What if this was the day?
Written by:
Hayriya Heidi Hansen
What if today was The Day? What if you had only 1440 minutes left? Only approximately 20,000 breaths? What would you do? Something different? Where would you go? Are there calls to make? Amends to seek? Love to share? Paperwork and business details to wrap up? People you’d want to see?
So here goes this crazy gal writing about death and dying… again! Or perhaps you prefer the more euphemistic terms: passing away, moving on, going to the other side, slipped away, departed, gone home, at rest, lost the battle. Maybe the more clinical terms: expired, perished, fatal. Or the more poetic: the final sleep, crossed the great divide, crossed the rainbow bridge, returned to the earth. And of course there are the slang versions: kicked the bucket, bought the farm, croaked, bit the dust. We have many ways to say one has died, many ways to acknowledge that our own “ticket to the beyond” has been drawn. And depending upon our familiarity with death, our comfort with acknowledging our own demise, our past interactions with those dying, and our various life events and spiritual and religious beliefs, many factors influence how (or even if) we are able to comprehend on a mental, physical, and spiritual level the fact that each of us will, at some moment in time, die.
Around the world, approximately 121 people die every minute. Will you or I be one of them in the next minute? And what does that really mean? Is there an “other side”? A rebirth? Or is it just lights out, done and gone? Will I suffer? Now that’s a question most people do wonder about and often fear. Have you ever really contemplated your own death? It sounds rather morbid. Yet even AI suggests that it is a “powerful practice that can strip away trivial concerns, ease existential anxiety, and awaken profound gratitude for the present moment. By consciously engaging with the impermanence of life, you reframe your time as a finite, precious gift.”
Many believe they will find some pure gold when they bask in the truth that they will die and it could happen today. It is a powerful practice to hold the truth, even for just one minute every day, that “I will die.” Perhaps even reading this brings a momentary solidity to this fact. All the petty hoo-ha of life becomes trivial, and what truly matters becomes evident. When one genuinely grasps the deep understanding that death, your death, my death, is inevitable, then living authentically becomes a practice, what one might call “a way of living fully alive.”
These are the folks I meet at death cafes, people who have grappled with life’s ultimate reality: that all this beauty, suffering, joy, grief, love, and loss will one day no longer plague us. We will be gone! I meet beautiful, sensitive people of all ages who have questions about the way they think, feel, and behave. Death cafes draw people who have expanded the boundaries of their feelings and emotions, who are ready to meet the infinite expanse of possibilities.
If you have an inquiring mind and want to talk (or listen) with other like-minded folks, then please join our Southern Oregon Living and Dying Alliance facilitators for one (or more!) of the five death cafes held throughout southern Oregon each month. Please check our website for further information at solada.org. We look forward to seeing you and your family and friends at one of our many events.
Hayriya Heidi A. Hansen
541-787-7490