She Taught Me How to Die

By Gary R. Uremovich, DMin, PhD

What a 91-year-old artist taught me about wholeness, aging, dignity, and the courage to remain fully alive.

Some people teach us by instruction, some by example, and a smaller number teach us simply by the way they inhabit their lives. Gunni was one of those people.

She was ninety-one when she died. Even writing that sentence gives me pause, because age has a peculiar way of swallowing identity in our culture. Once someone reaches ninety, the number itself often becomes the story. We hear “ninety-one” and begin, almost unconsciously, constructing a biography of decline: frailty, dependence, slowing, diminished capacity. But ninety-one was not who Gunni was. It was simply how long she had spent becoming herself.

She was born, raised, and educated in Sweden. Gunni was a celebrated artist, a widow, a friend, and a woman with a charismatic personality. She not only noticed beauty but created it. She loved all kinds of people. She had opinions, preferences, humor, and energy. She was fully herself, and that distinction became more important to me as I watched her approach the end of her life.

Just several months before she died, Gunni was diagnosed with inoperable Stage IV colon cancer. She declined treatment of the cancer. With that in mind, Gunni had decided she wanted to show people how to die. I have thought about that remarkable sentence many times. Death is the great disrupter of human certainty. We spend much of our life controlling, planning, treating, preventing, organizing, and preparing for death. When it eventually arrives, it exposes how limited our control has always been. How, then, can one person teach another how to die?

Watching Gunni, I came to understand that she was not teaching us a technique for dying. She was showing us the posture she had taken toward life itself. She was curious, engaged, attentive, and unwilling to withdraw from the world simply because time was growing short.

When Age Becomes the Story

I have spent much of my professional life thinking about health, human development, illness, spirituality, and the complicated relationship between body and personhood. Aging brings all of those questions together, and it also exposes some of our cultural prejudices.

Ageism is particularly difficult to confront because it often disguises itself as humor, concern, or even praise. We describe an older person as “still sharp,” as though clarity at eighty-five is surprising. We congratulate someone for “still getting around.” We say an energetic older woman is “young for her age,” as though we can't imagine that engaging actively in life might also belong to old age itself. Even our compliments can contain an insult.

The assumption beneath such language is that youth is the standard against which we measure human life, while aging is treated as decline and irrelevance. We try to resist it, slow it, disguise it, and sometimes even deny it. We praise longevity in the abstract while remaining uneasy with the visible realities of growing old.

Gunni quietly challenged that way of thinking simply by continuing to be fully herself. At ninety-one, she did not need to imitate fifty to matter. Her age did not diminish her value; it was part of the life she had lived, the person she had become, and the presence she still offered to others.

That helped me see a distinction that now seems obvious. Aging well is not successfully imitating youth. It is learning to authentically inhabit the life one has. The anti-aging advocate asks, “How can I keep from becoming old?” The wholeness viewpoint asks, “How can I continue to be fully alive as I become old?” Those are very different questions.

At 91 years, Gunni was definitely old, and there is no reason to apologize for the word. Old is not an insult unless we make it one. Her body had changed. Her world became smaller in some ways. She eventually needed increasing help from others as the massive tumor consumed her strength. Yet none of that suppressed her personhood. Dependence did not remove her identity, and that may be one of the most important lessons aging teaches us.

Western culture has elevated independence almost to a moral virtue. We admire self-sufficiency and often speak as though needing help represents a failure of adulthood. But human beings are never truly independent. The infant depends upon the parent. The patient depends upon the clinician. The clinician depends upon nurses, technicians, pharmacists, researchers, and generations of accumulated knowledge. The grieving person depends upon someone willing to sit nearby.

Interdependence is not a weakness introduced by aging. It is the condition of being human. Old age simply makes it more visible and harder to ignore.

Watching Gunni receive care challenged the assumption that the giver is strong while the receiver is weak. Receiving care graciously can require its own form of courage because it means acknowledging limitation and allowing another person into one’s vulnerability. Gunni did not stop being herself because others helped her. She was not a collection of deficits. She was Gunni.

That distinction is important in healthcare, caregiving, and ordinary friendship. A diagnosis may describe part of a person’s condition, and limitations may shape what they can or cannot do, but neither defines who they are. A person is always more than the circumstances of illness, dependency, or age.

The Artist’s Way of Seeing

Artists understand something the rest of us fail to recognize. That seeing is an active practice. Two people can stand before the same landscape and inhabit entirely different worlds. The artist notices what others overlook—the play of shadow, the balance of proportion, the texture of a surface, the tension of contrast, the subtle changes of color and light.

Gunni brought that same attentiveness to people. She did not simply meet them; she noticed them. She seemed to recognize that every person carried a particular history, character, and way of seeing the world. Their differences did not separate them from her. They intrigued her.

She collected people the way an artist collects color. Each person was different, bringing another shade, another texture, another possibility to the composition of her life. Artists and neighbors, old friends and new ones, people she had known for decades and others she had only recently met all found a place on her broad human canvas.That seems important to me now because wholeness begins, in part, with paying attention. We rush through vistas of beauty because we assume another opportunity will come. We miss the incredible portraits of humanity all around us. We divide our attention among appointments, devices, obligations, and worries. We live much of life preparing for whatever comes next. Many of us stop living long before we die. Not Gunni.

The people we love teach us what to notice. After they are gone, sometimes we continue seeing through their eyes. That may be one of the more profound forms of immortality.

She Wanted to Show Us How to Die

When Gunni was diagnosed, she said she wanted to show people how to die. Most of us spend considerable energy avoiding the subject. Modern medicine has made avoidance easier in some ways because it has accomplished extraordinary things. Illnesses once routinely fatal can now be treated. Pain can be relieved. Disabilities can be accommodated. Lives can be prolonged in ways unimaginable only a few generations ago.

These are remarkable achievements, but medicine’s success can unintentionally create the impression that death represents failure. It does not. Eventually the question cannot remain, “How do we prevent death?” Another question emerges: How do we remain fully human as death approaches?

Gunni seemed to understand that. She was not celebrating death. She was refusing to allow death to strip meaning from the final part of life. Dying well is sometimes romanticized by people who are not dying, but real dying can involve weakness, discomfort, dependence, frustration, uncertainty, and fear. Wholeness does not require pretending otherwise. Despite the hideous process of being consumed by cancer, just two weeks prior to her death, she said, “I wish everyone could be as happy as I am.” Her joy was in knowing she was loved and being able to love in return.

I don’t want you to misunderstand. A whole person can be afraid. A whole person can grieve. Faith does not eliminate sorrow, acceptance does not mean enthusiasm, and courage does not require fearlessness. The goal is not to perform a perfect death. It is to remain authentically human within the reality of dying.

That is what I saw in Gunni.

Aging as a Developmental Task

We speak extensively about childhood development, adolescence, career development, marriage, and parenthood, but our developmental language becomes strangely limited in old age. Later life is described more often in terms of decline than growth, and I think that is a mistake.

Aging asks profound developmental questions. Who am I when work no longer defines me? Who am I when my body changes? Who am I when my memory fails? Who am I when my spouse dies? Who am I when I can no longer do what I once enjoyed? Who am I when I need help for my basic needs? And eventually, who am I when I am dying?

These are questions of identity at its deepest level. If I believe I am valuable because of what I accomplish, aging becomes threatening. If I believe I am lovable only when I am useful, dependence becomes humiliating. If I equate dignity with control, dying becomes a vicious assault on the self.

But if identity rests somewhere deeper, aging may become not only a process of losing but also a process of uncovering our identity. Eventually many of the roles by which we introduce ourselves begin to fall away: profession, position, physical capacity, status. Underneath them is a more elemental question: Am I still worthy of love simply because I am here?

Gunni’s life answered boldly, yes.

There is also an interesting reversal near the end of life. We think that we are caring for the person who is dying, and of course we do. We make calls, bring food, sit nearby, manage practical details, and try to reduce suffering. But often the dying person is giving something to us as well. Clarification of priorities.

Mortality clarifies. When time becomes visibly limited, trivial distinctions lose some of their power. Old arguments appear smaller. Status becomes less impressive. Possessions reveal their temporary nature. Questions of love become larger. Who loves me? Whom have I loved? What matters? What lasts? What deserves another day of my life?

The dying person becomes a teacher of proportion, quietly revealing what matters and what does not.

Perhaps that is one reason death makes us uncomfortable. It does more than remind us that life will end; it forces us to examine how we are spending the life we still have. Gunni wanted to teach me how to die. Instead, she made me look more closely at how I am living.

Lasagna and the Communion of Memory

Six days after Gunni died, friends gathered in our home for our regular Thursday night community dinner. We served lasagna because it had been one of her favorite meals. The 30 or so people attending that meal knew Gunni and loved her.

There was something profoundly ordinary about the evening. Death had entered our lives, but life had not stopped. People still needed to eat. The table still had to be set. Someone carried in a dish. Someone told a story. Someone laughed. Someone remembered. Grief was present, but it did not distract us from our love for Gunni and each other. Love and gratitude were there too.

At the end of the evening, I read a poem I had written called Have You Met Gunni? As I read it, the title began to mean something more to me. It became less a question of whether someone had known Gunni and more a question of what it truly means to really encounter another human being.

We casually pass through the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. Most encounters are brief and leave little trace. A few are different. A few people alter how we see the world, ourselves, or the life still before us. Gunni was one of those people for many of us.

That may be one of the most amazing gifts of a relationship: another person can leave something within us that she may never have fully known she gave.

Beyond Preservation

Much contemporary discussion about aging is framed around preservation. Preserve cognition. Preserve mobility. Preserve muscle and bone. Preserve independence. These are worthy goals, and I do not dismiss them. Exercise matters. Nutrition matters. Cognitive engagement matters. Social connection matters. Good medical care matters.

But preservation cannot be our entire philosophy of aging because eventually something can’t be preserved. If successful aging means preventing loss, then every person ultimately fails. We need a larger and healthier concept.

I have increasingly come to think of aging not merely as preservation but as an expansion of our identity. An older person has lived through several versions of the world. She remembers people no one else remembers. She carries stories that may exist nowhere except in human memory. She has loved, failed, adapted, endured, grieved, forgiven, changed, and begun again.

Old age can therefore contain a kind of depth unavailable earlier in life. Age does not automatically produce wisdom, but a life of experience provides more material for wisdom to form. A ninety-year-old is not a defective forty-year-old. She is a ninety-year-old, and that stage of life deserves to be understood on its own terms.

Gunni helped me see that more clearly.

The Courage to Become Old

I am aging too, and that sentence becomes less theoretical each year. At some point, aging stops being something that happens to other people and becomes personal.

The body provides reminders. Recovery takes longer. Friends become patients. Some become widows and widowers. Some die. The horizon changes. But my vision of priorities and meaning becomes more acute.

When I was twenty, death was intellectually certain but psychologically remote. It is no longer remote. Oddly, that does not make life less meaningful. For me, it makes life more purposeful.

There are only so many mornings, only so many dinners with friends, only so many conversations with my wife, Viveca, only so many books left to write. There are only so many opportunities to tell someone I love them, forgive something unimportant, notice something beautiful, or stop wasting emotional energy on matters that do not deserve it.

Mortality creates scarcity, and scarcity creates value. A day matters precisely because days are not infinite.

Gunni’s death did not make me more preoccupied with dying. It made me more attentive to living.

She Taught Me How to Die

I return to Gunni’s original intention. She wanted to show us how to die, and I think she succeeded, but not because she provided a formula. She showed me that learning how to die begins long before that final illness or accident.

We learn when we discover that we are more than our productivity. We learn when we allow other people to care for us. We learn when we stop confusing independence with worth. We learn when we accept the body’s limitations without despising the body. We learn when we practice gratitude for ordinary things and when we make peace with some degree of remaining unfinished.

Most of all, we learn how to die when we learn how to live without pretending that we are immortal.

Perhaps that is what wholeness finally means. Not perfection, but integration. It is allowing strength and weakness, independence and dependence, joy and grief, vitality and mortality to belong to the same human story.

Much of early life is devoted to accumulation: knowledge, relationships, credentials, possessions, responsibilities, and identity formation. Later life asks us to practice another art—the art of letting go of the unimportant stuff. That may be among the most sophisticated developmental tasks of all.

Gunni practiced it in front of us. Not perfectly and not theoretically, but humanly. She became dependent without becoming insignificant. She became old without becoming invisible. She approached death without allowing death to become the defining fact of her life.

When she died at ninety-one, what mattered was not simply that she had survived ninety-one years. What mattered was that she had lived them. She painted. She loved. She laughed. She grieved. She loved her late husband, Bob. She received care. She remained herself.

Then she left to start another adventure.

I miss her, but gratitude now stands beside grief. I am grateful that our lives crossed. I am grateful for her ability to create vibrant paintings of art and of humanity. I am grateful for her personality, and the way she resisted becoming merely “an elderly woman” in my memory.

She wanted to show us how to die. She did, but her final lesson turned out to be larger than death. She taught me that the opposite of aging is not youth. Aging is life continuing to grow, and our task is not to defeat death but to fully inhabit life.

To remain curious. To remain connected. To keep creating. To accept care when it is needed. To retain dignity without demanding invulnerability. To allow ourselves to become old without apology. And eventually, when the time comes, to release the life we have spent so many years becoming.

I once thought learning how to die would mean becoming less afraid of death. Perhaps someday it will. For now, Gunni has taught me something more useful.

She has made me less afraid of growing old and more determined to be more fully alive while I am doing it.