Pining and longing
A friend of mine had a husband who was dying of cancer. He had worked hard all his life, read his newspaper and watched his television. She took him for one last trip in their open-topped MG around the Ayrshire coast. At one point, looking out over the ocean towards Ailsa Craig, he sighed and said, ‘Imagine having to leave all this.’ He had only noticed the beauty around him when he was about to depart it forever.
Apparently this is not unusual. According to psychologist Rollo May, ‘When people are on the verge of death they think, strangely enough, about beauty. Many of these thoughts are about how beautiful is this earth that they are about to leave.’ Oscar Wilde caught poignantly this awareness of beauty before death, in his poem Ballad of Reading Gaol, about a man waiting to be hanged:
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
Writer and theologian Matthew Fox comments on all of this: ‘How wonderful it would be if we incorporated this awareness daily into our lives before we die.’
When Spitfire designer Reginald J. Mitchell was dying of cancer, he received a last visit from the wife of his chief test-pilot and close friend, George Pickering. ‘Don’t let us talk about flying today,’ Gladys suggested.
‘Why should we?’ Mitchell replied. ‘There are more important things in the world than flying.’ He gazed at his favourite flowers, all in full summer bloom. ‘There is so much beauty all around us. I wish I had spent more time appreciating beauty. It is too late now, but tell George that there are more important things in life than speed. Tell him to look at the beautiful things while he has time.’