Dr. Denton Weiss on Death and Dying: Pride and Fear or Love and Faith?

By Dr. Denton D Weiss, MD
5/27/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

So how do I recover? How can I find joy when my soul aches in pain?

How can our faith help? Our Lord is a loving God. He clearly wants us to grieve and know the pain of loss, but he is also a God of Love and healing. Our depression and inability to move forward are not from a Lord of Love. However, he understands them well and walks through them with us. So how do I recover? How can I find joy when my soul aches in pain?

The emotions of despair, loneliness, and emptiness are inevitable. We must go here to heal, but the bottom of this barrel can be one of extreme muck.

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PORTSMOUTH,VA. (Catholic Online) - Dear Dr Denton: Recently I lost a loved one and I am having a tough time dealing with the loss. Can you help?

Pride and Fear or Love and Faith.

On Good Friday I walked into a church without kneelers and said to my Lord "Please Jesus bring the kneelers back into this beautiful basilica". Mass was starting and I was dressed to the nines. I had my suit and all the fittings in place. I was sitting asking God what am I doing with my life. I had just lost a friend after a surgery and was emotionally spent. The cause of his death was not clear and the Lenten season had been the worst of my life culminating in the loss of life.

As I sat in a state of quiet we all began to rise slowly and move forward to the cross. Initially they came out with three crosses. "What is this" I thought - "there is only one cross for Christ not three". Once again critical, angry, and simply questioning God. As we moved forward I waited and then stepped out to walk down the aisle. In front of me was a small, African American man bent and weathered with the burdens of time. He shuffled as I walked proudly. Then suddenly I realized he was wearing sweat pants and his gait was one of pain and agony. He knelt in front of me shaking as he touched the cross, he offered a kiss.

I cried, realizing he was Christ before me. I the Proud physician was struck to his knees. I could only hug the cross below the site where this beautiful man kissed the wood of life. I cried at my sin of Pride and asked forgiveness.

I made it back to the pew and held on for whatever would come next. My brother-in law by my side. We prayed for our wives who were home with their failing father. I prayed for answers to the questions running through my mind. Why was my father-in-law weakening? Why did my friend die? Why did my patient suddenly pass from this would to the next? Why Lord?

Now Fear began to overcome me as I thought of the future. What would happen to my patient's family, our family, the practice, and my patients? Please Lord! Like the voice of my father when I was a child, like the voice of The Father in the reconciliation. Like the voice of the Rabbi. "My Grace is Sufficient for You" Exploded in my head. "But, Lord... "My Grace is Sufficient for you." I cried.

Faith

As we moved to the Lords Table exhaustion really is the only word I can use to describe the moment. I lifted my head and received the Body and Blood. I knew I was given the ultimate gift, the gift of Love.

When I returned to the pew I found out why there were no kneelers. There was no need for them. The floor of stone was worn smooth by the knees of the faithful upon them. As I knelt there on the floor the presence of Our Lord filled my Soul with Faith and Love.

With the weeks of Easter now upon me I reflect back on Lent and losses of loved ones, now and in the past. I look at the life changing moments of crisis and I see the answers are in Faith and Love. My responses are simply human. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote the acclaimed book "On Death and Dying" and tried to give us all some sense of healing after the loss of a loved one. She and her colleagues studied the coping mechanisms of individuals who had lost loved ones. They came up with 5 stages that are now commonly used in helping people through healing and recovery.

Ms Kubler-Ross has been quoted as saying "The five stages.are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief's terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss."

These thoughts are reinforced by George A. Bonanno, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, in his book "The Other Side of Sadness." In his writings Professor Bonanno describes grief as highly individualized and personal, that no two people grieve in the same way.The Stages of Grief, as they are called, should probably be called The Healing Stages

Denial: Initially many of us close out the event as if it never happened we function as though the world hasn't changed. The feeling of being numb is common or even a sense of shock leaving a person speechless and fatigued. Pain, sadness, and especially guilt can creep into the heart. Why not me?

Anger: The most difficult of stages to manage because denial is gone. Someone or something is to blame for this pain I feel. The very people who are supporting us are often the ones we strike. Sometimes we strike at God. We yell in our minds "why Lord why, you could have stopped this from ...

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1 - 3 of 3 Comments

Lonny D'Agostini
2 months ago
My use of the terms “homeopathic” and “allopathic” - to distinguish “natural medicine” from “modern medicine” – was incorrect and may have unwittingly caused some confusion. Perhaps a better choice of words would have been “naturopathic” and “anaturopathic”.
Lonny D'Agostini
8 months ago
An addendum, on "bad medicine". "Bad medicine" can be found in both allopathic and homeopathic circles.

We might say that allopathic medicine is typically "masculine" in its more overt, rapid, isolated and inorganic approach - whereas homeopathic medicine is typically "feminine" in its more subtle, gradual, systemic and organic approach. So it is not a question of "either/or" but of "both" - knowing when to use each method. There are some conditions which will respond more effectively to an allopathic approach while other conditions require one which is more homoeopathic. Perhaps, in some way, the tension between these two types of medicine mirrors the tension between men and women.
Lonny D'Agostini
9 months ago
The best advice when facing any life-threatening illness comes from Sacred Scripture, (Ecclesiasticus 38:9-11) "My son, in thy sickness, neglect not thyself: but pray to the Lord and he shall heal thee. Turn away from sin and order thy hands aright: and cleanse thy heart from all offense. Give a sweet savour and a memorial of fine flour, and make a fat offering: and then give place to the physician." The Bible instructs a sick person to: 1) pray to God, 2) turn away from sin, 3) seek good spiritual direction and 4) offer the Lord a fitting sacrifice, which is the Holy Eucharist. As Pere Lamy reminds us, "one Mass is more acceptable to Almighty God than all the sighs and tears of the world combined because a Mass is pure God offered up to pure God..." Once these things are attended to one should then commend oneself to the care of a physician. But not just to any physician, but preferably to one who fears the Lord, (Ecclesiasticus 38:1,12-15) "Honor thy physician for the need thou hast of him...For the Lord created him: and let him not depart from thee, for his works are necessary. For there is a time when thou must fall into their hands. And they shall beseech the Lord that he would prosper what they give for ease and remedy, for their conversation. He that sinneth in the sight of His Maker shall fall into the hands of the physician." While God can cure a person even with bad medicine in some cases the best and safest way is through the natural means, (Ecclesiasticus 38:4-7) "The most High hath created medicines out of the earth: and a wise man will not abhor them...By these he shall cure and shall allay their pains: and of these the apothecary shall make sweet confections and shall make up ointments of health." There is perhaps a modern tendency to look upon herbs as weak and ineffective. Yet there are plants that if you chew on their leaves or eat their berries you will be dead in a matter of minutes. If natural remedies have this great power to destroy the health of the body then they also have the power to heal and restore it. But they must be the right ones and in their proper proportions. O happy the man to whom God reveals the secrets of His wisdom! (Tobit 6:7-9) "Then Tobias asked the angel, and said to him: I beseech thee, brother Azarias, tell me what remedies are these things good for, which thou hast bid me keep of the fish? And the angel, answering, said to him...the gall is good for anointing the eyes, in which there is a white speck, and they shall be cured." One thing people must take care to avoid is the temptation to use natural remedies in a superstitious or magical way. Far from helping the situation, it would only make things worse. If any of these things work, it is only because they are in direct contact with God’s Will. And God’s Will overrides everything. As St. Hildegard writes, (Causae et Curae) "The medications given below were prescribed by God to be used against the above named ailments. Either they will heal the person or he will die if God does not will that he be healed." God, of course, can heal us directly without the use of any treatments or physicians but we should first make use of the ordinary means, (Luke 8:43-44) "And there was a certain woman having an issue of blood twelve years, who had [spent] all her [living] on physicians and could not be healed by any. She came behind [Jesus] and touched the hem of his garment: and immediately the issue of her blood stopped." In the book of Acts we read how, (Acts 19:11-12) "God wrought by the hand of Paul more than common miracles. So that even there were brought from his body to the sick, handkerchiefs and aprons: and the diseases departed from them..." Yet, later in his letter to Timothy Paul advises him to, (1 Timothy 5:23) "use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thy frequent infirmities."

Those who sincerely put the above counsels into practice but still find no cure forthcoming need to recognize the possibility that God is calling them home and therefore they should prepare themselves accordingly, praying, if necessary, for the grace to accept His Will. (Scivias I, 24) "When a person has such fortitude that he burns for Me more ardently than other people, and, aware of the earthly dregs of stinking sin, is active in avoiding the snares of the ancient serpent, I do not take his spirit from his body before his fruits have fully ripened with sweetest fragrance. But if I find one who is of such frailty that in pain of his body and terror of the evil lurker he is too delicate to bear My yoke, I take him away from this world before his soul, wasting away in weakness, begins to dry up. For I know all things. But I want to caution the human race...When I strike them with a sentence of death as if they were about to die, when in fact they are to live for a long time yet, I warn and exhort people to do justice. For no one can have or make for himself any time unless I see usefulness in him and by My will allow him to live..."

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