Helping you through lock down

Male PTSD at birth

Today the Vine show on Radio 2 discussed whether fathers can be traumatised by attending a difficult birth.

Even when the birth goes relatively well both father and mother will find the event restimulates their own birth experiences. PTSD really only happens when something triggers an earlier experience.

A traumatic birth for the baby (and birth for western babies is routinely traumatic) can also impact the parents. All too few people understand that babies can undergo trauma at birth. They do. Their parents, seeing the distress of the baby can also be traumatized like a soldier on a battlefield.

The baby at birth can be as unhappy as this one below left or as happy as the one in the picture below.

If the parents are happy and supportive of their new born both physically and emotionally, a baby can recover from birth relatively quickly. If the parents become lost in their own primal pain and withdraw from the child it can lead to  big problems in the child's emotional development.






Midwives used to say that if a baby smiled at you before it was three months old it was only wind. The photo above shows you a baby smiling at birth. Meltzer has photographed smiling newborns in his psychology research enough to show that a baby will naturally mimic a mother's gestures and facial expressions if it is not traumatized.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ccjr

It is a well-known fact that the template for a child’s psychological development is laid down in earliest infancy. But did you ever consider that the experience of being born sets up the most fundamental predispositions and life reaction patterns we have? Our journey from the unborn world, inside our mothers, out into the big wide world of normal reality is the biggest transition we will ever make. What happens then, and how we react to those events, will stay with us for life, if we are not helped to undo the patterning. Furthermore, it is now possible for adults, children and even babies to get therapeutic help with that patterning.

These curious facts are most fully documented by that great researcher of human experience, the psychiatrist Dr. Stanislav Grof. Yet surprisingly, he did not start by exploring parenting and birth issues, which is the subject of this article, but rather peoples’ experiences of dying. What he found was that we tend to imagine the processes of dying in terms of experiences that happened to us at our births. The imprinting lasts for a lifetime!

Another great psychologist, Dr. Arthur Mindell, explains that we can be either the heroines or the victims of our life dramas. If we can learn to flow with our experience rather than resist and suffer from it, then fear turns into excitement, pain turns into intensity. This approach to psychology and therapy is called Process-Oriented Psychology. I have developed what I call process-oriented birthing using Mindell’s principles. Learning process-oriented birthing methods enables a woman to surf down the contractions, identifying with them rather than remaining within the normal rigid western ego, which experiences them as an overwhelming threat. When the woman can do this she can actually enjoy the flow of these intense experiences. Process work methods are also very helpful in building creative and transformative relationships with other inevitable challenges that come along to disturb our lives. Birth can be an intense, alive, erotic experience both for mother and baby.

But the kind of negative birth experience that is portrayed to us all in every sort of media from the medical to the melodramatic reinforces a set of expectations of victimhood and suffering for the mother. Pushed into this mindset by mainstream Western culture, the woman is likely to turn to the National Health Service as her saviour and rescuer. Furthermore, behind the scenes, the mother’s own experiences of being born and going through this stage herself give shape to her expectations of having a baby. The worse her own birth-experience, the greater her fear of giving birth. Research by Professor Zichella, et al. at a large maternity hospital in Rome showed that women are likely to have easier births when they have first learned about their own birth stories. A woman’s rational ideals may tell her to have a homebirth but the medicalisation of birth in this country has reached the point where in counties such as Oxfordshire it is all but impossible to choose a professionally assisted homebirth, because there is no midwifery service available outside hospital. Thousands of new midwives are needed, but the government has preferred to spend its money on hi-tech medicine and new hospitals. The pull of a woman’s own past and the cultural pull of the medical mind-set drag her toward the hospital and away from her own natural capacity.

The offer “We can anaesthetize your pain” from the medical system is very seductive to the woman who is afraid of pain. Man or woman—who of us is not afraid of pain? But this attitude, that life is painful and pain can be blocked out, is all part of a deadening of life experience in general, an encouragement not to live an erotic and embodied life. Rather than being helped to develop an intuitive feeling of the life inside you through touch, movement, song, speech and feeling, you are exposed to mechanical ultrasound, which will frighten and disturb your baby, but will give you the two-dimensional visual reality of a photograph. The dominance of disembodied tele-visuality in our culture is such that the ultrasound picture often gives more sense of the baby as a living being than does the inner experience.

The crushing in of space that the baby feels is mirrored by the mother when she is squashed into a car and rushed off to hospital in a state of fear and anxiety. Baby is stuck in the womb. Mum and dad get stuck in the traffic. Having to relocate at this crucial time is disorienting and increases a sense of vulnerability. An erotic birth experience is very hard to reach for in a hospital setting under these circumstances. Pure, clean, aseptic or antiseptic brightness, whiteness, sharp corners and harsh smells are fundamental to what hospitals are about. The dominant theme and mindset of a hospital is the avoidance of death, not the creation of life.

On the other hand, the vibrant colours, sweet smells and tastes, softness, roundness and the relative calmness and darkness of a real home are what Eros enjoys. Home is about familiarity, not strangeness or novelty. The process of having to change setting raises the stress levels enormously. But the mother is conditioned by mainstream society to be more fearful about giving birth at home.

If the mother is happy and positive about giving birth naturally at home then the birth is likely to happen easily and successfully. Naturally born babies also tend to be born at night, when the world and mother are calm and relaxed, not when doctors and nurses are readily available to run through their day routines.

Some may be surprised to hear that women can experience birth as profoundly erotic. Erotic birth is the antithesis of medicalised birth. In her book Unassisted Childbirth, Laura Shanley writes, “In these pages I hope you will discover not only a new way of birthing, but a new way of being. If we can free ourselves from fear, shame, and guilt, pregnancy and birth become emotionally, spiritually and even sexually fulfilling experiences.” We now know that the emotional states of the mother are communicated to the baby through the cord. If mother is anxious about the birth the baby will catch that anxiety. Sometimes people will need really skilled technical assistance and the loving support of an experienced midwife or doula (a doula is a trained birth assistant but not a nurse as such). In our culture a split in consciousness between mind and body, which philosophers call Cartesian Dualism, has led to the ego being cut off from the biological processes of our bodily being. To support a woman in being fully open to the deep eroticism of birth, a life-partner, or very close friend with training as a doula, might be more helpful than a normal midwifery service.

The end of the second stage comes with the full opening of the cervix. There is light at the end of the tunnel! This stage is the actual journey out of the womb and down the birth canal, the woman’s vagina, and out into the new world. In the positive scenario it is an erotic baby who swims or crawls its way down the birth canal with the firm but gentle support of the mother’s body. Frustration and blockages are normal and may feel hellish to mum and/or babe, but successful movement down the tunnel and out into the world can be orgasmic and heavenly for both. The babycentre.com Web site talks about this stage as transcendental, often involving an out-of-body experience. Grof calls this the matrix of heaven and hell. The pressures on the baby are so intense that the head is molded into quite a different shape, though if the traumatizing of the baby is not too bad the head will slowly return to a normal shape.

The experience here is the major template of all later empowerment and accomplishment in life. It also patterns failure, defeat and despair. It can be the precursor of permanent hostility to the environment, nature and the feminine. Interventions to extract the baby, whether forceps, caesarian or ventouse, lead both to a tendency to withdraw from the prospect of change and life opportunities, and an expectation of having to be rescued. Professor Vivette Glover has been researching perinatal stress levels formed in response to different kinds of birth experience. Her biochemical research shows that much higher levels of stress hormone response are set up in babies who have had a forceps delivery.

Major events later in life put us back in touch with birth. In terms of spiritual experiences, that wondrous light at the end of a tunnel, which so many people report when coming out of near-death experiences, may really be a recapitulation of the ordeal of birth, which had its own bright new world at the end of that first awesome tunnel.

Grof talks about this stage as a death/rebirth experience. The truth is that only a very few babies are “blue” and need bringing back from the dead. But psychologically, the pain may be so intense that it has to be blocked out as permanently as possible, so it is as if we had died and been reborn.

At this stage the baby completes the journey into the world and begins to connect with that world. The ends of the spectrum for this stage can bring brutalizing violence, abandonment, even murder, at one extreme, and blissful uninterrupted bonding with an ecstatic and fulfilled mother on the other. It used to be normal medical practise to hang a baby by its feet and bang it on the back till it screamed. A loud cry was seen as a good sign. Thank heavens for Frederick Leboyer and his pioneering work, Birth Without Violence.

A person may react to an emotional or physical abandonment at birth, either by repeating the experience compulsively in major life relationships, or by avoiding all deep personal intimacy so as never to have to approach that abandonment feeling again. Yet hospitals still routinely separated mothers and babies for considerable amounts of time after birth.

At the other end of the spectrum the most pleasurable way of birth is undoubtedly under water. The baby swims down under the water and comes to the surface on its own initiative. Trust it. Trust nature. The baby will spontaneously seek out the mother’s nipple and feed when placed on the abdomen. There is no need to cut the cord till it has spontaneously stopped pulsing. This first reception into the outer world sets a template for our level of security in our outer environment.

Dr. William Emerson, a pre-eminent American researcher into birth psychology, states that the degree of psychological trauma in birth is inversely proportional to the degree of medical intervention. Medical intervention is sometimes necessary to save life. That is not in question. However, the more we intervene to try to take over from what is natural the more the baby is traumatized. Emerson and others have identified a whole range of potential trauma points, both physical and psychological, in the birth process and the characteristic symptomatology that will follow from these trauma points in the life of the child and adult. These traumas can be therapeutically remedied. We do not have to stay stuck all our lives with the imprints of our births! However, that is the subject of another article. A very significant proportion of the clients who have come to me for psychotherapy over the last 20 years have been either premature, and therefore incubated and cut off from human support, or separated from their mother at birth for a period of time. Mothers and babies need to feel safe and secure and held to be at home in the world. Medical control tends to break into this vital process and interfere with it.

We now have far more understanding of birth both for mother and baby than we have ever had. But we can use that knowledge wisely or unwisely. The hi-tech approach favoured in America is actually increasing perinatal mortality. In Holland next May we have an International Congress on Embryology and Therapy, which hopes to set an agenda for improving our way of birth in Europe. In England, organizations such as OPPERA (the Oxford Prenatal and Perinatal Education Research and Awareness Trust) and PIPPIN (Parents in Partnership, Parent-Infant Network) also have an important contribution to make.

There are two major areas in which parents should concentrate on educating themselves. First and foremost there is preparation for parenting. Relationships with the unborn baby can be built up both for mother and father before the birth and a continuity of relatedness established into postnatal life. In the future I hope that all prenatal education for parenting will include understanding of the birth and perinatal matrices as real emotional experiences for baby. The best introduction to this is Nikki Bradford’s book The Miraculous World of Your Unborn Baby.

The second area is treatment for the effects of birth patterning. Many people have already experienced cranio-sacral therapy for birth problems and know how useful it can be. This form of therapy is called Birth Re-Facilitation. It works with emotional patterns as well as somatic structures. The child’s unconscious world is full of birth material. Enid Blyton’s immense success as a children’s writer may have had something to do with the fact that her stories are full of tunnels, dungeons, caves and other narrow places that the children must struggle through to overcome their problems. Changing birth schemas is a very liberating thing for children. They want to work on their material over and over again till they have mastery of it. It is the parents who sometimes find it difficult and emotionally demanding if they have not learned about their own patterning before helping their children.

The unborn baby is truly a sentient and intelligent human being who has much to go through at birth. We owe it to future generations to change how we tackle birth experiences in order to make birth an easier transition, a gateway to a fuller life, not a narrow and traumatized one.  Nick Owen

https://midwiferytoday.com/mt-articles/birth-love-death/  Article first appeared in Midwifery Today

Meetings with remarkable people 2:Gurumayi Chidvilasanada

Last week-end I travelled to Sunderland to bury the ashes of my father-in-law at his parents grave. I woke in the middle of the night in the hotel thinking about the Siddha Guru, Chidvilasananda.

I met her twice in the American Siddha Yoga Headquarters Ashram in 1983. (For some reason I have shifted the place in my mind to the Ashram at Ganeshpuri in India, which I have never visited.

When I arrived at the American ashram thirty five years ago with my partner and small child we were ushered into a long queue for Darshan with the new Guru, who had taken over the headship of the order from my guru, Muktanada, after his death, despite being a young woman still in her twenties.

As we reached the head of the queue, at the feet of the guru, she spoke to us. She said only,

"When did you come?"

I blustered and flustered about, trying to reply to her question, before becoming aware that this was not a question that I was supposed to answer. It was a koan, something like "the sound of one hand clapping", a puzzle, something to meditate on. It has stayed a puzzle to me for all this time.

The moment passed and we were ushered away.

This was not what most people would call a meeting. Yet Darshan, being brought before a great being, is regarded as very important in India. People have had immensely powerful experiences in such moments. I merely felt foolish at the end of a journey across the Atlantic and up country from New York for 100 miles. Perhaps I should have felt honored that she spoke to us at all. Most people just receive a swat with a peacock feather at most.

This was not to be the only meeting with Chidvilasanada, however.

Ashram life has a number of elements to it. All are considered to be ways of worshipping the Guru, who is both the inner Self of all and an outward embodied person, who was in residence with us in this Ashram.

The ashram day begins with a wash before an hour of meditation, sitting in the dark meditation hall. Then there is a first breakfast. Next comes chanting of introductory mantras and the guru gita for well over and hour. After that there is a second breakfast.

When this collective activity is over people are broken up into work groups. Work activity is called "Seva" and should be considered as devotional labour.

There might be lectures at different times of day. There is another act of communal worship called Arete at tea time.

Other times are for personal study or Seva. Everyone has some kind of job to do at an ashram. Over the two weeks we stayed at this ashram I did various cleaning jobs as well as food preparation. We also attended a two day meditation intensive.

It was while I was cleaning the kitchen floor with a mop that I met the Guru a second time. She was wandering around the ashram seeing how things were going. In business I think they would call it managing by walking about. It was evening as I recall. Suddenly I looked up from my work and there she stood. For a few seconds we stood face-to-face looking at each other eye-to-eye. It was slightly spell binding. No one spoke. I think she smiled. Then I broke the eye contact and looked back down at my mop.

The silent meeting was over. When I looked up again she was gone as silently as she had come. Not a word was said. I think it was in this moment that I decided she was not my guru.

I cannot tell you how I made this decision. She was a young and beautiful woman with a slightly bewitching smile. But there was nothing in her that invoked the incredible power I feel looking at Baba's picture even today.

Back in the dark strange bedroom in Sunderland I was thinking about this encounter from long ago without knowing if there was a dream or why else this memory had come to me.

A bizarre idea came into my head. There was now an answer to that koan question. I had met her, had come to her in another lifetime. When where or why I had no clues.

As I think about it now, while writing, it seems a silly idea, making a simple meaning out of a mystical utterance, a western mind's attempt to make something definite from what was never meant to be so clear.

I share it now as a story relating to a meeting with the spiritual head of an order that goes back before Christianity.

Gurumayi, Molti, or Chidvilasananda, as she was called at different times, had travelled the world with Baba Muktananda as his translator for a number of years. She was chosen as guru because her younger brother, Nityananda , whom Baba chose to succeed him, at the age of 22 was seen as not yet able to carry all the responsibility on his own. How true! Within another couple of years he had withdrawn or been pushed out of office by this fiery young woman, who assessed her brother as having broken his obligations and hence unworthy to be a guru.

I have continued with my meditation over the next thirty five years, but it is only in the last year that my practice has shifted on to a different level, leading to the creation of deeper mindfulness.

Muktanada is my guru. I read his works and follow his teaching. But I have no living teacher and I no longer visit ashrams.

If something more profound had happened in one of those short encounters my story might have been a very different one.

That is life and that is fate.

There will be more stories to unfold before my story is done.

Ten top tips for deeper mindfulness

1) Begin with your body. Don’t imagine that deeper mindfulness is about letting go of the body. Your body is the instrument on which you play out your life. Love your body. Take care of your body. 

Diet and exercise are a core part of your practice. (Details on my deeper mindfulness courses)

2) Breathe the breath of life. (My course is very strongly focused on breathing.) Here are the deepest secrets I can impart to you that will change your life. Learn to breathe slowly and deeply from the base of your spine to the place between your eyes. You probably do not breathe deeply yet.

3) Kundalini. Waiting for your attention, a wonderful serpent is coiled around the base of your spine. When you awaken it, this serpent energy rises through the Chakras to transform your life. There are many ways to awaken Kundalini. It can happen spontaneously, but I recommend you find a teacher. (I may be able to help you.)

4) Meditation. The aim is to concentrate your mind. Some people can concentrate on video games for hours on end. A heron stands in the water motionless for ages, concentrating on fish. The difference between these things and real meditation is the focus. There are many names for this focus: God, the Self, the Atman, Shiva, are but a few. If you wish to be deeply mindful in your life you will need to learn to meditate. The best time for meditation is on waking before the demands of ordinary life intrude. However, you can take time out of your day at any moment to become centred and rediscover deeper mindfulness for your work.

5) Posture. Everyone has seen the yogi sitting in the lotus position deep in mindful meditation. A small child can easily sit this way. An adult westerner will struggle. An older person will not be able to reach and hold the position. However, you do not even have to sit with your back straight, though this is a good thing to do. A chair helps in this if you are not comfortable in the lotus, the half lotus or cross legged. Older people may find that wonderful things are possible lying flat on a mattress in corpse pose. I recommend this to people of a certain age.

6) Deeper Mindfulness in walking. There are many ways of being you can experience in the course of a walk. Walking with a deeper mindfulness can take you to beautiful inner places as well as into the beauty of nature. Even a city landscape can become a place of deeper mindfulness. It is all about the quality of your attention to your world.

7) Deeper Mindfulness in vision. Some choose an outer point of light like a candle flame to concentrate upon for meditation. The goal is to become centred within. The still focus on the outer object leads you inwards to a deeper stillness of mind. As you go deeper into meditation visions will come. But you can also deepen your vision by creating art and photography in the outside world. You can learn to bring your deeper mindfulness into the world through creative work. (Check out my Mindful Photography courses and workshops)

8) Mantra. “So Ham” means “I am That, That I am.” If you practice saying “So” on the in-breath and “Ham” on the out-breath in your practice you will begin to discover your deeper being, your higher Self. You will be truly surprised what changes this mantra will bring to your life. (See the section on Mantra in my Deeper Mindfulness course). Playing on a "singing bowl" may be helpful in attuning you for meditation and peace of mind. You can also find helpful chants to learn on my deeper mindfulness youtube channel.

9) Follow the left hand pathway for a change. (This is sometimes called Tantric Yoga). Many people learn a few lessons from ancient India or Buddhist practice and apply them to daily western life, calling it mindfulness. It is certainly better than being mindless, the way of habitual repetition. But following the right handed path, the common way studied in Hatha Yoga, best known in the west) is introverted and leads to a deep withdrawal from the entanglements of living in the world, which few are able to follow very far. There is a left handed path which is also worthy of your consideration. This path leads to spiritual connection with the other and a deeper human relatedness. Try sitting with your partner and meditating on the connection between you. (Much more on this in my Deeper Mindfulness courses)

10) Respect and Compassion. All Mindfulness courses focus on helping you live your daily life in a more mindful way. The foundation of any such way of living flows from a profound respect and compassion for the world you live in, for yourself and the people in your life. Each person you meet has a divine spark within them. Respect that spark and honour it in the way you interact with the other. Compassion is natural to some, less so to others. You can open up your compassion for the suffering of the world and its beings by focusing on the heart chakra in your meditations, seeing the light of love emanating from your heart out into the world. You can also meditate on achieving power with people rather than power over people through the will centre chakra.

In Eden, the cafe at the end of the world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78SkTuk8Zd4

Last night I dreamed I was dancing with old friends, colleagues and students. One used to head the bereavement serice at Sobell, while Mary was my co-director, and is now long dead. Visitors from beyond the grave often come to people who are dying, as this video shows.

I am not sure how long I have left to carry on my work, but am currently well and enjoying what i am doing very much.

Peter Fenwick supervised Penny Sartori on her PhD study of people in the Cardiff cardiology centre who have had Near Death Experiences. I met her in oxford a while back. Lovely woman.

There is a great deal of research both from brain scientists and phenomenological researchers in this area now. I was very blessed to meet two people with insights in the area today at my departure lounge /death cafe meeting.


I was speaking to someone in the street yesterday about my death cafe (which happened today) and he complained that all the people he met at the one he attended a while ago were talking about their near death experiences.

Today, in the actual cafe meeting no one came specifically for the meeting.

However, a couple sat down close by me for coffee, seemingly oblivious of the event.

I engaged them in conversation. They were both doctors, one a distinguished brain surgeon. She had had a near death experience. Jung would call this synchronicity.

We had a fascinating conversation. He left me his card. Tonight I wrote to him so perhaps there will be more to follow.

I will do some more publicity and maybe I won't need synchronicity to bring people into the cafe on halloween next Thursday morning between nine and eleven. Oh, the staff are friendly and the food is vegan.

entrance to the cafe with departure lounge sandals

The departure lounge inside Eden.

cosey corner with head rests for those preparing to depart

time for reflection and maybe planning

Dignity in Dying

I am reading a very touching novel called "Chocolat" at the moment. If you did not read the book you may have come across the film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32x33l2sLe8  with Juliette Binoche and Jonny Depp.

I can't recall if the old man with his dying dog comes into the film or not. It makes a very sad tale in the book. I have seen so many people stricken by the suffering of their dogs. Dogs live such short lives in comparison with humans. We love them more than most humans and they are firmer friends and loving conscious beings.

As a poet, Kipling,  said

Ladies and gentlemen, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog, to tare.

We are encouraged to put down our dogs when they have cancer. This old man leaves it very late, till his dog cries out in pain all night. He needs his friend. He is utterly bereft when he finally gives in and goes to the vet.

Most people want to die at home, but the great majority do not die at home. They die in hospital or in a "home." We do not have to think quite so much about people dying that way. There are professional carers for that. They are often overworked and underpaid, and may not care that much, not as much as the nearest and dearest are supposed to care.

How do you want to die?

Have you made a living will?

or a will?

You may not even have the option to go to the vet/doctor, even when you have suffered more than enough.

We know that people will receive very good care in a hospice like Sobell House in Oxford.

Kubler Ross described how the medicines she formulated helped dying patients avoid suffering. However, some people do not respond well to such drugs. Their pain remains.

Please see my events at  https://www.edencafe.kiwi/ on 24 and 31st October after breakfast.

Maybe it is time to talk about death, and even https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/why-we-need-change/the-facts/

https://acmedsci.ac.uk/policy/policy-projects/the-departure-lounge   gives you much more information.

You can study about therapy at the end  of life here www.deepermindfulness.com

Death: last stage of personal growth or a dead end?

Deeper Mindfulness is working with a new national Initiative to persuade people to start talking about death. It is called The Departure Lounge.    https://www.departure-lounge.org/

The project invites us to consider something that has been out of fashion for centuries- A Good Death. They say:
Explore The Departure Lounge to discover what a good death has meant for others, and to think about what it might mean for you.

 I have all the props they sent me. 

On October 24th and October 31st 9.00 - 11.00 a.m. at the Eden Cafe in Witney, join me and the The Departure Lounge to talk about death and dying.

https://www.edencafe.kiwi/

As the oldest survivor of my family, and someone who has worked with such issues for forty years in health and social services settings I have something to contribute to such discussions. I have even written a training course for therapist who may come across death and dying in their work.

More details on end of life therapy at www.deepermindfulness.com which launches soon.

I held a very informal meeting, just an old friend and I, at The Eden Cafe in Witney this week.

The issue was when is it right to tell the truth to someone.

When a person is in total denial of their impending death and gives signals that they prefer it to stay that way, should we confront them with reality?  

Arnold Mindell once told me, "Not everyone is in the growers club," meaning that only some people are actively involved in their own personal development as human beings.

Maybe only a poet like Hausmann is thinking of death at the age of twenty:

Loveliest of Trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Housman

Some people like me had a near death experience when very young, and do not have the same fear of death as most. We know that life has in it the possibility of transcendence. 


I wrote a responded to his poem in mid-life.

HOMAGE TO HAUSMAN

Of my three score years and ten

I’ve twenty seven left, but then

I’ve spent the whole of forty three

So adding up its plain to see

There isn’t so much left to me.

When I was young the days were slow

And time stood still for all I knew

Or cared

I wasn’t scared.

But now the days depart at pace

There hardly seems to be a place

To stop

And think.

For now that I’ve reached forty four

I’ll strive to shut the study door

Push all my daily work outside

So I can tell myself I’ve tried

To contemplate what life remains

To use my brains to take great pains

To question what my life’s about

Before the candle gets snuffed out.

To chose what goals I’m aiming for

So I can have a chance to score.

At eighteen years I said to me

That thirty were enough to be

On this earth for.

The world I thought was too unkind

For children and their tender minds

For parents could not give enough

No one was formed of the right stuff

For doing that.

At thirty two I had a child

A love child.

Fortune on us smiled,

Or so I thought.

The child was what our loving brought.

Between a woman and a man

Deep love the generations span

Life opens up

It fills that cup

Transcends the helpless ego plan

I do not live with them any more

At forty years I closed that door

Another child soon came to me

Another girl on my family tree

A second chance,

Another home,

A place to settle,

No more to roam.

But is that what my life’s about?

Their lives go on while mine dies out

To see them grow like blossoms bright

While I gaze on with failing sight?

I care for them and love them too,

But is that all I have to do

With life?

I often stroll among the graves

The stones that stand,

While others pave

The ground I tread.

Could I be happy to be dead?

What words would have to mark my grave

Provide the rest in peace I crave?

Tomorrow I enter my seventieth year, having lived a year more than my father. 

For Christians, The Bible says in Psalm 90:


The days of our years are threescore years and ten; 

In which case I am entering the departure lounge right now. Modern medicine tells me I am only 50 in biological years, whatever that means. 

Should I be sorting out my affairs, making my will, preparing my family?

My friend's mother has terminal cancer and feels very content at the moment. Her husband is very happy to take care of her needs and never mention the subject.


Is ignorance bliss?


The conventional wisdom among health professionals is that dying people should be told about dying?


Is it so important that people face death and go through the difficult process of adjusting to the fact of death till we accept it and make our peace with our ending?

Culturally, we have been trying to hide away from death, shut it off in a back ward of a hospital and not give it much thought. Recent attempts to open up a dialogue like this one are not going too well so far.

We are schooled on medical science finding an answer to everything.


My friend is scared her mum will suddenly discover her impending death at the last minute and have no time for adjustment. She may die in terror, shockingly exposed to the truth.

I never had a long conversation about death with my mother. She talked about the practicalities, wills and stuff like that, all very matter of fact, very acceptingly. 

On a sudden impulse my partner and I went to visit her one day. We chatted as usual, pleased to see my new partner. As we were about to go she said, "I just wanted to see you settled."