Aging with Wisdom by Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle

Author:Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle [Hoblitzelle, Olivia Ames]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Published: 2017-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

The impact of this experience continued reverberating for weeks and months later. I wrote about it. I tried to paint the inner worlds I’d seen. I felt as though the primordial fear of death had been softened, though it would be hubris to claim freedom from that most universal of fears. Somehow the link between love and death had been insolubly forged. That was an extraordinary gift. In the face of death, love can always triumph—an inspiring promise.

“Life and death on one tether, running beautiful together.” That was the poetic fragment that my husband Hob quoted, knowing that Alzheimer’s would eventually take his life. Fourteen years my elder, he had had an insatiable curiosity about all dimensions of human experience including death. He taught the course on Death and Dying at our local university. We both started to do Hospice work and found ourselves accompanying loved ones who were dying.

Among those influences, there was also the deepening influence of meditation where deep states of absorption provided glimpses of going beyond the sense of “I.” Beyond suffering—the promise of the Buddha’s third noble truth—even beyond death.

I learned that in many Asian countries there are death-awareness practices, called maranasati, an ancient tradition considered by many to be the ultimate practice. As the Buddha said, “Of all meditations, that on death is supreme.”13 Although these may seem unusual or radical, opening to death as part of life feels entirely natural to me. Life becomes more precious. Just this precious, present moment. As one Buddhist teacher phrased it, “One learns the art of dying by learning the art of living: how to become master of the present moment.”14

The following pages include an assortment of inspiring pieces that deal with loss, dying, and death. Dear reader, you may be asking yourself, Why should I want to go there? There are many answers, but perhaps the simplest one is that an awareness of death gives life vividness and immediacy. We realize how precious life is, the miracle of being alive, and how easy it is to take for granted.

Some of the most powerful parts of this section arose when Hob was slipping into the mists of Alzheimer’s. “Bleached Bone,” about grief, still evokes my tears these many years later. In the midst of such challenging, harrowing times, I seldom thought about the possible gifts of what we were going through. It felt more like an initiation by fire. But like the experience with the shaman, what ultimately shone forth was the deepening in love, the love that transcends even death. That is the central message of this section on “Passages.”

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