Grimm's Fairy Tale

As the Grimm's story goes...a man becomes the father of his 13th child, a son. Realizing he is depleted of resources he goes out onto the road to find a godfather for his son but the first person he comes upon is the Lord God and the man rejects him as godfather because the man does not like how God proportions wealth, leaving some very poor. The next he also rejects, the devil, because he leads man astray. He finally settles on the third person he sees and that is Death. He likes Death because he "makes all things equal". Noone escapes death.

So when the young godson reaches an appropriate age, the godfather tells him he will make him a famous physician and he will be quite successful if only he does as he is told. When he is called to see a patient, death will be there. If death is at the head of the bed then the physician may give the patient this herb that grows in the forrest and he will be healed. If however death is at the foot of the bed, the physcian must tell the patient that all remedies will be useless and no physician in the world can heal him. So the physician agrees and becomes very famous.

So famous that when the king gets ill, the physician is called to his bedside. Death is already there at the foot of the bed. The physician thinks if he can save the king he can become rich and inherit the kingdom so he turns the king around in bed and gives him the herb. The king lives. The godfather is furious and warns him never to betray him again.

But then the king's daughter becomes ill and the king pleads with kingdom that whoever should heal his daughter will inherit her hand in marriage and the kingdom. When the physician arrives he sees death at the foot of the bed. Without thinking he picks up the princess , turns her around and gives her the herb and saves her life.

With that the godfather takes him down to the underworld where there are many candles buring of all sizes. These candles represent the lives of everyone. The small candles are those of newborns and the very old and the large candles are of those in middlle years who are married. Which one am I, asks the phsyciian. Godfather shows him a very small candle ready to burn out. The physician panics and pleads with his godfather to have mercy and put his light onto a larger candle. I cannot do that says death; I cannot burn a new candle without another going out. But death pretends to move the physician's light to another candle but lets it fall to the ground and the physician drops dead.

The Heroic Pathway

In exploring the heroic journey and its psychological strucure I have come to understand more deeply how that structure breaks down at the end of life. The more one clings to the personal heroic structure one has created, the more difficult one's death is. I will be using methods of analytic psychology and Jung's concept of active imagination to explore more fully this transformation at the end of life based on my experience as a nurse and a psychotherapist.

Denial of Death

The 1974 book Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is the culmination of years of study into the psychological impact of death on our lives. Working in hospice one is allowed the opportunity to see both the destructive and transfomative influences of death.

Carl Jung once wrote, "Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life...For seen in psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal" (Jung, CW 13, par. 68).