Art of dying well..Going Home..Mother Theresa said ‘Death is something beautiful: it means going home.’ And from Jim Towey book ‘To Love and be Loved.’ He writes ‘Hanging on the wall in Kalighat is a placard that read, ‘The Greatest Aim if Human Life is to die in Peace.’ (195) One man said who died there ‘in my life on the street I lived like an animal but here will die like an angel.’

The Church has prayers that we will not die suddenly.. have an unprepared death.. Why.. because we have not had time to prepare our soul for eternity.. St Francis would say ‘Woe to those who die in Mortal Sin.’ We used to talk about a holy death. We don’t use that language much any more.. because we have lost the sense of sin and the importance of the soul over the body.

St Augustine says ‘All the world combined does not equal the value of a single soul.’ Which to say in a more positive way ‘The salvation of our soul is of infinite value.’ And that a single person
has more value than all of the cosmos.

I am at the bed side of 1 to 3 persons every day who are actively dying. What does a holy death look like.. last week a woman was actively dying but could still speak, and I heard her confession and gave her absolution and as she prayed the litany of saints with me and the chaplet of Mercy.. as well as receive communion. and as she held the brown scapular I gave her. or a 80 year old woman that I Baptized and gave Confirmation too.. with St Juan Diego hours if not an hour before she died.

The Church had a book titled ‘Ars moriendi or ‘The Art of Dying.’ I think it something that we have lost with modern medicine. as we put almost all our emphasis on the body and relieving it suffering and forget the soul and eternity. The medieval manual stress the importance of the dying person going to confession before they die. in Fact the Church teaches the confession is to go first before Last Rites. as only confession can forgive mortal sin so that we can recive anointing in a state of Grace, than the Eucharist.

Death today seems like dramatic, as the person is not so much dying but being taken off a machine, in a state where they have been mostly unconscious often for several month. So we have lost much of this art of dying., an art that we need to discover again. As all of life is about preparing our souls for eternity, and as we lie on a hospital bed this serve to intensify our need or it ought to make us see that soon very soon we will face our eternity, for good or ill.