Bird Droppings May 24, 2025
To die a happy death:
I taught high school for nearly twenty years, and after summer break, another year ahead, hopefully doing some part-time work. I am starting my writing day a bit later than normal since we had grandbabies over and I am plum tuckered out. Over the past few years, I have been searching for my older thoughts, editing, cleaning up, and often finding a drop that ties in with my thoughts today or even somewhere I went yesterday. Only a few days ago, I got in a discussion on fearing death, which led me on a search for an email and some thoughts I jotted down many years ago. Since that note nearly twenty years back, my friend has lost several loved ones, and I have lost both my father-in-law and father, and many around us have as well. So, digging in my archives yesterday, I started reading a thought from a friend who was trying to generate answers for his niece based on how to die a happy death.
I was a bit taken aback, sitting here only a few days ago, not truly giving death much of a thought, having the attitude that when it happens, it happens, and for some number of years now, I have lost any fear of death. It has been some time since I realized we need to live each day, it isn’t about death and what is next, it is about what is now and where we are on our journey. It is not about anyone else’s, though we constantly interact and intertwine in my cosmic sort of jigsaw puzzle of explaining life. I had several answers to share, from a mixed bag of intellectuals across the country, when I responded to my friend’s note. I used to sit in Geometry in tenth grade with the first responder, and her thought was this.
“A contented life. One that has (at least partially) fulfilled personal dreams. “ 5/28/06 – A child psychologist from California
As I thought about it, dreams and aspirations are at the center of many of our hearts and souls. I have always wanted to go to Tahiti, however, I probably never will for one reason or another. It all goes back to my first reading of a Michener book, “Hawaii,” and how the original settlers sailed from Tahiti. In my romanticism, I know it is not the tropical paradise I dream of, and I will probably settle for South Florida and Sanibel Island, which today would be fine. My next responder is a mom and teacher from Texas whom I have met and known for eight or ten years through correspondence.
“I have always told myself that there is a difference between three powerful things: 1) mistakes learned from, 2) regret, and 3) a higher God that leaves certain things out of my control (thank goodness)…but anyway, ideally, I want to die having learned from my mistakes, having passed control over in areas of my life in which I have no control, and to die without regret. These are the three potentially negative “things” that will, even during my life, make me lose sleep. All in all…if we could live surrounded by love, and die surrounded by love (which will happen, of course, if we give just as much)…that would be a happy death.” 5/28/06 – A teacher in Texas
I have read and reread this one several times, and her comments are always deep and heartfelt. “Having learned from my mistakes,” this is a life lesson many should heed. Often, even within the past few days, I have addressed this with several students, take and learn from your mistakes, and move forward, and or backward, as a good friend would say direction is not the key, but movement, and in our world of multiple dimensions, it could be anywhere. My mother responded to the question, and this was a year before my father passed away. It is interesting when your mom is an avid reader of your essays and thoughts, as I am of her poetry and writing.
“Living a life that is fruitful and true makes for a happy death. Like your father has said many times, there is nothing in this world that he still wants to do. He has been there, done it, and seen it, and he always did it with love, peace, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control as his companions.” 5/28/06, My mom, Esther S. Bird, author, poet, and great-grandmother from Loganville, Georgia
My father at that time was eighty-four and had been all over the world teaching Loss Control and Safety Management. In South Africa, a headline once proclaimed he had saved millions of lives in the South African mines. Great Britain proclaimed him the Billy Graham of Safety in news headlines. My dad started to be a medical missionary, and I was the culprit who sent him to the steel mills for work. As a baby, I was very ill and hospitalized numerous times with seizures and a stoppage of breathing. My dad had to go to work instead of school. By chance, he found good-paying work in the open hearth of Lukens Steel Mill, and until they needed a Safety guy with a college diploma, he was a brick layer in the open hearth. He was offered a job as a Safety man, which, being nonunion, meant less pay, but he thought it had better hours and an office with no more than twenty-eight hundred-degree furnaces to contend with.
Shortly thereafter, in the early 1960s, his first book changed modern Safety Management. In 1965, he coined and then registered the trademark statement “Total Loss Control,” and the rest is history. So instead of saving souls in Africa in a mission hospital, he was saving lives worldwide through his programs and insights. I began reading the next responders’ poems several months ago and now, several hundred later, find them exhilarating.
“For me, the idea of a happy death is one where I’ve given my best effort, stayed current with conflict resolution, and being in the right place in God’s eyes.” 5/29/06 Poet from Puget Sound, Washington
I have come to read daily numerous blogs and poems posted by this wonderful person; she has many life-hindering illnesses and still features a giant smiley face as her calling card. She is such a powerful human spirit. I will end today with another responder on a regular basis, one who thinks far deeper than most teenagers and surprises me with responses that go far beyond her few years of experience. Today, she is a karate instructor in Georgia, and I would never have guessed that twenty years ago.
“I also enjoyed your droppings earlier about a happy death. I like to think of it this way, ‘Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you will be criticized either way.’ Eleanor Roosevelt, 5/29/06, A former student at Loganville High School, Loganville, Georgia
I was wondering, with all the death in the news here and abroad, is death ever happy? Yesterday, I read a blog from a young fellow in the army, and the remembrance of a buddy killed a few days earlier in Iraq. Someone posted a series of crosses on a back country road where three teenagers, a few years back, hit a tree at a hundred miles an hour. I have attended many funerals over the years and often will do my best to avoid them if I can. I have in recent years been to my father’s, father-in-law’s, several students, friends and other family members’ memorials. When I listen to the comments of joy and the celebration of life rather than mourning death, it is so different. It is so difficult to lose someone, but what if they have done what they intended to do, and know that. What if they were happy and knew there was meaning to their life? I recall a death some twenty-five years ago where a young man came to me the last time I saw him, unaware of his surroundings, for I held his hand through the night, watching monitors blink, showing his brain functioning was going and was irreversible. I sat and did last rites in my way as I was holding his hand, though there was no movement from him or acknowledgement, only monitors blinking and the respirator’s movement in his lungs.
At my last meeting with this young man, he shook my hand and said Not this time, Mr. Bird. Normally, he would extend his hand and pull it away, laughing at me. This time was different as he extended his hand, smiling, grasping mine with his other hand, saying thank you for everything, and we parted ways. He was riding in another car, going home from a day of tubing in North Georgia. I never spoke with him again. I know to the marrow of my bones he was happy in death. He was always happy-go-lucky, always joking, the life of the party; he was the group clown. When we gathered after the funeral, each of us said something similar; he had said goodbye to us each in a different way. That night, my son left a yellow sticky note for me on my computer that I shall never forget.
“Life is about the journey, not the destination,” Steven Tyler, Aerosmith.
I have thought about that note daily, every day, since I have listened to the Aerosmith CD version of Awesome many hundreds of times for that line. Somewhere in a box, I still have that yellow sticky note, over twelve years old now, folded away as a reminder about how precious each second is. We honor our veterans who died to provide us with ideas and thoughts about freedom and liberty over the years. I want to end with, what if we could have world peace? What if? It always seems like a what if? Please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts, and always give thanks, namaste.
My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
docbird
The daily meanderings of a teacher 