Tending to Endings (twelve)
It may sound strange to be comforted by a book about death during a pandemic, but I have been reading Frank Ostaseski’s The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach us about Living Fully. I have returned to it morning and night during this last week when so many of us find our lives changing, and it has given me direction and comfort and hope.
The principles will not be new to anyone who has practiced Buddhism or a Twelve-Step program of recovery or studied Brene Brown’s research on vulnerability and whole-hearted living or who knows the tenets of acceptance, humility, and love from a wide variety of traditions.
What Ostaseski does is give generous personal context to the practices, using story to show how they hold even in dire conditions. He takes the hard stuff head-on and gives such relevant, poignant examples that I end up trusting his perspective and being reassured.
Ostaseski began his work with hospice patients in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. He founded the Zen Hospice Center in California, where he worked for thirty years. More recently, began the Metta Institute which provides education on spirituality in dying. Over many years, he sat with thousands of people as they approached death.
He writes, “I am not romantic about dying. It is hard work. Maybe the hardest work we will ever do in this life. It doesn’t always turn out well. It can be sad, cruel, messy, beautiful, and mysterious. Most of all it is normal. We all go through it.”
Death is normal.
This week I intended to write about hospice, but like so many things, visits have been halted where I have been training to volunteer.
The stories of loss that have been getting to me most lately have been the ones about care facilities on lock-down and the many people who cannot be near their spouses or family or friends. It has been reading about people in Italy who died in isolation and whose families cannot yet come together to honor and grieve them.
My impulse to write this blog and to pay attention to endings myself has in part come from my sense that it is important to be present for people during their final months and days on earth. To bear witness and to share those times. To usher people out of this world lovingly the way we usher them in upon birth.
But even births hardly ever go as planned. Dying, too, involves a great deal we cannot control. Ostaseski’s book offers a window into how to proceed with an open heart anyway.
I have underlined a great deal throughout the whole book, but it is the second invitation, Welcome Everything, Push Nothing Away, that feels most relevant to me this week. Ostaseski explains, “I cannot be free if I am rejecting any part of my experience.”
His personal stories are of his brother’s alcoholism and death, his own triple heart bypass surgery, being sexually abuse as a young teen. So, he really does mean everything. Or, more specifically, everything that already is.
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 wast our energy and exhaust ourselves with the insistence that life be otherwise…Acceptance is not resignation. It is an opening to possibility. And openness is the basis for a skillful response to life.
In 2001, when anthrax was showing up in the mail and in the headlines, which happened about a month after the World Trade Center bombings, which happened soon after my divorce while I was still grieving and helping my young sons grieve, I had a teaching job that involved traveling to Southern Utah for a backpacking trip with a group of seventh graders. My own kids, kindergarteners at the time, were at home with their dad and I would be out of contact with them for five days. As we drove away from Boise in the vans, I felt vulnerable and uncertain and like the world might really be coming to an end.
At the trailhead, the teachers—four of us—cinched packs on awkward, seventh-grade shoulders, and the heaviest over our own. We walked into the desert among juniper and yucca, over red earth and beneath the clear blue sky.
The first night we slept on the rim of Dark Canyon, where we told stories from our sleeping bags and watched bright Orionids slip across the night sky. The next day, we found springs to refill our water bottles. We were in wilderness, so we took care to watch out for ourselves and each other and the organisms in cryptobiotic soil.
A couple of days into our trip while exploring Mule Canyon, we came upon the dwellings of ancient Puebloans, curved stone shelters shaped by people living more than a thousand years ago. It was impossible not to consider that these people, too, lived and drank from the spring and climbed the towers and slept beneath Pleiades. That the clay and the canyon and the sky had outlasted them, and would outlast us too.
I don’t know why humility reassures me during difficult times, but it does. What I felt in that moment was not that I was insignificant, but that I was connected, part of something vast and beautiful and whole.
When it came time to leave the canyon and we drove to the first small town where there was a gas station and convenience store, we saw the headline on the New York Times, “Twenty-one Senate Employees Test Positive for Anthrax.” It was jarring, but it was not everything anymore. Like the florescent light of the store, it outshone the sun due to proximity, not power.
Like most of us right now, I am unsure of many things. And maybe that is why it helpful to read something that reminds me good can come from not knowing. Ostaseski writes, “The energizing quality of mature hope helps us to remain open to the possibility that while life may not turn out the way we first thought, opportunities we never imagined may also arise.”
All five sections of the book have been compelling, useful: Don’t Wait; Welcome Everything Push Nothing Away; Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience; Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things; Cultivate Don’t Know Mind. They have been an antidote to fear and a reminder that humility is not weakness. It is a way towards openness and possibility.
With love,
Laura
If you would like to receive Tending to Endings each Friday, please leave your name and email below.
