Karen’s last sentence caught me: “Will you help me prepare for a good death?”
The question came at the end of a newsletter from a Christian author I’ve followed for years. For a teeny, alarmed second I wondered if Karen spoke of assisted suicide. I should have known better. Karen didn’t request assistance to die – she asked for assistance to live, and live well.
Karen Burton Mains is 72 at this writing, and healthy. But experience and the loss of a son to cancer has made her wise. Good health can reverse in a moment. As she rounds the corner of her life’s home stretch, she wants her friends to pray for God-given strength to accomplish, not only good, but the best, and right to the end.
Despite having many interests, global and local, Karen knows the time has come to prune her life, to focus on the branches that will grow the best fruit to leave behind. “Let’s say I have five years left, or ten,” Karen wrote, “What difference does that make in the way I live the life that is given to me?”
It’s my question too, for death may take any of us by surprise.
She answers that this way: “…for me, it means deciding what is the Most Important Thing for me to do with my gifts and interests and capabilities. In addition, what is the MIT to do while I still have health and a good mind?”
Karen asks her friends to pray she’ll finish well. That as long as she’s able, she’ll follow the God-planted passions that burn within her. Those include helping others see themselves as God sees them. Assisting the poverty-stricken. Compiling books she’s planned for years. Mentoring and teaching others – including me.
I was in my twenties when I first read one of Karen’s books. Her words changed me. We met later, at an intimate island gathering for women off the West Coast of the Pacific. She trashed (beautifully) every assumption I’d ever had about authors, but her spoken thoughts inspired me as much as her written ones.
Over the years, Karen’s writing, and her thoughtful practice of faith has continued to inspire me. So I’m not surprised by her request. She wants the end of her earthly years to be a faith-filled pause, not an intentional stop. Long enough only to let God take her hand and guide her into a new awareness of ongoing eternal purpose.
“I refuse to not be prepared for death,” Karen wrote, “to leave messes that our adult children have to sort through, to have bitter feelings about people in the past or in the present, or to not celebrate the ascent that death really is for those of us who are people of faith and belief.”
Karen wants to die doing, not shrinking. And that kind of good death, it seems to me, makes God smile.
