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

by Frank Ostaseski

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

Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart. In Japanese Zen, the term shoji translates as “birth-death.” There is no separation between life and death other than a small hyphen, a thin line that connects the two. We cannot be truly alive without maintaining an awareness of death.

Each cell in our bodies is a part of an organic, interdependent whole that must work in harmony to maintain good health. Similarly, everybody and everything exists in a constant interplay of relationships that reverberates throughout the entire system, affecting all the other parts. When we take action that ignores this basic truth, we suffer and create suffering. When we live mindfully of it, we support and are supported by the wholeness of life.

We can harness the awareness of death to appreciate the fact that we are alive, to encourage self-exploration, to clarify our values, to find meaning, and to generate positive action. It is the impermanence of life that gives us perspective. As we come in contact with life’s precarious nature, we also come to appreciate its preciousness. Then we don’t want to waste a minute. We want to enter our lives fully and use them in a responsible way. Death is a good companion on the road to living well and dying without regret.

Shortly after the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow suffered a near-fatal heart attack, he wrote in a letter: “The confrontation with death—and the reprieve from it—makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has never looked so beautiful … Death, and its ever-present possibility, makes love, passionate love, more possible.”

One rainy night after a particularly difficult day, I was so shaken as I walked back to my room that I collapsed to my knees in a mud puddle and started to weep. My attempts at taking away the participants’ heartache were just a self-defense strategy, a way of trying to protect myself from suffering. Just then, Elisabeth came along and picked me up. She brought me back to her room for a coffee and a cigarette. “You have to open yourself up and let the pain move through you,” Elisabeth said. “It’s not yours to hold.” Without this lesson, I don’t think I could have stayed present, in a healthy way, with the suffering I would witness in the decades to come.

It is almost banal to say so, yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis. —HENRY MILLER

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.

When we embrace impermanence, a certain grace enters our lives. We can treasure experiences; we can feel deeply—all without clinging. 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.

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.”

Everything will come apart. That is true of our bodies, our relationships, all of life. It is happening all the time, not just at the end when the curtain falls. Coming together inevitably means pa...

The more permeable I became, the more I realized that we humans are just bundles of ever-changing conditions. We ought to hold ourselves more lightly. Taking ourselves too seriously is the cause of much suffering. We tell ourselves that we are in charge: “Buckle up! Get this done!” When in reality, we are quite helpless, subject to the events taking place around us. But that helplessness brings us into contact with our vulnerability, which can be a doorway to awakening, to a deeper intimacy with reality.

Most of us choose comfort over truth. But when you think about it, we don’t grow and transform in our comfort zones. We grow when we realize we are no longer able to control all the conditions of our lives, and are therefore challenged to change ourselves. When we release our clinging to what used to be and our craving for what we think should be, we are free to embrace the truth of what is in this moment.

When we stop leaning into the next experience by hoping for a particular outcome, or leaning into the past by hoping we might somehow change it, only then are we free to know this moment completely.

In living, as in dying, when we hold hope apart from expectation, independent of attachment to outcome, we develop a wise connection with reality. We show up and participate directly in life’s unfolding. We engage in the journey instead of waiting to arrive at our destination.

Loving and letting go are inseparable. You can’t love and cling at the same time. Too often we mistake attachment for love.

Welcoming what is, as it is, we move toward reality. We may not like or agree with all that we encounter. However, when we argue with reality, we lose every time. We waste our energy and exhaust ourselves with the insistence that life be otherwise.

Turning toward our suffering is a critical part of welcoming everything and pushing away nothing. This invitation means that no part of ourselves or our experience can be left out: not the joy and wonder, nor the pain and anguish. All are woven throughout the very fabric of our lives. When we embrace that truth, we step more fully into life.

When you are afraid, don’t you know that you are afraid? Then that means some part of you, the part that is witnessing your fear, is not afraid. It is not caught by the fear. We can learn to relate to difficult thoughts, strong emotions, or challenging circumstances from the vantage point of the witness, of loving awareness. When we do, it all becomes a lot more workable.

Karen, a longtime Buddhist meditator, master gardener, and lover of nature, experienced the death of both of her parents in about a year’s time. Her father’s suicide was unexpected and particularly painful for her. She described her grief as an all-consuming rage. Not long after these events, an environmental group invited her to speak at a rally to save the old-growth redwoods. In response, Karen shouted into the phone, “My father has died! There are no trees!”

Some say time heals. That is a dangerous half-truth. Time alone doesn’t heal. Time and loving attention heal.

Every time we experience a loss, we have another chance to experience life at a greater depth. It opens us to the most essential truths of our lives: the inevitability of impermanence, the causes of suffering, and the illusion of separateness. We begin to appreciate that we are more than the grief. We are what the grief is moving through. In the end, we may still fear death, but we don’t fear living nearly as much. In surrendering to our grief, we have learned to give ourselves to life.

Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. The deity is pictured with a thousand arms. In each hand, there is an ear to hear the cries of the world.

Compassion is what enables us to come close to suffering, to know through intimacy. When we get that close, the illusion of “I and other” falls away. We know ourselves to be part of this web of mutuality. Wisdom shows us that the small, bounded sense of separate self we have taken ourselves to be is no more than a limiting story. When separation falls away, we recognize that we are everything. Being everything, compassion is simply an appropriate response, the natural way to serve and love what is really our whole selves, and to express its freedom.

Do we need to die before we can rest in peace? Rest is found when we are present instead of letting our minds wander aimlessly through the hallways of fear, worry, and anxiousness. Rest comes when we become more by doing less, when we don’t allow the urgent to crowd out the important. It is the result of a decluttering of the mind and decoupling from fixed views. Rest is a Sabbath, when we stop and turn to worship the possibilities of the ever-fresh moment.

Blaise Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

The deeper we go within ourselves, the more expansive we become. We allow everything to show itself, even what is buried in the unconscious. There is no need to repress the unwanted parts of our situations, ourselves, or others. We realize that everything is a product of our dynamics, our histories, and our reactivity—and that it’s all part of the human condition. We can allow thoughts, feelings, ideas to come and go without being swept away by any of them.

The thing is, trying to rest is not resting; it’s just more trying. Effort is necessary in life. You can’t lift your bag into the trunk of a car if you don’t extend effort. Yet when we apply this same sort of effort to resting, it backfires. We can’t seek the deepest rest through striving to change the way things are. We can only relax the activity that obstructs our contact with rest.

We love our true nature, we love presence, and because we so love it, we want to be close to it, to get intimate with it. It’s a kind of love affair with truth. It’s like when we are with our partners, we long to see them with as few clothes on as possible. We want them as they are, naked. Just so in spiritual life, we long to see the naked truth, unobstructed by preferences or the clothing of our treasured beliefs.

Actually, I don’t even like the word acceptance—it has too many moral overtones. The word allow is better suited to what I am describing. It’s a softer word, a word that takes us beyond the concepts of accepting and rejecting altogether. It releases us from the whole idea of comparison, preference for or against, hope and fear. It is a true resting place.

Our minds are wild. We don’t tame them by trying to stop our thoughts, by repressing our emotions, or even by resolving our problems. We have a lot less control over life than we imagined. To paraphrase Suzuki Roshi’s very kind meditation instruction, which he recited often at the Zen Center, “To give your cow a large, spacious meadow is the best way to control him.”

The American Buddhist teacher and bestselling author Jack Kornfield popularized the expression “After the ecstasy, the laundry” in a book by the same name. What this means is that even after a deeply insightful transcendent experience, we still have to deal with the nuts and bolts of life, the everyday activities like cooking and cleaning and caring for our children and elders. I’ve often wondered why we don’t use doing the laundry as a method to discover the ecstasy in the first place. Is this idea too far-fetched?

All things are a potential source of support and awakening. When we attempt to separate the sacred from the ordinary, we create a false dichotomy.

Claude Debussy is credited with saying, “Music is the space between the notes.” The white space on this page allows your eyes to rest on the words. In art, negative space is just as important as the image itself, helping to bring balance to a composition. No matter how much activity, no matter how many forms exist in our lives, there are pauses and spaces everywhere, inviting us to rest.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. —AUDRE LORDE

For Charles, courageous presence is accompanying his father to Sloan Kettering to discuss his inoperable cancer. For Steve, it’s leading a memorial service for his best friend’s young daughter, who fell to her death off an ocean cliff. For Tracy, it is being torn apart by both grief and love as she sits at the bedside of her dying mother while holding her newborn son. For Jackson, it is going to a maximum-security prison to sit face-to-face with the man who murdered his mother. For Terry, it is allowing his body to tremble and shake for three days while the contractions of old sexual traumas are released during a meditation retreat. For Joanna, it is embracing a new lesbian lover at age seventy-five, when she had imagined that she would never have another relationship. When fear speaks, courage is the heart’s answer.

The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

Ram Dass once said, “After many years of undergoing psychoanalysis, teaching psychology, working as a psychotherapist, taking drugs, being in India, being a yogi, having a guru, and meditating for decades, as far as I can see I haven’t gotten rid of one neurosis. Not one. The only thing that changed is that they don’t define me anymore. There is less energy invested in my personality, so it is easier to change. My neuroses are not huge monsters anymore. Now they are like little shmoos that I invite over for tea.”

Don’t know mind is one characterized by curiosity, surprise, and wonder. It is receptive, ready to meet whatever shows up as it is.

There is an old Yiddish saying: “Sometimes we need a story more than food.” Telling our stories, and having others listen, is a powerful way to gain new understandings of and fresh perspectives on our lives.

Michael, a Zen Hospice Project volunteer, was an English teacher who understood the power of story. He loved to spend time with patients, encouraging them to share moments from their lives. They would tell Michael stories of their childhoods or speak to him of their dead relatives and express love. They spoke of regrets and shared hidden secrets, and they talked about how they might have done things differently if given a second chance. Some had imaginary conversations with God. Michael would tape-record these exchanges. Later, at home, he would transcribe the tapes. Then he would craft beautiful, handmade storybooks, binding them with a leather cover that featured a photograph or image that highlighted an element from the story. He would gift wrap the books, tie the box up with a red ribbon, and give people back their stories in their own words.

Victor Frankl identified self-transcendence as an indispensable human capacity for meaningful living when he wrote, “Man is not destroyed by suffering; he is destroyed by suffering without meaning.”

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.