Marguerite Duras, the French writer and film director, was an alcoholic. She traveled back and forth between home and a rehabilitation center. She wrote of those days, which made up most of the days in her life: “Every morning I have to decide if I drink today or not. It means I have to decide every morning if I want to die or I want to live on that day.” Me, too. I ask myself many times per day if I want to see vision with Holy Spirit or continue to perceive ego’s guilty thoughts. It means I need to decide if I want to be alive or want to be dead.
Since 1994, the year I met A Course in Miracles, I have witnessed many people who are taking off the shell called body and flying freely as spirit. Several years ago, one Course student I knew was facing her last stage of cancer. She was only in her 30’s, a prominent visual artist and a writer. The beauty of her shining eyes, her smooth and white skin, her elegant hands remained. But her body was wasting away. Her height was much reduced. Her spine was bent. She breathed only with much effort. She was constantly in pain and could barely move anymore. A few months before, she decided to write her ”last words,” but found she could no longer type or grip a pen.
I commuted to her bedside every few days. Kneeling down, bending my upper body, and bringing my ear to her lips, I tried to listen to her.
“Well, but there is still a body, isn’t there?” she whispered to me over and over again with shallow breaths. “Whenever I fall asleep, I wish I will die while sleeping.” Yet, her mind would will more and more words through that tiny cracking voice. “But unluckily I wake up. I find my body. So painful to have a body. Even just lying down, very painful. I need to breathe because my body is still here.” She was using an oxygen tube and each breath looked very hard.
The main reason she asked me to come to see her is that she had thought that since I was a miracle worker, I could help her to take off her body as soon as possible.
“Please give me a healing. I want to die now. You can let me go, can’t you?”
(This essay first appeared in Miracles Magazine Vol.14~No.2~Issue 80~March – April 2015)
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