As I write, my father lies in an emergency room with congestive heart failure, and the governor of Florida hopes to win protective custody of a young woman who left her body a long long time ago.

I believe that my father fears death perhaps as much as he loves life. He is beyond 90 and his body wants to drop away. Two months of rotation between hospital cardiac units and rehabilitation centers had left him hopeful that he might yet cheat Death. But less than a week after returning home to sleep in his own bed, his body has once again betrayed him and the core body functions -- oxygen, hydration, temperature and blood pressure all gone south fast -- signaled him urgently once more to prepare for Death.

I pray for my father to let go, go home, slip away, fall back into space and trust that God and all the angels will catch him and bear him away to a place where the spirit is deathless. I love and adore him, and have only powerful respect and admiration for his fight for life, and would expect no less. And he cannot let go, not yet, and so the cycle will continue.

In Florida, Jeb Bush turns his back on Jesus' promise that all souls will come to Him in their right time, and cannot let go of Terri Schiavo. The courts -- top to bottom, conservative to liberal -- have properly declared that such matters must be the province of the individual and their spouse first of all, as the Bible teaches. But he cannot let go, not yet, and so the horrifying cycle continues as a nation watches, stunned by the possibility that we may not, after all, have final say over our last days.

Jessica Mitford foretold this nightmare in her 1963 seminal work, "The American Way of Death," writing decades ago of our national and seemingly remorseless trend of seating Death at a table far away from us. How, in our fear of our inevitable human end, we have recast the dying in a new theater of medicinal technologies and the final moments in the theater of the American mortuary business. Now, 40 years later, it comes to pass just as she once described. We die -- not in our beds surrounded by our loved ones -- but instead wired up and intubated in the pristine and wholly alien confines of a hospital room. Strangers tend our deserted shells when we die, and freshen our looks in hopes that we no longer look deceased, and lay us to rest on satin pillows in mahogany boxes.

Once, just a generation before my father's, those who were dying were made comfortable in their beds, such palliative care as was available for pain was supplied along with loving sips of water, while those who loved us and neighbors who cared for us and fellow parishioners who believed in us sat by in the vigil. In time, body functions naturally failed, and we died. In my own Jewish heritage, the body was washed by community members and placed kindly in a plain pine box, and buried with a prayer for life. Other cultural and religious communities in America did much the same.

Our First Nation families knew that an elder, sensing Death approaching, quietly gave to others their cherished belongings and badges of honor and, taking Death's hand, walked away to lie down in the woods and give the body back to the Earth, the Spirit flying to God. Inuit elders walked out onto the ice in the spring when the floes were breaking up, and so were not seen again.

All such deaths are dignified and, having watched my father's distress, and Terri Schiavo's husband's travails, I too want this dignified death. But our times dictate that I likely will only have palliative care in the form of hospice and, then, only for certain kinds of body ills. We have no national understanding of the meaning of a good death, and so the struggle is amplified in terms of Right Wing and Liberal, Conservative Christian and Just About Everyone Else.

I pray that, when I sense Death has come for me, that I walk away into whatever metaphorical forest has meaning for me, and lie down to die. No tubes, no mahogany boxes, no white-walled rooms. Those who love me will know not to arrest the process of dying, for we are as much a part of nature as any plant or animal on this Earth and all go to dust in the end.

Welcome, Angel of Death.

Deborah Morse-Kahn (dmk@regionalresearch.net), Minneapolis, is director of Regional Research Associates.

© 2005 Star Tribune

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