"All I want to do is die"

“God, I am sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said as she lay on the procedure table with tears rolling down her cheeks. “I am giving up on life and all I want to do is die.”

She had been a dialysis patient for years, the result of an inherited condition. Born with faulty genetics, she was finally at the point of giving up altogether.

In her mid thirties, she had a daughter and a husband she loved. Although she went to dialysis three days a week for four hours a day just to stay alive, as most people on kidney dialysis do, she was even able to hold down a job.

But now her condition had become far more extreme. As a result of many fistulas and grafts, over the years her veins were beginning to clot and narrow, causing her life lines to slowly diminish.

When she discovered that one of her last life lines, which was a graft, would no longer work and was infected, she was in despair.

This is when, tears rolling down her face, she protested that she was finished with trying to stay alive. “I just want to go to sleep and never wake up,” she sobbed.

It was one of the saddest moments the staff had encountered, and it made everyone realize how much we take our own lives for granted.

But even if we have good health and don’t have to go through the painful experience of this young woman, many of us nevertheless find ourselves in a life situation we aren’t happy with.

Perhaps we aren’t in the career we imagined or don’t live in the nice house we dreamed of. We may even wish we weren’t with the person we are with—or wish we were with someone but find ourselves all alone.

When things don’t go the way we hoped they would, we tend to go through life fighting our situation. Perhaps we get irritated with our loved ones, or we are grumpy and snap at those we work with. In all kinds of ways, we show our discontent.

The trouble is that none of this changes anything.

It doesn’t matter what precise form our discontent takes, at times of disappointment, frustration, or outright despair, there’s only one helpful response: complete and total acceptance.

I can understand the feeling of wanting to die because I have been in enough pain to wish the same thing as this young woman. In extreme pain, it’s an understandable and natural reaction, and I feel for people when they are going through a situation like this. But if we get stuck in the reaction, it isn’t helpful to ourselves or to anyone else.

The fact is, we really don’t want to die: we want to be out of our pain, unhappiness, misery. We want peace.

An amazing thing happens when we stop fighting, quit resisting, end all complaining about what we are going through.

In total surrender to our life situation, we find ourselves entering into what Jesus called the “peace that passes understanding.”

It really is beyond understanding, because it isn’t the kind of peace that comes from everything going right in our life, or from affirmations we tell ourselves, or any other method of trying to be at peace.

The mind, no matter how we manipulate it, can’t bring us peace. We can’t think our way into a peaceful state.

Inner peace is a state that has always been with us. It’s always been with us because it’s our very nature.

Even in our most painful or stormy moments, beneath all of the things we are experiencing, our peace has never gone away. We simply haven’t entered into our inner being, where alone we can experience it.

In the moment of surrender, our anxious thoughts and turbulent emotions die down. As we come to a place of stillness, we unexpectedly find the peace that is an aspect of our very being arising and suffusing our life.