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

by Frank Ostaseski

I found they mostly pointed my attention toward the future. “Tomorrow will be a better day,” they would say, intending to reassure me.

Too often, caregivers tend to amplify the patient’s fear or exacerbate the condition of confusion by focusing exclusively on problem solving. In so doing, they may intensify the contraction. Soon, just as I had, the patient loses contact with their innate resourcefulness.

In the chaos of illness, one calm person in the room can make all the difference. In caring for someone who is sick, we use the strength of our arms and backs to move a patient from the bed to the commode. We lend the patient our bodies. We can also lend people the concentration of our minds and the fearlessness of our hearts. We can be a reminder of stability and confidence. We

As caregivers, as friends, our work is to be portals, not just problem solvers.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., says this better than anyone I know when she writes, “Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.” Fixing and helping are draining. Over time, we may burn out. But service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will renew us. In helping, we may find a sense of satisfaction, but in serving we find a sense of gratitude.

Try it sometime. Sit with another person without a solution to their problem, without playing a role. No analyzing, no fixing, no meddling, no mending. Listen generously, as if the other person has all of the resources that they need inside of them. Just respect and receive what is being offered. It’s not even important that you understand. Imagine your listening presence is enough, exactly what is needed. Often a receptive silence heals more than all the well-meaning words.

It’s not that roles have no value; it’s that they are not sufficient for our well-being. For that, we need the courage to be authentically whole. What is authenticity? It is saying what is so when it is so. Showing up, doing what we say we will do, remembering our commitments, and honoring our agreements. Authenticity engages the will and points to what has heart and meaning, while simultaneously diminishing reactivity. It means taking personal responsibility for both the tasks at hand and the relationships we build as we perform those tasks. Acting authentically builds trust.

We have to discover how to love what we do, even if we don’t always do what we love.

Chances are if you’re extremely critical of yourself, you’ll be a harsh critic of others.

But every new loss triggers the memory of another.

Most often, we think of grief as an overwhelming response to a singular event, usually the death of someone we love. Yet when we look more closely, we see that grief has been our companion for a good part of our lives. Clyde was talking about everyday grief, the response to the multiple losses and little deaths that occur almost daily.

The author C. S. Lewis, after the death of his wife, wrote, “No one told me grief felt so much like fear.” Our grief manifests as anger, self-judgment, regret, and guilt.

we never speak about “managing” our joy or “getting over” our happiness. Grief is like a stream running through our lives, and it is important to understand that loss doesn’t go away. It lasts a lifetime. It is our relationship to a particular loss that changes. It won’t always hold the same intensity for us, or take the same expression.

Shock and disbelief usually give way to guilt and regret.

Grief is disorienting. We forget our keys, arrive at places and can’t remember why we went there. This is the state of grief that at Zen Hospice Project we called losing. We can’t concentrate. We live in a confused reality. And this goes on for a while after the death of someone you love.

In the old days, people used to wear black armbands to let each other know that they were mourning because grief is like being in an altered state. And people treated mourners differently. They took care of them. In the first days and weeks after someone you love dies, don’t expect yourself to be able to function fully. Ask for help. Let somebody else make the meals and do the laundry. Cancel your appointments. Take time. Walk if you can. Your body will be rebelling in all sorts of odd ways. Incredible fatigue. Your legs will feel like lead. Restlessness will rule. You may not want to sleep or eat. Or you might need to sleep all day. Find someone to hold you, or find a shirt with your loved one’s scent on it and hold it close. Distracting yourself only postpones the experience. It doesn’t make it go away.

Losing can go on for weeks, months, even years. When someone we love dies, we keep on losing that person over and over again, especially at holidays, in times of difficult decisions, and in those little personal moments we long to share. During this period, we realize most clearly the roles that the other person has played in our lives, and we grieve the loss of those also.

If our parents die, we may find ourselves feeling really fragile. They were the buffer standing between us and death, and suddenly, we become much more aware of our own mortality. This is the phase of grief when we feel most alone. Friends drop away, others give us unwanted advice.

invite her out to dinner. The friend said, “I know you may not want to go, and it’s okay to say no. But I want you to know that I’m here when you need me. I will call again next Monday.”

In this period of losing, it is critical that we allow ourselves to feel the pain. Some say time heals. That is a dangerous half-truth. Time alone doesn’t heal. Time and loving attention heal.

It is not the pain that awakens us; it is our attention to the pain. Our willingness to experience and investigate our suffering gives rise to compassion and kindness. Consistent, loving attention melts our well-constructed defenses and unleashes old holdings. We begin to invite the pain into our hearts.

Loosening is the period in which the knot of our grief is untied. It is a time of renewal. You can’t go back to life as it was before because you are a different person now, changed by your journey through grief. But you can begin to embrace life again, to feel alive again. The intensity of emotions has subsided somewhat. You can remember the loss without being caught up in a stranglehold of grief. You can move forward without abandoning the one you love.

when we feel that we have given ourselves fully and completely to our grief and didn’t hold anything back, then we will surely feel great sorrow. But also we will feel gratitude and the possibility of opening to a reservoir of joy and love that we may have never known before. I call this undying love.

we are more than the grief. We are what the grief is moving through.

This person has a body, heart, and mind, just like me. This person worries and gets frightened, just like me. This person is trying their best to navigate life, just like me. This person is a fellow human being, just like me. Now, allow some benevolent wishes for well-being to arise: May this person have the strength and support to face the difficulties in life. May this person be free from suffering and its causes. May this person be peaceful and happy. May this person be loved.

when I am really present, sitting in my own seat, so to speak, and grounded in compassion, the other person can sense that and begins to trust and open up—not because there is no danger, but because they feel that they are not alone. Genuine understanding and compassionate companionship offer them the support and encouragement they need in order to go toward what feels dangerous.

At times when the grief was overwhelming, I did three things: I made a point of getting regular bodywork, often spending the better part of a session crying on the massage table; I regularly returned to my meditation cushion and the practices that stabilized my attention, regulated my emotional states, and cultivated pro-social qualities like loving kindness; and I would visit my nurse friends who worked in the unit at the general hospital caring for babies who have been born to addicted mothers. I’d sit in a rocking chair, hold these babies, and rock them to sleep. There was something about the innocence of the babies and the satisfaction of being able to soothe them that enabled me to reconnect with my compassion and meet the daily suffering that was part of the hospice experience.

It can be helpful to consider the possibility that compassion is not a quality that we possess, but rather one that we access, inherent in the nature of reality. Love has been here all along. It is absolute because everything and everyone always has been held in love.

“radical connectedness” and how the wisdom of non-separation is the source of compassion.

Universal compassion needs our arms and legs and strong backs. We are its vehicle. We are how it manifests in the everyday world.

There is a labor to dying as there is a labor to giving birth.

We often think of rest as something that will come to us when everything else in our lives is complete: at the end of the day, when we take a bath; once we go on holiday or get through all our to-do lists. We imagine that we can only find rest by changing our circumstances. The Fourth Invitation teaches us that, like Adele, we can find a place of rest within us, without having to alter the conditions of our lives. After all, the conditions of Adele’s life remained the same—her breathing didn’t change; she was still dying. Nevertheless, she found a place of rest. This place of rest is always available to us. We need only turn toward it. It is experienced when we bring our full attention, without distraction, to this moment, to this activity. With sincere practice, after some time, we can come to know this spaciousness as a regular part of our lives. It manifests as an aspect of us that is never sick, is not born, and does not die.

A recent survey of San Francisco residents found that on any given day, most people interact with their smartphones more than they do with other human beings. Half of the people surveyed admitted to using their phones to escape social interaction, and nearly a third said they felt anxious when they didn’t have access to their phones.

“Nature’s rhythm is medium to slow. Many of us live in the fast lane, out of nature’s rhythm. There are two things we can never do in the fast lane: we can neither deepen our experience nor integrate it.”

The engine that drives the wheel is sometimes referred to as the three poisons. These are the root causes of our suffering: craving (greed), aversion (hatred), and ignorance (delusion).

He called them demand, defense, and distract.

Koans often appear contradictory, but they are not intended as riddles or puzzles to be solved. Rather, they are meant to help us gain insight, freeing us up from our ordinary ways of seeing and knowing the world by propelling us toward our direct experience. The koan “Cultivate don’t know mind” may seem confusing at first. Why should we seek to be ignorant? But this is not an encouragement to avoid knowledge. Don’t know mind is one characterized by curiosity, surprise, and wonder. It is receptive, ready to meet whatever shows up as it is.

“Dad, are you going to live through this surgery?” he asked. Now, I love my son beyond words, and so like any father, I wanted to reassure him that of course I would live, I would be just fine. But I paused for a moment, searching for the right response. I felt into my experience before answering. Then I heard myself say, “I’m not taking sides.” My answer surprised us both. What I meant was that I wasn’t taking sides with life or death. Either way, I trusted that everything would be okay. I don’t know where the words came from; they spilled from me without censorship. I wasn’t trying to appear sage or to be a good Buddhist. Yet we both were reassured by my response. I think it was because we knew we were in the presence of the truth spoken with love.

Don’t know mind represents something else entirely. It is beyond knowing and not knowing. It is off the charts of our conventional ideas about knowledge and ignorance. It is the “beginner’s mind” Zen master Suzuki Roshi spoke of when he famously said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Don’t know mind is not limited by agendas, roles, and expectations. It is free to discover. When we are filled with knowing, when our minds are made up, it narrows our vision, obscures our ability to see the whole picture, and limits our capacity to act. We only see what our knowing allows us to see. The wise person is both compassionate and humble and knows that she does not know. This moment right here before us, this problem we are tackling, this person who is dying, this task we are completing, this relationship we are building, this pain and beauty we are facing—we have never experienced it before. When we enter a situation with don’t know mind, we have a pure willingness to do so, without attachment to a particular view or outcome. We don’t throw our knowledge away—it is always there in the background, ready to come to our aid should we need it—but we let go of fixed ideas. We let go of control. Don’t know mind is an invitation to enter life with fresh eyes, to empty our minds and open our hearts.

To know the sacred is not to see new things, but rather to see things in a new way. The sacred is not separate or different from all things; it is hidden in all things. And dying is an opportunity to uncover what is hidden.

The sacred has always existed. Everything is saturated with it. It is the nature of reality. Yet most of the time, we walk around in the sacred world with ordinary vision.

when people are dying, they need intensive care—intensive love, intensive compassion, and intensive presence. Ultimately, spiritual support is the fearless commitment to honor the individual’s unique way of meeting death.

At some point, however, meaning loses its importance to people who are dying. They withdraw from the external world as they are pulled into a more inward journey. If we—their well-intentioned friends, family members, and caregivers—keep distracting them by pulling them back to the world of time, objects, and meaning, we may break their connection to the flow of the sacred. Grandma doesn’t want to talk anymore about her first kiss on the Ferris wheel at the county fair. Playing your father’s favorite song no longer sends him into a reverie about his wedding day. Auntie Ellen’s heroic expedition to Antarctica, which was once the defining adventure of her life, fades in importance. Remember the stillness and quiet I referenced that we feel at places that are doorways to the sacred, like Chartres Cathedral or a grove of redwoods? Now imagine several tour buses suddenly arrived and two hundred tourists disembarked with their cameras and loud voices, swarming through the place. Our attention would be sidetracked by the commotion. While the sacred would still be present, we might temporarily lose our connection with it. When caregivers and loved ones appear with their own agendas, memories, and needs, they become like the annoying tourists—an unpleasant distraction to those who are dying. But it need not be that way. As loved ones and caregivers, we can choose instead to act as quiet companions or trustworthy guides as the person who is dying journeys deeper into the sacred forest.

Dying happens on two levels simultaneously—the physical and the spiritual. The body is closing down, while the consciousness is opening up. In order to compassionately companion the dying, ideally we attend to both processes at once. It can prove challenging for one person to manage all this. I find it difficult even with three decades of experience. That is why I often find it valuable to have more than one person in the room. One cares for the physical needs of the individual; the other accompanies the person on a spiritual journey.

I did not know how Jennifer should die. Death is unknown and timeless. We discover it moment to moment. So I did my best not to interfere. I trusted in the wisdom of compassion, that our loving hearts would be our reliable guides.

When we take what in Zen is called the “backward step,” we can look from the vantage point of open awareness, we know ourselves to be this background, this pure, bare awareness, against which all personal and universal change occurs. This is what we surrender to.

The potential these experiences have shown me is undeniable. Without a doubt, dying holds an unmatched possibility for transformation. It can be inspiring and awesomely beautiful. And it can also be intense, messy, and complicated. Even in dying, we are impacted by conditions beyond our control.

In the process of dying, a gradual awakening occurs. Almost imperceptibly, we begin a long, slow process of letting go, relinquishing what we know we can no longer hold on to or control. Letting go is an entry into unknown territory. Grief is the toll that we pay.

In our dying, we must even let go of the future and everything and everyone that we loved. Letting go is how we prepare for dying. Suzuki Roshi said that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, but accepting that they go away. An acceptance of impermanence helps us learn how to die. It also reveals the flip side of loss, which is that letting go is an act of generosity. We let go of old grudges, and give ourselves peace. We let go of fixed views, and give ourselves to not knowing. We let go of self-sufficiency and give ourselves to the care of others. We let go of clinging and give ourselves to gratitude. We let go of control and give ourselves to surrender. Surrender is not the same thing as letting go. Normally, we think of letting go as a release often accompanied by a sense of freedom from previous restraints. Surrender is more about expansion.

Surrender means moving into flow.