Confessions of a Retarded Animal Lover

 By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Nature and I are two. - Woody Allen

I’ve always loved that quip of Woody’s, probably because I identify with it. For much of my life, and even to some extent today, I have felt not only removed from nature but alien to it. Some years ago, I wrote a memoir about my father from whom I was separated at an early age and who died when he was scarcely forty years old. I called it My Father, Once Removed. If I were to write about my life in nature, I could give it a similar title.  

Didn’t Thomas Carlyle, who was not a fan of things mechanical, somewhere assert that "machines are inherently aggressive?" Well, I could say something akin to that sentiment about nature – that it is inherently frightening, at least to me. But I know I’m not the only one who thinks this way about nature. I remember when I was young reading the books of a man named Eric Hoffer – he was a self-educated longshoreman whose books were very popular when I was a kid – where he said much the same thing about nature in trying to counter the typical romantic blather about it. Nature is fine on a sunny day in the park, but if you get caught in a sudden thunderstorm in the woods, it is not your friend; it could kill you. 

I don’t know how I got to feel this way, but unlike many kids, I did not grow up with animals. In neither my mother’s home nor that of my aunt’s where I also spent a lot of time when I was growing up were there any pets. Not having a father, no one took me camping, fishing or hunting either. I even flunked out of cub scouts because I couldn’t figure out how to tie a knot properly. I knew that I was descended from a long line of Lithuanian rabbis; what I was good at was reading books and studying. That was the world where I felt at home. Jews are urban people anyway. We didn’t farm; we made money (although I was never much good at that either, come to think of it).

I also had another problem growing up that helped to make me a misfit in nature. I was born with a congenital nystagmus that left me with very poor vision and a wayward sense of balance. No one even discovered my visual problems until I was six years old. Before that, I guess I was walking around like a child version of Mr. Magoo.  

You can’t become much of a naturalist if you can’t see. I can’t tell you how many times I would be walking with a friend who would suddenly stop to point out a beautiful bird in a tree. I could see the tree. Or I remember a time when I was walking by the Pacific Ocean in Monterey with a good friend when she stopped to look at how the sea lions were cavorting. I could see the water. I could never see well enough to make out anything. In order to learn to appreciate nature, of course I had to read books about it, such as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I could be in nature, but I could never experience it the way most people could. Where nature was concerned, I was a hopeless retard!  

But that was to change when I was in my mid-thirties. It was then that I had my first LSD experience, which took place mainly when I was ambling around in the woods not far from the University of Connecticut where I was teaching.

That experience was a revelation to me at many levels, and it totally changed my feelings about nature. I remember looking at a certain tree and realizing as if for the first time that it was alive – and holy. For a long time after that experience, I could no longer look at trees in the same way I had been used to. And after that, I spent a lot of time tramping through the nearby woods. I would go there as often as possible, both for pleasure and as a place of refuge. I would drag my kids there, too, who were not keen to go and would complain. But I was at home in nature now, and when I could travel to places, such as Colorado, where there were mountains, I learned to love to hike up them. Of course, I was never much of a hiker, given my physical limitations, but hiking became one of the supreme recreational pleasures of my life. It’s only been in the last few years that I was no longer able to hike. I miss it terribly.  

My views about animals have changed, too, and I will get to that since that is what I really want to focus on in this essay but first I need to say a little about my feelings about the two types of pets we are most familiar with – cats and dogs.

It’s often said, simplistically, that there are two kinds of people in the world: dog people and cat people. Well, I am definitely a cat person. And I always have been. Even though I didn’t grow up with them, once I got married and had kids of my own, cats became a part of my life. I feel about them the way the ancient Egyptians did. They are divine creatures, and truly one of the jewels of evolution’s experiments. There’s an old song from South Pacific, "There is Nothing Like a Dame." For me, there is nothing like a cat. Nietzsche said "Without music life would be a mistake." I would say the same for cats. A catless world would be an abomination. I trust I have made myself clear. 

As for dogs, I would be happy to live in a world without them. They may be "man’s best friend," but they are not mine. Oh, I know there are touching stories about men and their dogs, one by Thomas Mann called in fact "A Man and His Dog," or the famous story by J. R. Ackerley, about his dog Tulip (though it was actually named Queenie), and many others. Fine, to each his own. But, frankly, some dogs look like unmade beds to me, and I really can’t abide their slobbering tongues, their panting, their fearsome teeth, their annoying barks, and their slavish loyalty. When my second wife suddenly arrived one day with a large matted four-legged thing, who proceeded to jump on me, seeking out my gonads, I immediately named him Albatross, and his name, shortened to Alby, stuck. I’m sure he was responsible for our fighting like cats and dogs ourselves (you will know who was who) and in part for our later divorce. I’m sorry if I have offended you, if you are a dog lover, but I hope to redeem myself in my next blog when I will have some wonderful things to say about dogs who don’t live with me.  

In fact, I will soon have some wonderful things to say about animals, period, because in recent years I have become fascinated with books about animal intelligence (or "animal cognition," as it is now usually called) as well as the emotional life of animals. Indeed, I now have a slew of books in my library – well over a dozen – dealing with various facets of the lives of animals and am currently reading a new one on animal languages. For somebody who didn’t grow up with animals, I am now growing old with them, and what I have learned about them has been a source of endless wonderment and enchantment. Of course, I admit I am really not spending my time with actual animals; I am limited merely to doing my usual thing – reading about them. But that’s been enough to thrill me with what I’m learning about them and why I’m keen to share some of that knowledge with you in the remainder of this essay.   

The thing that’s new in animal studies, and what has particularly excited me, has been the focus on the inner lives of animals. Perhaps surprisingly, in recent years animal researchers have learned a great deal about how animals think, what they feel, what kind of emotional lives they have, and most intriguingly, about the structure of the languages they use to communicate with one another and to us. Consider, for example, the titles or sub-titles of the following books, which are representative of these new directions in the exploration of the lives of animals.

Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal. (De Waal is world famous for his forty years of research on chimpanzees.) In this illuminating book, de Waal shows us how similar the emotional lives of chimps are to our own. After beginning with the very moving story of the death of the chimp, Mama, de Waal shows us that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust and empathy. There is no sharp dividing line between us and them; we all animals after all and we share a continuum with all life.   

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.(Safina, a MacArthur Fellow and a marvelous writer – I even wrote him a fan letter and he responded most graciously – in this book writes about the inner lives of elephants, wolves and killer whales.)  I can’t resist quoting just a short passage from the book jacket, which echoes de Waal’s sentiments: 

Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to reevaluate how we interact with animals.

The Soul of An Octopus: A surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery. (Montgomery is another accomplished writer and naturalist. She lives with a flock of chickens and a border collie – and did you know that one border collie learned the names of a thousand toys and understands grammar? Yes!) Of course, when it comes to octopuses (yes, that’s the plural – not octopi!), we encounter a creature vastly different from ourselves. For one thing, their brain is distributed through their arms, but Montgomery, too, wants to explore their emotional lives and how they come to experience and navigate the world. I defy anyone not to be amazed and utterly captivated with the story that Montgomery tells of these extraordinary beings whose evolutionary history is so different from ours. And yet…. 

Modern research into the lives of animals has taken us a long way from Descartes (or Des-car-tees, as my best friend, Stan, in junior high was wont to call him until I gave him some French lessons) who thought that animals, because they could not speak and therefore could not think, were soulless creatures, mere machines (in fact, he called animals bêtes-machines), incapable of experiencing pain. 

Did that man ever look into the eyes of a dog?  

Of course, Descartes was famous for his dictum, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. But why doesn’t someone ever pose this question: If Descartes had said instead, "I do not think," would he then conclude that he didn’t exist?

I think Descartes, as great a philosopher as he may have been, is over-rated. He may have been a smart cookie, but at least where animals were concerned, he was an arrogant anthropocentric nincompoop.  

But he got his comeuppance. The fabled Queen Christina of Sweden, who was fascinated by Descartes’ ideas, invited him to come to Sweden so she could learn from him. Against his better judgment, Descartes allowed himself to be lured there in the fall of 1649. As a brutally cold winter set in, he was obliged meet with the queen in her unheated library very early in the morning, and because she was the queen, Descartes had to appear bare-headed. Naturally, he developed influenza, which turned into pneumonia, which turned into death. So ended the life of a great philosopher who knew everything about how to think but would die without knowing that animals could think, too, and would never be stupid enough voluntarily to venture into territory which could be expected to be a mortal threat. 

Well, so much for our Cartesian diversion. Let’s return to more intelligent creatures. Take bats, for instance.

Free-tailed bats use echolocation to navigate and to catch prey. They emit sounds that are too high-pitched for human ears to detect. And they sing, too. In recent years, digital technology has revealed that bats are now believed to be the mammals with the most complex form of vocal communication after humans.

These bats not only sing, but each male bat creates his own distinctive song to court females. And these songs are extremely complex and varied, and are constructed like human sentences. The language of bats, therefore, has its own syntax.  

I learned all this from reading a fascinating book I alluded to earlier on the language of animals by a Dutch researcher and philosopher named Eva Meijer. She also revealed to me the secret lives of the lowly prairie dog.   

Prairie dogs live in underground tunnels with different areas for sleeping, giving birth, and getting rid of bodily wastes. Because they have to be vigilant for predators when they surface, they have developed various complex alarm calls that sound a bit like the twittering of birds. Did you ever wonder why these animals are called prairie dogs? It’s because when they are out in force vocalizing their alarm calls, it sounds like the barking of dogs.

But these calls also contain information about the predator, and it is so highly specific as to be almost unbelievable. According to Meijer, in the case of a human predator, for example, they can communicate that it is a human, what color clothes he is wearing, and if he is carrying something like an umbrella or a gun. Different parts of the call change meaning depending on the order of its elements, so that the language of prairie dogs has a simple grammar. Meijer says that research into the language of prairie dogs shows that they use verbs, nouns and adverbs in meaningful ways.

Take that, Descartes!

I wish I had the space to talk about the wonders of larger animals that are more familiar to us, such as chimps and elephants (I have read a number of books about each of them, which have been fascinating to me), but for now, let me mention another creature that is familiar to us all on a daily basis: the crow.  

Crows are among the most intelligent of birds. A number of studies have shown that they can solve complicated puzzles and devise and use tools. They are extraordinarily clever and tales of their prodigious memories are legion. If you threaten or actually injure a crow, that crow will never forget you and will attack you on sight. I have read a number of accounts of this sort of thing, but one of the most fascinating comes from one of the best books on birds you could ever read, Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds.

I just can’t resist quoting this story, which I will lightly edit and slightly abridge here:

A brilliant string of studies over the past five years ... at the University of Washington has revealed the extraordinary abilities of American crows not just to recognize individual humans by their faces but to pass along to other crows information about those whom they deem dangerous. In one experiment, teams of people wandered through several Seattle neighborhoods wearing different sorts of masks. One type of mask in each group represented the "dangerous" mask. The people wearing the dangerous mask captured several wild crows. Other people, wearing "neutral" masks or no mask at all just meandered along harmlessly.

Nine years later, the masked scientists returned to the scene of the crime. The crows in these neighborhoods – including those who weren’t even hatched at the time of the capture -- reacted to the people with the dangerous masks as if they were a threat, dive-bombing, scolding, and mobbing them. 

Moral: Never mistreat a crow or you will pay for it. And also don’t volunteer to carry out any such experiments wearing a threatening mask. You may decide that some scientific experiments are just not worth having to fend off savage crow attacks!

Well, there are so many remarkable stories about animals I would love to regale you with, but this blog can’t go on forever, anymore than I can, so let me conclude with one more topic, which many of you will know has long played a special role in my life: death. In this case, the death of animals.

Can animals actually die?  Of course, they can, you would say. That’s obvious!  But not to some philosophers. Martin Heidegger, who along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, is generally regarded as the most important philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century, famously held that animals, because they presumably have no concept of death, cannot die; they simply disappear.

Honestly, these philosophers! Some of them deserve to be attacked by a swarm of vengeful, screaming crows.

I have already referred to the fact that animals are capable of empathy, so it won’t surprise you to learn many animals mourn those who have died. Chimps, for example, and the mourning rituals of elephants are well known. (I could easily write pages about elephants in this connection; the stories I have collected about them are deeply moving.) What isn’t well known is that giraffes and foxes also mourn their dead. There is even a remarkable story about a gorilla who used sign language to describe the death of his parents by poachers.   

And there are our crows again whose mourning of their dead comrades is especially affecting. I have read several very touching stories, especially in Ackerman’s book, about the way crows gather around the body of a dead crow, and often return to drop twigs or a piece of grass over its body.  

In fact, when I was talking about such rituals to my girlfriend Lauren a few days ago, she volunteered that she already knew all this from her own experience and proceeded to tell me about something she had witnessed herself a few years ago. After listening to her account, I asked her if she would be good enough to write it out for me so that I could use it in this essay. Lauren indeed was "good enough," so here it is in her own words:

There is a set of wires that intersect in front of my house. One goes to my home, and another is attached to a pole across the street that crosses in front of my view, which would otherwise be exposed to a panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. One day I heard a terrific uproar at the front of my residence and wondered at the commotion. As the cacophony continued, I investigated only to find crows sitting on the wires abutting one another bawling, rocking back and forth, and in utter distress. There must have been forty of them in lamentation. Why were they crying so piteously?

In a moment of bravery, I walked out my front door, down my steps, and peered into the street at the object of anguish. There to my surprise was a huge crow without a mark on his body, but dead. I looked up at the mourners and said to them, "I am so sorry that your friend has gone." With those words, the crows inexplicably and suddenly became quiet. I picked up the body, which was surprisingly heavy, and said, "I will take care of his body. You may lament him, but I will take guardianship over him." The crows reciprocated with a soothing cooing sound. I was stupefied that my words and actions had such an impact on these beautiful highly intelligent avians. 

I walked with their friend to my backyard noticing that five of them followed me up the driveway and settled in a tree under which I placed his body. They bobbed and swayed and cooed quietly while I went about my preparations. Inside I found a length of fabric with which to wrap his body and returning I picked up a shovel with which to dig his grave. I dug as deep a hole as I could, perhaps a foot and a half deep all the while the mourners remained unchanged, quietly grieving. When I had completed my regrettable task, I covered the grave with an old doormat knowing that one of the night creatures might dig him up. I then placed an antique fireplace grate over the mat to make sure the gravesite would remain untouched.

This is the biggest surprise of all: five of the crows returned each day for five days and remained all day to mourn their friend. Then I noticed that there were only three who came to lament his passing, and they too remained all day for three days. While I can never be sure, I suspect that one still comes each day to pay her respects, and I welcome her.

I need to bring this blog to an end soon, but not quite yet.

Obviously, I could offer you here only a few tidbits, as it were, about the lives of animals based on my reading of books about them. But I hope I have said enough to intrigue some of you to read some of these books yourself. (If you would like a complete list of such books in my own library, please write me.) Of course, books are no substitute for actual physical encounters with animals, but most of us can’t easily arrange to have an elephant in our backyard or to burrow underground looking for prairie dogs. Anyway, in my case and at my advanced age, I am pretty much forced to follow my usual practice – to spend time learning about animals, once removed, in my belated efforts to become an animal lover after all these years malgré moi. It is never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks. 

And speaking of dogs, I haven’t forgotten my promise to say some good things about them in my next blog, which will be about the psychic life of dogs and especially cats, wherein more wondrous stories will be told about the amazing sensitivities of those we call our pets, including what happens to them after they die.

What Death Has to Teach Us

 By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Recently I was introduced to an exceptional man by the name of Hitendra Wadhwa. My son-in-law, Craig, who had worked with this man, sent me one of Hitendra's articles on cultivating death awareness, and I was so struck by its wisdom and the luminous quality of Hitendra's writing that I knew I wanted to share it with you. Hitendra kindly gave me permission to do so, and you will find his essay below. I'm sure you will appreciate it as much as I did.

But before you start to read it, I should give you just a little bit of information about Hitendra himself. He is Professor of Practice at Columbia Business School, where he has won many awards, including the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence. He is also the founder of The Mentora Institute, where he codifies and teaches timeless principles of success in life and leadership based on scientific breakthroughs, ancient wisdom and studies of great leaders. 

Now here’s his essay….

By Hitendra Wadhwa

Is it possible — regardless of what belief we hold about what happens when someone dies — for us to come together, across diverse faiths and traditions, to recognize the same set of truths, principles and implications for how to use our awareness of death to uplift our consciousness and help us to do our best work during our remaining time in this life? If that is a challenge that intrigues you, then read on.

"If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again." — Abraham Lincoln

The cremation ground in Chandigarh, the modern Indian city I grew up in, is located at a discreet distance from the city center. On the rare occasion when our family would find itself driving by it, I would point in its direction and say, "Look! We’re driving by the cremation ground." My mother would frown and bid my sisters and me to look away. It was her way of loving us. She hoped that by having us shun death, death would shun us as well.

We are made to believe that death is our greatest foe. We live in fear of it because it is unavoidable, unpredictable, irreversible and absolute, wresting us and our loved ones away from everything we possess in this life to which we are so attached.

Fear of death

Part of our fear of death is productive. The fear of the virus, for instance, has made many of us, almost overnight, change a number of deep-set habits. Many of us wear face masks, practice social distancing, meet people on Zoom, observe quiet Friday evenings at home, avoid touching our faces, and diligently sanitize our hands. In more normal conditions, when there is no fear, over ninety percent of people give up on their new year’s resolutions, because behavior change is hard to do when there’s no fear or other motivational force.

But part of our fear of death is unproductive. It distracts us, demoralizes us and diminishes us. Since there is no way to guarantee that death will shun us, what might we gain if we stopped shunning death? In the middle of a speech during the Civil War, President Lincoln was criticized by some for showing respect for Southerners instead of seeing them as enemies that should be destroyed. Lincoln responded with a rhetorical question,

"Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?"

Perhaps we too could destroy our unproductive fear of death by making it our friend.

Could death be our friend?

"Keep the prospect of death, exile, and all such apparent tragedies before you every day – especially death – and you will never have an abject thought, or desire anything to excess." — Epictetus

Somerset Maugham once did a retelling of an ancient tale from Mesopotamia where a merchant in Baghdad one day sent his servant to buy provisions from the market. 

The servant came back, white and trembling, saying, "Just now, when I was in the market-place, I was jostled by someone in the crowd. When I turned I saw it was Death that had jostled me. She looked at me in a threatening way. Please lend me your horse for I wish to ride away from this city to escape my fate. I will go to Samarra so she cannot find me."

The merchant lent the horse, and the servant rode away. Then the merchant went to the marketplace and saw Death standing there in the crowd. "Why did you look at my servant in a threatening way this morning?" he asked her. 

"That was not a threatening gesture. I was just acting surprised, because I did not expect to see him here in Baghdad."

"Why so? After all, he lives and works here in Baghdad," said the merchant. "Because," replied Death, "tonight, I am meant to have an appointment with him in Samarra."

The first step toward befriending death is to recognize that it is always hiding behind the veil of our existence. There is nothing we can do to shoo it away. When it decides our time is up, it will pull up the veil and come in to claim us, however powerful we may be. So perhaps we should lift the veil ourselves, look at it in the eye, and make peace with it.

On some occasions, during my meditation practice, I visualize that the time has come for me to pass on. I imagine myself having to walk out of the world I have lived in all these years, out of the lives of the people I have loved, out of every aspect of my mortal identity, out of my own body. How would I respond? 

Powerful and unexpected realizations arise within me. 

"Oh! You should have helped strengthen this one quality in yourself. You should have further prepared your daughter for the world in this way or that way. You should have meditated more. You should have offered more gratitude to those who loved and supported you."

There are other, more positive realizations too.

"I have lived a blessed and meaningful life. I have pursued my purpose. I’m so grateful for all the love I received. Now I will finally experience what lies beyond. I have gone on this same road before. There is nothing to fear. My spirit is ready for this journey into the vast beyond."

Knowing that my life might end any day gives me a clearer view of what is true to me and a surging desire to act in harmony with this truth. I become free and alive – free from social impositions and idle hungers and alive to the need to make every moment count. Steve Jobs would have agreed. He once said:

"Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Steve had a practice not dissimilar to my own.

"I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

This kinship with his own mortality guided Steve to have the courage to be true to himself. Once he visited Stanford University to give a talk to the MBA students, and a student, Laurene, caught his eye. As he was departing, he noticed her again, but then remembered he had to be at a business meeting. 

"I was in the parking lot with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, ‘If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman?’ I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we’ve been together ever since."

A recent article in Scientific American states:

"Across a series of research studies, Stanford University psychologist Laura Carstensen and co-authors have shown that ... once life’s fragility becomes a personal truth instead of a philosophical concept that happens to 'other people,' we become more capable of celebrating whatever days and experiences remain to us instead of focusing on everyday hassles. Acknowledging our impermanence makes us more mindful of life’s small moments and our relationships with others."…

American rabbi Joshua L. Liebman writes in his book Peace of Mind:

"Death is not the enemy of life, but its friend, for it is the knowledge that our years are limited which makes them so precious."

Losing a loved one

There is great power also in staying ever-mindful of the possibility of death claiming a loved one – instead of claiming us. It makes us more appreciative of the moments we have with them. We all are guilty of being occasionally distracted, disengaged or disgruntled in the presence of others. Not because we do not love them, but because we do not feel the need to always give them our hundred percent. We expect to have many more opportunities with them tomorrow, the day after, and beyond. But if you were to acknowledge death as an ever-present possibility, you might approach each interaction with a loved one as one that could turn out to be the last. Then would you not take it more seriously and give it your all? Would they not welcome that additional warmth, grace and patience you might bring to the encounter? And when you wrap up a beautiful moment with them, you could whisper a silent "thank you" to your new-found awareness of death for motivating you to give your best in all moments.

After a visit to my parents a few years ago, I was waving a rushed goodbye to my father on my way out. "I will see you again in a few weeks, Dad." I said. Then a thought crossed my mind: "What if there is no next time?" He was eighty-five, and in reasonably good health, so there was no reason to feel this way, but I recognized in that moment the ever-present possibility of death in our lives. I stopped in my tracks, turned and walked toward him, held his hand in my own, and after an unhurried silence, said softly, "Love you, Dad. See you soon." I felt a powerful wave of affection emanating from his deep-set eyes. We both savored the moment. Then I flew to New York, and four days later I received an early morning call from my mother. "Son, I have some news. Your father passed away an hour ago."

I returned to Chandigarh. This time, my mother did not bid my sisters and me to look away as we drove to the same cremation ground we had passed by innocently as children. There is much I miss about my father and much I wish I could have said to him and done for him in life, but this much is clear – I do not regret where my heart and mind were when I held his hand during those treasured moments that turned out to be our last.

Now you might say, "You got lucky, Hitendra – you got that last moment with your dad. In my case, someone I have dearly loved passed away quite suddenly. I did not have that opportunity to be prepared for it or be present for it. How can death be my friend when it summoned them away from life so abruptly?"

I understand. The card of death is the harshest in life’s deck. It is but human to feel the pain of separation when we lose someone we love. And yet, some of the students and executives in my Personal Leadership & Success course at Columbia Business School have shared personal journeys where untimely loss led them, over time, to unexpected riches. The pain someone feels in losing a loved one is a powerful energy, and once the initial shock and grief have been soothed by the passage of time and by one’s own fortitude, some people find a way to direct this energy toward a positive end. A student once shared how he had felt strong grief after the passing of a loved one, but then he realized that the only reason for that grief was because he had been so blessed having had this beautiful friend in his life during her time on earth; if their friendship had not been as special an experience, her loss would not have mattered as much. This realization helped him translate his pain into a feeling of gratitude for the time he got with her. Other students have shared how the loss of a loved one gave them greater motivation to treasure the time they have left with other loved ones, made them take one virtue they really admired in that person and strive to practice it in their own life, or made them more empathetic to the pain other people go through when they lose someone. 

One Columbia alum, a senior executive at a major New York bank, once told me:

"My wife and I lost our daughter when she was three. For some months after her passing, we were inconsolable. What finally got us to make peace with her loss and move on was an orphanage we started in her memory."

The loss of a loved one is irreplaceable, but the grief we feel can become more bearable when it is infused with meaning, when our pain can stand for something. Viktor Frankl, who started a school of psychotherapy focused on helping people find meaning in suffering, shared the following story.

"Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him?"

Frankl asked the bereaved man a question: "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?"

"Oh," he said, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!"

Frankl then observed to the man how he had spared his wife this suffering. One of them had to die first, and by surviving his wife, he would need to mourn her so she was spared the pain of mourning him.

"He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice."

Experience of dying

But what about the process of dying? It is revealing – and reassuring – to study the research on near-death experiences (NDEs). These are experiences where people have come very close to dying during an accident or health crisis, where their heart and brain temporarily shut down. Some telling insights emerge from interviewing people who recover from such experiences. 80% of people report a feeling of peacefulness about the near-death experience. When a group of cardiac arrest patients were investigated 2- and then 8-years after their near-death experience, they showed a greater likelihood to have a reduced fear of death, have an increased belief in life after death, take greater interest in the meaning of life, have greater acceptance of others, and be more loving and empathetic.

Here’s a powerful story related by Dr. Kenneth Ring, a pre-eminent researcher in the discipline, on why NDEs make people grow in their empathy. Remarkably, these changes emerged from something they experienced only for a few minutes.

When the time finally came for Steve Jobs to die, he "looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them."

How must he have felt in those final moments where he was shedding all earthly possessions, attachments and identities to become finally, as he had put it, "naked"? We may never know, though we do have a piece of evidence from his sister Patty. 

Steve’s final words were: 'Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.'"

If we follow Gandhi’s precept of "live as if you will die tomorrow," being ever mindful of our highest aspirations and duties and never taking the moments of life for granted, perhaps we will find that when Death finally makes its appointment with us at our own Samarra, we are packed and prepared for the journey that lies ahead.

"Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come."  — Rabindranath Tagore

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