The Divine Art of Dying Quotes

“LOVE Katharine Hepburn said: “Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only what you are expecting to give — which is everything.” Love is heart-power and it can’t be defined by the brain. It showers us with magic, as Thomas Moore put it, “and even in the midst of pain it can offer moments of rapture.” Love at the end of life is a force that cannot be denied. Nor can it be rationed, for love overflows and cannot be contained. True love is unconditional. We need do nothing. Love just is!”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“When we embrace all our feelings, all our emotions including suffering, hope will endure and sustain us. We can then truly live and face our last moments with integrity and wholeness.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“The Tao of Dying:                                  In letting go                                  There is gain.                                  In giving up,                                  There is advancement. Letting go of control makes room for the gift of interdependence. Letting go of dreams makes room for ordinary moments of grace. Letting go of replicating past experiences makes room for tomorrow’s surprises. Letting go of self-sufficiency makes room for discovering vulnerabilities previously unknown. Ira Byock says he’s learned through his patients’ dying stories “that people can become stronger and more whole as physical weakness becomes overwhelming and life itself wanes.” Letting go makes room for something new.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“Meister Eckhart said it this way: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Some call this the Buddha Eye. If we haven’t celebrated the ordinary before dying, paying attention at life’s end may require a seismic shift in consciousness that only comes from intentional practice. When we acknowledge the nearness of death and when we have the courage to embrace living fully while dying, then it will be easier to celebrate every ordinary event, discovery, conversation, or gift as a window into the Divine.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“Focusing techniques that enhance attentiveness (such as mindfulness meditation) help to increase appreciation for the simple blessings of life and banish incompatible thoughts from consciousness. For that reason, celebrating the ordinary is a practice that requires paying attention. Embrace the temporary. Live in the moment. Be grateful for all the little things. Let your eyes linger on what’s right in front of you.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“Einstein taught us that time doesn’t flow in one direction. It spirals. The future and the past exist simultaneously. One of the things people in my condition think about is what am I really afraid of when I face — rather up close and personal — my own death? Pain? That can be controlled. Abandonment? Perhaps. But the larger fear may be that we’re most afraid of being free of time. Outside time. When you’re outside of time, you’re no longer in control. S-C-A-R-Y!”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“however, we start with the presumption that all life is a gift, then gratitude is not an occasional moment when we remember to say thank you to a spouse or to a service provider. Instead, it creates a way of living that acknowledges human neediness and dependency as unavoidable. Gratitude, then, becomes as normal as breathing.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“Celebrating the Ordinary: The Practice of Paying Attention Most of us are so busy, so preoccupied, that we miss a lot of what happens in us and to us and around us. We do a lot of looking, but not much seeing. Long-range planning sets our sights on the future at the expense of the present moment. Obsessions about work or past mistakes or the next appointment are the excuses we often give for not paying attention. We’re just too busy to bother. By contrast, paying attention is noticing and becoming aware of blessings we normally take for granted.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“The clergyman and writer William Sloane Coffin said that spirituality to him meant “living the ordinary life extraordinarily well.” We wake up to an ordinary day. The sky is blue. Trees sway in the breeze and birds twitter. Everything is as usual. Our hearts beat; our lungs take in air. We talk to friends. We eat dinner. We brush our teeth. And finally, when we put our heads down on our favorite pillows, we think, “This was a good, very ordinary day.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“To serve, Martin Luther King Jr. said, all you need is a soul generated by love. We are “God-in-action” through our smiles, our willing hands, our busy feet, our gentle voices, and all the other ways we find to show our love.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“Tibetan Buddhism teaches that suffering is a feeling that our wishes are not being fulfilled. Or that no one is listening to us or does what we expect them to do.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“Death isn’t the problem. Fear is. And fear is something we create.” Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“The Dalai Lama said, “If you are mindful of death, it will not come as a surprise — you will not be anxious. You will feel that death is merely like changing your clothes.” Finally we can let go of all responsibility for making things happen and acknowledge that we lived life as a gift. It has meaning.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“In a talk he gave two hours before his death in 1968, the renowned Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, “The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another and all involved with one another.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“We mourn with those who mourn; weep with those in tears. John Ruusbroec, the fourteenth-century Dutch mystic, said “compassion is a wounding of the heart which love extends to all without distinction.” At the end of life, as at the beginning of life, we need communities of compassion to hold our pain.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“How then shall we live? Fully. Intentionally. Attentively. Lovingly.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“Mortality teaches clinicians that there is more to doctoring than diagnosing and treating injuries and diseases, more even than saving lives. Mastery of physiological, pathological, and pharmacological knowledge and expertise is essential, but insufficient. Science only becomes medicine when it is applied with caring intention to promote the well-being of people — mortal people.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying