On Death and Dying

Being at the bedside, memento mori, and the unexpected strength it can take die. Some reflections on helping others die and what it means to resolve myself to my own death. (With audio.)

The first sakura (cherry blossoms) coming out this winter/spring.

This is a different post from what I usually write for this newsletter. You'll find it less opining and more reflective, although seasoned readers of this newsletter will know that my core message is always the same: Train hard! 🙂

I'm also posting a recording of myself reading this article in case you'd prefer to listen rather than read. Let me know in the comments if you like the recording and I'll do more of it.

Cristina

---

Recently, I was asked to help a 92-year-old man die. 

After a very painful decline, my Zen teacher's neighbor had received approval from the state of Hawaii for Medical Aid in Dying (MAID). Sayama Roshi was going to be there to say goodbye, and also to perform a small ceremony. He needed a second for the ceremony, and he called on me.

Recently, I was asked to help a 92-year-old man die. In the preceding weeks, death had already been on my mind, including wondering whether I'm adequately preparing for mine.

Most of the time that I was there in that lofty house with its exquisite view of Diamondhead, I spent just observing and pouring sake for the man's friends. His instructions had been clear: he wanted to die hearing them laugh and drink, clinking their glasses. In attendance was the young man who rented the apartment downstairs and who had taken to him like a long lost grandson. There were also a few friends from the neighborhood, all with their own stories of how they'd met that illustrated their friend's great kindness and his saucy sense of humor. 

Before I arrived, an anti-nausea medication had been administered. The medication used in MAID is noxious and fickle, so everyone was waiting for the anti-nausea meds to take effect to keep the final, lethal concoction down. When it was time, the white powder was combined with several ounces of water, which all had to be consumed within two minutes, otherwise it would solidify. 

He took hesitant sips and then big, brave gulps. It was terrible, he said, and the slurry burned his throat on the way down. But his humor in those last moments was still intact: "Yuck! Did you try this? Where did you get it?" he scolded his loving and anxious friends. "Do I have to drink it ALL?!"

Then, we waited. Within a few minutes, he was asleep. It was another forty before his heart—which had been as strong as an ox's—finally faded down to nothing. I had actually misunderstood how long it would take for the medication to work, so there were several times when I thought he was gone, only to hear him take another big breath of air.

After he was finally gone, Sayama Roshi and I chanted the Makahannya Haramita Shingyo (The Heart Sutra) and stroked him from head to toe, releasing the energy from his body. Then, after our last bow to him, I picked up the sake bottle and asked everyone where their glasses were. I put on Otis Redding's "(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay." Everyone was still absorbed in the quiet sobriety of waiting for him to pass, but I reminded them that he'd said he wanted to hear a party and they kindly obliged him this last act.

In the preceding weeks, death had already been on my mind, including wondering whether I'm adequately preparing for mine. I spoke with someone entering a chaplaincy program, and I interviewed a friend about her memoir on chaplaincy and the death of her best friend. At some point, I came across a video by a Japanese influencer who travels the world teaching people about the path of the samurai. He quoted a line from the samurai manual, The Hagakure, which says, "the Way of the samurai is to die." He then picked up a ceramic urn that he keeps on a shelf by his bed, and explained that it's the urn he's picked out to hold his ashes. Gazing upon this urn, he said, he contemplates his death every day.

He picked up a ceramic urn that he keeps on a shelf by his bed, and explained that it's the urn he's picked out to hold his ashes. Gazing upon this urn, he said, he contemplates his death every day.

For some reason that I can't really remember, I tried to do this with my own memento mori when I was a teenager. It didn't work. It was only a few days before I looked right past the object that was supposed to trigger my existential reflection. Perhaps I was too immature, or perhaps the exercise required too much thinking, adding conceptual meaning to an otherwise ordinary thing. In any case, it didn't bring me any closer to being able to face my ultimate end without equivocation or, more importantly, to being a kinder and wiser person for having accepted my own mortality. 

Much later, in my 30s, I was at my grandmother's bedside just before she was put on hospice. I remember how she drew the cross on herself, a way of communicating something deep and meaningful despite the fact that she could no longer speak or hear. It was her way of telling us that she was ready, that she wanted to die, that that was why she was refusing food and water. When I visited again the next day, she was visibly weaker. So much so that she lacked the strength to push away the hand trying to feed her. 

I thought I saw disappointment in her deeply lined face as she ate just a little bit of rice porridge. I realized then that it is very hard to stay resolute in the end. It can take enormous focus, concentration, and will—not to stay alive but to die.

I realized that it is very hard to stay resolute in the end. It can take enormous focus, concentration, and will—not to stay alive but to die.

In my Zen training, I recognize in myself inklings of the practical resolve and spiritual strength I wished for my grandmother. I see it when I'm sitting long hours of zazen through physical pain. In the last moments with Roshi's neighbor, I settled into a space by his side that begged to be filled and I held him. The day after, I waited patiently for any intrusive thoughts and recollections of the moment of his death but they never came. 

Sometimes, I recognize these qualities in the form of an ordinary and pleasant emptiness. If I can muster up all my concentration while also staying totally relaxed during zazen or another activity, it's possible to breathe and feel no "me" breathing. For a fleeting moment, it's like I am the one being breathed.

In the ceramics workshop, where I am letting the clay shape me through endless repetition, I can see and feel my hands shaping the clay, and I am fully engaged in the act of shaping. I can see, hear, and feel everything. If I stay relaxed and throw everything I have into my task, I get a synesthetic glimpse into something contradictory and yet indescribably clear: I cease to exist and, through my action and concentration, I bring everything I perceive into existence.

In my Zen training, I sometimes feel a small death. It feels empty, an echo of the emptiness I’ve seen in a body after the life has finally left it. As a student recently said to me, it rhymes.

It feels empty, an echo of the emptiness that I saw in Roshi's neighbor after the life had finally, visibly left him. As a student recently said to me, it rhymes. It's a small death, indelibly satisfying, liberating. When I feel it, a small cry rises in my chest and then disappears the moment I notice it, a response to witnessing something rare, terrifying, mundane, and in the end, beautiful.