Let's Talk About Death_4

So how do we talk about death in a culture that has such deep denial? We all say, yeah everything dies but under that often there is, everything dies but me. The ego plans to live forever. In a thousand ways and mostly unconsciously we hold onto the hope that something of this self, somehow will remain.

Trigger Warning: This practice includes references to death, dying, and the departed.

Transcript

So for those of you who have been dropping in regularly,

This will be the final talk in our two-week series on death.

And it's been a bit of a journey that we've been on together.

We know that everything dies.

It's universal.

And yet,

Often what we want most is to deny it or to avoid it,

Right?

It was Suzuki Roshi who was once asked,

If you could break down all of the Buddhist teachings into just one single understandable phrase,

What would it be?

And his response?

Everything changes.

Everything changes.

And change can't be avoided.

And sometimes change hurts.

Everything changes.

This is the fundamental teaching of this path of practice.

To get comfortable with,

To relax with,

And to welcome change.

The poet Rilke wrote,

Be ahead of all parting as if it had already happened.

The encouragement is to bring death into the midst of our lives with the understanding that by keeping our vulnerability and our mortality close,

We learn to meet each moment.

We learn to meet change.

The conversations about death,

They ask us to look directly at it and look at the way that we're living.

I think it just is a byproduct.

When we start to look at death,

We start to look at the way we're living.

So often when we first broach the subject,

It arrives in the body.

The felt sense is a version.

That's how it can feel for many people to talk about it.

And just know that if you broach this subject with somebody that's not here in this practice room or is not practicing the way that we are,

That it could arrive in their body as a version.

You know,

Maybe you bring it up to your adult children,

For example,

And they feel so uncomfortable and they dismiss the conversation by saying something like,

You know,

You're just being morbid or something like that.

You know,

They just don't.

It's very uncomfortable for people to talk about.

And yet here we are.

And we've spent a couple of weeks doing that.

And the suggestion is to do it a lot.

I put a couple of resources that Charles Lee put offered to me into the chat.

So if you go to the chat,

You'll see there are resources.

And one of the one of the offerings is like this.

It's called croak.

And it's daily meditations.

I haven't looked at this yet.

I'm looking forward to seeing it that reminds you of the impermanence of life.

So I recommend checking that out.

It's www.

Wecroak.

Com.

And again,

It's in the chat.

Thank you,

Charles Lee,

For bringing that to our group.

Yeah,

It's really helpful.

So how do we talk about death in a culture that has such deep denial and discomfort?

You know,

We all say,

Yeah,

Everything dies.

But you know what's under that?

Everything dies but me.

You know,

The ego plans to live forever.

And 1000 ways and mostly unconsciously,

We hold on to this hope that something of ourself will somehow remain.

In the Bhagavad Gita,

Arjuna,

The warrior says to Krishna,

The God,

What's the most amazing thing you've seen created on earth?

And Krishna's response is the most amazing thing is that human beings can see people all around them,

Aging and dying,

And think it won't happen to them.

And that's in this body that yeah,

That happens in this body to the very nature of incarnating being born,

Is that we want to hold on to our existence.

You know,

We want things a certain way.

We wanted to be treated in a certain way.

We want to look a certain way.

We want appliances that last forever,

Bodies that don't break down.

Yet trying to control it,

Our life,

To make things a certain way,

To hold on a certain way is like holding on to a moving rope.

What happens when you hold on to a moving rope?

You get rope burn.

You know,

We can take care of our bodies and care for ourselves.

This is the natural way of things.

But we get rope burn when we're fighting the current of old age,

Sickness and death.

When we grasp and we resist.

And the flag for us is that our body gets tense.

Our minds leave the present moment and we go off into control mode.

You know,

Trying to keep controlling things.

Another flag is kind of the,

The word should.

A kind of judging occurs when we drop should into a sentence.

Right?

And,

You know,

We faced little deaths all throughout our lifetime.

We talked a little bit about that,

You know,

The in-breath and the out-breath.

In-breath life,

Out-breath death.

But in a more,

I guess,

Substantive way,

A friendship will end or a business fails or a physical ability diminishes and an activity that we used to do so easily,

We don't do anymore.

So all these little deaths throughout our lifetime and what the key is,

How to meet that like it's all about how we choose to respond to these little deaths.

We can resist it.

We could go in and say to our trainer,

You know what?

My knees don't really want to do this anymore,

But I don't care.

Let's get strong.

Let me get strong so I can continue on this sport,

Continue on this trajectory.

We push,

We suffer.

There's a story that illustrates choosing how we respond that I've shared before in a class that I offered called Zen and the Art of Dying.

But this story is so poignant and so timeless.

And this happened years ago.

A woman who was connected to Zen Hospice Project,

Her name was Janet,

And she was having a back bar,

A backyard barbecue with her husband and her friend Albert and her son.

She had a son,

Jack,

Who was three,

And Albert's son,

Daniel.

And the adults were in the backyard talking and the kids were in the front yard playing.

And Janet gets this intuition that she should go check on the kids.

But Albert,

Her friend,

And her husband say,

Oh,

Just sit down,

They're fine.

They live kind of rurally and they're fine.

And a few minutes later,

They hear a crash.

And then Albert's son,

Daniel,

Is running through the house to the backyard.

And Janet runs past him to the front of the house.

And she sees her son,

Jack,

Lying on the road.

And he's been hit by a hit and run driver.

And so everyone gathers around Jack,

Who is three and a half years old.

And they scoop up little Jack and they put him in the truck to get to the hospital.

And Janet's in the backseat of the truck and Albert's a doctor and he's doing CPR because Jack's not breathing.

But all Janet can see is Jack's broken leg.

And she's thinking,

How could she let this happen to let him break his leg like this?

That's all she can see.

Well,

Jack had more than a broken leg.

And so they get to the hospital and Jack is hooked up to life support.

And it went on like this for some hours.

And it became pretty apparent that Jack's brain damage was too severe.

And they had to unhook him from life support.

And they picked up Jack and Janet,

She rocked him like she did every other night.

Except there wasn't going to be any waking from this dream,

You know.

And they drove home and Janet was holding her child.

They brought him home.

And something rose up inside her some wisdom.

And she said to herself,

If I'm going to honor Jack's life,

Then I can't let this accident destroy me.

And she didn't know where that came from.

So a day or so later,

The police confirmed that this had been a hit and run.

And at that point,

Janet just had fury and anger.

And so she was furious.

And understandable,

Right?

Well,

Later that same morning,

There's a knock on the screen door.

And she went to the door and through the screen,

She saw a man that she had never seen before.

And she knew immediately who he was.

This was the man who had hit Jack.

And Janet invited this stranger into her home and they sat together.

And she said that the anguish on this man's face washed away her rage in that moment.

It's not that it didn't come back,

But in the moment it disappeared.

It was the poet Longfellow who wrote,

If we can read the secret history of our enemies,

We should find in each person's life,

Sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

It was like that.

So this man,

He took full responsibility.

And Janet,

She replied from this,

This deep guidance from this place where she had that moment in the car on her way home from the hospital.

She said that we four adults share responsibility.

She said that it was their moment of distraction on all their parts that led to this disastrous outcome.

This man was on his way to his daughter's wedding and he was late and his mind was busy and he didn't even know that he hit Jack until later,

Until he went to his car.

That's how he knew.

So Janet says to him,

This is the responsibility of all four of us.

So in our culture,

You know,

We tend to want somebody to be held accountable.

We want to be able to point to somebody.

We want the outrageousness and the impossible to be understood,

Blamed on somebody else so that we can alleviate our sense of helplessness.

But life doesn't present itself that way.

It's not right and reasonable all the time.

So in her humility,

Janet understood that the only way her life could be saved is she had to take her share of responsibility in order not to live a life of blame and shame.

It's an impossible vow and that's what she did.

And just knowing a bit of the story,

There were years of grief work ahead for Janet and all this just cracked her open.

And what cracked open was joy and generosity of heart.

And in her community,

When there was a child that needed to be taken off life support or was nearing death,

They called Janet and she doesn't give any advice or say that it's going to be okay or don't worry.

She just bears witness,

Is just present for the suffering.

That's what we are practicing.

Because things change,

Because there's this quality of unreliability and instability,

There's this really hard to bear quality embedded in the fabric of humanity.

And we come to know it and to feel it in our bones.

You know,

Everything I love I will be separated from.

We practice with that.

Can you bear the difficult that comes?

You can.

You can,

You know.

This is part of life for all of us.

And what we're doing here is we stop in some way.

We stop running.

Like instead of running away,

We face with mercy and compassion,

The limits of our humanity,

As well as the beauty.

And what we do here together with our time together on these mornings is we create a temple,

A place of mercy in which to hold that which is hard to bear.

So thank you.

Thank you for your practice and your willingness.

It's a gift to all of us and to the people in our lives and to each other.

Reviews

🙏🏾 2026. 💕

Thank you, that was so helpful
🙏❤️🙏

Very helpful, Thank you 🙏🏼

Thank you for this thought-provoking and memorable series of talks 🌟