Graceful Passages: A Companion For Living And Dying

reviewed by Christine Hall

We’ve made death a scarier subject than it should be. We celebrate youth, the beginning of life, throughout our culture, yet we deny and turn away from the end of life. We don’t make it easy for those we love when they are dying, for we bring them our fear and send them to the next world with the understanding that whatever is awaiting will be awful – or worse. Ironically, we’ve made dying a fate worse than death.

This is not how it should be, of course. Think how healthier we would be if we were taught not to fear death, but to accept it and even embrace it when it’s time has come. We don’t seem to realize that if we see death as something horrific, then life too is horrific, since death is the end product of all life. If life is awesome and wondrous, then death should be the same. After all, it’s part of the life process.

Due, in part, to our cultural training, most of us will leave life completely unprepared for it’s ending. Unless we are lucky and have had great spiritual guidance, we will meet our end full of fear and dread, for there are very few examples to teach us how to die with grace, dignity and joy in our hearts. This is most unfortunate. As the Buddhists say, death is a part of life, and people should be encouraged to contemplate death often. Doing so only serves to make life more precious.

This would seem to be the purpose behind Graceful Passages: A Companion For Living And Dying, a beautifully packaged two-CD set and booklet offered by Companion Arts Productions. Here, the listener and reader is offered the opportunity to explore the usually denied end-of-life experience, and to contemplate how life’s ending is intricately tied to life’s living.

The project is the brainchild of songwriter Michael Stillwater, who approached his friend, composer Gary Remal Malkin, who’s father had just passed-on. “His own father had recently died,” Malkin explains of that conversation, “and the passage had inspired a vision of using music to heal people’s hearts touched by the mystery of dying. Compelled by the memory of my father’s final days, I embraced the dream wholeheartedly.”

What they have done is to compose a musical score suitable for meditation, and to weave that music in and around messages on dying that are written and read by noted spiritual leaders and other experts on death and dying. The result is not morbid, as some might expect, but life affirming to the extreme. One CD contains both the music and messages, the other is only music to be used in meditation or contemplation.

The cast they have garnered to read the messages is like a Who’s Who of spirituality and the science of dying. Some, like Ram Dass, Timothy Leary’s friend and author of the perennial hippie favorite Be Here Now, will be familiar to almost everyone. “Each of us contains a being that doesn’t die and a being that does die,” he says. “Everything must change except the soul. Your preparation for dying is done by identifying with your soul, not your ego. Identify with your soul now.”

Another name that will be familiar to most, at least by association, is Arun Gandhi, grandson to Mahatma Gandhi. “My grandfather... used to say that physical death is the birth of spiritual life,” he relates. “He felt that, since light is enlightenment and also a life-giving source, that when we die, we all merge into the Great Sun or the Moon, because they are the celestial lights that give us life – and they take us back again.”

Other names that may not be so well-known to the lay public are still heavy hitters in their fields. People like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., author of the ground-breaking book on death and grief, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families. “Look forward to your transition,” she advises. “It’s the first time you will experience unconditional love. There will be all peace and love, and all the nightmares and the turmoil you went through in your life will be like nothing.” Also included is a reading by Thich Nhat Nanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who was nominated by Martin Luther King for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

Graceful Passages will serve the needs of the dying, and loved ones of those who are dying or who have recently passed. But it is not just for them, for here is a wonderful tool for anyone who is interested in the beauty and mystery of life – or for anybody who might some day face death. In other words, Graceful Passages is for us all.

For more information visit the web site http://gracefulpassages.com.