to knowing this now than I was then but carrying this question with me reminds me of something important, something I do not want to forget. Much of life can never be explained but only witnessed.”
Sometimes the particulars of the way in which someone dies, the time, place, even the circumstances, may cause those left behind to wonder whether the event marks the healing of hidden patterns and personal issues, and answers for that person certain lifelong questions. Death has been referred to as the great teacher. It may be the great healer as well. Educare, the root word of ‘education,’ means to lead forth the innate wholeness in a person. So, in the deepest sense, that which truly educates us also heals us.
The theory of karma suggests that life itself is in its essential nature both educational and healing, that the innate wholeness underlying the personality of each of us is being evoked, clarified, and strengthened through the challenges and experiences of our lifetime. All life paths may be a movement toward the soul, In which case our death may be the final and most integrating of our life’s experiences.
Anything that is real has no beginning and no end. The stories in your life and in mine do not stop here.
Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you’ve ever been given is yours forever.
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 300-301, 325, 331, 333.
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