Making Friends with Death

{xtypo_quote}If one knows that what is born will end in death, then there will be love.
- Sutra of Buddha Teaching the Seven Daughters {/xtypo_quote}

I recently read an interview with a dying woman. She was asked what she most regretted in her life. She answered, "That I never thought about death ‘til now."

For most death is something dark and unknown and for many something to fear. Fear is fundamentally a state of unawareness supported by grandiose beliefs and misconceptions.

Our grandiose beliefs about death include: "I shouldn't have to die," "I must have a 100% guarantee that I won't die tomorrow," "I should be able to control things so I don't have to die," "Death should not be this way for me (or my loved ones) and I will not let it happen because it is so unfair and terribly sad, and makes me feel lonely and fearful."[1]

On our way to making friends with death we must begin to challenge our grandiose beliefs surrounding our death. We have to ask ourselves, just what is so special about me that somehow the universe should single me out for special treatment? Death may be unfortunate and terribly sad, but it is also terribly normal as well.

Of course the conscious thought, "I will never die," does not ordinarily arise in our minds. If somebody were to ask us, "Will you die?" we would naturally answer, "Of course. Everybody dies. We all have to die sooner or later." Nevertheless, we still harbour an innate sense that somehow we will always be here.

Moreover, even though we do not explicitly think, "I won't die," still, there is always the underlying feeling, "It will probably be a long time before I do die." We feel that death will not happen this year, or this month, what to say of today. We feel there is something at the core of ourselves that is going to be around for a long, long time yet to come.

Of course we cannot but admit that people die. We know that we, too, shall have to die some day, but not anytime soon. Death is still far away, far enough at any rate to permit us to raise some veils to hide this last inevitability which nobody can take from us, which more than any anything else reveals to us just how inescapably this life is our own, how alone each of us is in the face of death.

We want to forget death and the fear of losing everything - our loved ones, our possessions, our achievements, an entire life lost, everything upon which we base the conception of who we are, what we are and even if we are. Our very identity lost "and go we know not where."

{xtypo_quote}Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.[2] {/xtypo_quote}

The essence of cowardice is not to admit our fears; to systematically cultivate an unawareness of them. Most all of us, at some level, have a dread of death. We are skilled in disguising our reactions to death with expressions and conventions that contain death within a manageable social frame. Or we simply distract ourselves and pretend it just does not exist.

But the significance of making friends with death, is neither just to become conscious of our fears surrounding it nor merely to overcome those fears. The significance is to appreciate life and, thereby, to insure that we do not waste our lives; that we stop postponing what we "really" want to do until conditions are more favourable or live a life of a kind of compromise. To insure that we are not one of those "cowards" who "die many times before their death" - the living deaths of banality, impotence, hypocrisy, inauthenticity and pettiness, an existential death of meaningless and purposeless, a series of hollow events which pass for a life, a poor imitation of life.

The purpose of making friends with death is so that we not allow the opportunity this precious human life presents us with to slip away from us through laziness and procrastination, so that we keep our priorities straight and not lose sight of them in a life consumed by the mere pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, so that we will not be filled with regret at the time of our death for how we have wasted our life. Only when we lose the use of something taken for granted are we jolted into a recognition of its value. In taking life for granted we fail to notice it and, thus, to live it.

A student asked his teacher:

{xtypo_quote}Master, how do I prepare for death?
Learn to live.

How shall I learn to live?
Prepare yourself for death. {/xtypo_quote}

To face and take control of our fear of death, means to take control of our life; to accept death, is to accept life. To always keep the inevitability of death before our mind's eye, is to always remember what is uniquely important to each of us in our life; to be aware of the uncertainty of the time of our death, is to be mindful that we are still alive; and to ask what is it that can help at the moment of death, is to relearn how to live.

{xtypo_quote}Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come-to them, their wives, their children, their friends-catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair!...

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind that death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.[3] {/xtypo_quote}

Thus, death becomes an ally in the living of a greater life. Our death becomes a wise adviser, a true friend.

[1] Robert Powel, Staying Rational, p. 253.

[2] William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3.

[3] Michael de Montaigne, The Essays of Michael de Montaigne. Quoted in Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (London: Rider, 1992) p. 15.