No one chooses his end. And yet, God allows doctors to shorten lives. When I asked Dom David about this subject, a silence came over the room where we had been speaking for so many hours: “Today, the problem of sedation is serious. We have to fight against intolerable sufferings. But if we do not feel pain anymore, life goes away. Now, with the progress of analgesics, we no longer feel anything. We no longer feel life. We no longer feel humanity. We no longer feel God approaching. Man becomes an abstract machine. Several brothers wanted to write instructions for the end of life. They refuse life-prolonging interventions, and they do not want deep sedation. We would all like to die in our sleep. The doctors induce artificial comas to be certain that the patient does not suffer anymore. Fear is a bad counselor. It is the ultimate antithesis of faith. Our materialist societies have an irrepressible obsession with pain. Why has our world forgotten that life does not exist without suffering? In the West, we are well-off, and we have trouble imagining the daily lives of the vast majority of mankind. How should I react when a ninety-year-old monk asks for a hearing aid? How should I react when this investment of three thousand euros could help twenty people in an African village? How should I react when ninety-five-year-old brother asks for new dentures? When you consider we eat mostly eggs, fish, and little meat There are hypochondriac monks. These are weaknesses. If a brother agrees to work on this weakness, a big step is made. His fault is shocking, but God pardons everything.” So does Dom David. His patience is immense.
En-Calcat is an oasis that one leaves with regret. To remember that time, it is enough for me to listen to Dom David one last time. In I986, when he returned to the abbey after a first unsuccessful attempt, he had the sense of being in mourning. The young brother entered into monastic life in order to be as close as possible to the cross. He did not leave a love-interest behind him, and yet, it took him a year to regain interior joy. Every brother experiences, in his own way, a widowhood.
Entering a monastery is the first step toward death. Every day, Dom David reflects on his last hour: “When I am face to face with the Grim Reaper, I might not have the courage to look at him. But I do not see him as a threat. Death is a passage toward Christ. I hope that the son of God will come to take me by the hand. There is a Hindu allegory about the last moments that I particularly like. It distinguishes young monkeys from kittens, The latter wait without doing anything for their mother to take them in her mouth, while the little monkeys cling to their to go from branch to branch t. At the hour of death, the monk would like to be a kitten in the mouth of Christ,” mother in order carried in the mouth of Christ.
“A Time to Die: Monks of the Threshold of Eternal Life” — Nicholas Diat
The Monk and Death by Wenceslaus Hollar 1651. Art Institute of Chicago collection
