I have a peculiar attitude to death, and I would like to explain why I treat death not only calmly, but with desire, with hope, with longing for it.
My first vivid impression of death is a conversation with my father, who once said to me: “You must live in such a way that you learn to expect your death the way a groom expects his bride: wait for her, long for her, rejoice in advance about this meeting , and meet her reverently, affectionately. The second impression (of course, not immediately, but much later) is the death of my father. He died suddenly. I went to him, to a poor room at the top of a French house, where there was a bed, a table, a stool, and a few books. I entered his room, closed the door and stood. And I was overwhelmed by such silence, such a depth of silence, that I remember exclaiming aloud: “And people say that there is death!.. What a lie!”. Because this room was full of life, and such a fullness of life that I had never met outside it, on the street, in the yard. That is why I have such an attitude towards death and why I experience with such force the words of the Apostle Paul: For me, life is Christ, death is gain, because as long as I live in the flesh, I am separated from Christ … But the apostle adds further words that make me also very impressed. The quote is not exact, but this is what he says: he wholeheartedly wants to die and be united with Christ, but adds: “However, you need me to stay alive, and I will continue to live.” This is the last sacrifice that he can make: everything he aspires to, what he hopes for, what he does, he is ready to put aside, because others need him.
I have seen a lot of death. I worked as a doctor for fifteen years, five of which were in the war or in the French Resistance. After that, I lived for forty-six years as a priest and gradually buried a whole generation of our early emigration; so I saw death a lot. And it struck me that the Russians are dying peacefully; Western people more often with fear. Russians believe in life, go into life. And this is one of the things that every priest and every person should repeat to himself and to others: we must not prepare for death, we must prepare for eternal life.
We know nothing about death. We do not know what happens to us at the moment of death, but we know at least a rudimentary what eternal life is. Each of us knows from experience that there are some moments when he no longer lives in time, but in such a fullness of life, such exultation, which belongs not just to the earth. Therefore, the first thing we must teach ourselves and others is to prepare not for death, but for life. And if we talk about death, then we can only talk about it as a door that will open wide and let us enter into eternal life.
But dying is still not easy. Whatever we think about death, about eternal life, we do not know anything about death itself, about dying. I want to give you one example of my experience during the war.
I was a junior surgeon in a front-line hospital. We had a young soldier about twenty-five years old, my age, dying. I came to him in the evening, sat next to him and said: “Well, how do you feel?” He looked at me and said, «I’m going to die tonight.» “Are you scared to die?” “It’s not scary to die, but it hurts me to part with everything that I love: with my young wife, with the village, with my parents; and one thing is really scary: to die alone.” I say, «You won’t die alone.» — «So how?» “I will stay with you.” – “You can’t sit with me all night…” I answered: “Of course I can!” He thought and said: “Even if you sit with me, at some point I will no longer be aware of this, and then I will go into the darkness and die alone.” I say, “No, not at all. I will sit next to you and we will talk. You will tell me everything you want: about the village, about the family, about childhood, about your wife, about everything that is in your memory, in your soul, what you love. I will hold your hand. Gradually it will become tiresome for you to talk, then I will talk more than you. And then I will see that you start to doze, and then I will speak more quietly. You close your eyes, I will stop talking, but I will hold your hand, and you will periodically shake my hand, knowing that I am here. Gradually, your hand, although it will feel my hand, will no longer be able to shake it, I myself will begin to shake your hand. And at some point you will no longer be among us, but you will not leave alone. We will make the whole journey together.” And so hour after hour we spent that night. At some point, he really stopped squeezing my hand, I started shaking his hand so that he knew that I was here. Then his hand began to grow cold, then it opened, and he was no longer with us. And this is a very important point; it is very important that a person is not alone when he goes into eternity.
But it also happens differently. Sometimes a person is sick for a long time, and if he is then surrounded by love, care, it is easy to die, although it hurts (I will also talk about this). But it is very scary when a person is surrounded by people who are just waiting for him to die: they say, while he is sick, we are prisoners of his illness, we cannot move away from his bed, we cannot return to our life, we cannot rejoice in our joys; he, like a dark cloud, hangs over us; how he would die as soon as possible… And the dying person feels it. This may take months. Relatives come and coldly ask: “Well, how are you? nothing? Do you need something? do not need anything? OK; you know, I have my own business, I will come back to you.” And even if the voice does not sound cruel, the person knows that he was visited only because he had to visit, but that his death is eagerly awaited.
And sometimes it’s different. A person dies, dies for a long time, but he is loved, he is dear; and he himself is also ready to sacrifice the happiness of being with a loved one, because this can give joy or help to someone else. Let me now say something personal about myself.
My mother had been dying of cancer for three years; I followed her. We were very close, dear to each other. But I had my own work — I was the only priest of the London parish, and besides, I had to go to Paris once a month for meetings of the Diocesan Council. I didn’t have money to make a phone call, so I came back thinking: will I find my mother alive or not? .. She was alive — what a joy! what a meeting! .. Gradually, she began to fade away. There were moments when she would ring the bell, I would come, and she would say to me: “I feel sad without you, we will stay together.” And there were moments when I myself was unbearable. I went up to her, leaving my affairs, and said: “It hurts me without you.” And she consoled me about her dying and her death. And so we gradually went into eternity together, because when she died, she took with her all my love for her, everything that was between us. And there were so many between us! We lived almost all our lives together, only the first years of emigration lived apart, because there was nowhere to live together. But then we lived together, and she knew me deeply. And somehow she told me: “How strange: the more I know you, the less I could say about you, because every word that I would say about you would have to be corrected with some additional features.” Yes, we reached the moment when we knew each other so deeply that we could not say anything about each other, but we could join life, dying and death.
And so we must remember that everyone who dies in such a position, when any kind of callousness, indifference or desire “finally it would end” is unbearable. A person feels it, knows it, and we must learn to overcome all dark, gloomy, bad feelings in ourselves and, forgetting about ourselves, think deeply, peer, get used to another person. And then death becomes a victory: O death, where is your sting?! O death, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and not one of the dead is in the tomb…
I want to say something else about death, because what I have already said is very personal. Death surrounds us all the time, death is the fate of all mankind. Now wars are going on, people are dying in terrible suffering, and we must learn to be calm in relation to our own death, because in it we see life, eternal life emerging. Victory over death, over the fear of death lies in living deeper and deeper into eternity and bringing others to this fullness of life.
But before death there are other moments. We do not die immediately, we do not simply die out bodily. There are very strange occurrences. I remember one of our old women, such Maria Andreevna, a wonderful little creature who once came to me and said: “Father Anthony, I don’t know what to do with myself: I can’t sleep anymore. Throughout the night, images of my past rise in my memory, but not bright ones, but only dark, bad ones, images that torment me. I turned to the doctor, asked him to give me some kind of sleeping pill, but sleeping pills do not remove this haze. When I take sleeping pills, I can no longer separate these images from myself, they become delusional, and I feel even worse. What should I do?» I then said to her: “Maria Andreevna, you know, I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I believe that it is given to us by God to experience our life more than once, not in the sense that you will die and return to life again, but in the sense that what is happening to you right now. When you were young, you, within the narrow limits of your understanding, sometimes did wrong; and by word, and by thought, and by action, they denigrated themselves and others. Then you forgot it and at different ages continued, to the best of your understanding, to act similarly, again, to humiliate, desecrate, defame yourself. Now, when you no longer have the strength to resist the memories, they come up, and each time they come up, they seem to say to you: Maria Andreevna, now that you are over eighty years old, almost ninety — if you were in the same position that you are now I remember when you were twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years old, would you have acted as you did then? .. If you can look deeply into what happened then, into your state, into events, into people and say: no , now, with my experience of life, I could not have said that murderous word for anything, I could not have acted as I did! — if you can say this with your whole being: with your thought, and your heart, and your will, and your flesh, — it will leave you. But other, more and more other images will come. And every time the image comes, God will put the question before you: is this your past sin or is it still your present sin? Because if you once hated some person and did not forgive him, did not reconcile with him, then the sin of that time is your present sinfulness; it has not departed from you and will not depart until you repent.”
I can give another example of the same kind. I was once summoned by the family of one of our dilapidated old women, a bright, bright woman. She was obviously supposed to die that same day. She confessed, and finally I asked her: “Tell me, Natasha, have you forgiven everyone and everything, or do you still have some kind of thorn in your soul?” She replied: “I have forgiven everyone except my son-in-law; I will never forgive him!» I said to this: “In this case, I will not give you a prayer of permission and will not partake of the Holy Mysteries; you will go to the judgment of God and will answer before God for your words.” She says: “After all, today I will die!”. “Yes, you will die without prayer of liberation and without communion unless you repent and reconcile. I’ll be back in an hour,» and left. When I returned an hour later, she greeted me with a radiant look and said: “How right you were! I called my son-in-law, we explained, reconciled, he is now coming to me, and I hope we will kiss each other to death, and I will enter eternity reconciled with everyone.