Lessons From The Dying (Rodney Smith)
I’m not sure how, but I have again (for the third time? fourth time?) found myself reading a book written by a hospice worker who was also a former Buddhist monk. The field of contemplative mortality is replete with them!
OVERVIEW
Despite it not being entirely secular, I enjoyed Lessons From The Dying immensely. It’s the same flavour as Frank Ostaseski’s The Five Invitations, but I found the content slightly more accessible, more actionable, and more death-focused. Like The Five Invitations, the lessons draw heavily from Rodney Smith’s experience as a monk and from working with the dying in hospice. Each of the 14 chapters ends with multiple exercises and meditations. I love Smith’s quote: ‘we cannot play with death as an intellectual curiosity and expect it to reveal its secrets - a wide gap lies between recognizing the subject and letting it into our hearts.’
The treasure in reading books by those who have worked with the dying is that it’s abundantly clear the gap between healthy and ill is paper thin; the stories of the dying are our stories. As Smith says, this is a “happening to me” book, and the exercises/meditations are meant to draw out real, experiential insight.
Like many of the other books I’ve read by Buddhists, Lessons From the Dying is a call to live with an intimate awareness of death. Here are some points I think this book makes better than most:
· How preparing for death prepares us for all of life’s transitions, losses, and griefs – for uncertainty and insecurity. Our relationship with the unknown is our relationship with death.
· How projecting ourselves into the future, or projecting our fears onto the future, causes us great suffering.
· How to embrace the whole human experience and live in the present moment with self-acceptance and unpretentiousness. How death and dying can teach us to live with authentic contentment.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
For each chapter I’ve tried to pull out the crux of the lesson/exercise. 14 chapters, 14 lessons:
· Delight in the mystery of nature and consciousness (this can be divorced from anything woo-woo).
· Stop avoiding the reality of death. Don’t push it away.
· Get comfortable with the unknown. Adopt a childlike curiosity.
· Bring your whole being to every experience (sounds like one of Ostaseski’s five invitations).
· Be free of expectation.
· Maintain an open, curious, receptive attention – a learning attitude. Don’t project your fears of the unknown onto death.
· Listen with care and concern, respond genuinely (both truthfully and usefully). Be open and receptive to fear.
· Imagine the time has come for you to die. Reflect on what would give you strength. What would give you peace? What would make you feel like your life had been led meaningfully?
· Explore your relationship with suffering. How much is amplified by your reactivity to pain or unpleasant emotions?
· Be expansive with your love and generosity.
· A lifetime of clinging to ambition, independence, individualism, self-sufficiency, and control makes for a difficult death. Practice surrender and letting be/letting go more in your life.
· Accept that grief is disorientating and confusing. Sincere loss and grief cannot be ignored, and so we must turn our complete attention to loss and grief to move through them.
· Live in the moment you have. Be present.
· Practice stillness. As we age or are faced with life-limiting illness, we are increasingly less productive, less able to “do.” What is left behind is being, and “being” is something we can practice now.
A further note on this last point, which is from the last chapter – The Deathless. What was made salient for me in this chapter is why meditation is so important. Learning to sit in stillness and quietude is fundamental to living presently (yes duh, but another shoe dropped here). When our mind stirs and becomes restless, it’s because we want to be doing something different, thinking about something different… something more interesting. This right here is exposing our desire to create a different future. The pull for “something” other than what “is”. If we want to learn how to be present (and every single thing I’ve read to date suggests this is fundamental to embracing life and death), we must learn to be still, to resist the urge to project ourselves into the future.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No (especially in the first chapter). Themes of the ‘unknowable,’ feeling the deceased’s consciousness after death, the ‘unseen.’ You know the drill.
If you had to describe the book in one sentence? 14 lessons on how to live and die from a former Buddhist monk, complete with meditations and exercises to help you practice.
Who should read this book? Those who think Buddhism gets a lot of things right about living and dying but want the teachings presented in a way that’s not so esoteric or abstract.