What the Dying Teach the Living

Even though death is inevitable, and frequently occurs around us, it’s astonishing we don’t speak more openly about it. There’s so much death can teach us about life. Death has many gifts. It can help us discover the best of ourselves.

If we really attend to death, listen to it, and talk about it, instead of trying as hard as possible to pretend it doesn’t exist, it can teach us three lessons—not how to die but how to live a worthy and fulfilling life.

We are a society that lives in denial of death and so we are a society that denies life. But out here, how flimsy we are, with no boundaries between us and nature. What a wonderful teacher of how to live.