Bringing Life to Completion: Reflections on Living Deeply and Ending Life Well

By Edward Cell

In our quest to live a worthwhile life --one we can affirm with a whole heart --we experience much about life that we cannot affirm. This confronts us with the question of whether there is something about life that can take us beyond its times of loss, heartache, and emptiness, and bring a flourishing that endures.
No one can answer this question for another, of course, but we have much in common about the fundamentals of life and whatever answer we achieve will grow out of what we learn from one another. I have written in this spirit, drawing on what I have learned from others, especially in teaching philosophy, religion and psychology, working with those who are dying, bearing the loss of people I have cared deeply for, and centering my life in times with friends and family that have brought deep meaning, courage and delight.
Whatever flourishing we achieve will depend, in part, on fate--all the physical, social and psychological things that happen to us and that may work for us or against us. This is especially likely to be an important side of our final stage of life. Our well-being, though, will also be a matter of how we engage life. Some of this will be influenced by how we deal with whatever psychological problems life has brought, but this book focuses, rather, on the creative, life affirming uses to which we can put our basic human powers.
There are two fundamental perspectives --those we can think of as secular and transcendental--by which we in the West have been helped to experience this affirmative feeling for life. I explore both perspectives for the insights they have to offer and ask what it is about life, for all of us, that can make possible new meaning, greater intimacy, and deepened belief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468538601

Edward Cell

Dr. Cell received his PH.D in philosophy of religion from Princeton University. He has taught and written about philosophy, religion, and psychology for forty years, the last twenty three at the University of Illinois at Springfield. For the past ten years he has served as a hospice volunteer, spending time with patients who are close to death and with their families. He speaks of his book as inspired by some memorable people he has known in this work. He draws, too, from his experiences of the loss of people he has cared deeply for and from times with friends and family that have brought him meaning, courage, and delight.

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Contents

DEDICATION

PREFACE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

ADDENDUM

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Religion and Contemporary Western Culture

Language, Existence and God

Learning To Learn From Experience

Readings From the Quakers

Organizational Life: Learning To Be Self-Directed

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to two excellent philosophers and fine human beings, Larry Shiner and Peter Wenz, who have helped me professionally and personally for a generation.

We were a three-person department for 22 years. We are friends for life.

PREFACE

In our quest to live a worthwhile life—one we can affirm with a whole heart—we experience much about life that we cannot affirm. This confronts us with the question of whether there is something about life that can take us beyond its times of loss, heartache, and emptiness, and bring a flourishing that endures.

No one can answer this question for another, of course, but we have much in common about the fundamentals of life and whatever answer we achieve will grow out of what we learn from one another. I have written in this spirit, drawing on what I have learned from others, especially in teaching philosophy, religion and psychology, working with those who are dying, bearing the loss of people I have cared deeply for, and centering my life in times with friends and family that have brought deep meaning, courage and delight.

Whatever flourishing we achieve will depend, in part, on fate—all the physical, social and psychological things that happen to us and that may work for us or against us. This is especially likely to be an important side of our final stage of life. Our well-being, though, will also be a matter of how we engage life. Some of this will be influenced by how we deal with whatever psychological problems life has brought, but this book focuses, rather, on the creative, life affirming uses to which we can put our basic human powers.

There are two fundamental perspectives—those we can think of as secular and transcendental—by which we in the West have been helped to experience this affirmative feeling for life. I explore both perspectives for the insights they have to offer and ask what it is about life, for all of us, that can make possible new meaning, greater intimacy, and deepened belief.

Chapter 1 introduces the basic themes of the book, discussing the things that, taken together, can enable us to transcend our fear of death. Much attention is given to two personal resources we can develop and learn to use to achieve this transcendence. First is the power we have to shape our emotions in ways that increase their capacity to enrich our lives and to help us cope with the problematic sides of life. Second is the deep well spring of meaning that develops beneath the surface of our minds that we can learn to nurture and draw on effectively.

Chapter 2 gives detailed attention to this well spring of meaning, exploring the ways it enters into our conscious experience, why it takes courage to open ourselves to it, and the resources we have for developing this courage and tapping into this meaning.

Chapter 3 describes the transcendental and secular ways of finding a meaning for life. It then considers how it is that we humans manage to create a world in which such meaning can be experienced and how we can increase our ability to do this. The idea is that we begin by creating a world of facts and causes and then build on this world to create one of our intentions, values, and meanings. The key to this second world is seen to be the way we constantly form experiences into narratives. Much attention is given to the kinds of narratives that work for us and those that work against us in our quest for a life of meaning. Special consideration is given to how our narratives can bring us a sense of completion at life’s end by interweaving the things that happen along the way into a meaningful whole.

Chapter 4 examines the changing impact of our scientific understanding of the world on the way we see life and its meaning. We are increasingly led to see ourselves not as oddities in an impersonal universe but as having a deeply rooted kinship with the forces that govern life. Many are responding to all this with feelings of awe, wonder and a sense of the sacred, and this chapter explores the importance these feelings can have for our sense of life’s meaning.

Chapter 5 considers the way an anxiety about failures in relating to others, to ourselves and to life itself are often coiled in that about impermanence and can give death a second face. Attention is given to how achieving affirmative connections with our world and ourselves can change our feelings about death. This can enable us, in turn, to come to terms with life’s impermanence and to go about learning, paradoxically, that meaning and impermanence can be seen as inseparable sides of a creative process that we can affirm with a whole heart.

Chapter 6 takes ups how we engage life in individual, social, bodily and deeper states of mind. Death can affect our everyday sense of life in different ways depending on which mind-state we are in. Being mindful of this can help us to clarify and strengthen the way of engaging life that best enables us to deal with death both for ourselves and others. It can also enable us to reflect on when we need these ways of seeing to work together.

Chapter 7 discusses how the way we die can help other people deal with their fear of death and with the loss of what we have been together. It considers, too, that our final days can also be a time when we experience together a completion of the life we have shared.

Chapter 8 culminates our discussion with a consideration of how feelings of reverence can contribute deeply to a final affirmation and gratitude for life. The theme is that we come to revere life when our feeling about its worth lifts us out of narrow concerns into a compelling desire to further it as best we can, whether in ourselves, or others, or in the larger world.

The addenda comprise two documents that can be used to give effective expression to our desires concerning end of life medical treatment.

Among the many to whom I owe much in thinking through and writing this book, the following have been especially helpful. I think first of a group of friends with whom I have met weekly: David Archibald, Marty Greenberg, Milt Lessner, George Mansfield, Hugh Mays, Ramon Ross, Edward Spilkin, and David Tansey. Next are my former colleagues of many years, Larry Shiner and Peter Wenz. My son-in-law Jeff Nelson, daughter Kristin Cell and brother Donald Cell have read and talked with me about much of the book. Finally, my wife Marjorie has shared in the process every step of the way and been unfailingly supportive and encouraging.

Chapter 1

The Questions That Shake Us And

Life’s Power To Answer

What does it mean to end life well and how can we best manage it? The more I reflect on this, the more I believe it’s really a question about what it means to live deeply. How we live and how we end life are intimately related. It’s all one story, and running through it are deeply-seated questions about the meaning and value of our lives and also a quest to find answers for these questions in our experience, answers that enable us to affirm life with a whole heart and that can grow in power as we move through life’s stages.

The things that bring life into question stir up strong emotions. At their starkest, these emotions include anxiousness about having to die, grief at the loss of those we care for, and heart-ache about ways we harm one another or grow apart. We may also be deeply troubled by feelings of doubt concerning direction and purpose for our lives, and of regret about ways we fall short of becoming the best we can be.

1.   EMBRACING LIFE’S QUESTIONS

Whatever answers we experience as we face these questions will give rise to emotions that can also be intensely powerful. At their most compelling, these feelings include courage to embrace life in its entirety, gratitude for the bonds that unite us, and joy at the meaning that comes partly from our own doing and partly from beyond us. They are all complexly interrelated, but, as I have come to believe, the joy we find in a life of meaning is the foundation for the rest.

These answering experiences will work effectively for us only insofar as we have first really opened ourselves to the questions life brings and given them careful thought. Often these questions will concern our relations with the people in our lives. Why the times when we damage what is best about our life together? How deep is the understanding and care that connects us with each other? What do we count for—what kind of difference do we make—when things really matter and how much of this will continue into our final days?

Over time, if we think carefully about these things, a different kind of questioning may grow in us and we may come to ask something like this: does the meaning we create together sometimes bring a sense of life moving toward a kind of completion—a feeling that Yes, it’s really been worth while? This can be in an important advance in our way of seeing things because we could not even ask about completion unless we were gaining some sense of what this might mean for our lives.

Still other questions may develop out of a larger perspective than that of thinking about our personal relations, one that concerns our relation with life itself. Does life make sense even though it ends in death and everything we value comes to an end? Why does life often bring so much suffering no matter how we strive to live it? What place do we have in the vastness of the universe?

Attending to these concerns is yet another way in which we may be led to take our questioning further and, in this case, ask whether we might come to see our lives as contributing to something profoundly great and good, something that we can draw on for an enduring courage and power of affirmation? This can be another important step forward because, here too, the very asking arises from an awareness of something stirring within us.

At some level, we face these questions in moments of decision about ourselves along the way and, in some form, they will rise again as a tide in our final days. They can be gift-bearing, if disturbing, guests because they can point the way to the answers we seek.

The answers we can come to experience will profoundly affect the quality of our living right up to the end. Attending to them, especially by reflecting on our life as a whole and on what we will want for our final days, can add depth to who we are and to our understanding of others. It can help us to complete our journey with meaning and gratitude and prepare us for being with others when they are dying.

2.   MEANING THAT BRINGS AFFIRMATION

Especially as I have been with people as they face death, I have more and more come to think of finding a meaning for life as being able to affirm it all with a whole heart. We find this meaning—what I am referring to as life’s answering power—in experiences that enable us to love and affirm ourselves, others, and life itself even though there are things about it all that we cannot love and affirm. The answers we come to, then, are not conclusions to careful analysis that bring an end to our doubt and questioning but experiences that change the way these things affect us.

We can find the key to such affirmation by reflecting on our concern to live a life that we feel is truly of worth. In this concern, we embrace something of fundamental importance to us: our need to create in ourselves and our world that which has enduring value. I propose that our most powerful feelings develop from the things that give life meaning because they arise out of a deep part of who we are. These feelings can come to us more closely than breath itself and as the heart of our affirmations. As we create things that matter, we form our best selves, bond with others, and touch something that lies deeper within us than our heartaches and our fear of death.

3.   THE THINKING AND VALUING AT WORK IN OUR FEELINGS

Much of our discussion will be guided by two convictions about personal resources we can develop and learn to draw on that will help us experience the answers we seek and achieve a life of meaning. The first of these convictions concerns our emotions, a side of life that is not easily attended to because it has such an unruly nature. We doubtless all agree that we impoverish life if we live it with too little feeling, but feelings can also be so disrupting and dispiriting. On top of this, we can sometimes feel helpless to do much about this side of things. As important as our emotions are to making life worthwhile, it may seem that the best we can do is to keep the troublesome ones from affecting us too badly and be grateful that we have those that enrich and strengthen us. Certainly, at any given moment, our feelings are likely to come over us spontaneously and we may also find that we are somehow just predisposed toward some of them, as some people are, say, toward depression and others toward liveliness.

But what we are apt to overlook is the sense in which our emotions are not simply physical feelings—in the way that is largely true, say, of listlessness, or illness, or tiredness—but are feelings about things. This about means that mind is also involved in our emotions. When we have a feeling about something this includes having, first, a conception of that thing and, second, a sense of its value or disvalue. Thus, in our feeling of love for someone there resides an understanding of what a person is, what makes a person important, who that particular person is, and what we find loveable about them—things they say and do and, in an intimate relation, ways we find them physically attractive and desirable.

What this means is that our realistically positive emotions are not just momentary feelings that are pleasant to have but ways of engaging our world that bring an ongoing understanding of its personal significance for us and an appreciation of its value. We might think here of those people who have exceptionally rich, mature