Don’t Wait

by Carol Russell
Adapted from a talk given at Prescott Insight Meditation on May 6, 2025

My Mom died three weeks ago. She died the way she lived, with a good measure of love, and honesty, acceptance, and a sense of wonder. Not that it was easy. Death is hard work. Accompanying her on this journey – from 11 years ago when she had her first stroke to the final week when she took to her bed – has been a priceless honor. Although we miss her very much, how she died is a profound part of the gift she leaves her family and the people who cared for her.

What does death have to offer those of us left behind? What does death have to offer the living? Death has the potential to inform us – and to transform us. Some of us have had death touch us recently, as I have, or we are aging and feeling it, or we have a diagnosis that makes death a little more tangible. But really, we are all on the edge of death. How many of us think death will happen later – sometime in the distant future? The truth is death can come any moment. If not us imminently, it could be someone we love very much.

This is what the Dhamma teaches us. The Buddha encouraged this kind of reflection, conceptually and experientially, not as a theoretical idea, but to touch into the reality of change and endings, life and death. This kind of study penetrates to the level that it penetrates for each of us, perhaps touching us more profoundly as our practice deepens.

Foundational to our mindfulness practice is the question we can bring to whatever is arising in our lives: what is my relationship to it? What is my relationship to dying and death? Maybe we recoil. Maybe we’re curious. Some face the truth of the end of life with a comforting story of something beyond. Perhaps we have decided we will think about death when we are older. Our relationship to death is very personal.

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