THE BEST WAY TO DIE

Midweek, October 21, 1987

By Dean Ontai

The 72-year-old Aoki has devoted his life to helping people accept death

People die. Mitsuo Aoki helps them.

The 72-year-old Aoki is professor emeritus of religion at the University of Hawaii, a scholar on the subject of death, and a volunteer counselor of terminally ill people.

"I don’t work to cure an illness," Aoki says, "but to change an attitude." Most of the 450 patients he has counseled are cancer victims whom he teaches to accept death and dying. His holistic approach unites the mind, body and spirit, he explains, and attempts to replace the natural fear of death with a gradual, total acceptance.

My work is to help dying persons turn their dying into an achievement, a shining work of art," Aoki says.

One technique he uses to make people comfortable with the subject of death is humor. A favorite story he tells is of a novice student and a Zen master. The student asks, "What is death?"

"I don’t know," the master replies.

The surprised student explains, "But you are a Zen master!"

"Yes," the master says. "But I am not a dead Zen master."

In that sense, Aoki has an advantage: He has died, he says, in an automobile crash, but his spirit soon returned to his body. The car hit a tree. The driver and a child in the front seat were killed instantly.

The accident happened 23 years ago, but Aoki remembers it vividly. "I died," he says. "I had an out-of-body experience. I found myself floating."

He looked down, he says, to see his lifeless body on the ground and hear a firefighter pronounce him dead.

"And I said, ‘No, I’m not dead!’ Then I was back in my body."

From that point on, Aoki devoted his life to helping people accept death. He admires those who are dying and continues to learn from their reactions. "Dying people are so very honest," he explains. "They tell you how things really are. They don’t fool around any more. They go right to the heart of the matter."

Aoki cites an example of a man he helped to die in about 20 minutes, after a long period of suffering. "I helped facilitate what might have lasted all day long," Aoki says. "The family, who had seen so much grief and slowness in the process, suddenly saw him let go — really let go — his death became a great achievement, a beautiful kind of dying. A great deal of joy emerged in the midst of profound grief.

"Why not?" Aoki asks of death’s role as a positive force. "Dying is a part of living, isn’t it? It’s just the last part."

Aoki grew up on a Kohala plantation on the Big Island, one of 12 children. His father was a carpenter and, he says, he was expected to "work, marry and die on the plantation." Aoki got fired — twice — from his position as a plantation store clerk, which forced him to seek opportunities in Honolulu.

While there, in his 20s, he converted from Buddhism to Christianity. He received his undergraduate education at the University of Hawaii and Drury College, and he got a PH.D. from Chicago Theological Seminary, for his thesis, "The Meaning of Death." For six years he was a minister on Kauai and Maui with the United Church of Christ.

He also has lived in Asian monasteries, he says, interviewed gurus and Zen masters, and twice traveled around the world in search of a "planetary consciousness."

In 1956, Aoki joined the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii and soon introduced courses on death and dying into the curriculum. Now semi-retired, he teaches one course each fall, spending the remainder of his time counseling cancer patients and training volunteers. He sees about two patients a day in sessions ranging from a few minutes to an hour and a half.

His services are voluntary, although he accepts donations for his Foundation for Holistic Healing, basically a one-man operation. The money is used for operational expenses, such as a sizeable library of cassettes, videotapes and literature on health, healing and dying available to the public.

Interested parties can simply phone Aoki, whose number is listed.

Aoki’s spare time is spent relaxing in his Kaimuki home with his wife of 17 years, Lynne, 66. He enjoys gardening, football, movies, classical music, dining out. "All the normal things," he says wryly. He meditates each morning as well.

Although he is trim and stays fit, rising each day at 5 a.m. for an hour’s walk, he has given much thought to his own inevitable death. He would like to die in Manoa’s Andrews Amphitheater, at age 100, after a relaxing lecture.

He would rather not die in a hospital, he says.

"We give so much of our power away, especially in a hospital," he says. Dying people really want to die at home, he adds, but family members resist because of the care required.

"Dying people resent being shut off from the daily flow of life, from friends and family who feel guilt about being well," Aoki says. "We act as though we were dead."

"The one thing dying people need is to have someone touch them," Aoki says. He reads from a letter written by a 13-year-old boy dying of leukemia.

". . .Don’t run away — Wait. All I want to know is that there will be someone to hold my hand — touch me when I need it. I’m afraid. I’ve never died before."