A Walk Down the Dock

Stephen on his boat

This is Stephen’s story as told by Ellary Allis. Our “Opening Our Hearts” stories are based on people’s real-life experiences. By sharing these experiences publicly, we hope to help our readers feel less alone in their grief and, ultimately, to aid them in their healing process. In this article, we tell the story of a 75-year-old man diagnosed with arteriosclerosis and his journey around death and dying. 

I’m 75 years young, and two years ago I was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis. I’ve undergone successful coronary artery bypass grafting, a type of surgery that improves blood flow to the heart by connecting, or grafting, healthy arteries or veins to coronary arteries blocked with plaque buildup. It may or may not buy me time. What I do know is that I will die from this.

When I went in for surgery, I asked the surgeon, “Give it to me straight. Even if this surgery is successful, I’m dying, Doc, right?” He looked at me, eyes full of compassion, and said, “Right.”

I saw two roads before me. One was the road of avoidance. I could go on with my life, turning a blind eye to my condition, hoping the surgery would mean I’d live a good while longer. The other was the road of meeting death head-on — doing all I could to reconcile with my past and clear the way so I can leave my attachments behind and dwell in the spiritual essence of life before death. The second is the road I’ve chosen.

I’ve experienced a number of deaths and rebirths during my 75 years on the planet. We all do, after all: transformations in which we shed old skins, environments, relationships, jobs, and start over. Or our lives shift in some way that upends everything.

I was born in Hawaii, and when we were young, my parents moved me and my three sisters to the Bay Area of California, where they raised us. My mother had me when she was just 16. I had a difficult relationship with my father in my youth. I got into trouble with the law when I was a teenager, and when I was 17, my father decided to give me $500 and send me on a one-way trip to Alaska to sort myself out.

I had to figure out how to survive, and I did. I put myself through college. I lived in the wilderness for a time, growing my own vegetables and hunting animals for meat. I got married, and I got divorced. After 16 years in Alaska, I came back to California, and once again started building a new life from scratch.

Stephen’s boat he built in Richmond Point, California

While living in a hippie trailer park in California, I became aware of the Indian guru Rajneesh. A friend played me a recording of Rajneesh giving a talk, and I heard something in his voice that struck a chord with me. I became a disciple of Rajneesh for 16 years. I lived with him in India, and when he moved to a ranch in Oregon, I followed. I decided to leave the community when it became clear to me that Rajneesh was lying to the public about what went on on the ranch. The day I left, I had $70 to my name, and I had to hike 18 miles to the nearest town that had a Greyhound bus leaving for the Bay Area, where my parents lived.

I stayed for a while with my parents at their place in Mill Valley, California, and got myself back on my feet. I worked as a handyman and eventually became a successful contractor. For the past 29 years, I’ve lived on a refurbished fishing boat carved from the trunk of a single redwood tree. I bought the thing for $500, gutted it and built a redwood house on top. When I met my second and current wife Maria, I refurbished a boat for her, and now we live on our boats, parked side by side at a dock in San Francisco.

Reflecting on my life, I’ve undergone a number of dramatic transformations. None, however, comes close to what I’m facing now. Of all the incredible journeys in life, I cannot think of anything that beats death. There’s nothing so dramatic in life as death. Nothing. I want to be present when I die — I want to be there for it. And what I can do now is practice. I can practice looking death in the face and saying, “Welcome.”

I am now in the process of unbecoming being a human being, and I’m learning the stuff that is discovered (I think!) by everyone when they are in the last stages of dying — after all attachments to living life as we know it drop from the sheer exhaustion of holding onto them.

After I received my diagnosis, I began voraciously reading literature dealing with death and dying. I read everything I could get my hands on. I scoured the internet for resources and came across the Conscious Dying Institute, founded by my now friend Tarron Estes.

The mission of The Conscious Dying Institute is to create a new wisdom-based culture of healing caregivers and professionals who elevate the experience of end-of-life care. Through The Conscious Dying Institute, I became an end-of-life doula. I also attended a retreat called the Life/Death Lodge: Forgiveness, Apology, Reconciliation. The retreat gives participants an opportunity to do a life review, reflecting on their experiences from childhood up to and through the process of confronting death. We took solo walks in the wilderness, examined traumas and wounds, dove into the heart of what it means to forgive and reconcile. I’ve done this work in the name of clearing anything blocking me from approaching death with open eyes and an open heart.

Stephen and his wife Maria

Another thing I’ve done in preparation for my death was to buy death shrouds for both myself and my cat. My wife Maria went with me to a fabric store in San Francisco, and I spent the afternoon searching for the perfect piece of cloth. Tears poured from my eyes as I rolled out bolt after bolt of cloth: There I was, in the middle of a bustling city, touching the very cloth that would cover my body after I died. How incredibly intimate and respectful it feels to sense and deeply know that I love my existence so much that I am preparing to wash my sacred body, anoint it with oils, dress my body in beauty for its last journey in this life. It’s quite the piece of cloth alright! And I’ll give it but a few moments in the crematorium and then it will become ash like the rest me.

One of the most profound things I’ve done so far is to make amends to everyone I’d caused harm to over the course of my life. It’s been a healing experience to go through a life review and contact people, sometimes 50 years after falling out of touch, to say “I’m sorry.” I’ll share one of those stories with you here.

When I was 46 I got in a horrible fight with my then girlfriend and punched a hole in a sheetrock wall near her. I immediately realized I’d been out of my mind and out of control. We stopped being together sometime later — not directly because of my anger but because we were constantly fighting. When we parted, I said I was sorry for my anger and physical expression of it around her, but I was still raw from the ongoing conflict and knew it wasn’t a truly heartfelt apology. A few months later, I joined a Men Against Violence Towards Women group for a year and learned to “walk away and be safe” when I got triggered.

That was 38 years ago. I wrote a letter to her two years ago, sincerely apologizing, pouring my heart into the apology. She wrote back with understanding, and I was finally able to feel that I had truly closed a chapter in my life and that the final closure was a peaceful one.

I’ve done a lot of work to get to a place of acceptance around dying. It was important work, but, truth be told, none of it stopped the tears or quelled the anxieties. It was frustrating to feel that none of the psychological and spiritual work I’d done—the years of therapy, the hours of meditation, the Life/Death Lodge, the years with Rajneesh— delivered the peace that I yearned for. I was still lying in my boat at night, wrestling with my fear.

Stephen reflecting on his peace and acceptance around his approaching death

I could not have predicted the moment that the sense of peace and acceptance that so eluded me came, all at once, in a rush. One evening, I took a walk down the dock where my boat is parked. While walking down the dock, I was suddenly overcome with a sense of utter presence, on a level I had never experienced. At that moment, my thoughts were quieted, there was no fear of the future, and I tapped into an overwhelming feeling of being whole and part of the whole. It’s this state of presence that I want to share with those who are facing death —  with everyone, really, because death is a journey that every single person will have to take at some point.

I believe that the psychological and spiritual work I’ve done is both connected and not connected at all to the state of presence that I’m now able to access. There’s nothing I can do in my state of everyday consciousness that will foster or plant the soil for presence to occur. It’s not something you earn. However, if I hadn’t done all of that work, I wouldn’t have been able to access it. I had to remove my internal blocks.

At this point, I vacillate hundreds of times a day between the normal state of ego consciousness and this state of complete presence. I respect the ego state of consciousness very much. We need it in order to live in this world. It allows us to do the things we need to do in order to survive and fulfill responsibilities; it allows me to drive my truck, it’s allowed me to build careers, to refurbish my boat, to get myself out of bad situations and to create better ones. But that ego state of consciousness doesn’t run the show anymore for me. And that is an incredible blessing.

Presence is not a state you can chase. If you try and tug on the thread of presence to pull it close, it tugs in the opposite direction. It rushes in when you let go. In the end, if we want to be fully present for death, we all have to learn how to let go of the attachments that keep us tethered to our human state. The world is so beautiful. All I want is for people to drop the trappings that keep them from being present and come for a walk down the dock with me.