How to be Invincible

My middle name is Lennart. It was my grandfather’s name. He died three years before I was born, and I want to tell you about one of the last things he ever said.

There is something that happens almost universally with people as they get near to the end: they start to see things.

The Hospice Foundation calls it “near death awareness.”

"[Dying people] may report awareness of their imminent death and express that they will soon be able to see their God or other religious figure or see loved friends and relatives who have preceded them in death. It is not uncommon for dying people to speak about preparing to take a trip, traveling, or activities related to travel, such as getting on a plane or packing a bag. Many dying persons find this awareness comforting, particularly the prospect of reunification."

https://hospicefoundation.org/Hospice-Care/Signs-of-Approaching-Death

By the time Lennart entered this phase, he couldn’t speak. His condition had gotten to a point where he had to write things on a small paper pad that was kept by his bed.

He was too young to be dying. I mean, in a way anyone is, but he and my grandmother Donnette still had children at home. She, besides being heartbroken about losing the love of her life, was distressed about the rapidly approaching future without him. How would she pay for things? How would she manage caring for three still-dependent children, including one who was special needs? My grandparents shared a deep, rich interest in spirituality, including belief in a life after death. But that was being tested now, with Donnette staring down the unyieldingly-concrete reality of a life alone. When Lennart began to tell her (through scrawled notes) about the things beyond this world that he was seeing, she desperately wanted reassurance.

“Is it true? What we believe, is it all true?” she asked him one night. “Yes.” He wrote in his shaky late-life hand. “All that I’ve seen through the night has shown me.”

“What’s it like?”

Decades later Donnette described this moment to me, showed me his answers on the notepad that she’d kept. And when she told this part of the story she always acted it out. Lennart’s eyes lit up, he smiled widely and silently mouthed the words “it’s wonderful!”

Fearing a long-drawn out death and the emotional and financial toll, but not wanting to lose him, and being worried that the longer he lived the more painful it would be for him, she didn’t know what she wanted to happen. “What are we going to do?” she asked. “What should we be hoping for?” He looked down at his pad and labored to write: “I hope the Lord will use me as is best for everyone.” 

A few days later he was gone, but those words remained, and found their way to me decades later. As soon as I heard that phrase, I realized that it could apply to me too. And it could apply to me even in much more mundane situations. Actually, in just about any situation that I had any kind of distress around. I started to use it, started to repeat it in my head. It was like a tool in my toolbelt, like a legal loophole in the court of consciousness. The spiritual equivalent of pleading the 5th.

Worried about where my career was heading? I hope the Lord will use me as is best for everyone.

Worried about what would happen in my relationships? I hope the Lord will use me as is best for everyone. Uncertain about how I would navigate whatever the current turmoil was? I hope the Lord will use me as is best for everyone.

It was like Tylenol. It soothed incredibly effectively. I didn’t fully understand why it worked, but it did, so I kept using it and other phrases that encapsulated similar sentiments. I would push back on my chaotic mind: “I don’t know what I need,” “care for the morrow,” “talk to my manager,” “I don’t have my lawyer present,” “the Lord is my shepherd.” I would keep a collection of them and rotate through them and repeat them and they would often be the only thing that really kept my head above water. I called them “truths.” Not all truths worked, and I probably couldn’t articulate for you at the time what qualified a phrase to become an effective truth, but I knew one when I came across it.

Now, after a couple decades more life experience and study, I realize the thing they all had in common was: they all had the power to make you invincible. At least temporarily.

I don’t mean invincible like nothing can harm you physically–Lennart’s truth didn’t stop his physical decline, but it puts you in an invincible position. It redirects challenges, and threats, and whatever else your mind serves up away from your finite, flawed capacity to deal with them and places them in the jurisdiction of the infinite. Doing that, even just imagining it in your head, creates this emotional resilience, this deeper undercurrent of peace with how life is going and what life is, that allows you to weather things with an underlying sense of happiness intact. In short, whatever the process is, you learn to trust the process.

And I think that’s the closest you can get to being truly invincible.