Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 13.5-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro introduces four tasks for preparing to die well, drawn from Christine Longacre’s “Facing Death and Finding Hope.” The first—understanding and transforming suffering—argues that learning to cope with pain and difficulty, rather than avoiding it, develops compassion for others; she gives examples of people who remain cheerful despite hardship and explains how our own suffering teaches us what others endure. The second task, healing relationships, means resolving conflicts now; she illustrates with a story of a mother and son whose last encounter was in anger before an accident took the son’s life. The final tasks involve cultivating spiritual practice and finding meaning in life, which prevent despair at death. Open to Buddhist and non-Buddhist practitioners alike.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 3.08 Preparing for Death.mp3
UUID: f47e1546-21eb-433b-b72c-d62ce1926293
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 13.5 minutes
Words: ~2,106
So there’s been a lot of talk so far about how important it is to do something to prepare ourselves for death. To make preparations for the end of our life. For the experience of dying and going to the next life. So, what can we do? What are some things that we can do to prepare ourselves for death?
So, that’s what I’ll be talking about now. Giving some suggestions. But feel free to find your own methods. These are just ideas from the Buddhist tradition and some other sources. But you can feel free to make your own research to find things that will be helpful for you to be prepared for death, to be able to have a peaceful, positive mind at the time of death.
So, there’s a book called Facing Death and Finding Hope by Christine Longacre. She’s a woman who has twenty five or more years of experience working with dying people. And she began this work after the death of her own husband when he was just twenty five years old. She is also a student of Sogyal Rinpoche, the author of the Tibetan book of Living and Dying. So she brings her own experience in working with death and dying and some material from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in writing this book.
It’s an excellent book. And she mainly focuses on what she calls four tasks of living and dying. I’m just going to briefly mention these here. And if you’re interested you can read more about them in her book. So these four tasks are ways in which we ourselves can prepare for our own death.
And we can also bring these into our experiences and being with people who are dying, whether they are family or friends or if we are a hospice volunteer. So, these things are very helpful in being able to have a more peaceful positive death. So these four are first of all understanding and transforming suffering. So what that means is that most probably at the time of death, there will be suffering. There could be physical pain or discomfort.
But even if there is no physical suffering, there might be mental suffering. People usually don’t want to die. They feel unhappy about dying. They may feel angry. They may feel sad.
And so, it’s quite likely that there will be on the mental level unpleasant feelings, unpleasant thoughts coming up. So there’s a good chance that death will involve suffering, physical and or mental. And as we go through life, if we never learn how to deal with suffering, if we are always trying to avoid it, taking painkillers every opportunity we have, and never learning to just face suffering and deal with suffering and learn how to cope with it, then we might find it very difficult at the time of death. We may not know how to deal. We may find ourselves overwhelmed by suffering.
So this is one important way in which we can prepare ourselves for death. Understanding that suffering is simply a fact of life, a reality of life, something that everyone has to go through. And that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a terrible experience, an unbearable overwhelming experience. There are ways in which we can handle suffering. We can see this just with ordinary people.
Probably people we know or people we meet who may have very difficult circumstances in life. They may have some terrible sickness or injury or pain or just very difficult circumstances in life. And yet they’re very cheerful, very happy even. They’re not bothered by these problems in their life. And it’s possible for us to learn that as well, to learn strength and courage and the ability to just stay on top of suffering and not be overwhelmed by it.
Not be buried under it. So this is one thing that’s very helpful. Learning how to cope with suffering and even transform suffering. So, for example, in Buddhism, it’s said that going through suffering is very helpful for being able to develop compassion. Compassion is a very important quality, a very precious quality, a very beautiful quality.
Compassion makes our mind soft and gentle and happy. Compassion is where we understand others suffering and empathize with them and feel the wish for them not to suffer. And it’s what motivates us to reach out and do what we can to relieve the suffering of another person or other beings. It’s an essential quality for being able to follow the spiritual path and achieve higher goals such as liberation and enlightenment. It’s also just very beneficial in our present life.
It’s helpful for ourselves. It’s a way of making our own mind very beautiful, peaceful and positive. It’s helpful in our relationships with others. Enables us to get closer to others and give them help and comfort when they need it. So compassion, to be able to have compassion, to be able to increase compassion, it’s necessary for us to have experiences of suffering.
When we ourselves know what it’s like to have pain, or to be sick, or to face difficulties, or to have disturbing emotions, painful emotions like sadness and grief. When we have our own first hand experiences of physical or mental suffering, that puts us in a situation where we can understand the suffering of others and enables us to empathize with them and have compassion for them and be helpful to them. We’ll know what is the right thing to do, what is the right thing to say that will be helpful and not harmful to them. So, the experience of suffering is actually very helpful for learning compassion. And learning how to deal with others in a more compassionate way.
So as we go through life, if we can learn to deal with suffering, starting with small experiences of suffering. Starting with little things like, you know, little injuries or headaches or stomachaches or little difficulties we find ourselves in in life. If we can learn to deal with suffering starting with smaller problems and then gradually we can work on bigger and bigger problems. That’s helpful for being able to deal with the problems we’ll face at the time of death. The second point mentioned by Christine Longacre, the second of her four tasks of living and dying is healing relationships.
So, this means that if there are any unresolved problems we have in any of our relationships with others, it’s important that we resolve those, heal those while we have time, while we have a chance. Otherwise, there’s the possibility that at the time death, we might feel sadness or regret that we’re still angry at someone we’ve never, you know, apologized or made up or healed a relationship with another person, and it may be too late. So that could cause our mind to be disturbed by feelings of regret, sadness, guilt, and make it difficult to have a peaceful positive state of mind at that time. So it’s much better if we can resolve whatever problems we have, heal our relationships with other people as soon as we can. Because again, we don’t know when death is gonna happen.
So don’t let things drag on. Learn to forgive, to extend forgiveness, to ask for forgiveness, to heal whatever problems you have. I heard a story of a woman who had an argument with her son just before the son left to go on a fishing trip with his father. So, when the son left, he was angry at her, she was angry at him. So, they left in this angry mode.
And the son never came home. There was an accident on the fishing trip. The son died. So you can imagine how painful that must have been for the mother. It’s bad enough losing a child.
That must be one of the most painful experiences anyone could have, having a child die. But on top of that, the last encounter that she had with her child was an angry one. They didn’t have a chance to kiss and make up, to say I’m sorry and hug each other and tell each other how much they love them. So this is something that could happen to any of us. If we can recognize how painful that would be, how undesirable that would be to die before we had a chance to express our love to one of our family members or one of our friends and heal whatever problems we had between us.
Then that can motivate us to really take care of any such problems as soon as we can, not let them drag on. So, heal our relationships. The third of the four tasks of living and dying is to cultivate a spiritual practice. And I’ll be talking about that a little bit later. I’ll go on to the fourth point, which is finding meaning in life.
So, this means that some people don’t really have a strong sense of purpose in life. Why am I here? What is life all about? What’s the purpose of life? And if people have not come to terms with that, have not found an answer to that question, that can make it very difficult for them at the time of death because they’re most probably going to be experiencing some physical and or mental difficulties.
And it’s only natural that our mind gets down by difficulties. It’s difficult to remain cheerful and happy, positive when we’re facing difficulties. So if we’ve never come to a clear sense of what’s the purpose of life? What’s the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of all the experiences that I have in my life?
Then it’s possible it’s quite likely that one would become depressed and even feel a sense of despair at that time and make it very, very difficult to be positive, to go through that experience of dying with a positive state of mind. So to avoid that, it’s better that we come to some understanding. And this is something each person has to do for themselves. What is the meaning of my life? What is the purpose?
Why am I here? From the Buddhist point of view, the answer to that question is the purpose of our life is to benefit others as much as we can and to work on ourselves, to work on developing our positive potential. We have so much potential, so much good within us. We have wisdom. We have compassion and love.
We have patience. We have the ability to help others, to to bring more peace and happiness and benefit to others, to help others when they’re suffering. There’s so much good we can do both for ourselves to have a, you know, more positive, peaceful life and existence and to be of benefit to others. And that’s the real purpose of our life. And beyond that, for those who are able to accept the possibility of attaining enlightenment, a higher state of mind, liberation, state of complete perfection, freedom from all suffering, from all problems, and from the very causes of problems, disturbing negative states of mind and karma.
So if you’re able to accept that those states exist and that you have the ability to attain those states, then that’s again the real purpose of life is working towards those states, creating the causes to attain enlightenment and to attain liberation. So, those would be the purposes of life for someone on the Buddhist path. But if that isn’t your path, then you can find whatever path, whatever meaning or purpose of life does make sense to you is is something you can relate to. But this is something important to take care of as we go through life, before we reach the end of our life, so that we can avoid feelings of depression and despair and hopelessness at that time. So again, that’s just a brief explanation of these four points, these four tasks of living and dying.
If you’re interested in knowing more about them, you can read the book by Christine Longacre called Facing Death and Finding Hope. Information about that is in the recommended reading list. So, again, she mentions the importance of having some kind of spiritual practice. Cultivating or making yourself familiar with spiritual practice during your life. So I’m going to talk about that.
What are some practices that we can do that will enable us to have a peaceful death, a positive state of mind at the time of death?