The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

by Frank Ostaseski

seeing each death as unique and meaningful, as an opportunity for wisdom and healing—not only for the dying, but also for those who live on.

This book is a sharing of deep experience by a superbly aware observer. It invites you to grow your eyes. My grandfather taught me that a teacher is not a wise man, but a pointing finger directing our attention to the reality that surrounds us.

reminded me of how few things really matter and how much they matter.

The purpose of every life is to grow in wisdom and learn to love better.

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly, they are passed on unopened. —RAINER MARIA RILKE

What made the difference was the willingness to gradually live into the deeper dimensions of what it means to be human. 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.

Staying close to my intuition, trusting that listening is the most powerful way to connect,

Elisabeth was skillful, intuitive, and often opinionated, but above all, she demonstrated how to love those she served, without reservation or attachment.

do compassion practices, imagining that I could transform the pain I was witnessing.

“You have to open yourself up and let the pain move through you,” Elisabeth said. “It’s not yours to hold.”

gather up the suffering in my life, use it as grist for the mill, and alchemically change it into the fuel for selfless service—all

without making a big deal about it.

I learned that the activities of caregiving are themselves quite ordinary. You make soup, give a back rub, change soiled sheets, help with medications, listen to a lifetime of stories lived and now ending, show up as a calm and loving presence. Nothing special. Just simple human kindness, really.

Ours was a legacy project aimed at reclaiming the soul in caregiving and restoring a life-affirming relationship to dying.

“Death comes not to you, but to someone else whom the gods make ready.” This sentiment feels true to me. The person I am today, living in this story, is not exactly the same person as the one who will die. Life and death will change me. I will be different in some very fundamental ways. For something new to emerge within us, we must be open

The cliché says, “We die as we live.”

1. Don’t wait. 2. Welcome everything, push away nothing. 3. Bring your whole self to the experience. 4. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. 5. Cultivate don’t know mind.

“The problem with the word patience,” said Zen master Suzuki Roshi, “is that it implies we are waiting for something to get better, we are waiting for something good that will come. A more accurate word for this quality is constancy, a capacity to be with what is true moment after moment.”

our lives on meaningless activities. We learn to not hold our opinions, our desires, and even our own identities so tightly.

Don’t wait is a pathway to fulfillment and an antidote to regret.

Where is my childhood? Where is last night’s lovemaking? All that is here today will be only a memory tomorrow. Intellectually, we may understand that our mother’s treasured vase will one day fall off the shelf, the car will break down, and those we love will die. Our work is to move this understanding from our intellect and to nestle it deep within our hearts.

While we mostly associate impermanence with sadness and endings, it is not all about loss. In Buddhism, impermanence is often referred to as the “Law of Change and Becoming.” These two correlated principles provide balance and harmony. Just as there is constant “dissolving,” there is also constant “becoming.”

“We don’t feel any negativity. We don’t know how to judge her motivations. We pray for her with love and compassion.”

I can’t create conditions that are capable of providing an enduring happiness that is resistant to change. Like most

Usually, we seek happiness through trying to arrange the world in such a way that we meet things that are pleasant and avoid what is unpleasant.

The truth of life is that its one constant is change. When we look closely, is there anything else? Not living in harmony with this truth causes us no end of suffering. It strengthens our ignorance and sets up the habits of craving, defense, and regret. These habits harden into character and have a powerful momentum that frequently shows up as obstacles to peace at the time of dying.

We know that the end of all accumulation is dispersion. Reflecting on this might help us to practice simplicity and discover what has real value.

We are free to savor life, to touch the texture of each passing moment completely, whether the moment is one of sadness or joy. When we understand on a deep level that impermanence is in the life of all things, we learn to tolerate change better. We become more appreciative and resilient.

In “Living and Dying: A Buddhist Perspective,” Carol Hyman wrote, “If we learn to let go into uncertainty, to trust that our basic nature and that of the world are not different, then the fact that things are not solid and fixed becomes, rather than a threat, a liberating opportunity.”

Impermanence is the doorway to possibility. Embracing it is where true freedom lies.

Apprentice yourself to the curve of your own disappearance. —DAVID WHYTE

Sadly, we are so disconnected from the actual experience of death that I frequently have observed family

members watching their loved ones’ deaths on a TV screen, rather than looking into their beloveds’ eyes or sensing the death viscerally in their own bodies.

more fundamental sense of belonging, which involves a falling away of differences. This is similar to what happens naturally in the dying process. The ways we have defined our “self,” the identities we have carried for so long—of mother or father, provider or caregiver, loner or people person, rich or poor, success or failure—all these descriptions gradually are stripped away by illness and old age, or they are gracefully surrendered.

She asked me what she could do for him that might help. I asked, “What do you do when your young children are sick?” She said, “Well, I sit quietly right next to their bed, or sometimes I snuggle up with them. I speak less and listen more. I let them know I am right here with them. I retell them in words and in touch how much I love them.” “Beautiful,” I said. “What else?” I could see her remembering what she already knew. She almost whispered, “I try to create a kind environment that is peaceful so they are not as afraid. I try to do simple things with great attention. I promise I won’t leave them. I tell them it’s okay that they are sick and that it won’t be like this forever.”

a few lines from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

than to me. “I thought I was losing him, but he is everywhere.” Earth dissolves into water. Water dissolves into fire. Fire dissolves into air. Air dissolves into space. Space dissolves into consciousness.

have found that what we can experience or know directly may be much more important than our ability to explain or measure it.

It’s funny—we all pretty much agree that life is in constant flux. Yet we prefer to cling to the illusion that we ourselves are solid things moving through a changing world. “Everything is changing except me,” we tell ourselves. But we are mistaken. We are not only the small solid selves we have taken ourselves to be.

While illness can contract us into an even smaller sense of self, many people who are sick or dying speak of no longer being limited by the previous boundaries of their old, familiar identities. They are exposed to a more expansive landscape. In a strange way, illness—like a powerful encounter with beauty—shakes us, ripens us, and opens us to deeper dimensions of being. It’s not that life becomes perfectly sweet and neatly ordered. There is still plenty of madness, mayhem, and chaos. However, we come to embody much wider identities. The interior life and the external world permeate each other and commingle.

When we are seriously ill, like Charles, it can take all our energy just to stand, to get to the toilet, or to perform the simplest functions of daily life. Illness cracks our notions of control. We don’t realize it, but the lifelong process of repression takes energy. When we simply don’t have that energy available to us anymore, unconscious material begins slipping out. Frequently, it surprises us.

Zen master Suzuki Roshi was pointing to when he said, “What we call I is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.”

When we relax the clinging to our treasured beliefs and ideas, soften our resistance to the blows of life, stop trying to manage the uncertainty and hold ourselves more lightly, then we become a less solid thing. Less of a fixed identity.

I could feel the exhaustion of propping up my personality. At times, my personality seemed like a giant balloon that I had become breathless constantly trying to inflate. As I accepted the fragility of my life, it opened me. I felt myself to be a porous thing, more transparent, more permeable.

Luckily, we don’t have to wait until we are sick or dying to embrace our own impermanence. Any major life-changing event provides us with this opportunity.

Embracing our own impermanence is a journey, taking us deeper and deeper into contact with the true nature of things.

The beauty is that our impermanence binds us to every other human being.

Hope inspires the good to reveal itself. —ANONYMOUS (OR ATTRIBUTED TO EMILY DICKINSON)

Experts differ on whether hope is an emotion, a belief, a conscious choice, or all three. Václav Havel, the philosopher and first president of the Czech Republic, suggested that hope is “an orientation of the spirit.” I think of hope as an innate quality of being, an open, active trust in life that refuses to quit.

stops being about managing the symptoms we did not choose and cannot avoid, and instead turns toward discovering the value in living fully given our current conditions.