Death: The Greatest Teacher

Whether we struggle against it, deny it, or accept it, all of us have a relationship with death. Some people encounter death only a few times during youth, and it becomes something personal only in old age, as the number of funerals begins to outnumber weddings. Others grow up in violent environments where sudden death is common, or they watch a family member die from a terminal illness. Many of us have never witnessed a person die, while those who work in hospitals and nursing homes see the reality of death and dying every day. But whether death feels distant to us or we stand close to it, it haunts us and challenges us.

Death is a powerful messenger, a demanding teacher. In response to death's message, we could close ourselves off and become more rigid. Or we could open ourselves and become freer and more loving. We could try to avoid its message in every way, but that would require tremendous effort, because death is a persistent teacher.

The Teacher called Death meets us at the moment we are born and stands beside us at every moment of our lives. What death has to teach us cuts straight to the point. It is profound and at the same time intimate. Death is a complete stop. It interrupts the delusions and mental habits that trap us in small, confined thoughts. It is an affront to the ego.

Death is a fact. Our challenge is to discover how to work with it, because struggling against it or denying it has never been a good strategy. The more we struggle against death, the greater our resentment and suffering become. We take a painful situation and, by struggling, add another layer of pain to it.

We cannot avoid death, but we can change how we relate to it. We can meet death as a teacher and see what is possible to learn from it.

The fact is: everyone will die, sooner or later. No magic trick or spiritual sleight of hand will make that disappear. Distancing ourselves from death or refusing to think about it does not work.

I have noticed that the more distant we are from death, the greater the fear that arises. Death becomes alien, other, frightening, mysterious. People who work regularly with dying, who are closer to death, seem to have less fear.

Each of us has our own unique relationship with death, our own history and particular circumstances, but in one way or another, we all relate to it. The question is: how do we relate to this reality and how does it color our lives? It is possible to reconcile ourselves with the fact of death in a way that enriches our lives, but to learn from death, we must be willing to adopt an unbiased view of our experiences and assumptions.

Reflection on our own mortality and on the reality of death is practiced in many contemplative traditions. In the Buddhist tradition, contemplation of death is called the “supreme contemplation.” It encompasses reflecting not only on physical death but on impermanence in all its dimensions.

Through meditation and the development of continuous awareness of death, we can change our relationship with death and, in doing so, change our relationship with life. We can see that death is not only something that arrives at the end of life, but that it is inseparably woven into our life moment by moment, from beginning to end. We can see that death is not only a final teacher. It is available to teach us here and now.

When we contemplate it this way, our various schemes created to get around the reality of death, such as inventing interpretations to make it more palatable, are exposed and dismantled one by one. Death is the great interrupter, irrational and non-negotiable. No amount of cleverness will change that.

Contemplating death is not an easy practice. It is not merely conceptual. It stirs things up. It evokes emotions of love, grief, fear, and anxiety. It brings up anger, disappointment, regret, and groundlessness. How gentle it is to reflect on the many losses we have experienced and will experience in the future. How harsh it is to reflect on the fleeting quality of life.

In this practice, we deliberately bring our attention, again and again, to our relationship with death. We examine what we understand about death and what it brings up for us. We reflect on our experiences and on our reactions to those experiences.

It is a bit like going to couples therapy. “When did you two meet? Tell me a little about your history. Do you spend much time together? What was it that hurt you about him or her? How do you see your relationship moving forward?” You could say that death is your most intimate partner. It is with you all the time, completely woven into your daily activities. Being that the case, would it not be worthwhile to develop a relationship with it?

But our relationship with death is not quite so simple. In seeking to understand it, we need to slow down and systematically examine our ideas about it, what it brings up, and what it means to us. Death brings up all kinds of thoughts. And hidden among these clouds of thoughts is a small, unspoken, deeply rooted and yet persistent notion that we will pass through it intact, as if we could attend our own funeral.

The more closely you look at all these ideas, the more you see how inadequate conceptual mind is in the face of death. Nevertheless, how we think about death matters. It affects how we live our lives and how we relate to one another.

Contemplative practice challenges us to look deeply into our thoughts and beliefs, fantasies and assumptions, hopes and fears. It challenges us to separate what we have been told from what we ourselves think and experience. We have all kinds of thoughts about what happens when we die and how we and others should relate to death, but through meditation, we learn to recognize thoughts as thoughts. We learn not to confuse these thoughts and ideas about death with direct knowledge or experience. We learn not to believe everything we think or everything we have been told.

We are in a dance with death at all levels, and each level influences and is influenced by the others. We are influenced by what we have been told about death and dying, by our personal history, by our cultural bias, and by what we have observed. We are also influenced by internal habits of thought and conditioned responses. Our more subtle views and reactions to impermanence may be somewhat hidden, but they touch our view of life all at once, and our personal identity.

If we want to understand our relationship with death, we need to explore its breadth as well as its more subtle dimensions. If we are willing to honestly take a look at how we personally deal with this reality, we can develop a deeper understanding of impermanence and even become comfortable with it.

One way to begin is by reflecting on your personal history with death. What were you told about death? What are some of your earliest experiences with it?

In my case, when I was about five years old, I was told that my nanny had died, and that was all. To me, she had simply disappeared, and children did not go to funerals. Later, when my aunt died, I was told that she would go to heaven, a very beautiful place. But I did not think people really believed that, because all I saw were upset people crying. When pets died, I was told they had “gone to sleep.” To me, it did not seem like they were sleeping.

As a child, I observed that dead animals did not breathe and did not move like living ones. I saw that they contracted and began to smell strange, or were crushed so they became unrecognizable. I saw that dogs hit by cars screamed in pain and that animals seemed sick before they died. I saw that people grew old and frail. I saw that when you killed an insect, you could not bring it back to life, even if you felt sorry. My friends and I thought it was funny to hum songs like “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…” Death was not so real to us; we turned it into a joke.

I observed many of these things on an external level, but on an internal level, I had no idea what death was or what any of it meant. I did not know how to make sense of it, or how to connect it to the other experiences of my life.

In our encounter with mortality, it is this internal dimension, the dimension of relationship, that we need to explore. It becomes clear that to arrive at a more unobstructed relationship with death, first we need to push through a surprising number of ideas, assumptions, and speculations, some of them rooted very deeply. Through this process, we can become aware of the many concepts floating around us and try to discover where they come from and what effect they have on us.

When we search for the origin of all this, we find a paradox. We generally consider death to be the end, but it begins to seem that, in fact, death is the beginning. It is the texture from which we mature our identity, the stage on which we enact our story.

We can begin our exploration right here, where we are. We have already been born, we are alive, and we have not yet died. And now? We can connect with our life in terms of a story or narrative. For example, we were born at such and such a time and place, we did this and that, and we possess a certain label and a certain identity. But this story is always changing and always in process; it is not so reliable. In any case, when our story is combined with a physical body, we seem to have something more solid, a complete package. We have something to hold onto and to defend. We have something that can be taken from us.

But what are we actually holding onto? Our story is not so solid. It is always being revised and rewritten. Similarly, our body is not a solid and continuous thing. It too is always changing. If you look for that body that is you, you will not find it.

The more closely you look, the less solid it all seems. When we investigate our experience as it actually is, here and now, moment by moment, we see how fleeting and dynamic it is. As soon as we perceive a thought, feeling, or sensation, it has already happened. Poof! It is gone! And the observer, the one who is perceiving, is nowhere to be found. Poof! When we contemplate in this way, we begin to suspect that this life is not so solid, that we are not so solid.

This may sound like bad news, but in fact this discovery is of supreme importance. As we begin to see through our mythical solidity, we also start to notice all kinds of small gaps that exist in our conceptual schemes. We notice small tastes of freedom and ease where our struggle to be someone dissolves, and we simply are. In such moments, at least briefly, we are not being driven by hope or fear. We see that continuously grasping at life and protecting ourselves from death as a future threat is not our only option. There is an alternative to this tense habit of holding and defending.

After each small insight or pause there is a regrouping, and we find ourselves rebuilding our world. Every time we reconstruct it, we are also reconstructing the threat that it cannot be maintained. We do this again and again. We are repeatedly and continuously fueling the pretense of solidity and the fear of death that comes with it.

To undo this harmful habit, we need to see it more clearly. We need to recognize that we are responsible for perpetuating it, and therefore we have the power to stop it.

By looking at the seeds of our relationship with life and death at a subtle internal level, we discover how we set ourselves up for a battle against death from the beginning, at a very personal level of identity and self-definition.

The more solid we construct ourselves, and the more rigidly we identify with that construction, the more we have to defend and the more we have to fear. Looking at death in terms of these hidden and subtle patterns may seem inconsequential, but it is not.

When we abandon the battlefield approach, the idea that life and death are enemies, we become open to a completely new way of seeing things. Instead of this against that, us against them, something far more inspiring can take its place. Experiences can arise with freshness because they are immediately released. Because they are released as soon as they arise, there is nothing to hold onto and nothing to lose. There is no battlefield, no winner and loser, no good guy and bad guy.

Simple formless meditation is a powerful tool for relaxing this pattern of holding and defending. Working with death through awareness of momentary arising and dissolving is a profound practice. It shows us that the life-death boundary is a ceaseless and even ordinary experience, and that this unsettling point of meeting colors everything we do. If we can become more grounded at this level, we can become more open to what death has to teach us as a whole.

Although death is a continuous reality, there are moments when it strikes us particularly hard. It can be when we get a health scare or a close call. In these moments, we really wake up to the presence of death, and its teachings emerge loud and clear. The heart pounds, the senses sharpen, and we feel extra alive. There is a quietness, as if time had stopped.

Moments like this are so simple and direct, so immediate. “This is it,” we think. “It is really happening.” In these moments, our heightened awareness of death simultaneously increases our sense of being alive.

In fact, in the face of death, we feel more alive than ever. We are forced to think more seriously about what to do with the time we have left. Yet we usually do not maintain this awareness, and the feeling of being more alive fades away. We return to the normal pattern of avoiding death and, with it, our dulled approach to life.

Maintaining awareness of death makes life more vivid. In the light of death, trivial interests fall away and our worries become meaningless. It is as if thick clouds of dust that were covering something bright and vivid had been blown away, and then we are left with something raw, immediate, and beautiful. We gain insight into what matters and what does not matter.

Awareness of death, listening to its teachings, cuts through the subtle clinging present at the heart of our experiences. It cuts through our self-clinging and our clinging to others. This may sound shocking, but all this clinging really has not helped us or anyone else. Our clinging to others may look like genuine care, but it is based on fear and the attempt to freeze and control life. It is a way of suppressing death and shielding ourselves from the intensity of life. But if we develop greater ease with our own impermanence and our difficulties with death, we can be more understanding with others and their difficulties. We can connect with one another in a more genuine and welcoming way.

Death comes to be the teacher who frees us from fear. It is the teacher who opens our hearts to a love and appreciation for life and for others that is freer and more fluid. When we get caught in our self-importance and seriousness, death appears. When we are caught by self-pity, death appears. When we become complacent and take things for granted, death appears.

Death urges us forward with a sense of urgency and puts our worries in perspective. Death makes our attachments lighter and mocks our pretensions. Death wakes us up. It is our most reliable teacher and our most constant companion.

Text by Judy Lief originally published in English at Lions Roar.

The images illustrating this post are by artist Tashi Mannox from the series “Laughing in the Face of Death: Living and Dying Without Regrets.”