How to Prepare for the Hour of Your Death

“A User’s Guide to Death and Dying” — Part 2 of 2

Francisco de Goya, “El tránsito de San José”, 1787
Francisco de Goya, “El tránsito de San José”, 1787 (photo: Public Domain)

This is the second part of a two-part series. The first part can be read here.

“I will then prepare myself for that hour,
and I will take all possible care to end this journey happily.”
~ St. Frances de Sales
 

We know we’re going to die – that’s a given. We also know that hastening our deaths or the deaths of those we care for is absolutely forbidden – also a given.

So what can we do?

Let’s consider that question from two different angles: That which we must do and that which we ought to do.

 

What we must do

The Church teaches us that we are always obliged to make use of ordinary means of preserving human life and that we are bound to deliver ordinary care until natural death.

First, ordinary means. In sorting out what means are “ordinary” as opposed to “extraordinary” (and thus optional), Catholic ethicists rely on the idea of proportionality. “Proportionate means are those that in the judgment of the patient offer a reasonable hope of benefit and do not entail an excessive burden or impose excessive expense on the family or the community (ERD 56). The judgment of the patient himself is instrumental, for his “reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected” (CCC 2278). The same deference ought to be accorded to the patient’s legal representative when the patient himself is no longer capable of making decisions for himself.

Take chemotherapy, for example, or perhaps a major surgery of some kind. The patient can take into account the encumbrance and/or risk of undergoing such interventions and weigh those against prospective outcomes. A patient in good conscience can refuse either one as long as he is not intending to hasten his own death. In so doing, he is merely accepting “one’s inability to impede” death (CCC 2278), and is making a reasonable and morally licit calculation as to how best to spend his remaining days.

However, that doesn’t mean we should jump at the chance to discontinue anything and everything that appears burdensome or expensive. Given our belief in the value of redemptive suffering, it may be that we can accomplish a great deal of spiritual good if we choose to extend our lives by means of extraordinary treatments – not to mention the value of continued relationship (and reconciliation if necessary) with our loved ones.

What’s more, as our Lord clearly taught in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, our needs and vulnerability can be an opportunity for others to practice virtue through their sacrificial service. This is especially true for our offspring, who are in any case bound by the 4th Commandment: “Honor your father and mother” (CCC 2218). Robust and generous attention to the needs of aging and infirm parents will redound to our adult children’s own sanctification, and our living longer just might help them save their souls.

So, then, what of ordinary care? Regardless of our choices regarding extraordinary means of preserving life, we all should avail ourselves of uninterrupted care as we approach death – and we must provide for others. Commonly understood, ordinary care encompasses what is everywhere considered routine humane treatment: safety, warmth, shelter, hygiene, preservation of dignity, and (as a default) the provision of food and water.

Preeminent among these efforts is aggressive pain management. Similar to our refusal to allow anyone to die from dehydration is our refusal that they should have to endure intolerable pain in their final days (CCC 2279). Good pain control is absolutely essential, and it is virtually always possible today. In fact, aggressive pain management is even morally permissible when it may “indirectly shorten the person’s life so long as the intent is not to hasten death” (ERD 61) an example of what philosophers call the principle of double effect.

Pain control is a core element of palliative care – a healthcare specialty oriented to providing whatever is required to the dying “so that they can live with dignity until the time of natural death” (ERD 60). It’s central to the modern hospice care movement, which holds up comfort, instead of cure, as the expected outcome. Authentic, ethical hospice care neither hastens nor postpones death, but provides relief of symptoms experienced by the dying (like nausea, anxiety, shortness of breath) while providing thoroughgoing emotional and spiritual support.

Although doctors are involved in this care, it’s the particular provenance of hospice nurses, whose constant bedside presence and attentiveness have earned them the moniker of “midwives of the soul.” Like midwives at the beginning of life, hospice nurses stand by to assist, to guide, to support, to facilitate a passage – in this case, from life to a good death. When hospice care is provided in the home setting, as is preferred, family members themselves become the primary providers of palliation and support. They, too, become facilitators and midwives of their loved one’s good death, and can justly say with Servant of God Rose Hawthorne, a turn-of-the-century pioneer in hospice nursing, that “if our Lord knocked at the door we should not be ashamed to show what we have done.”
 

What we ought to do

We turn then from what is demanded of us at the end of life to what is eminently advisable – namely, to make adequate preparations for death (ERD 55).

First off, in practical terms, we owe it to those who’ll be caring for us at the end of life to let them know our wishes and preferences – particularly with regards to ordinary means and care. This puts us square in the territory of “advance directives,” and there are numerous instruments and legal arrangements to choose from. True “advance directives” are just that: Binding documents that tell caregivers what we want and what we don’t want when it comes to end-of-life care. This category includes “living wills,” which have been around for a while, as well as the more recent Physicians’ Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLSTs). These are static documents that are supposed to legally “speak” for us when we become incapacitated. Although you can tailor advance directives to conform with Catholic teaching, they can’t possibly address all future healthcare contingencies. Plus, they’re open to broad interpretation on the part of those implementing them, and so the values of physicians who end up caring for us will ultimately take precedence over our own.

Consequently, most Catholic ethicists, along with our bishops, urge the appointing of a trusted healthcare proxy or a durable power of attorney for healthcare. This would be someone you designate who would be legally authorized to make healthcare decisions for you when and if you’d become unable to do so for yourself. By appointing someone who shares or at least respects your sincerely held Catholic beliefs, you can be confident that he or she would seek to make decisions on your behalf that are both in your best interests and also accord with Church teaching. And we shouldn’t be put off by the idea that it might be a nuisance or a bother for others to act as such. As philosopher Gilbert Meilaender noted in a justly celebrated reflection on these matters, “I hope…that I will have the good sense to empower my wife, while she is able, to make such decisions for me….” Meilaender went on to explain:

No doubt this will be a burden to her. No doubt she will bear the burden better than I would. No doubt it will be only the last in a long history of burdens she has borne for me. But then, mystery and continuous miracle that it is, she loves me. And because she does, I must of course be a burden to her.

 

Once you have your advance directives out of the way, whatever form they take, then you can get down to the real nitty-gritty of death preparations. As I noted in Part One of this “Guide,” Solanus Casey likened death to a wedding. They’re both cause for celebration because both mark an end and a beginning. “What we call the beginning is often the end,” writes T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets, “and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” For newlyweds, singleness, with its concomitant freedoms and loneliness, comes to an end. Simultaneously, a new permanent coupling, founded on love, filled with mystery, and laden with all kinds of new responsibilities and joy, commences.

Similarly, death is a conclusion and a commencement. One’s physical life on earth, its triumphs and disappointments, not to mention its inevitable frailties, is completed just as one surrenders to whatever comes next – God willing, a glorious flourishing. “Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended,” is how the funeral liturgy expresses it. “When the body of our earthly dwelling lies in death we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven” (CCC 1012).

To be sure, that heavenly destination isn’t something we can take for granted, and so, as with a wedding, the Church would have us adequately prepare while we have the chance. “Every action of yours, every thought, should be those of one who expects to die before the day is out,” Thomas à Kempis advised. “If you aren't fit to face death today, it's very unlikely you will be tomorrow” (CCC 1014). Chief among such lifelong preparations would be regular reception of the sacraments, daily prayer, practicing the spiritual and corporal Works of Mercy according to one’s state of life, and faithfully living out one’s vocation.

And when we reach the threshold of death itself, our prayer turns more fervent, sealing our fealty to the Lord and helping us guard against despair and anguish. We lean more surely on our heavenly friends, especially St. Joseph, “the patron of a happy death” (CCC 1014), and St. Benedict of Nursia, the patron of the dying. St. Francis of Assisi, too, who memorably came to terms with his mortality by dubbing it “Sister Death.”

Moreover, we eagerly receive the sacraments, particularly the anointing of the sick, when the “whole Church commends those who are ill to the suffering and glorified Lord, that he may raise them up and save them” (CCC 1499). Our last confessions clear the decks of our consciences and our last Holy Communions are like food for the journey. It’s as if we’re provisioning for a journey, and the Catechism even draws a parallel between the sacraments of initiation we received at our beginnings to these latter sacraments at the end of life “that complete the earthly pilgrimage” and “prepare for our heavenly homeland” (§1525).

It’s a homeland worth looking forward to – not the caricatures that we’re used to from comics and the movies: angels flitting around from cloud to cloud with harps and happy grins and nothing much to do. No, heaven will be an adventure – the greatest adventure. If we’re counted among the saints, we’ll find ourselves united with our resurrected bodies, and we’ll launch expeditions into the reality of the Trinity and the infinitude of the divine which no chronicle could ever record and no poet could ever imagine.

But I believe C. S. Lewis came pretty close. In the last paragraph of The Last Battle, Lewis sketched out his own vision of the heavenly campaign that awaits:

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Doesn’t that sound fabulous? And the great thing is that the reality, as Mr. Lewis would’ve no doubt acknowledged, has to be still more wonderful, still more enticing than even he could’ve imagined. Whatever it is, it’ll be an end and a beginning well worth preparing for.