I have been surprised and touched by the responses from my email to solicit questions around Consciously Being and Consciously Leaving.  Here are some highlights:

• Close to 70 people contacted me.

• Over 25% of the responses came from people I either did not know personally (e.g., people who signed up on my website) or who I had not communicated with in over a year, sometimes several years.

• More than a third of the responses came within two days after I emailed my distribution list.

• After compiling the questions by general categories, I ended up with 8 pages of questions. While I have not actually counted the total number, my guess is that it is well over 100 unique questions, with lots of variations around the most popular ones.

• Questions fell into the following categories (you’ll have to trust me that I sorted and named these appropriately):

• Consciously Being
• Consciously Leaving
• Looking Back (e.g., what would you do differently?)
• Changing Perspectives (e.g., how do you see healthy people now?)
• Current State (e.g., what gives you joy?)
• Relationship with Friends/Family/Others (e.g., how are you talking about loved ones about your death?)
• Faith (e.g., where is God for you?)

• While lots of people sent in questions, many also told intimate stories of loved ones who had died of an illness, their struggles, their regrets, their anger at dealing with a disease like ALS.

• Several people sent the names of books and songs dealing with the topic of dying. Many people cited the book, “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom.

• A couple of responses were along the lines of “I’m intrigued by this project but don’t necessarily want to think about the dying process.”

I’m not sure what I expected when I solicited questions.  I certainly did not expect the number or the immediacy of the responses.  I could tell in the first day of replies that this project touches a sacred place, deep within, where the soft murmurings of the heart speak.   There is a real hunger for a safe place to talk about what happens when a loved one is dying. I was especially moved by strangers writing long emails about their deepest feelings on this topic.

Human beings are infinitely curious. I am amazed at the depth and breadth of the questions.  I remember a quote from Sam Keen, a noted author and psychologist, who said something to the effect that our questions determine who we are.  It was clear to me from the many different types of questions that we each see life and death through our own unique filters. 

This project is about living well by learning about the dying process. It is also one woman’s unique story and perspective. So while books on what others have discovered about the dying process are helpful, they can only be applied in the general sense, never in the specific.  There is no template for dying well.

Likewise, what my friend talks about is specific to her experience.  Which is exactly what I’m trying to capture in the interviews—her experience.  I say this because some people have looked to my friend to have “the answers” to life’s most puzzling questions.  We each create our own answers.

I feel privileged to be the conduit for this story to emerge. 

I will be using this blog to post updates on this project. See right hand column of this blog to add it as one of your feeds or see left hand column of this blog to have blog updates emailed to you.