I came back to the hospital after office hours just to tell Seana the operative findings. As her general internist, I knew there was no real need for me to tell her, as she would be just coming out of general anesthesia and was, technically, on the surgery service. But I felt that I should. This would be her fourth major surgery to try and defeat the inexorably metastasizing colon cancer.
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She’d been preoccupied with death for several years now; but one aspect had never before crossed her mind: dying, you don’t get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant…
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“We can survive death to the extent that we have already let go of our singular solitary selves… Immortality, for Spinoza, is impersonal. I survive my necessary death to the extent that I have ceased identifying with the mere thing that I am, and identify with the whole intricate web I have assimilated into knowing…” I…
Read More“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” — Neils Bohr What follows is a true story. Though the experience is personal, it involves that most universal of all experiences, death. It is the “dark place” in the title. By…
Read MoreA Personal Approach To The Integration Of The Scientific Worldview And Spiritual Life Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put up a swing: all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway Between these two trees, and it never winds down. Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;…
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If I look objectively at my body, I see that it is made of cells, which are made of atoms. These atoms have been elsewhere before they were me. They were part of the food I ate, the water I drank, the air I breathed. Of course, what I call “food” were once (mostly) living…
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Sitting on the rock mantle, moon up ahead, vast canyon below, bottom layer 250 million years old: We are little bursts of life in the well of space-timeformed by our pebble in the cosmos and our nuclear furnace-star/sun. Human history is the history of small mammals with extraordinary potential. Is there a Divine Hand in…
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“When a relaxed spirit meditates and dreams… the mind sees and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in the object.” If we were to look with finer detail into that which perceive as “matter”, we would see it to be mostly space. Atomic physicists long ago learned that the…
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Suddenly, Einstein lifted his head, looked upward at the clear skies and said: “We know nothing about it all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of school children.” “Do you think we shall ever probe the secret?” “Possibly we shall know a little more than we now know, but…”
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This has been my first weekend covering the inpatient hospice unit. I suppose that I secretly hoped for a place of ecstatic mystical death, but this has been more like death–row than St. Theresa of Avila.
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