I am grateful for how much dying people have taught me about living, and I seek to encourage you to listen. If we spend time with those who are dying and listen in such a way they will want to talk about living and dying, not only will we help them pass away with acceptance but they will help us to live meaningfully and purposefully.

The medical center wards to which I was assigned as a chaplain included some where two ormthree patients died each day, and death and dying were everyday experiences for us. I have kept their names and even now recall many and still picture their faces. I owe them much, because they gave me much.

Many people don’t even begin to live until they start to die. For the first time, they pay attention to their lives and take hold. Some people live more on their death beds than they did when they were too busy to think about life. I listened to these people when there was nothing left for them to do but talk, because they needed to be heard. They recall vividly the many good things in their lives, but they seem to have forgotten (or let go of) perhaps even more bad things. They gain new perspective with a keener sense of priorities, what really matters in life.

The negative recollections are most often missed opportunities, e.g., people they could have gotten to know but ignored, things they could have done but never got around to, places they always wanted to visit but did not, experiences they wanted to try but feared, activities they started but failed to finished, wrongs they should have righted but lacked the courage, resources readily available to enrich their lives but left tapped. These things.

I learned and grew by listening to them. More than telling me about their lives, they shared them as if, somehow, at least some of these understandings could become part of my life. A departing gift, if you will. One woman expressly scolded me when I was reticent to answer her inquires about my family’s fun. “I’ve had a wonderful life, and as I leave it, I want to know someone else is still enjoying life. Life goes on, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Others had, indeed, lived well and richly. Their joy of living was all the more heightened by the opportunity of thinking back with gratitude. Some harbored no regrets at all. They had gained so much by living, they felt no sense of loss now. Although none ever articulated this, some impressed me with feeling they were actually taking with them what they had learned in life, because these things can never really be lost. They become part of the person, not something that could be shed and left behind.

A real tragedy is that some dying people were being ignored by their families and friends. Most often it was because they refused to believe this one was actually going to die. They would come home from the hospital, as people do all the time, and then they would spend time with them. As I talked with these neglecting people, they gave me the impression they felt refusing to visit a death bed, death couldn’t come. They sunk into a state of denial.

They left it to me, the chaplain, to learn about living from those who had lived well and, so, were dying well. What a shame they missed this.

After my father died, a colleague’s father was told he would. I dropped by his office and told him I predicted the next months could well be the richest and happiest he ever enjoyed with his father. Following the funeral, he stuck his head in my office and said only, “You were right.”

Please don’t dread those final hours with someone you love. They offer an opportunity that comes no other way. These hours or days may be uncomfortable and even painful, but you can’t imagine how gratified you will feel about them for the rest of your life. You will live much better. Living well will enable you to die well.