Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a sort of meditative essay on the “art of dying” as it appears in Tibetan culture and in the West.
Best,
Sam
ON THE ART OF DYING
I think everybody who reads Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is very struck by it — the sort of book that’s a kind of crossover point in your life.
In the opening chapter, Sogyal Rinpoche describes the death of an elderly monk, Lama Tseten, and the perfect aplomb demonstrated by him. “It’s happening now,” says the Lama, with something like excitement, and then looks at the sky and expires. (Tseten’s master then visits him and, annoyed that Tseten died in a particular manner — “LaGen, we are travelers, we are pilgrims, we don’t have time to wait that long” — he briefly brings him back to life and then sends him off on his death journey in a different direction, one that allows the band of lamas to mourn a little more efficiently.)
The point is that death is understood to be an art and all of life a journey towards death. In the case of Lama Tseten and his master, the sense is of treating death as something like the climax of a movie (complete with director’s cut), with everything else in the film threading into the ending and the film more or less meaningless without it. Even allowing for some exaggeration in the telling of the story, it’s clear that, for Sogyal Rinpoche, the Lama’s masterful death made a pronounced impression. “At the age of seven I had my first glimpse of the vast power of the tradition I was being made a part of,” he writes.
Much of the rest of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is a critique of practices towards death in the West. “When I first came to the West, I was shocked by the contrast between the attitudes towards death that I had been brought up with and those I now found,” he writes. “I learned that people today are taught to deny death and taught that it means nothing but annihilation and loss. That means that most of the world lives either in denial of death or in terror of it.”
Closely connected to the denial of death is what Sogyal Rinpoche calls “active laziness” — a very Western phenomenon. “It consists of cramming our lives with obsessive activity so there is no time to confront the real issues,” he writes.
Meanwhile, travelers to Tibet are shocked in turn by the sanguinity towards death in the culture, which seems to border on callousness — as in the story of a Western woman who visited a prominent doctor hoping for a cure for her cancer and was told, instead, “You must learn to die.”
But the sometimes brusqueness of how this is expressed aside, it seems to me that there is no question that “learning to die” is of real value — and a critical offset to the “active laziness” that Sogyal Rinpoche found everywhere around him in the West.
For myself, I can’t say that I’ve actively put myself in the company of death — didn’t, for instance, actually volunteer to do hospice care, as I had a fleeting impulse to do when in college — but, starting around the time I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, developed a different approach to it. I started, basically, saying goodbye to life all the time. Every time I got on a plane I sort of assumed it would crash and tried to say thank you and goodbye to everything that I’d experienced in my life. Every time I left a place, tried to make a note to myself that this very likely would be the last time I would see it, did my best to register that.
This new habit didn’t feel morbid to me. It just felt like a new phase of my life — getting a little older; starting (and just starting) to think of death not so much as a catastrophe but as a companion. I also felt clumsy in this and felt as if I were sort of alone in it. This wasn’t a culture in which people were outfitted with ‘masters’ or ‘death guides.’ It felt very much like everybody just had to improvise, had to negotiate with their own psyche to figure out their own approach to death.
***
I’ve been reflecting on this a bit more than usual because my 9-year-old brother is going through a death phase. He’s had some loss recently — his cats; a friend — but, for several years, he’s been obsessed with war, learning everything about it, thinking about battles all the time. I have some understanding of what he’s going through because I went through my own militaristic phase when I was a year or two older than he is now. War was really all I thought about — it just seemed more intense, more real, than anything else. I remember telling my mother, “I love war,” to which she — getting a little nervous about the whole thing — said, “No, you don’t.” And not too long after that, that side of me switched off. As a natural progression in my militaristic phase, I went from reading about strategy, and playing war games, to actually reading soldiers’ accounts — and, somewhere in there, the reality of war (and, probably, the fact that I could die in it) got to me and I moved on in my interests. I think I saw a glimpse of that the other weekend — I went with my brother to a World War II reenactment, with real tanks and real gunpowder — and it was really scary! And I could see the way that a new consciousness of war, and of death, sank in for him.
I was describing the reenactment and describing how I felt that the whole obsession with war — the boyhood soldier phase — was basically the psyche having a complicated discussion with itself on the subject of death, and was wondering what the equivalent of that was for girls, and my interlocutor said that there was nothing really. “Maybe playing dress-up,” she said. And then this seemed to be more astute that we first realized. The idea with dress-up, with playing house, was about being perfect — a vision of a peak self. But somewhere in the heart of the game, the mirror cracked; the observe of it was being ugly, which led to the thought of having all of one’s beauty, all one’s perfection, eradicated. War and violence seemed not particularly to enter into the maturation process for girls, but, for boys in their soldier phase, it served a similar function: war was thought of as a game in which you were always winning, in which you were at the peak of your ability, in which you obtained glory. And then, in a national progression of that interest in the topic, the mirror cracked, the psyche encountered the other side of it.
I found this whole way of thinking oddly absorbing. It seemed to run through every activity I had. Playing chess, in the beginning, had seemed like it was all about improving, about being better. Eventually — having played as much I had — chess turned out really to be the art of losing, of knowing that there would always be somebody better, of learning to accept that with good grace. Writing, which had seemed so expansive, turned out mostly to be about memory, about capturing moments and saying goodbye to life as I was living it.
There’s a character in Samuel Butler’s The Way of all Flesh who, watching the last sunset of his life, is heard muttering “Goodbye sun, goodbye sun,” and that seemed like a nice way to do it — as much as possible, as much as the psyche would allow, saying goodbye; and being genuinely grateful as one did so.
Growing up on a reservation with so many early deaths, I always believed that I'd live to be 80 as long as I lived to be 30.
Powerful. Last year I had a phase of life self help kick and found Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal quite good.