The scene is our bedroom, late October 1992. Dawn is dying from cancer. (As it turned out, she was only a few days from her "appointed time.") Once again, it has been a restless night. 'Why? What's going on?" I asked. "Those people in there have offered me a larger room, and I want to take them up on the offer," she replied.

I knew now who she was talking about. These people were all deceased family and friends. Dawn knew it; I knew it. But they were the same people who had been "hanging around" for several days. At first there was no shape or identity to them. Then one day they offered her a "ticket for the bus," and the bus was "going to Heaven, of course!" They had come for her, but were waiting; and now they had apparently offered her a "larger room." Later, there would be the "Ritual People" and the "Ritual Planner" coming to plan a "welcoming."

It seems clear that Dawn's reference to the offer of a "larger room" was a metaphorical statement with at least two profound meanings. First, here was a woman very much at home with the Scriptures, very aware and accepting of her dying. Any parallel between her desire to take the offer of a larger room and Jesus' promise in Jn. 14: 1-4 of a special dwelling place being prepared would be no accident. Second, with all the other apparent metaphors being shared, it seemed she was expressing a certain readiness and eagerness to go.

Charlie, on the other hand, was in his early 80's, blind and nearly deaf, dying with cardiovascular disease, abandoned by a family that seemed to be retaliating for his abuse and abandonment of them; alone in a care center, angry at his lot in life, upset at the world and incensed at something called God. After I introduced myself by virtually screaming into his one "good" ear and gained permission to place an assisted-hearing device over his head, we began to talk. Or rather I began to listen to the anger.

Finally, getting ready to take my leave, I risked inquiring whether Charlie would like a prayer. "It's up to you! Don't matter none to me!" came Charlie's patently angry reply. Aware of the limits of tolerance before me, I intoned a brief prayer, alluding to Jn. 14:1-4 ("I go to prepare a place for you"). At first there was no manifest reaction; but then I noticed a slight tear at the corner of one eye-a tear that seemed to catalyze a most remarkable statement: "I never had much room for God in my life; so I don't know if he has a room for me or not." We talked about the God of forgiveness, the God of second and third and multiple chances. We prayed again, for forgiveness.

Later that evening, Charlie asked for the hospice nurse. When she arrived he said to her, "He's still here, isn't he?" Not sure what Charlie was talking about, she asked him to explain. Charlie responded: "That man has been sitting here all night. He's waiting for me to go with him. I think it's time for us to go." Charlie died within the hour.

Two very different people: Dawn, who consciously strove to live the Gospel her whole life; Charlie, who admittedly denied and denigrated the same Gospel his entire life. Both, at the end of life haying very similar experiences of the living Gospel in the midst of dying. Charlie and Dawn finding hope in the symbolic language of Scripture; Dawn, a devoted Catholic; Charlie, a fallen-away Mormon. Charlie and Dawn speaking their own symbolic language of readiness to die, to move, to make a change, to go with the unseen, acknowledging the presence of the mysterious but most comforting Other. Charlie and Dawn, only two out of countless stories that could be told here.

How do we account for this phenomenon? Some, of course, will write it all off as hallucinatory, drug-induced behavior. Although Dawn was taking some pain medication, she was as coherent and oriented as ever; Charlie was taking no pain medication whatsoever. At the risk of over-simplification, let us just say it's the poetry of the dying that is happening here.

When Dawn requested to be wheeled down the hall, wanting to go to the larger room, or spoke of accepting a ticket for the bus; when Charlie spoke of the man waiting for him to go; when Kurt asked his friend to get his airline ticket; when Frank asked his wife to hitch up the horses ("Can't you see them? They are looking in the window. It's time for me to go. Hitch them up!")—the dying were speaking in metaphorical language—a poetry of the dying.

John Savant has cogently pointed out: "One misperception of metaphor sees it as a kind of intellectual game in which we are rewarded for identifying apparent correspondences between unlike things... Such a limitation of the term falls woefully short of the radical meaning and role of metaphor-an activity Aristotle called the highest function of the mind" ("Of Sacrament and Poetry," Am., 3/20).

At one level the poetry of the dying appears to fit the "misperception" Savant speaks of-"identifying apparent correspondences between unlike things." After all, the symbolism of riding on a bus, plane or horse and wagon in order to travel to one's death, one's God, presents us with perhaps the ultimate in "unlike things." But there is more to this picture.

If metaphor is the "highest function of the mind," as Aristotle said; if the poet-philosopher king is the most exalted in Plato's Republic; and if full understanding of Jesus' call to discipleship depends on penetrating his metaphoric parable-based teachings, then what we often experience with the dying is precious and prescient understanding of the divine.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, in his book Knowledge and the Sacred, laments that knowledge in the post-industrial age has become so empiricized and scientized that there is no longer any place for God language. But something strange happens during the last days and hours of life. The dying, as they move closer and closer to the life beyond this one, begin to see (often in a very literal way) that other dimension-a dimension that the rest of us must simply await our turn to see what they see, to hear what they hear.

John Savant rightly notes that it is "not so much likeness or correspondence as un-likeness that explains the energy and productivity of metaphor.. .that generates the true 'transference' of meaning from the dimension of mind and concept to the more comprehensive and irreducible levels of feeling, memory, dream, sensation, intuition and being itself.. .what poets would call 'resonance' ...the validation of reality at the deepest levels of our being..."

Annie barely survived a plane crash that took the life of her husband and the pilot. Mormon missionaries, they were flying into a remote Alaskan post when the plane went down in a forest, breaking nearly every bone in her body. After three months in a near-coma state and after much reconstructive surgery, one evening Annie began to talk As she gained strength a few nights later, I said to her, "Annie, you have survived something that few people have been able to do!" Smiling broadly she exclaimed with enthusiasm, "It was a beautiful experience!"

Annie's mother, who was sitting on the other side of the bed, interjected with disbelief, "Beautiful?" Inviting Annie to share more of the tale, I asked "What was beautiful, Annie?" Without hesitation she said, "As the animals and I were flying through and up out of the forest, it was so peaceful, so gorgeous, so warm, so safe and free!" A stillness suffused the room as Annie, a living miracle, re-lived the memory of her near death experience. Not wanting to disturb the sacredness of this moment, I risked one more question. "Annie, why did you come back?" Looking me right in the eye, she replied: "Uncle Paul told me to; he said I had more work to do-that I needed to return to finish what Dave and I had started, that it was not yet time for me. The animals and I were flying to Heaven, and we almost made it!"

Annie's sister, who was listening intently to this account from her perch on a window well, exclaimed: "My God, isn't that exactly what we've always been taught? It's Uncle Paul and the saints; it's the sacredness of all life; it's heaven itself, and you've seen it all, Annie! Guess I need to re-examine things and get back to church; I thought it was all a bunch of poppycock!"

For Annie's sister the metaphoric tale of that near-death experience resonated at the deepest level with a truth no longer to be denied-a transformative moment. The transformative moment is what we all risk losing by ignoring the language of the dying or, worse yet, by considering invalid what they are trying to tell us. Those who have the courage to share the metaphoric experience of coming near death, and those who are encouraged to share t}us awareness, provide for those who will listen the closest thing we have to proof of a life after the present one.

Somehow, in a very mysterious way that perhaps can be "explained" only as a function of the "collective unconscious" and the individual subconscious, there is more than symbolism at work in the near-death experience or in awareness of approaching death. In hindsight Dawn's encounter with the "Ritual Planner" who had come to plan "Ritual No. 7," along with the Ritual People and their multi-colored flags, suggests that this woman (who had no conscious awareness of being one-quarter Sioux) was experiencing something beyond symbolism in her dying days. Indeed, it appears she had encountered her paternal grandmother's Oglala Sioux Nation. Similarly, Peter, a young man dying of AIDS, suddenly speaking in the Danish language of his ancestors-a language he had never spoken before in his life-appears to have connected at a subconscious and collective-unconscious level with his Danish roots.

Is there any better way to make sense of this multicultural poetry of the dying than to frame it in Jungian terms? The collective unconscious, according to Jolande Jacobi (The Psychology of C. G. Jung), is "the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual." It should not surprise us, therefore, that during the more active dying process, when the things of this world become less and less relevant-a time when this world becomes "more veiled...steadily losing in colour, tone, and passion, the more urgently the inner world calls us."

The blessing for those who keep vigil at the bedside of the dying is that they stand shoulder high in the depths of the mystery of life and death, humanity and divinity, listening and opening themselves to a person's last poetic verse as it is being written. To do otherwise, to ignore what is happening there, to contradict or argue with the reality of the dying, is to miss the whole sense of what Ira Progoff called the moment's "transcendent validity, authenticity, and essential divinity."

Ron Wooten-Green, a chaplain who ministers to the dying in southwest Iowa, has written articles on symbolic language for Vision, Harvest and Sojourners magazines.

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