Making the Transition
The first time I was informed about a human death, when I was just a child, I was told that the man who lived down the street had "gone to heaven." A friend's mother died when we were in junior high school; she went "to be with Jesus." When my grandfather died, we said he had "passed on." Over the years, I've often heard that phrase pared down to "passed."
For a long time I preferred just being straightforward about it. The person had "died." After all, we don't have euphemisms for birth; why have them for death? I'm not sure when I first heard death called a "transition," as in "so-and-so made his transition yesterday." But that's one that I really resonate with. No matter what your religious beliefs are about what happens when someone dies—heaven, reincarnation, decay into compost—it is a transition. And as the New Morning show on A Change of Worlds implied, in this sense a death is similar to a birth. Both are a journey from the "known" to the "unknown." Both also usually involve some pain and struggle, so it is good to have companions with you for the transition. We met some wonderful ones on this program -- a nurse, a midwife, a choir of angelic singers, and a hospice worker.
The appeal of "transition" is that it makes both birth and death into points of passages but not the very beginning or the very end. It honors the mystery of these moments because, truth be told, we in the middle passage (life here now) can't know what exists in the other worlds. That's why I've always loved this passage from Living Buddha, Living Christ by the great Buddhist spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hanh:
One day as I was about to step on a dry leaf, I saw the leaf in the ultimate dimension. I saw that it was not really dead, but that it was merging with the moist soil in order to appear on the tree the following spring in another form. I smiled at the leaf and said, 'You are pretending.' Everything is pretending to be born and pretending to die, including that leaf. The Buddha said, 'When conditions are sufficient, the body reveals itself, and we say the body exists. When conditions are not sufficient, the body cannot be perceived by us, and we say the body does not exist.' The day of our 'death' is a day of our continuation in many other forms."
Still, I have to admit that when my mother died, I found the greatest comfort and the best description of her transition in a passage from the Sufi poet Rumi:
Your mouth closes here
and immediately opens
with a shout of joy there.