This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
Linda opens this talk with a deliberate choice: she’s going to stay in the first person. Not speaking about what we experience, but about what she experiences. From where she’s at. She’ll let you notice what resonates, and what doesn’t.
The topic — present and impending death — has been on their list for a while. And then a friend died, and it stopped being a topic and became something else entirely.
Too busy for death
There’s a line Linda catches herself saying, usually somewhere in the busy middle of the day: I’m just too busy for death. She laughs when she says it. And she notices it’s genuinely there.
She feels somewhat defended against death — sheltered by living. During the day, she understands it intellectually. Of course she does. Of course we all do. But in the quiet hours of the night when she wakes, the thought arrives differently: one day this mind and body will be gone. Gone. Disappeared. Dead. And that feels entirely unlike the daytime version of the same knowledge.
Our culture, she observes, provides many ways to look away. The Dharma is an invitation to look instead — to become curious about death as a present and future reality. But she’s also learned something important about that invitation: it only works from where she actually is. Making herself look when she can’t doesn’t accomplish anything. The practice meets her where she’s standing.
The accumulation
What she hadn’t fully anticipated was not just her own mortality, but the accumulation of other people’s.
As she grows older, more people die. Some deaths are close. Others are acquaintances, or people she’s admired from a distance. In her own family, three have died young and shockingly — which arrives with a feeling she recognizes as something like wrongness, a violation of some order she didn’t know she believed in. And sometimes she hears that someone has died and feels deep grief, and other times almost nothing, and she doesn’t always know why. She never felt taught how to hold this many deaths, or how to be with so many people who are living with the approach of their own.
Her aunt Loretta, in her late 90s, fully blind and with little mobility, would wake each morning disappointed that the good Lord hadn’t taken her yet. That’s one kind of waiting. Janet’s experience with Dave was another kind entirely. The range is enormous, and conditioned in ways that often aren’t visible until you’re inside them.
Finding the right distance
She was told as a child, as many of us were, that she was too sensitive. She’s never quite figured out how to turn that off. And it means that proximity to death — especially honest proximity — affects her differently depending on the kind.
Watching death from a distance, through the news, she can modulate. When someone is sheltered from their own fear, and she’s listening, it’s more complex. And when someone is speaking honestly about their life and impending death — as Janet did on Friday — something else opens in her entirely. That, she says, is the kind of presence she finds herself most capable of. Reflective, vulnerable honesty. It’s where she can actually show up.
But there are cycles to how open or closed she is. Those cycles feel conditioned, not chosen. And the practice doesn’t ask her to override them — it asks her not to pretend to feel more than she does, and not to push away what’s genuinely present. Knowing her experience more honestly, in both directions.
The lens she was looking for
She remembers being in college and considering gerontology, then setting it aside — I want to live more first. Aging belonged to other people. Her friend Peggy, who did choose that path, seemed like an old person to Linda at the time. Old people, she thought, sit around and play games.
She laughs at that now. Life carried her into aging and death anyway, as it carries everyone. What she’s grateful for is the lens she arrived with: a Dharma perspective. It wasn’t what she planned. It was, she thinks, exactly what she needed.
No one anywhere is dearer
A Buddhist teaching has been accompanying her through this week’s reflections. She first encountered it through Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism, and it took time to understand: no one anywhere is dearer to us than ourselves. No one anywhere is nearer.
It sounds selfish at first. It isn’t. When Linda imagines her own death, she can feel how deeply she wants to continue living. And when she imagines someone else’s — when she lets that in — she can hold that they might feel exactly the same. That they, too, hold themselves dear. That they, too, have loved this life and feared losing it and hoped, quietly, for more.
That recognition, she suggests, is where practicing with death becomes something more than intellectual. It becomes a bridge. We may not always be ready for death. But sometimes we are. And it’s something, she concludes, that we can practice toward — even if we can’t plan for it.
