DO THE BEST THINGS IN THE WORST TIMES

 A Sermon given September 21, 2025 

At High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

Macon, Georgia

Guy’s walking down the street not paying attention so he trips on something and he falls in a hole. Sprains his leg good so he can’t stand up, and that wouldn’t do him any good because the hole is deep. The sides are sheer, and he can’t get a handhold. 

So he’s lying there and a priest walks by. Guy shouts, “Hey, Father, can you help me? I’m down in this hole and I can’t get out.”

Priest looks over the side, sees he’s in there deep and says, “I’m on my way somewhere but I’ll pray for you.” He prays over the hole, goes on.

Guy’s getting cold and he’s feeling desperate. Doctor walks by. Guy yells, “Hey, Doc, can you help me? I’ve fallen down this hole and I can’t get out.”

Doctor looks over the edge, says, “This isn’t really my area so I’ll write you a consultation.” So he writes it up, throws it down. He goes on.

Now’s it’s getting darker and the guy’s feeling pretty hopeless. He’s cold and his leg hurts. He starts crying and he’s not sure if he’s ever getting out.

Homeless guy walks by and looks down in the hole, sees the guy crying, and he jumps in and sits in the dirt next to him. 

Guy just about explodes, says, “What are you doing? I need help getting out of here and instead you jump down with me! What’s wrong with you?”

Homeless guy takes off his coat and puts it over the other guy’s shoulders. Says, “You looked like someone who could use a friend, and here I am. Besides, I’ve been down here before and I know how to get out.”

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is so ubiquitous in American culture most of us can probably tell it off the top of our heads. Admittedly, this version owes more to Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing than to the New Testament, but like theologian Karl Barth said, “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both,” but nobody gets a newspaper anymore, so we’ll go with a TV show

Here's a real life version from theologian Diana Butler Bass. In a sermon from 2022 she writes about riding a steep escalator when an elderly man ahead of her collapsed, tumbling down the steps, bleeding. People came running and they lifted him and found a bench to lay him on. A waiter from a restaurant brought paper towels and someone else had a water bottle. Blood running down his face, the elderly man tried waving them off, saying it was all right, he was fine. Someone called for an ambulance and the crowd waited with him until the ambulance arrived and he was wheeled out by EMTs. She says, “We all shook hands and went on our separate ways.” 

That’s great, isn’t it? A spontaneous act of help, a crowd of people coming together to make themselves useful and remaining with the injured until he’s tended to by professionals. Great story. 

Then she goes on. “About three weeks later, I was crossing a street…and I tripped, landing spread-eagle in the crosswalk. My purse flew one direction, my glasses another. My hands were scuffed and bleeding from my feeble attempt to break the fall. And my knee hurt.” She was goggle-eyed and cried because she knew she was in danger.

Butler Bass was 62 when this happened. “A car stopped, and a woman opened the driver’s side door…[but] instead of helping, she began to yell at me. ‘What’s wrong with you? Get up! You’re blocking traffic!’ When I didn’t answer, she shouted, ‘Are you deaf?’ and she leaned on her car horn. I crawled across the street to the far corner. ‘Idiot!’ she shouted as she drove away. I sat on the curb sobbing. No one asked me how I was; no one helped. Several people walked by without comment, turning their gaze from the rattled, bleeding woman on the sidewalk.”

She concludes, “Occasionally, you get to be the Samaritan. But sometimes you’re in the ditch.” 

Friends, we are in the ditch. 

Fred Rogers’ mother famously told him in an emergency, look to the helpers. But what if there aren’t any helpers around? Butler Bass writes, “sooner or later, we’ll all be in the ditch…Splayed on that road, I didn’t care who helped me. I just needed help.” That’s the real point of the Parable, she points out, citing Amy-Jill Levine, a scholar of parables. Where most of us associate with the Samaritan Levine insists that Jesus’ hearers, Jewish hearers, would have identified as the wretch in the ditch. “’I’d rather die than acknowledge that [a Samaritan] saved me’; ‘I do not want to acknowledge that a rapist has a human face’; or ‘I do not recognize that a murderer will be the one to rescue me.’” Jews of Jesus’ time were certain that the Samaritans weren’t, in the phrase popular today, sending their best people. That Samaritans were the descendants of rapists and murderers and worshipped at a corrupt Temple. Levine writes that “a contemporary version of the parable would turn the Good Samaritan into the ‘Good Hamas Member.’” The real message of the parable is that “Whoever shows up—even your enemy—especially your enemy—is your neighbor.” 

Let me give you a for instance from my own life. My wife and I work with dog rescue groups. We’re currently fostering two blind chihuahua pups and we go to a lot of foster events. One of the most visible members also appearing at these events are this guy I'll call Frank and his wife. Now, there’s no question they’re good fosters or members in good standing. But I’m leery of Frank. Very white, overfed, bluff, he appears at every event wearing an unconcealed gun at his hip. Like the Paiutes will race over the hill to rustle the dogs any minute. I’ve strongly suspected he has a MAGA hat he only wears around the house.

I know where my antipathy toward him comes from. I’m afraid of guns. I was shot at once and I don’t like firearms anywhere near me. I don’t trust the people with them, even cops, even my wife’s family, even my own family, not to suddenly take a potshot at me. 

A couple months ago at one of the adoption events, I drove over a curb and got a flat tire. Jayne went in with the pups and I tried to change the tire. In vain. It turned out my car, having originated in the wintry central Midwest, had acquired an accumulation of rust on the underside that in retrospect I’m surprised I hadn’t put my feet Flintstone style through the floor when braking. 

While I was mismanaging my solo tire changing, I saw Frank out of the corner of my eye. I hoped he’d go on but he came over to the side of the car and said, “I bet you can use some help.” I swallowed what little pride I still had invested in doing this and said, “Thanks.” We tried this and that, none of which worked, but in the process we both worked up a good sweat. That’s when he said, “You’re wearing patchouli, aren’t you?” Yes, I was. I like the smell of patchouli. I even wash our clothes in patchouli-scented detergent. I espected grief from him.

Frank said something like, “Boy, that takes me back to my hippie days. I used to always get the evil eye from the guys I went to school with, and when we moved out of the commune my wife made me stop wearing it in public.”

Shock can’t begin to suggest the look on my face. You could have driven a Toyota in my mouth my jaw dropped so much.

Butler Bass concludes, “Down [in the ditch] we feel helpless, hurt, afraid, and angry. We stare in shock at those who threaten to run us over if we don’t get out of their way. In the ditch, we have the chance to learn the most radical truth of all—even our enemy is our neighbor.” 

Find the helpers. Would Donald Trump or JD Vance be acceptable helpers? That’s stacking the deck because, while they could have a change of heart and offer their hands, the scenario itself is so unlikely as to be a joke. Let’s make it more probable. Do you accept help from the guy wearing a MAGA hat? From the woman in the Marjorie Taylor Green tee-shirt? From the local Republican Party chair? 

It’s a hard question to answer, I know, and it’s their own extreme actions that make it hard. Keeping people accountable to their words and their deeds are an important part of keeping each other honest.

There’s a meme I’m sure you’ve seen, a New Yorker cartoon where one person says to another, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” We might be tempted to subscribe to the solution offered by Rabbi Bob Alper who quipped when he moved his family to Vermont, “We’re too remote for cable so we have a satellite dish. We can pick up some pretty obscure stations, including a Jewish Cable Channel. Every hour a guy meanders on the screen and says, ‘You don’t wanna know.’” 

Okay, so maybe that’s not really a good solution. An apocryphal story about Margaret Mead says the first sign of civilization is a human femur that’s been broken and then healed. In the animal kingdom, you don’t heal from injuries like that. You become lunch. Let me acknowledge the other Bible allusion in my story. I’m talking about the part where the homeless guy takes off his coat and puts it around the guy’s shoulders and says, “You looked like you could use a friend.” I took that little bit from a comment in the Book of Job, specifically the end of chapter 2. 

These are the three friends of Job who, when they hear of the tragedies that befall him and his family, go to comfort him. He’s so changed they don’t even recognize him from a distance, and when they do, they weep, “they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads.” These three get a bad rap in most analyses because in the next chapter they try convincing Job that he’s somehow brought all his problems on himself. 

But let’s stay with the end of chapter 2. There, they do what a lot of people won’t do. “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw his suffering was great.” They get down in the dirt and the dust and ashes with my man for a week—a week!—imagine that. And they keep their yaps shut because they know the only thing that will come out will be recriminations and poppycock about how you, my good friend Job, brought this all on yourself even if you don’t know how, but in my heart of hearts I know that isn’t going to give anyone anything but agita for Job and a smug feeling for me. 

There is a reason they would have done. Per psychology researcher Steve Taylor, for most of human history we’ve lived as tribes, and certainly the Bible qualifies as a tribal testament. Taylor writes, “There’s no reason why early human beings should be competative or individualistic. That would not have helped our survival at all. It would have actually endangered our survival.” He concludes, “There’s such a strong association between well-being and altruism that it would be foolish not to live altruistically.

This jibes with something I’ve observed, which is there are more “good” people than ones who take advantage of someone. In seminary I was taught Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s practice of the non-anxious presence, the guy just there in the house where tragedy has happened to provide support. Visit the lonely. Do the dishes or the laundry. Mow the lawn. Hold the baby. Stand quietly by, available.

In my title I call these The Worst Times, but make no mistake, these aren’t the worst times in world or even American history. To the contrary, everything considered, these are good times. Many of us have enough money to see to our needs if not our wants. Here. People aren’t being shot in the streets. Here. People aren’t dropping dead from preventable diseases. Here. Yet.

Some of us have seen some really bad times, some of our parents and grandparents lived through them. Maybe that’s what stings the most about these times. We’ve seen things get better. In my lifetime little black girls had to be escorted to school by US Marshalls. Black churches were bombed. The National Guard fired live ammunition into students protesting at Kent and Jackson State Universities. It was a long slog getting past a lot of that and some of us are in danger or have already lost the rights others worked and died for. In the annals of the 300,000 years homo sapiens have existed, these troubled times don’t even merit a footnote, let alone being called the worst. But these may qualify as the worst times many of us will live through.

The saddest part of all this that’s happening, the chaos, the pulling back of the smiling mask of bigotry and repression that many of us are seeing for the first time, but that has lain dormant underneath, is that there is no Samaritan coming to save us. We’re lying in the ditch or in the hole or creeping across the street. We’re on our backs like turtles. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, in the words of poet June Jordan, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We are the homeless guy, the woman on the escalator, the gun-guy ex-hippie in the rain, the non-anxious presence. This is what we must do. Hold up the hurt and disillusioned. Feed the hungry. Shelter the unsheltered. Raise your voice for the voiceless and afraid. Don’t expect anything in return except the feeling of having done right. Do the best things in these worst times. 

What the Beloved Community is

It is a concept embraced by, but not created by, Dr ML King, Jr, an idea that in the radical community of people inspired by God (and for King, the words of Jesus), there is no hate, no poverty, no separation between what we can be and what we are. In this wild inclusivity, a person doesn't just look out for himself but for everyone, knowing that all people are also him.

Here are some examples. In this first one, from 2017, it's the efforts, first of the two men who lift up a woman who is nearly on her face in the final yards of a half-marathon in Philadelphia (!). They each take an arm, effectively ending the times most marathoners care about and need to keep up if they want to submit for longer marathons, and walk her together toward the finish. I think it's clear that for her, it isn't the time that's important, it's the completion that's important. But finally her legs are just too weak and buckle and it's at this point another man, yards ahead, stops, turns around, and scoops her up to carry her there.

In the second, from earlier this year, a teen waitress is rewarded for helping a customer eat his breakfast. It isn't the proclamation by the town's mayor of "Evoni 'Nini' Williams Day" or the gratefully accepted money to help her with tuition that's an example from the Beloved Community because there wouldn't be a reason there for those things. It's in the simple, unselfconscious act of Evoni Williams, at the customer's request, of reaching across the counter and cutting his meat for him, the way billions of fathers and mothers have done for their children. It isn't an infantilizing gesture and Williams doesn't seem embarrassed by the request. Presumably, in her mind and in Adrien Charpentier's mind, it is what people ask for and do in the Beloved Community.

"Simply being present"

The past month and change has been one of deaths, some personal, some better known, some metaphorical and emotional. Thus, this seems a perfect time to post this reading from Parker Palmer's A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.

When we sit with a dying person, we gain two critical insights into what it means to "be alone together." First, we realize that we must abandon the arrogance that often distorts our relationships--the arrogance of beleiving that we have the answer to the other person's problem. When we sit with a dying person, we understand that what is before us is not a "problem to be solved" but a mystery to be honored. As we find a way to stand respectfully on the edge of that mystery, we start to see that all of our relationships would be deepened if we could play the fixer role less frequently. 

Second, when we sit with a dying person, we realize that we must overcome the fear that often distorts our relationships--the fear that causes us to turn away when the other reveals something too vexing, painful, or ugly to bear. Death may be all of this and more. And yet we hold the dying person in our gaze, our hearts, our prayers, knowing that it would be disrespectful to avert our eyes, that the only gift we have to offer in this moment is our undivided attention.

When people sit with a dying person, they know that they are doing more than taking up space in the room. But if you ask them to describe what that "more" is, they have a hard time finding the right words. And when the words come, they are almost always some variant on "I was simply being present." 

We learn to "practice presence" when we sit with a dying person--to treat the space between us as sacred, to honor the soul and its destiny. Our honoring may be wordless or perhaps mediated by speech that the dying person cannot hear. Yet this honoring somehow keeps us connected as we bear witness to another's journey into the ultimate solitude. 

The liminal redemption of Donald Trump

I believe strongly in redemption, the idea that anyone can redeem himself or herself with the good of society no matter what evils he or she may have done. Anyone. This includes racists and Donald Trump.The things we do, little things that we may not think about, big things we give a lot of thought to, affect other people and radiate in ways we don't understand fully. We call such things liminal, the confusing, often unconscious transition point between acting and not acting, a doorway between "Someone should do something about that" and "I am someone."

Can this liminal redemption happen? I don't know, but the butterfly effect is real. It's given us the ends of the Soviet Union, American institutional slavery, and South African Apartheid. It's given us smaller, more personal things like the cousin who checks in to make certain you're okay, the employer who gives you a second chance, the busy driver who helps you cross the street. These small acts of compassion demonstrate our humanity. They are what we must do to build us up against those who would tear us down.

a little hope

I have, as some might imagine, much to say about the burning dumpster fire which is the situation in Charlottesville, VA, and I will say it. But today, as I've been reacting and texting, I came across a short ad that fills me with hope.

I say an ad because it's a trailer for a BBC show. Amazing Humans, and the episode is subtitled "Every Child Deserves the Right to Play." It chronicles a group of people who had an idea to help, tried it, were absolutely stunned at the realization they had no clue how they were going to accomplish it, and discovered that being there is sometimes all the planning you need. Watch it.

"What is noise now will be music later"

All of us felt differently the morning of November 9, some the heady rush that what they believed was suddenly and unexpectedly given credence, and some that what they were afraid would happen now would happen. In the latter category, for many of us this has been expressed as numbness, a kind of unwillingness that other people were willing to vote their anger and fear rather than their hope and future. This essay, written by someone who watched his country go from peace to violence and noted the changes afterward: "People asked me if I had known the war was coming — I did, I'd say, I just didn't know I did, because my mind refused to accept the possibility that the only life and reality I had known could be so easily annihilated." Will Trump take us to war? My initial response is, Of course not! We are too civilized, too well-intentioned for that to happen. But of course, exactly those words were how I greeted Trump's second-- or is it third? Can anyone be certain of any fact now?--run at the White House. If this is the new normal, will compassion in government or relationships be seen as abnormal? Will gasps of apprehension become sonatas?

My Old Man

Twenty years ago, in an obscure regional magazine, I published a story about my dad. It was called "My Old Man" and it was funny and affectionate and my wife calls it her favorite piece of mine. I am, I think, rightly proud of it.

My old man, as described in that story, is a different old man than the one I come here to visit. There remain some indications he's the same man. He's funny and has the same goofy grin widening his cheeks when he says something he knows people will laugh at. He still sits with his arms folded or purses his lips, steeples his fingers, and puts them in front of his mouth when he's relaxing, often after a meal. He still doesn't want to be seen without his teeth in and a "nice" shirt and pair of slacks on. With shoes, not slippers. He's a favorite of the nurses and aides at his nursing facility, partly because he rarely complains and partly because he will spend days smiling at nothing.

In a deeper, more important way, he is a different person. He's like the hospice patients I visit. When I see him and he's asleep, I sit quietly in a chair next to him, touching his shoulder, holding his hand. When he starts to make sounds, like my dogs when they dream, I gently rub his shoulder, his hands, and he has the same reaction as them. He remains asleep and settles, calmed, relaxed, his breathing that of someone sliding into a warm tub. The flecks of dead skin on his cheeks or the dried milk on his lips remind me he has joined ranks of the elderly who have either forgotten to wipe their faces after eating or no longer care. He loses control of his emotions, on occasion, possibly as a result of his strokes, possibly because of the UTIs his body collects like stamps. It rarely lasts long, a flash of fear and hopelessness, tears, and then he's forgotten it. He's smiling again, at nothing again.

It took me decades to come to love the Old Man I grew up with. He was a good man although like most children I wasn't always aware of it. Frankly, it wasn't until my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and he became her primary caregiver that I realized just how good he was capable of being. When I began to visit him in the nursing facility, I was faced with a different Old Man, one who was more frail and, at that time, not even certain of who I was. He has improved, partly physically and partly mentally, to the extent he can occasionally use a walker instead of a wheelchair and he usually recognizes my face and voice. But he tires easily and I can't spend more than a couple hours with him before he's got to sleep, and doesn't want to see me until the next day. He is, in some ways, the same Old Man I've loved, but in a more profound way I've had to come to love a new Old Man.

258 candles-days 57-48

I have been necessarily absent, as I first prepared for my vacation and then drove back to the thick to spend time with my dad. As a result, I'm behind on posting.

But this is an excellent article that makes the pertinent point on a subject whose scab seems never allowed to heal before it's torn off again. In the words of Simone Leigh, "We need to step up the care to.match the stress."

258 candles-days 159-Whatever

Somehow I've lost track of the days. My election countdown clock tells me there are 60 days left before the election, which seems right. But then that means I ought to be on day 198, and I don't see how that might be. So, while I'll continue to call this project 258 Candles, I won't pretend to count down any longer. Or maybe I'll start counting up. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Meanwhile, I remember stories people told in the 60s and 70s of traveling cross-country with no more than a dollar or two and the clothes on their backs, hitching and relying on the kindnesses of strangers to feed and clothe them. Maybe not all those stories were true, or maybe they shaded some of the less friendly parts, but in the main I think the takeaway, that most people are good and given the chance will willingly help another person, is true. I don't think this story proves that sentiment: at best, it proves that the people this man met at this time were good. But I know when I need help from strangers it's available in some way. And I know that when strangers need help from me, I also provide it in some way. Perhaps the help coming isn't in the form it was asked for--food instead of money--but help is nonetheless provided, openly and without expectation. This is the basis of politics, the way we act in the city. We help one another because, while our homes are thousands of miles apart, we are neighbors.

258 candles-days 156-163

I love this commercial. I don't know who might have made it but it encapsulates, in a minute and a half, my belief in change and redemption. It shows a life which, while I'm glad I don't live it, I will gladly describe as being worthwhile in the end.

258 candles-day 132

The morning after yet another black man has been killed in an otherwise routine traffic stop--this one back in the hub where I used to spend my days, a situation that has become almost as ubiquitous as mass shootings--I seek out something to make me feel better about people. These bright spots can be found and celebrated. Today I celebrate Tim Wong and his butterfly reclamation. 

258 candles-day 131

It's all about the humanity.

258 candles-day111

A year ago we were waking up to the news that Dallas, Texas police headquarters had been attacked by James Boulware using an armored van. Today we wake to the new, larger number of 50 dead in the attack by a lone gunman armed with a handgun and an assault rifle on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. In the face of such disturbing and heartrending events, we could be forgiven for the urge to curl up into ourselves, if only to protect ourselves from the psychic pain we experience every single time this happens.

But if we do that, we also miss the brave actions of individuals. We need to be reminded of them at least as often as we need to be reminded that people take up arms to hurt others who aren't like them, or who are sometimes too much like them for comfort. Especially in this current political atmosphere when the default setting for much of the electorate seems to be "It's the other guy's fault!", we need to remember it's just as often the other guy who keeps us safe, who comforts us, who sometimes literally holds us close to his or her heart. 

258 candles-day 110

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: When I was younger, I wanted to experience ayahuasca, but I never did. I expected that, if I were to make it to Arcosanti, I would have it available to me, and it might have been. But I never made it there either. But it's good to know such places as this exist, where shamans presumably give the drug the respect it demands.

258 candles-days 102-109

Herein I offer my confession, that like so many others, and despite my safeguards and attempts at being different, I have caught myself arguing with friends who are more or less on the same side politically as I am, but whose choice of candidate is different and whose method of explaining why it's the superior choice involves demonizing the opposing candidate. My realization involves something like this great story Anne Lamott tells in Travelling Mercies:

She was in a wheelchair, wearing a wig to cover her baldness, weighing almost no pounds, but very serene, very alive. We were at Macy’s. I was modeling a short dress for her that I thought my boyfriend would like.

But then I asked whether it made me look big in the hips, and Pammy said, as clear and kind as a woman can be, “Annie? You really don’t have that kind of time.” 

I don't have that kind of time. None of us has that kind of time. In the immortal words of Toni Childs, Stop your fussin'.

258 candles-day 98

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: What would happen if we taught meditation as part of American education?

258 candles-days 82-95

Yet again I've found myself caught up in the string of requirements and responsibilities, and as a result haven't been as attentive to this countdown as I should. Besides the demands of my profession, I've been at work on a sermon, delivered two weeks ago, and a wedding service, done one week ago. I'm posting the sermon below because it relates to the theme of this series: to care for others in this period of disturbing political me-firstism. 

A Good Death

A Sermon Delivered to Unitarian Church North

May 15, 2016

Almost everyone knows the word “hospice” by now. It’s an early 19^th century French word that has gone from its original meaning of a way-station to our current usage as shorthand for a profession that provides comfort and dignity to people who are dying.
It stands to reason almost everyone must die in somewhat the same way. Wouldn’t you think? The Population ReferenceBureau, whose unenviable task it is to calculate these sorts of things, has determined that nearly one hundred eight billion people have been born and died in the six million years science estimates people have been crawling and hobbling around on the Earth. They have determined, through statistics, mathematics, algorithms, and observation, that there is a one hundred percent certainty that if you are born, you will die. That’s the trick about life: none of us gets out alive.

Amazingly, there is still some variation. There are as many unique ways to die as there are to live. Some of us die alone. Some of us surrounded. Some of us die by violence, some by our own hand, some by accident, and some by the slow accrual of time and entropy. Each of our deaths are as unique as our fingerprints or our dreams.

We long, all of us, once we admit to ourselves we will die, for a good death.  What is that? Well, that’s up to you. I have a friend who once expressed the wish that a nuclear bomb would take him out, squarely to the top of his head. He wanted to die fast and easy, having no wish to live in a post-apocalyptic anything or to watch his loved ones and friends die agonizing deaths. Another friend once said, if he contracted cancer or AIDS or something incurable, he planned to take out a platinum credit card and use it to travel around the world, succumbing just as the mail was delivering the bill to his home. I’m pretty certain credit card companies anticipate this kind of thing.

I used to think I knew how I wanted to die. I was once hiking the Appalachian Trail through New England and in New Hampshire I was on Mount Washington in the White Mountains. It’s a high, rugged mountain where erratic weather—snowstorms in August, winds in excess of a hundred miles an hour out of nowhere—is the norm. It collects at its alpine apex an annual average of nearly 100 inches of rain and snowmelt, so it is covered with magnificent waterfalls and ravines fed by runoff from the Lakes of the Clouds.

I was at one such ravine on the Ammonoosuc River on the western slope, lying on a hump of dirt and grass that jutted out above the cataract and afforded an excellent view downward toward Vermont and lower Canada. I was taking a photo of my hiking partner who had straddled another, higher rock jutting out from that hump when I felt the rock I had planted my foot against suddenly give way and I slid. In my mind I went shooting off the hump and straight down the ravine. It was a long way down and I saw the trees and brush and birds in glorious detail. My feet struck slick boulders just before they accordioned to my chin. In reality I’d only slid about three feet, but it was enough. And in my mind, just as I’d hit those rocks I thought, “This is a fine death.”

I’m not so certain now that’s how I’d like to go. Working with hospice patients I often talk about good ways to die. Some would have liked to die immediately and unknowingly, like from a bullet or getting hit by a bus. Others are glad to have had the opportunity to talk with relatives they hadn’t connected with in some cases for decades. Still others, of course, curse the length of time it can take a sick person to die. Many people lose their faith in a personal, loving God when they find their breathing and cognition outlasting, sometimes by months or years, their ability to move without pain or to communicate simple things like “eat,” “sleep,” “toilet.”

I suspect that my mother, who died six years ago next month, had what most of society would call a good death. She had breast cancer the last fifteen years of her life, and those were hard years, but that isn’t what killed her. No, my dad woke up one morning to find she wasn’t in the bed next to him but face down on the floor in the living room. Mom had a habit of getting up in the night to sit in her recliner for a few hours’ respite after her back began aching. The coroner ruled that she had stood up from her chair, maybe a little too quickly, and had a heart attack. She was dead, he claimed, before she hit the floor.

Sometimes I describe hers as a good death because in those final fifteen years our family and her friends had the opportunity to see her and speak with her, reminisce with her, and tell her what she meant to us. Sometimes people can’t believe that I’m as comfortable with her death as I say I am, but there was nothing left between us, no words unspoken, no undelivered messages. I had loved her, she had loved me, and we let one another know how deeply we felt, and then she died. There’s another sense too in which it was a good death and that’s the lengths to which I discovered, to my surprise and probably his too, how good a caregiver my father could be to her. I’ll never forget the image of him, during my visit the winter before she died, dressing her for an outing in the cold, adjusting the scarf around her neck just so and bundling the top button of her coat gently under the scarf so the wind wouldn’t whip under it.

We all want, whether we admit to it or maybe more importantly when we do not, a death that’s good, whether it’s “good” in terms of its painlessness, its ease, its meaningfulness, or its message. But the truth is no one can give us that. Especially not in the way most of us mean it. For most of us, a good death means we die painlessly, unknowingly, in our sleep. Without prolonged illness, without having felt pain, without even knowing we were ill.

That happens shockingly rarely, the percentage hovering around 4 or 5. This means of every hundred people, four or five will die in such a way. To give you a better idea of this, imagine one hundred of us are qualified to apply to Princeton—top-notch grades, excellent application essay, impressive recommendations, sound extracurricular and community activities. All one hundred of us are capable and deserving. Five of us will get in.

If it’s any consolation, neither will most of us die in a violent manner, not from terrorist attacks or stabbings or violent accidents, shark attacks, lightning strikes, air crashes, radiation poisoning, falling through the ice, or someone intentionally dropping an electric fan into our bath. Most of us will die in the hospital or at home—in an interesting turn, after a century of many if not most people dying in hospitals, often separated from family and friends, there is a resurgence in the way most people used to die, at home in their bed—of the complications from disease, usually heart disease or cancer.

How will we die? Well, again, there are at least as many variations on the act of dying as there are in living, but there are characteristics that can be called constants in the same way I suppose that school education is a constant. That is, some of us go through twenty or more years of schooling, some no more than sixteen, some twelve, some six or seven, and some have no formal schooling at all. But even by its absence, we know that schooling is common.

There’s a booklet I like to give to families when we admit someone into hospice called Gone from My Sight: The Dying Experience. It was published in 1986 by Barbara Karnes, a hospice nurse, and has gone through many revisions. It presents what most people experience during their final days in a non-sensationalistic, understandable manner, using plain language. I caution patients and their families there is no timetable to death. The periods Karnes refers to are a general outline of when some things happen. They may not happen at that time. They may not happen in that order. They may not happen at all.

Karnes characterizes One to Three Months Prior to Death as a period of Withdrawal. It’s not unusual for those first glimmers of our actual mortality—“This is it”—to send us into a spiral of separation from everyone and everything else. We may become irritable or serene. We are slipping into a cocoon, and there’s no room for children, grandchildren, or other loved ones. We’ll peep out at them, even enjoy their presence for a while, but really we’re focused on ourselves.

We sleep more often and longer. Little naps here and there, several a day. It may seem as if we’re bored but our interior life has taken on great interest. We don’t feel the need to communicate with other people. Karnes writes, “Words lose their importance; touch and wordlessness take on more meaning.”

We may stop eating. This is often very hard for families to understand or accept; in many cultures there’s still a certainty that so long as we’re eating, we’re alive. “If only she’d eat she’d feel better.” But nothing tastes good. Or only certain things—sourballs, ice cream, bacon, citruses—taste good. Meat is usually the first to go, and then other hard-to-digest food like vegetables. We’ll stick with soft foods longest, but eventually we’ll stop eating those too.

At One to Two Weeks, people begin to show signs of disorientation. We sleep even more often. Longer periods, deeper naps. It’s almost like hibernation, some patients say. We may talk to people who aren’t there and about events no one recognizes. We start picking at imaginary threads or hairs, our arms or legs seem agitated and move without our volition.

Our blood pressure goes down, our pulse goes up. Or it may seem to stop altogether. We sweat a lot more and when people hug us they remark afterward how clammy we feel. We want the windows open as we’re burning up or more blankets because we just can’t get warm. Our skin changes color, we seem pale and flushed, blue like we’re freezing. Our extremities are often blue because the heart is no longer pumping the way it used to and blood can’t reach there. It might be harder to breathe so we need oxygen. We might breathe faster, like we’re always racing. We’ll hack and cough but nothing comes up.Finally, at One to Two Days and in the Final Hours Before Death, we may have a surge of energy, what hospice workers call a “spike.” We’ll sit up all night talking, drinking, and laughing with friends who’ve come by. We want a plate of fried potatoes and a rare steak and we eat every bite. Loved ones look at this and say, “He’s over the worst,” and we are, but not in the way they mean it.

We get more restless but take to our bed. We collapse. Breathing is slower, less regular, sometimes stopping altogether for nearly a minute. We sound congested, loudly congested, the way we did as kids with a croupy cough. Our eyes are open but we don’t see anything or recognize anyone. We might respond to sounds or voices or movements but we can’t identify them and we’ve stopped responding at all, except for an occasional grunt or moan. We aren’t in pain, usually, it’s just the air moving around our lungs and throat.

Our hands and feet turn purple; the heart can’t pump blood that far anymore. Joints become blotchy and because we’re lying down blood starts to pool on the underside of our arms and legs, our backs, our buttocks. We stop responding altogether.

In the Final Minutes Before Death, there is often the sort of gasping you see when fish are out of water—it’s called Cheyne-Stokes Breathing—and we can’t be awakened or roused. This is often the hardest for family present because they can see the end and they want to be there but this experience can last for hours. Sometimes, when they can’t hold off going to the bathroom any longer, we take that opportunity we’re alone to finally just stop.

We all die and we all die in our own time. It may sound sad and it may seem sad but it isn’t to the person undergoing it. It’s just what they’re going through and they’re beyond any consideration of whether they want to do it.

I’d like to read to you the narrative I wrote after the death of one of my patients to help make this as personable as possible.

I visited a patient whose decline was dramatic after a period of relative energy. Inside a week she had gone from sitting in a wheelchair and actively participating in life to being bed-bound and sleeping nearly all the time. She was unconscious when I arrived so I took her hand while the RN who'd got there before I had went through her paces. She said, "I'll be surprised if she lasts the day."

The nurse left about 20 minutes later. We were waiting for one of her daughters to arrive and I said I'd stay with her until she came. But a half hour after the nurse left she became agitated, having difficulty breathing, and opening and closing her eyes without seeing. Her dyspnea was a series of quick, almost urgent, shallow breaths, as if she can't catch it. I talked to her, letting her know I was there with her and she wasn't alone. She could be scared, I said, but I was with her and wouldn't be leaving until she was finished. She lay on her back, swallowing great gulps of nothing. I held her hand more tightly and reminded her of my presence.

There was no great shudder. No death rattle. No final words of wisdom. One moment she was breathing, which I could see from the gentle rise and fall of her chest. Then she stopped. But then she started again. This went on a few times, the shallow intake, the rise, the wheeze out, the fall. Until finally, she stopped. From my seat I could see the flutter of her carotid artery. I watched that pulse slower, until it too stopped. I touched my fingers to it but couldn't be positive if I felt it still or if it was the throb of my own pulse. After about a minute I pressed her eyelids closed and they stayed that way and I stepped out to ask a nurse to check her. 

I have seen other people die, but it was always with the safety of distance. This time I had held her hand and felt her life slow until I couldn't feel it at all. I don't know exactly what I felt. It wasn't fear or anxiety or even relief at its conclusion. What comes nearest I think is humility. I felt humble in the face of what happened, struggling to hold her one hand while she held a plush chipmunk in the other, and keeping the live flower her daughter had placed in her hair from tipping and rolling off her pillow. My entire role came to, "I'm here." There seemed nothing else that needed to be done.

258 candles-day 81

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: The self-sacrifice one man makes for the forgotten beasts of Fukushima. 

25768 candles-day 76

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Dancing out the hammers in your head. 

258 candles-day 75

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: A quick survey of important Muslim concepts.