Sublime

some of the most redemptive, life-giving moments happen around dinner tables and in our homes, where we cross the line and actually become a friend, not just a service provider.

Medical authors Atul Gawande and David Kuhl have both written beautiful books about death and the experience of dying patients. B. J. Miller, of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, gives a truly magnificent TED talk on the subject. These and many others wish to bring a more humanistic perspective to the treatment of the dying. They warn of th

As another Zen teaching says, “The path is right beneath your feet.”

The gift of impermanence is that it places us squarely in the here and now. We know that birth will end in death. Reflecting on this might cause us to savor the moment, to imbue our lives with more appreciation and gratitude. We know that the end of all accumulation is dispersion. Reflecting on this might help us to practice simplicity and discover

the problems that beset modern people at the peak of their family and work lives closely parallel issues that arise for people everywhere at the end of life: an inability to accept impermanence, grasping at what is not available, and not being able to let go.

Grief asks that we honor the loss and, in so doing, deepen our capacity for compassion.

At a seminar on death and dying guided by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse and mother of four was dying of cancer. She had been through eleven operations, and she asked those of us in attendance, “How would you feel if you came into a hospital room to visit a twenty-eight-year-old mother dying of cancer?” The answers called out

with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor—or maybe because of it—we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long. In camp, too, a man migh