The society we live in is obsessed with youth and power, discarding the elderly into old people's homes when they are no longer useful. Even when someone we love is dying, often we find we are given almost no idea of how to help them. There are others who go to the extremes of glamorizing death, people who commit suicide because they believe death to be an escape. Whether we fear death and refuse to face it, or whether we romanticize it, death is trivialized.

Whenever I go in the West, I am struck by the great mental suffering that arises from the fear of dying, whether or not this fear is acknowledged. How reassuring it would be for people if they knew that when they lay dying they would be cared for with insight! In Tibet, no one died without being cared for, in both superficial and profound ways, by the community.

As it is, our culture is so heartless in its expediency that people, when faced with terminal illness, feel terrified that they are simply going to be thrown away like useless goods. At the moment of their greatest vulnerability, then, people are left almost totally without support or insight. This is a tragic and humiliating state of affairs, which must change. All of the modern world's pretensions to power and success will ring hollow until everyone can in this culture die with some measure of true peace, and until then at least some effort be made to ensure this is possible.

A friend of mine finished medical school and started work at one of the larger London hospitals. On her first day on the ward, four or five people died. It was a terrible shock for her; nothing in her training had equipped her to deal with it. Isn't this astonishing, considering she was being trained to be a doctor? One elderly man was alone, no family or friends visited him, and he was desperate for someone to talk to. My friend had no idea how to respond to his questions and call for reassurance about the meaning of his life; all she was able to do was to hide behind her professional status as a doctor. Bewildered, she asked me, "What would you have done?"

I have often been very moved by how you can help people by helping them to discover their own truths. The sources of awareness are deep within each of us. My task is never under any circumstances to impose my beliefs, but to enable people to find these within themselves.

There are two things that are needed when we come to die: whatever we have done in our lives, and what state of mind we are at that moment. In Tibet there are practices to relieve the dying of discomfort and anxiety, and to assist them to die with composure.


excerpts paraphrased from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

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