Being One with Dying: 
Showing Up for the Great Matter
(Part 1)

by Joan Halifax Roshi

"Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost.
Let us awaken
awaken....
Do not squander your life."

 – Zen Night Chant

Thornton Wilder’s famous novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey imagines the lives of five people killed in the collapse of a bridge in Peru. In the novel, a missionary watches the falling bridge “fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below.” Curious, he sets out to trace the lives of the victims in an effort to understand the seemingly random nature of the tragedy.

Really, Wilder’s story is a parable of the struggle to find meaning in chance and in inexplicable tragedy – a struggle the victims’ relatives face after the disaster. Wilder explained that he himself was seeking the answer to a question: “Is there a direction and meaning in life, beyond the individual’s own will?”*

His story reminds us that death isn’t only for the dying – it is also for those who survive us. Indeed, dying is not an individual act. A dying person is often a performer in a communal drama. Like our last will and testament, a legacy that materially benefits our survivors, we also leave a legacy of how we experience our death. And the bulk of that legacy comes from how we transition through the ultimate rite of passage – how we are able to be with our own dying.

Often we take part in rites of passage without being aware of what we are doing, or without having the transition and its shifts in consciousness acknowledged by our culture. Long, sleepless hours, high pressure, and the presence of suffering, death, and the mysterious unknown are ingredients in such rites.

Even though we may not call them rites of passage, such universal transitions in everyone’s life include the elements of separation, the threshold, and return. Often we are not fully present for these experiences, the tide’s deep ebb, because they may be painful or frightening. They include being ill and recovering our health, making love for the first time, giving birth to a child. And dying is possibly the ultimate example of such a transition.

Death urges us to accept and appreciate our lives, to forgive ourselves and others, and to let go as the small self is dissolved into a larger stream of being. From the perspective of Buddhism, this is the greatest opportunity for awakening and freedom—as Emerson said, the wounded oyster that mends itself with a pearl.

But what rituals do we have in our culture that denote and legitimize such transformative passages? Practically none. Our society does not view catastrophe as a passage. Instead, chaotic, frightening experiences are usually controlled and suppressed. They aren’t conditions with which our society is comfortable.

Yet even without support we instinctively seek the experience of separation, the threshold or being on the edge, and return. Clearly, dying and death in our culture are a rite of passage, whether we realize it or not. Some people experience a mental breakdown that induces maturity. Others, suffering, resolve to enter a strong spiritual practice. Some become physically ill and then evolve into wounded healers, turning outward to help others after having healed themselves. And of course, many people in their experience of dying “unconceal” their own natural wisdom. My father became even wiser as he was dying. Issan Dorsey became a true Zen man as he died. My friend Julie matured into a teacher as she lay dying. And Ann, the brilliant physician and research scientist, found faith beyond language as her brain was taken over by an aggressive death-dealing tumor.

Strange to say, but catastrophe is usually the circumstance that liberates strength, wisdom, and kindness from within the suffocating embrace of fear. Dying, we can be more alive. Being present and giving care in the midst of a meltdown of mind or life can seed compassion. This is how we mature, and how transparency and intimacy are engendered. Our very physical and psychic vulnerability, if we allow it, shows us the path and the present. It can also nurture gratitude and humility. Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth. (...Continue to Part 2...)

Copyright 2008 by Joan Halifax.
Published by Shambhala Publications.
Used with permission.

Joan Halifax Roshi – Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, civil-rights activist, and author – is Founder and Abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As Director of the Project for Being with Dying, she counsels dying people and teaches health-care professionals about the dying process. Our thanks for the gracious permission granted by her and by the staff at Shambhala to post this Afterword from her new book, Being with Dying:  Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death.

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* Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 107.