At the end of physical life the first thing that always catches up with you is the habits you have cultivated throughout your life. I am speaking both of the small habits of daily living and also the larger habits of ways of thinking. The smaller daily habits seem fairly obvious, so not much time shall be spent here; smoking leads to disease as do other lifestyle choices and so forth. How about those larger habits of thinking? Larger because the way we have trained our mind to think and respond directly effects the quality of life we perceive that we have as well as the way we approach physical death. If you have trained your mind to only believe in the material then you will have trouble accessing the spiritual and will tend to be defined by your material circumstances. If you have trained yourself to think about yourself firstly then you will be preoccupied with self concerns and find it hard to cope with what is happening to you. If you have cultivated an abusive lifestyle than you will experience acrimony as you deal with others. If you have cultivated lack of forgiveness you will be convicted of the need to forgive but may not know how to truly do it. If you have lived a life without grace you will experience a hardness that you will wish were not so. If you have lived a life of judgement you will feel the guilt of judgement. If you have lived as a pharisee then you will experience shortcomings because of a lack of perfection. If you have lived without mercy than you will experience a blessed and wholly unlooked for mercy that will teach the meaning of itself; for God is merciful and in the end you will call upon Him.
The second thing that always catches up with us is our lack of forgiveness. You see we have all been transgressed upon and we have all transgressed although most of the time we do not perceive it. We can only forgive those who have offended us and ask for the mercy to know how we have offended others and thus readily express forgiveness. We can only beg to be forgiven our own shortcomings in extending forgiveness. You see the lack of forgiveness is like acid to our beings; it corrodes us and eats away until we are consumed. In the end we do not triumph over our adversary but actually become less than human as a result. There is almost always a bitterness of life associated with lack of forgiveness, or the false pride that sets one up for a great fall. Death is bitter for those who lack forgiveness, either given or received, and at the end there is always a fear of eternal judgement as a result, or again the false pride that leads to a fall.
The third thing that nearly always catches up with one is not cultivating the spiritual. Without an awareness of the spiritual we die alone and unassisted. With a sense of the spiritual we are enshrouded in love, mercy, and experience God gathering us unto His Light.
The fourth thing that always catches up with us is a lack of grace. Grace is not only the freely given unmerited favor from God but is also blessing and a soulish participation in the luminous grace of God. Not knowing ourselves to be un-deserving of eternity by our own merits we suffer the effects of pride and as we are diminished by sickness and then the dying process this becomes a hardship for us. Not knowing Divine favor we do not know who we really are and imagine that our struggles and hardships can destroy our worth and dignity and this leads to further suffering. Not participating in Heavenly grace we know not how to let it shine forth in our life, and how to fully function as citizens of Heaven in thought, word, and deed, but in the fullness of our being as well.
The fifth thing that always catches up with us is self-centeredness. We imagine that it is all about ourself, and imagine that our suffering is so much greater than endured, and thus create a self-indulgent suffering that is so interiorly focused that it has no outward vision to see God at work.