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Planning for the Future
By Rabbi Saul Goldman
Caregivers are lonely people. The
more fortunate ones may be surrounded by close family
and friends, but many Caregivers are left to struggle
with the pain of a loved one by themselves. My pastoral
visits to hospitals and nursing homes introduce me to
wives, husbands and children standing vigils along the
bedside of individuals in a game of hide and seek with
the angel of death. Too often, we remain firm in our
conviction that death is the final defeat; it is our
enemy. Actually, my faith suggests the hope that death
is not an end: merely a transition. It remains one of
the last taboos of our culture in which eternal youth
and materialism are the measure of our success as
persons. Consequently, death is often left as an
afterthought.
People do make final arrangements, but these
arrangements are usually matters of caskets and
gravesites, rather than the content of the funeral
itself. Usually planning for the future involves legal
and financial planning; we consider what we shall
bequeath to our children and grandchildren. These issues
are too often merely matters of property and money. Yet
the very fact of our illness and eventual death is a
reminder that what is immortal is not eternal. Matter is
temporal; every thing is finally fossilized except the
human spirit. Indeed, as both individual and Caregiver
witness the physical container of life deteriorate, it
becomes important to focus upon the human transcendent
content of that container - the soul.
The funeral can be a service of healing and transition:
a celebration of life and a loved one's sacred and
cherished ideals and values. Painfully absent from the
final arrangements is consideration and planning in a
meaningful and respectful service. In community it
appears especially obvious that this aspect of life is
often ignored or minimized. Funeral directors will ask a
family, do you belong to a congregation? If the answer
is negative, then a clergyman will be selected from a
list. Yet we will be a bit more careful in selecting a
lawyer or physician; sometimes one invests more research
in choosing a hairdresser. Caregiving is shepherding. It
is accompanying someone on a journey (at least part
way). If that journey is to be a good one, then neither
the pain, neither the anxiety nor the anticipation of
its destination can be trivialized. Illness is a journey
on a spiritual plane rather than a topographical one. In
order to do this successfully, we must be courageous and
loving. We must dare to speak of our fears and sadness;
we must discover that our shared spirituality provides
other modes of communication. By exploring our feelings
about separation and our thoughts about immortality with
our loved ones, we establish a meaningful context for
this journey whose destination is the final reunion that
Judaism and Christianity believe await us.
At the funeral, we realize that pain and anguish are no
longer part of our loved one’s life. Instead, we turn
our attention to how and why that life was lived and
what lessons can be derived from their journey into
eternity. The funeral service becomes the last element
in caregiving because it demonstrates the manner in
which we honor the human spirit as much as we tend to
the body, which temporarily houses that spirit.
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