Zen-ish Thoughts About Your Own Death

I just came from a memorial / celebration of life service for a truly remarkable person. Some among us have one or a few of these attributes: exceptionally smart, self-directed, accomplished, politically active for important causes, good at music or art, good at undistractedly listening to people and making them feel truly known and deeply loved. The person whose life we celebrated today was exceptionally good at all of these things, as well as being genuinely humble and contagiously joyful.

Her many impressive activities and accomplishments gently faded beneath the number of people who cried as they described this lost friend as their most special friend, their soulmate, the person who made them feel more okay about themselves, more seen and heard and truly loved than anyone else they had ever known, and as a great person to just have fun with too. Many of these people knew each other, and when each described her as their most special friend or family member, there were no apparent hard feelings, not "why do you not see me that way," no "but she was that for me, and I want that to myself alone". It was clear that she was everyone's most special friend all at the same time, that that was just who she was, no matter who she was with. It was a jealousy-free recognition of their shared good fortune that she made all of them feel uniquely loved and affirmed. There was no need to individually posses what she gave so universally and freely. What a remarkable human being.

One might wonder how many decades it took her to develop so much love, maturity, and generosity while also actively spending time with others, engaging in political leadership for social change, doing her day job, and singing in a nationally recognized girls' and woman's choir. Who can do all of these things? The sum of her personal and vocational presence has been such that a fund is being established in her name to help young women find strong places in society. One might wonder at someone being such a charmed person, having such a charmed life.

Adding to the impressiveness of her story, the answer to how long a life allowed her to develop so much depth in so many different dimensions is 28. She was all of that by just 28 years of age, and then her seemingly limitless, super-charged, charmed life ended. None of all of that stopped her from unexpectedly and undramatically simply dying in her sleep from an exceptionally rare consequence of a brief and exceptionally rare disease that she happened to have when she was not yet old enough to attend school.

Impermanence even reaches extraordinarily gifted people with "charmed" lives.

The ominous sounding Buddhist practice of "death meditation" is one in which you become deeply aware of the impermanence of your own life in a way that you are prompted to act now. People you love will die before you are ready. So will you. People around you are suffering now. So are you. The time to act is now, not later. In time travel stories we worry that changing one little thing in the past may completely rewrite the present, but in the stories we tell ourselves daily, we are so often certain that nothing we can do today is big enough to materially affect the future. Oops.

The trouble is, you think you have time. Buddha

There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time … If you don't think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for? Carlos Castaneda

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly. Marcus Aurelius

It is unknown the place and uncertain the time when death awaits you. Thus you must expect death to find you every time, and in every place. Seneca

This is our big mistake, to think we look forward to death. … Whatever time has passed is (already) owned by death. Seneca

We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one. Confucius

Live well. Do what must be done before your time is up. Eat the strawberries whenever you can. Stop waiting. There is no waiting. There is only what you are and are not doing, now.