This paper examines the idea that dying can be a process of healing, growth, and self-discovery, drawing on three sources: Mwalimu Imara's essay "Dying as the Last Stage of Growth," Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Ira Byock's memoir Dying Well. The paper argues that Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, despite living a shallow and materialistic life, ultimately achieves genuine personhood in his final hours. These literary and autobiographical accounts are analyzed alongside Imara's and Byock's frameworks to show how confronting death honestly — rather than denying or fearing it — can yield profound insight, compassion, and inner peace.
In her chapter "A Broader View of Healing," Margaret Coberly argues that dying is itself a healing process — a form of discovery. A similar claim appears in Mwalimu Imara's essay "Dying as the Last Stage of Growth," which asserts that dying is a stage of life experienced as a profound growth event within the totality of one's experience. Together, these perspectives invite a reexamination of how we understand the end of life.
According to Mwalimu Imara's essay, rather than rejecting death as abnormal — for death comes to us all — or fearing it, death should be viewed as simply another stage of life. Imara recounts the experience of a woman who said that she lived more fully in the last months of her life than she had throughout her entire existence, because only then was she able to appreciate the goodness in people and open herself up enough to be emotionally vulnerable (Imara 1975: 154). The same could be said of Leo Tolstoy's character Ivan Ilyich.
Throughout most of his life, Ilyich is an ambitious, grasping man who does everything he can to advance professionally. He believes his wife and children love him, but they really only care about the material objects he can provide. When Ilyich is injured and begins to die from the kidney failure brought about by that injury, most of his relatives and associates pull away in disgust. They are afraid of death, as if his ill health will somehow affect their own pleasures, and as if they themselves will never die. Only the compassionate peasant Gerasim takes a philosophical attitude toward death, acknowledging that it comes to everyone.
Ilyich initially adopts the point of view held by most of society, wondering how someone who "lived so well" as himself could possibly die. However, during the last hours of his life, he finally finds peace. He no longer resists death or feels anger toward his surviving family. He learns to appreciate the simple compassion and strength of Gerasim, the only person who does not appear disgusted by his illness. Imara would say that only during these final days does Ilyich achieve full personhood and escape the social strictures that society had imposed upon him — the strictures that defined what it meant to be a successful person.
Ilyich no longer defines success in material terms, or even as the ability to live longer, but rather as the ability to understand his place in the universe.
"Byock's memoir parallels and contrasts Ilyich's death"
"Gerasim's compassion offers Ilyich genuine healing"
Ilyich is literally "killed" by the house he has so carefully decorated — he dies as a result of the accident he sustained while hanging curtains. However, after feeling anger about the manner of his dying and about the irony that someone who has striven so long to "make it" in the world must die this way, he finally comes in death to understand the meaningless nature of everything he has been striving for, and he is able to appreciate simple goodness and kindness.
Although Ilyich may not have "lived well" in the terms defined by Byock, it can be said that at the very end he "died well" — in the sense that he learned profoundly from the experience.
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