This site shares Life-affirming meditations
that heal misconceptions about Death.
Living beautifully and dying beautifully,
Embrace Death as our Birth
into limitless Life Awareness.
Dying touches us all deeply.
We all die and so, in our ordinary nary lives,
in the midst of the joys and sorrows we experience,
in our work and play, the relations we form,
and the children we have,
we are continually accompanied-
if not consciously then unconsciously-
by our own mortality.
We are reminded of this daily by loved ones we lose,
friends and acquaintances who die,
as well as by the myriad anonymous deaths
that fill the newspapers, pers, films, and television.
Dying is part of living.
Yet, during the last few centuries,
we have preferred to deny death
by making it an end so final
that it is unthinkable-
a void, absolute negation.
We thought we did so because we loved life.
In fact, we did so
because in our obsession with material things occupying space,
we lost the ability to understand
that life extends far beyond the limits of our five senses.
We lost the sense that the visible world
is merely the tip of an unquantifiable,
qualitative, invisible reality.
That is to say,
we "lost" the spiritual world and, having lost it,
can no longer imagine that life
can take forms other than the purely physical form
we have made supreme: the only reality.
Rudolf Steiner
Christopher Bamford
Staying Connected
How to Continue Your Relationships With Those Who Have Died
We must regain the understanding
that we are not on earth just to build things
in the physical universe during our physical existence.
We must understand that during our whole existence
we are connected to the whole world.
Those who have passed through the gates of death
want to work with us on the physical world.
This working together only appears to be a physical collaboration,
for everything physical
is only an outer expression of spirit.
Materialism has alienated human beings
from the world of the dead.
Spiritual science must help us
make friends again with that world.
The time must come
when we no longer alienate ourselves from the dead.
For it is our alienation that prevents them
from spiritualizing the physical world.
Rudolf Steiner
Staying Connected
How to Continue Your Relationships With Those Who Have Died
In clinical death
the cessation of respiration
is accompanied with the cessation of cardiac activity and brain function.
When you stop breathing in meditation
and your sense of self disappears,
it’s a potent preview of coming attractions.
Death becomes much more attractive,
because you discover it really is an illusion.
(The highest spiritual practitioners
look forward to death.)
Death only applies to gross states of body and mind.
Andrew Holecek
Dreams of Light
Death is wonderful—after life.
Only one like myself
who has opened his mouth and spoken,
only one who has said Yes, Yes, Yes,
and again Yes!
can open wide his arms to death
and know no fear.
Death as a reward, yes!
Death as a result of fulfillment, yes!
Death as a crown and shield, yes!
The first word any man writes
when he has found himself,
his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm,
is Yes!
Henry Miller
Henry Miller on Writing
“Death as an image of the path of transformation
points to dying to the world of conventional wisdom
as the center of one’s security and identity
and dying to the self as the center of one’s concern.…
Death [is] the ultimate letting go,
and thus the opposite of the grasping
that marks the life of conventional wisdom.”
In this way
“the path of death is also, for Jesus,
the path to new life.
It results in rebirth,
a resurrection to a life centered in God.”
Matthew Fox
quoting Marcus Borg
Meister Eckhart
Facing death and bereavement so early in my adulthood
brought me this precious gift of a spiritual path.
Awaiting everyone who is facing the struggles of dying, death,
or bereavement is the same secret gift.
A gaze into the mirror of death each day
reveals to us how to live more meaningfully
and provides the impetus for changing ourselves
and transforming our suffering.
Our deepest experiences of suffering and loss
can inspire us to take the first step
upon the path toward spiritual liberation.
Christine Longaker
Facing Death and Finding Hope:
A Guide to the Emotional and Spiritual Care of the Dying
The main difference between the living and the so-called dead
is that they are in different fields of energy.
And those different fields of energy—let’s say—overlap.
And both living and so-called dead people
can at any given time
be aware of either field of energy or both at the same time.
So, where’s the actual separation?
There is none.
The two fields of energy are not separated
by time or space or anything like that.
The concept of physical separation in and of itself
implies direction, distance, and place.
But in reality, there is no direction.
No distance. No place.
And so, no separation.
Reality is nonlocal.
The mystics know that intuitively
and quantum physicists know it scientifically.
James Goi Jr.
Ten Spiritual Secrets of Dead People
No one is actually dead or alive.
Those are just arbitrary, meaningless designations
assigned by minds
that though conscious and functioning
are not conscious and functioning
to nearly the degree they could be.
So what’s the truth about those we call dead?
Like us they’re conscious, aware, and functioning.
But what else can we say about them?
Well, here’s one thing we can say for sure:
The first spiritual secret of dead people
is that they are not actually dead.
James Goi Jr.
Ten Spiritual Secrets of Dead People
Once we can accept
that impermanence is the very nature of life,
and that everyone suffers, including ourselves,
at the hands of changes and death,
then letting go becomes quite natural.
With impermanence securely in our hearts,
we’ll see that if everyone were to realize its truth,
then even in the thick of change and death and bereavement,
we would not feel any great sense of loss.
Our tears then
would not be because death and impermanence are facts of life,
but because of something much deeper:
we would weep with compassion,
because we’d know
that all the pain and hurt and suffering we go through
do not need to be there.
They are only there in fact
because we fail to understand that everything,
absolutely everything,
is transient.
Christine Longaker
Facing Death and Finding Hope:
A Guide to the Emotional and Spiritual Care of the Dying .
I never had any intention
of becoming a role model on aging.
I believe we are put on this earth to do something.
If you stop using your brain at any age,
it is going to atrophy
and eventually stop working.
It’s harder when you get older,
but you just have to do it.
Why curl up in a ball
and wait to die?
Iris Apfel
Accidental Icon
When we set out on the spiritual path,
we’re attempting to evolve
from the material to the spiritual,
from ego to egolessness,
from fully manifest form into formlessness (emptiness).
From an egoic perspective,
this pursuit of a return to the clear-light mind
creates “a sensation of impending annihilation”
akin to death—
Andrew Holecek
Dreams of Light
We think we’re protecting the person who is dying
by not telling them,
but we’re probably trying to protect ourselves.
For many people, death is almost an embarrassment,
a failure, the ultimate defeat.
But it’s more accurately a time of truth,
a time to face reality.
Codependent denial does not honor reality.
Don’t underestimate the dying person’s capacity
to face things squarely.
There is power in acknowledging reality.
Nothing cuts through ego’s games,
and hurls you more directly into reality,
than death.
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die:
Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
When people are dying they should be told so,
“as quietly, as kindly, as sensitively, and as skillfully as possible.”
Most of the time they know anyway,
as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says,
“They sense it by the changed attention,
by the new and different approach that people take to them,
by the lowering of voices or avoidance of sounds,
by the tearful face of a relative
or ominous, unsmiling member of the family
who cannot hide his true feelings.”
They seem to know instinctively,
and often count on us to confirm their intuitions.
Kübler-Ross also says
that people often have an inner alert system
that warns them of their own death.
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die:
Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
Even though death is serious,
there’s no need to lose your sense of humor.
On an absolute level death is a big joke—
there’s no such thing as death.
The yogi Gotsangpa sang:
When it’s time to leave this body,
this illusionary tangle,
Don’t cause yourself anxiety and grief;
The thing that you should train in and clear up for yourself
There’s no such thing as dying to be done
It’s just clear light,
the mother, and child clear light uniting,
When mind forsakes the body,
sheer delight!
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die:
Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
Frank Ostaseski,
the founding director of the first Buddhist hospice in America, says,
“Everybody who is dying has a story about how one dies,
and that story shapes the way they die.
It helps to discover more about the story someone is holding
and to work with it,
rather than to try to change it
or impose some other story.”
Approach the dying person
not with answers but with openness.
Don’t feel like you need to get it all right.
As Ostaseski says,
the process is characterized
much more by mystery than mastery.
Andrew Holecek
Preparing to Die:
Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
What the poet Kabir said of death
also applies to sleep and dream:
“What is found now is found then.”
Conversely,
for the untrained mind,
what is not found now is not found then.
Andrew Holocek
Dreams of Light
The instructions of the Book of the Dead
were not intended for the physical body,
embalmed and buried in a lavish tomb,
but for the living God that gave it life,
that imbued its embodiment
with a warm touch
and a sparkle in its eyes.
Jaime Leal-Anaya
introduction to:
Ramtha
The Mystery of Birth and Death: Redefining the Self
Gods are mortal, men immortal:
our life is their death,
our death their life.
Life and death,
sleeping and waking,
youth and age are identical.
Heraclitus
Having made myself into what I am—
at worst a lunatic with grandiose dreams,
at best not just a writer but an entire literature—
I may be contributing not only to my own amusement
(which would already be good enough for me)
but to the enrichment of the universe,
for when someone dies
and leaves behind one beautiful verse,
he leaves the earth and heavens that much richer,
and the reason for stars and people
that much more emotionally mysterious.
Fernando Pessoa
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
IRRELEVANCE
All questions at the public meeting that day
were about life beyond the grave.
The Master only laughed and did not give a single answer.
To his disciples,
who demanded to know the reason for his evasiveness,
he later said,
“Have you observed
that it is precisely those who do not know what to do with this life
who want another that will last forever?”
“But is there life after death or is there not?” persisted a disciple.
“Is there life before death?—that is the question!”
said the Master enigmatically.
Anthony De Mello
One Minute Wisdom
DREAMS
“When will I be Enlightened?”
“When you see,” the Master said.
“See what?”
“Trees and flowers and moon and stars.”
“But I see these every day.”
“No. What you see is paper trees, paper flowers,
paper moons and paper stars.
For you live not in reality
but in your words and thoughts.”
And for good measure, he added gently,
“You live a paper life,
alas,
and will die a paper death.”
Anthony De Mello
One Minute Wisdom
Can a heart that has fallen in Love
Still look at the world?
That is impossible!
In fact, there is nothing in the world to be seen
Besides Love.
I am tired and sick of the eyes that,
on the day of death,
Look at soul instead of Love.
Nevit Ergin
Unknown Rumi: Selected Rubais and Commentary
Death means going to sleep
and never waking up,
as if we had never been born.
Alan Watts
The Collected Letters of Alan Watts
What is that which we call Love?
Tell me, what is that secret hidden within the ages
yet which permeates all consciousness?
What is this consciousness
that is at once origin and result of everything?
What is this vigil
that fashions from Life and Death a dream,
stranger than Life and deeper than Death?
Tell me, friends, is there one among you
who would not awake from the slumber of Life
if Love touched his soul with its fingertip?
Kahlil Gibran
Thoughts and Meditations
At the hour of your death,
the story of your life may, indeed,
appear to you like a dream that is coming to an end.
Yet even in a dream
there must be an essence that is real.
There must be a consciousness
in which the dream happens;
otherwise, it would not be.
That consciousness —
does the body create it
or does consciousness create the dream of body,
the dream of somebody?
Why have most of those
who went through a near-death experience
lost their fear of death?
Reflect upon this.
Eckhart Tolle
Stillness Speaks
In the phenomenal world,
we see that there is birth and death.
There is coming and going,
being and non-being.
But in nirvana,
which is the ground of being equivalent to God,
there is no birth, no death,
no coming, no going,
no being, no non-being.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Quoted by Matthew Fox
Meister Eckhart
Death strikes terror into their hearts.
But you will only begin to live when you are “dead.”
Now you live
but in reality you are almost dead.
So many are dead to the things of the spirit.
The little life-force flickers in their puny bodies,
but no spiritual things can find any response within them.
But gradually we make progress.
Gradually the force of the spirit
increases in strength all over your world of matter.
Gradually darkness retreats,
as it must when confronted by the light of spiritual truth.
There are no words
to compare the life in your world of matter
with the life in the world of spirit.
We who are “dead”
know so much more of life than you do.
A. W. Austen
The Teachings of Silver Birch
Remember, only that which you can take with you
when you leave the body is important.
Except awareness,
nothing is important,
because only awareness cannot be taken away by death.
Everything else will be snatched away,
because everything else comes from without.
Only awareness wells up within.
That cannot be taken away.
And the shadows of awareness
- compassion, love - they cannot be taken away.
They are intrinsic parts of awareness.
You will be taking with you
only whatsoever awareness you have attained.
That is your only real wealth.
Osho
Just because you no longer have a physical body
does not mean that you cannot function.
If you thought that your hard work was over when you died
then I’m afraid that evidence would point
to the idea that this may not indeed be true.
Tricia J. Robertson
Things You Can do When You’re Dead!:
True Accounts of After-Death Communication
The very closeness of death
makes it possible for you to understand
the deathless which is within you.
That's the whole art of meditation:
to go within as deep as you can
to the very center of your being.
And you will be surprised,
amazed that at the center of your being
you are eternal.
There is no death,
there has never been any death.
Nothing dies in reality,
it only changes forms.
Osho
From Death to Deathlessness
Q: What is the ultimate goal?
A: To go beyond the Self.
To die before death.
To discover something permanent.
This life is temporary.
We occupy this house for a short period of time.
We’re going to leave it anyway.
Nevit O. Ergin:
The Sufi Path of Annihilation
Q: How does annihilation of our Being change our perception?
A: Our Being is the result of our present-day perception.
We’re hooked;
we’re addicted to this being and becoming business.
It’s the basis of our life.
We cannot slip ourselves out of Being,
but eventually, we’ll have to.
Being and becoming ends when our body dies.
If we do consciously stop this process
of being and becoming before we die,
we call it annihilation:
dying before death.
Nevit O. Ergin:
The Sufi Path of Annihilation
If death is as horrible as is claimed,
how is it that after the passage
of a certain period of time
we consider happy any being,
friend or enemy,
who has ceased to live?
E.M. Cioran
The Trouble With Being Born
The moment of waking is especially favourable
for the dead to approach us.
At the moment of waking,
very much comes from the dead to every human being.
A great deal of what we undertake in life
is really inspired in us by the dead
or by beings of the higher hierarchies,
although we attribute it to ourselves,
imagining that it comes from our own soul.
Rudolf Steiner
The Dead Are With Us
If I should die,
bury me on the highest mountain,
that I might hear the great sea’s songs,
the distant songs of ships,
that I might hear the shepherd’s songs,
the echoes of his pipe.
When the sea winds sweep up to me,
I’ll smell the sweet, sweet sea,
and when the mountain winds swoop down
around my grave,
I’ll smell the smell of violets.
Konstantinos Lardas
Mourning Songs of Greek Women
Ah, as you fought to live,
the moon went down,
the plane tree crashed and fell,—
because you struggled so.
I’ll plant white lilies on your grave
and I will come each dawn
to water them with tears.
Konstantinos Lardas
Mourning Songs of Greek Women
Immortality has nothing to do with life or death,
for life and death are but illusory pictures,
whereas immortality is the spiritually real,
eternality is the spiritually real,
incorporeality is the spiritually real.
Life and death are two phases of human illusion
just as are disease and health,
poverty and wealth,
sin and purity.
Joel S. Goldsmith
A Parenthesis in Eternity
Before speaking of death,
ask yourself what is life.
All perception is, only because
you are eternal present beingness.
This is the background of waking, dreaming and deep sleep.
In living knowledge,
in this presentness,
the problem of death has no meaning.
Jean Klein
The Ease of Being
When the body dies does consciousness remain?
What is the body?
The body is a thought, a contrivance of the mind.
When you look at the sky where is the body?
When you look at the sky where is the man?
Is there a man?
There is only seeing the sky.
Without the thought of being a man there’s no man.
You have an idea of a body
but in reality it doesn’t exist.
The body, the man, are ways of thinking.
You do not wake up in the morning.
It is the idea of a body which wakes up in you.
What is there before the body wakes up?
You are!
Jean Klein
The Ease of Being
There is a stark contrast
between the old and new ways of reckoning with gradual dying:
the frustrations of the former
and the gratifications of the latter,
the technology of the first
and the human touch of the second,
the expense of one
and the emotional richness of the other.
We now know how to help a loved one die well.
We’ve developed the metaphysical maturity
to realize that death is something we can indeed bear to face,
and should face—
because if we do, we can shape its meaning and effect.
We’ve learned that we must shoulder the responsibility of our own death,
to attain a fitting passage for ourselves.
We’ve realized that death is not an afterthought of life
but an opportunity to reaffirm
all of life that is noblest, most compassionate, most courageous.
Stephen P. Kiernan
Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System
A generation ago life ended swiftly.
Death fell upon most people
with nearly the speed and severity of a guillotine blade.
It is no longer so.
Over the past thirty years
the rapid causes of death have declined,
while gradual causes have grown exponentially.
Most people today do not die suddenly;
they die incrementally.
The way we die has been utterly altered.
Today people’s dying occurs gradually,
from sicknesses that take their lives by degrees.
Stephen P. Kiernan
Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System
The largest societal change in America in recent years
has been the transformation of death.
For the first time in human history,
we can anticipate our mortality.
We can watch its slow approach.
We can look death in the eye.
Gradual death has its own savagery.
Its result is no less final than a sudden passing.
But death by degrees does mean that dying is different.
It takes months, not minutes.
For a rapidly growing number of people,
dying has become a process.
When dying is a process,
the manner and meaning of a person’s final days
are not left wholly to chance.
There are options and opportunities;
there are choices.
Stephen P. Kiernan
Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System
When one annihilates their self,
when one dies before their death,
they discover the biggest paradise.
They see.
They understand.
Nevit Ergin
Unknown Rumi
Some of us believe creation has never taken place,
that humanity is the child of perception,
and the universe a hallucination.
We are stuck in this world
like a silkworm caged in its self-made cocoon.
Seldom do we suspect that our limited perception
put us in this predicament.
Some of us believe there was no beginning,
and that there is no end.
If no one has ever been born,
then no one ever dies.
Nevit O. Ergin
Sufi
Rumi Translator
Some of us are born restless,
like misfits who are never satisfied
by the offers of religion, science, and philosophy.
Some of us don’t want the comfort of conformity and tradition,
so we accept the quest for truth
as an individual journey
that mirrors the process of our own death.
Nevit O. Ergin
Sufi
Rumi Translator
If we believe that death is the end,
nothingness, the stopping of our clock,
there is not anything to prepare for.
The only thing to do
s to stay alive as long and as well as possible.
But I don’t believe that death is the end.
All that I have learned through life
and all that I experienced during my encounters with death
has taught me that death is like a second birth,
leading me to a new way of living.
I had nothing to say about my first birth.
But I have a lot to say about my second birth
and I can get ready for it.
I believe that everything that happens during my life
offers me an opportunity
to let my death become a rebirth.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, Robert Durback
Beyond the Mirror
the encounter with God in my hours near death
made me wonder whether being “better again”
was indeed the best thing for me.
Would it not have been preferable
to have been completely set free from this ambiguous world
and taken home to full communion with God?
Would it not have been better
to have left this mortal world
and to be held ultimately safe
in the incorruptible reality of God?
Would it not have been better
to have arrived than to remain on the road?
No one who wrote me letters,
called me by phone, sent flowers, or visited me
seemed to think so.
That did not surprise me;
I would have responded to a friend’s illness in the same way.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, Robert Durback
Beyond the Mirror
Q: Why did I see my father and his two brothers (in the astral plane) as young men,
although I knew them when they were white-haired?
A: They are growing, as it were, upon the eternal plane.
For, as may be experienced in every entity,
a death is a birth.
And those that are growing then appear in their growing state.
Edgar Cayce
Beyond Death
In the application of self to the vicissitudes of life—
in the midst of life one is in the midst of death,
for death is but the beginning of life,
as life is but the beginning of an opportunity
to manifest that as is innately built
within the soul of an individual itself.
Edgar Cayce
Beyond Death
There is still a widespread denial of death in Western cultures.
Even old people try not to speak or think about it,
and dead bodies are hidden away.
A culture that denies death
inevitably becomes shallow and superficial,
concerned only with the external form of things.
When death is denied, life loses its depth.
The possibility of knowing
who we are beyond name and form,
the dimension of the transcendent,
disappears from our lives
because death is the opening into that dimension.
Eckhart Tolle
Stillness Speaks
Death is not the opposite of life.
Life has no opposite.
The opposite of death is birth.
Life is eternal.
Eckhart Tolle
Stillness Speaks
You must believe
that none of the things that depart from your sight
, and that are subsumed into the universe from which they sprang
(and will soon spring again),
is used up;
these things pause, but do not die,
just as death, which we fear and shun,
interrupts but does not strip away our life.
The day will come again
which will return us into the light.
Many would reject that day,
were it not that it returns us without our memories.
Seneca
How to Die
Before I became old,
I took care to live well;
in old age I take care to die well.
And dying well means dying willingly….
Let’s compose our minds
such that we want whatever the situation demands,
and in particular
that we contemplate our end without sadness.
We must prepare for death before life.
Our life is well furnished,
yet we’re greedy for its furnishings;
something always seems to be lacking,
and always will.
It’s not years nor days,
but the mind, that determines that we’ve lived enough.
I, my dearest Lucilius,
have lived as much as is enough.
Full, I await my death.
Farewell.
Seneca
How to Die
Modern readers have sometimes found Seneca’s writings
to be macabre or death obsessed.
But Seneca might reply
that such readers are life obsessed,
deluding themselves
with a denial of the importance of death.
Dying, for him,
was one of the essential functions of living,
and the only one that could not
be learned or refined through repetition.
Because we will die only once,
and quite possibly without advance warning,
it’s essential that we prepare ourselves ahead of time
and be ready at all moments.
Seneca
How to Die
When the Master said
that he had overcome the world,
he had overcome these temptations,
but when he had overcome death
he had really overcome the world.
Personally, I do not think he overcame the world
until he was in the Garden of Gethsemane.
There he faced death.
There he left his human sense of life.
No one fully “dies” until he faces death;
then he is in the Fourth Dimension.
He is then alive not in the human sense
but in the spiritual sense.
Joel S. Goldsmith
Living Now
Dying Before We Die
In proportion to our ability
to grasp and become convinced of the truth
that there is neither good nor evil,
we become pure Consciousness.
Pure Consciousness is that of which we are composed:
the states of consciousness we express
are superimposed by the beliefs of the world.
To attain pure Consciousness
involves a process of “dying daily.”
Every time we drop a theory,
every time we drop an anxiety or a superstition,
to that extent we have “died” to this world.
Joel S. Goldsmith
Living Now
A recent report by the British Medical Association
concluded that doctors continue to treat people who are dying
when active treatment is no longer of any benefit.
The report stated they do this
because of pressure from patients and their families.
Many doctors we have spoken to
also feel that by acknowledging
there’s nothing more that can be done,
they themselves are admitting defeat
and have failed.
Death is not a failure.
Anna Lyons, Louise Winter
We all know how this ends
https://www.amazon.com/all-know-how-this-ends/dp/1472966813
In our work, both independently and together,
we have unparalleled access
to life at its most heightened, vulnerable and fragile.
We inhabit the liminal space
as people transition between life and death,
bearing witness to this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
With this comes a wealth of understanding
and lessons that teach us so much
about how to live,
not just how to die.
Anna Lyons, Louise Winter
We all know how this ends
Then from the night-warm soilbed of your heart
you dug the seeds, still green,
from which your death would sprout:
your own, your perfect death,
the one that was your whole life’s perfect consummation.
And swallowed down the kernels of your death,
like all the other ones, swallowed them,
and were startled to find
an aftertaste of sweetness you hadn’t planned on,
a sweetness on your lips,
you who inside your senses
were so sweet already.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Requiem For A Friend
It is only for first-class men
to dwell purely on the thing itself [death], consider it, and judge it.
It belongs to the one and only Socrates
to become acquainted with death with an ordinary countenance,
to become familiar with it, and play with it.
He seeks no consolation outside the thing itself;
dying seems to him a natural and indifferent incident.
He fixes his gaze precisely on it,
and makes up his mind to it,
without looking elsewhere.
Montaigne
quoted in
Arthur M. Melzer
Philosophy Between the Lines:
The Lost History of Esoteric Writing
Come into the candlelight.
I’m not afraid to look the dead in the face.
When they return, they have a right,
as much as other Things do,
to pause
and refresh themselves within our vision.
Come;
and we will be silent for a while.
Look at this rose on the corner of my desk:
isn’t the light around it
just as timid as the light on you?
It too should not be here,
it should have bloomed or faded in the garden,
outside,
never involved with me.
But now it lives on
in its small porcelain vase:
what meaning does it find in my awareness?
Don’t be frightened
if I understand it now;
it’s rising in me,
ah, I’m trying to grasp it,
must grasp it,
even if I die of it.
Must grasp that you are here.
As a blind man grasps an object,
I feel your fate,
although I cannot name it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Requiem For A Friend
I have my dead,
and I have let them go,
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead,
so cheerful,
so unlike their reputation.
Only you return;
brush past me, loiter,
try to knock against something,
so that the sound reveals your presence.
Oh don’t take from me what I am slowly learning.
I’m sure you have gone astray
if you are moved to homesickness
for anything in this dimension.
We transform these Things;
they aren’t real,
they are only the reflections
upon the polished surface of our being.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Requiem For A Friend
Our life is no Dream,
but it may and will perhaps become one —
Novalis
Dying becomes the way to everlasting fruitfulness.
Here is the most hope-giving aspect of death.
Our death may be the end of our success,
our productivity, our fame, or our importance among people,
but it is not the end of our fruitfulness.
In fact, the opposite is true:
the fruitfulness of our lives
shows itself in its fullness
only after we have died.
Henri J. M. Nouwen
Our Greatest Gift:
A Meditation on Dying and Caring
Befriending our death
is a lifelong spiritual task but a task that,
in all its different nuances,
deeply affects our relationships with our fellow human beings.
Every step we take toward deeper self-understanding
brings us closer to those with whom we share our lives.
As we learn, over time,
to live the truth that death does not have a sting,
we find within ourselves
the gift to guide others to discover the same truth.
We do not first do one of these things
and later the other.
Befriending our own death
and helping others to befriend theirs
are inseparable.
Henri J. M. Nouwen
Our Greatest Gift:
A Meditation on Dying and Caring
Let’s not go back to life as usual.
Because for many, when someone we love deeply dies,
life is not “normal” —
not yesterday, not today, and not tomorrow.
Life is forever changed.
We feel grief because we have deeply loved.
And while this hurts,
most of us would not return one moment with that person,
even if it meant the promise of abated grief.
Our beloved dead are worth our pain.
They are worth our tears.
They are worth remembering.
Joanne Cacciatore
Grieving is Loving
"We grieve because we have loved.”
To say grief is pathological or abnormal
when it lasts beyond an artificially determined time limit,
or to imply that it is a disease to be treated with drugs,
is to deny the core of our very being-ness.
Even animals mourn their dead, Dr. Jo shared, as did J35 —
an orca whale nicknamed “Tahlequah,”
who was observed by scientists
to have carried the body of her dead baby,
with the help of her pod,
for seventeen days through the Pacific Ocean.
Far from being irrational, Dr. Jo says,
the pain of grief is necessary.
“I don’t even want to recover from her death,”
she says about her daughter, Cheyenne.
“Staying connected to the grief
helps me to do my work with such a full, compassionate heart,”
and to live as fully as she can.
Johann Hari
from introduction of
Joanne Cacciatore
Grieving is Loving
Once you stop clinging to life,
real life becomes available to you.
The more you cling to life,
the more you are clinging to death itself.
This life is nothing but death—
death camouflaged, covered, hidden.
Once you accept death,
this life disappears,
but another dimension opens.
OSHO
Above All, Don’t Wobble
It is a hard thing to accept,
that death and decay and everything bad
leads to everything good,
but I for one believe it.
As Emily Dickinson,
eternally great poet
and occasionally anxious agoraphobe, said:
“That it will never come again
is what makes life so sweet.”
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
Usually the dying person knows.
What they need is some help
in being able to articulate that knowledge.
But everyone else's distress makes it hard for them to talk–
the dying are in essence being forced
into a position of having to protect their survivors.
Once they are able to say 'I am going to die' they become,
'not the victim of death
but rather the protagonist in their own dying'.
Elizabeth Fenwick
The Art of Dying
The worst kind of solitude when you're dying
is not being able to say to the people you love
that you're going to die.
To feel your death approaching
and not to be able to talk about it
or to be able to share with others
what this leave-taking inspires in you
often results directly in mental breakdown,
a kind of delirium,
or some manifestation of pain
that at least gives you
something you are allowed to talk about.
Marie de Hennezel
quoted in
Elizabeth Fenwick
The Art of Dying
The weird thing about depression is that,
even though you might have more suicidal thoughts,
the fear of death remains the same.
The only difference
is that the pain of life has rapidly increased.
So when you hear about someone killing themselves
it’s important to know
that death wasn’t any less scary for them.
It wasn’t a “choice” in the moral sense.
To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand.
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
I wanted to be dead.
No. That’s not quite right.
I didn’t want to be dead.
I just didn’t want to be alive.
Death was something that scared me.
And death only happens to people who have been living.
There were infinitely more people
who had never been alive.
I wanted to be one of those people.
That old classic wish.
Matt Haig
Reasons to Stay Alive
According to Nietzsche,
there are two forms of health:
the futile type
that tries to keep death at bay as long as possible,
and the affirming type
that embraces life,
even its deficiencies and excesses.
John J. Kaag
Hiking with Nietzsche
The dying process,
with its numerous losses,
can become a powerful opportunity
to let go of the ego’s hold on our identity
and finally discover our true nature as spirit.
The ego’s lifelong striving to defend itself
from all attacks on its value is over.
We can relax into spirit.
We can find refuge, strength, and empowerment
in our identity as immortal soul.
Philip Jones
Light on Death: The Spiritual Art of Dying
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