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.

So much about death is unknown. It is mysterious, wondrous – where we come from and where we go. As Carl Jung described it: Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one.

Our relatively recent cultural legacy of empirical science with its incredible expansion of knowledge and its tenet that reality is limited to what can be measured and observed, can bring a kind of reductionism to death and dying, squeezing out the mythical, the imaginal, even the poetic, and death itself is reduced to a biological event, or even worse, a medical event.

Our culture has a strange relationship with death. It is hidden away as a kind of unfortunate event end that one must resist. Sometimes for me, I experience a kind of relief in these teachings and in my experiences with the dying of friends and family, because of the openness and honesty about the reality of death. There is an end coming– a radical dissolving of the body and personality. It is coming for me and everyone I know. How does the understanding of that truth help me live more fully now? Knowing everyone – everyone – will die, that this is a fate we all share – how does that inform my relationships? How does that guide my aspirations?

The title of this talk – Don’t Wait - is borrowed from The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski. Frank is a Buddhist teacher who co-founded the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco. Over the years, he has accompanied more than a thousand people in their dying journey. What he has learned about living and dying is distilled in this book, and it has inspired this talk.

Here's a quote from the introduction:
"To imagine that at the time of our dying we will have the physical strength, emotional stability, and mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime is a ridiculous gamble. This book is an invitation … to sit down with death, to have a cup of tea with her, to let her guide you toward living a more meaningful and loving life."

Each of us can develop a kind of a road map into unknown territory. Not that we will then clearly know where we are going, but we may have an idea of we wish to take one step after the other. And we can make choices now for living more fully.

Don’t wait.

One thing death shows us is the same thing we learn in meditation – that things are changing all the time. Arising, changing, and passing away. We see directly that thoughts and feelings are fleeting. And the body is breathing and moving. On a cellular level, change is happening: our cells are renewing themselves all the time; the average lifespan of a cell is 10 years. Skin cells renew themselves every few weeks. The harmonious counterpart to this constant dying all around and inside of us is renewal, becoming. So, that head cold we have doesn’t last, this talk will end, and that scrape on your knee will heal over with new skin cells.

Stephen Jenkinson, who wrote Die Wise, advises us: There is something enduring and true and useful about what dying is and what it asks of us all, and we need to be able to act on this wisdom when the time comes.

When are old enough that some time has gone and we look back, one of the blessings of that time of life is to see the arc of our lives. Yes, things have changed. We can see it. We are not the same person we once were. This kind of contemplative perspective can give us wisdom and understanding.

I once heard a talk that Frances Vaughn– one of the founders of transpersonal psychology – gave when she turned 80. She divided her life into four roughly 20-year periods; she called these four periods magical, mastery, meaning, and mystery. The first 20 years of life, childhood, is magical. The second 20 years of life are a time of mastery, when we are mastering who we will be in the world, learning skills, perhaps establishing a career and a family. The third 20-year period Frances characterized as a time of meaning, when we begin to wonder about the deeper significance and purpose of our life. And finally, the final period, she called mystery, the time of what she called ‘making friends with the mystery.’

Carl Jung wrote about the middle of life – that period Frances Vaughn described as shifting from mastery to meaning – as holding the potential for shifting from our doing in the world to being, a time in which many seek meaning – what’s the point of all this? – and a connection with the deeper elements of our psyche. We may also encounter an inner desperation and resistance as we glimpse the coming end to life – the descending slope of the arc.

"In the secret hour of life’s midday, the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal."

Jung goes on to describe how refusing to acknowledge the descent - death - will mean one is not truly living. The two – life and death – make one complete whole.

"The negation of life’s fulfilment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve."

The arc of ascending and descending: one complete curve that forms the natural shape of life. And if we turn toward the reality of the unavoidable ending, the second half of life can be accompanied by an expanded and integrated sense of self that embraces wholeness.

Frank Osteseski writes:

"Most of us choose comfort over truth. But when you think about it, we don’t grow and transform in our comfort zones. We grow when we realize we are no longer able to control all the conditions of our lives and are therefore challenged to change ourselves. When we release our clinging to what used to be and our craving for what we think should be, we are free to embrace what is ..."

What is more profoundly out of our control than dying and death?

Many years ago, I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. A central theme in the book is that preparing for death is the most important task of life. That struck me, and I found myself disagreeing. Why, I wondered, when death is the thing that happens at the end of life – would I need to dwell on it throughout life? It has taken me years to begin to understand this.

This kind of preparation will affect our experience of our own dying. Don’t wait to develop the understandings and practices that will aid us as we face the loss of everything, dissolving of our identities, the end of ‘self.’  As one Tibetan teacher writes: Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. Everything, absolutely everything, counts.

Not that this means we will have control over dying. Perhaps that is its biggest lesson – the complete dropping of any illusion of ultimate control. But we can influence our experience of dying. We can be served by the fine and nuanced practices of surrender, of acceptance, of presence, of patience.

There’s a beautiful instruction the Buddha gives for the sick and dying, that very much echoes the practices we work with every day. Thanissaro Bhikkhu summarizes:

"The Buddha once visited a sick ward and told the monks there to approach the moment of death mindful and alert. Instead of focusing on whether they would recover, they should observe the movements of the feelings they were experiencing: painful, pleasant, or neutral. Observing a sensation of pain, for instance, they should notice how inconstant it is and then focus on the repeated dissolution of all pains. They could then apply the same focused alertness to pleasant and neutral feelings as well. The steadiness of their focus would give rise to a sense of ease independent of sensory feelings, and from this point of independence they could develop dispassion and relinquishment, both for the body and for feelings of any sort. With relinquishment would come a genuine insight into the Dharma which, being Deathless, would end all fear of death."

As these instructions make it clear, the focus is not on trying to control the situation and resisting what is happening, the work is to observe the experience, and that observation has the potential to develop a sense of ease independent of the sensory experience. There are layers to this releasing and dis-identifying, with the potential to free us from all fear of death.

To make it clear, dying can be messy, painful, unpredictable, and likely to be absorbing. It can be long and drawn out, or instantaneous. Dying is something we do, but it is probable we will be weak and tired, perhaps dealing with pain, and unable to take care of ourselves without help. It is not known how much we will be able to bring our practice to the experience. Still, we can see that practicing now helps us develop the softness, steadiness, ease, honesty, kindness, and sense of humor that serve us now and will hopefully be resources we can call on even when things get challenging.

Frank Ostaseski tells the story of his heart attack. He was teaching at a symposium about dying with Ram Dass. He was complaining about numbness and tingling in his arms and his assistant insisted they go to the hospital. Later Ram Dass asked Frank what he saw as he was being wheeled into emergency bypass surgery, not knowing if he would make it out alive.

His answer? ‘The ceiling.’  

Frank asked Ram Dass what he saw when he was taken to the hospital with a massive stroke that left him unable to move or talk. His answer? ‘The pipes.’

Ram Dass later said:
"Here I was, Mr. Spiritual, having a life-and-death experience. I should’ve been merging with God,… not watching the pipes on the ceiling. If death is one of the great matters for spiritual work, I flunked the big test. I was disappointed with myself…"

"Of course, the truth is that we all keep failing tests until we don’t. That’s a definition of the spiritual path. Eventually, surrendering to my damaged body, I had to surrender my judging mind too—the attachments, the motivations, how I thought it should be or how I should be."

True to Ram Dass’s life, he continued to make his debility into grist for the mill of awakening.

Don’t wait.

What else might be beneficial in addition to a mindfulness practice? Living an ethical life as well as practicing self-compassion and self-forgiveness, so that one is not burdened by regrets of the past.  Thannissaro Bhikkhu, in his essay Educating Compassion, writes:
"The patients best suited for making the most of the Dharma when sick or dying are those who are not tormented with memories of cruel or hurtful things they did in the past, and who have already developed a meditative or contemplative practice prior to their illness. Even if that practice isn't Buddhist, they intuitively respond to the Buddha's message on pain and are able to use it to alleviate their own sufferings."

Thai master Ajaan Fuang once said: when you meditate, you're gaining practice in how to die — how to be mindful and alert, how to endure pain, how to gain control over wayward thoughts and maybe even reach the Deathless — so that when the time comes to die, you'll do it with skill.

Don’t wait.

Deepening our own acceptance and understanding and preparation for death can also build our own capacity for accompanying others in their dying. I consider this a sacred opportunity – and a great gift to the dying person and to ourselves. Stephen Jenkinson writes,

"You need a willingness to see the dying in front of you and the dying within you for what they are. Though they are not likely to ask for it, dying people need a faithful witness to their dying, not someone who will banish what is hard and demanding about dying. Dying is hard enough, in a death-phobic time and place, without that."

‘Dying people need a faithful witness to their dying.’ My mom and I had many conversations about death and dying. Over the years, she would have times of acceptance of the end of life. Sometimes she was eager for death, and heartbroken to still be here in her life, stripped away of the abilities and independence that had made her life meaningful. She was sometime deeply sad at the thought of leaving us behind. Other times she would rediscover meaning and enjoyment and wanted to live. In all of these conversations, I tried my best to be as open-hearted and present as I could be, while not sugar-coating any of it.

When the final week of her dying time came, I felt there was acceptance and settling in her. Several times she asked what was happening and we were honest with her: You are dying, and we are all hear to support you as best we can. Dying is hard work, maybe the hardest thing we ever do. And yet, over that final week, she developed a kind of inexplicable radiance that seemed to increase even as her being receded.


Don’t wait.


Sacred Ground
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And if, as I now know, the closet
is sacred and the bare room
is sacred and the sidewalk
and classroom and the ER
are sacred, then I trip
into the teaching
that everywhere is sacred--
not only the church, but
the alley. Not only the mosque,
but the bench.
Not only the places in candlelight
where the air is pungent
and woody with myrrh.
I want to worship
at the shrine of everywhere,
want to know every inch
of this earth as an altar--
every walk, a pilgrimage.
Every step, a step
from holy to holy
to holy.


May all beings be at peace with dying and thereby live fully.