The World as Emptiness II, Part 2: A Happy Death

I love the story of the conversation at an English country house at a dinner party, where the hostess started up the question of death and asked the various guests what they thought was going to happen to them when they die. And some thought about reincarnation, and others thought about different planes of being, and others thought they were going to be annihilated. But none of the guests had answered except Sir Roderick, who was a kind of a military type, but a very devout pillar of the Church of England. He was the church warden, chief, of the vestry in the local country parish. And the lady said, Sir Roderick, you haven’t said a word. What do you think is going to happen to you when you die? Oh, he said, I’m perfectly certain I shall go to heaven and enjoy everlasting bliss. But I wish you wouldn’t indulge in such a depressing conversation.

It’s true, isn’t it? Death, in the Western world, is a real problem. We hush it up. We pretend it hasn’t happened. Our morticians, who are very smart commercial operators, know exactly what’s expected of them. And they make death just awful by pretending it doesn’t happen. See, what happens—you go to a hospital, and you’re at the end; you’ve got terminal cancer. And all your friends come around, and they wear false smiles and they say, Cheer up, you’ll be alright. In a few days from now you’ll be back home, and we’ll go out for a picnic again. The doctors have their bedside manners. See, a doctor is absolutely helpless with a terminal case. Because a doctor is, by social definition, a healer. He’s not allowed to help you die. He’s out of role, even though—I mean—he may sneak behind the rules and do it. But he’s got to heal you, so he’s got to keep you, indefinitely, on the end of tubes and all kinds of things, while there’s a certain grave demeanor to all this, and all the nurses are so pleasant and so totally distant, because they know this is death. And they may be frank with you, that’s why they feel distant. It’s not that they’re not concerned. It’s not that they are heartless people. But that they just don’t know how to be frank. Like lots of people, when they meet a drunk, they don’t know what to do with a drunk. Because he’s not behaving right. When you’re dying you’re not behaving right! You’re supposed to live! See?

So we don’t know what to do with a dying person. We don’t get around that person and say, Listen. Now, listen, man. Listen, I got the news for you! You’re gonna die, and this is going to be great! Look, no more responsibilities! Don’t have to pay those bills anymore! Don’t have to worry about anything! You’re going to just die! And let’s go out with a bang! Let’s have a party! See? We’ll put some of that morphine in you so you won’t hurt too much. We’re going to prop you up in bed and we’re going to bring all our friends around, and we’re going to have champagne, and you’re going to die at the end of it, see? And it’s going to be just marvelous! Just like being born!

See, when we have birth problems—see—all women used to think that birth had to be painful; it was good for them. It was one of those things you had to suffer, because you’d been screwing around with people, and therefore, you had to have a child, and it’s going to hurt. And then the doctors got together and they scratched their heads, and a man called [Grante DeGreed [?]] said, No, birth doesn’t hurt. It’s natural. All you’ve got to do is talk these women into the idea that it doesn’t hurt, and these so-called pains are just tensions, and that birth is great. It’s not a disease, it’s not really something you ought to go to the hospital for. Because you associate hospitals with diseases and sickness. Birth isn’t sickness.

Alright, now let’s do some new thinking. What about death? Is death sickness? Or is it a healthy natural event, like being born? Of course it is. So a little change in social attitude about this will fortify everybody else. If I’m alone and all my relatives are moaning and pretending it’s going to be hard for me, I’ve got to challenge the whole bunch of them. Get my dander up and say, Listen, damn you, I don’t want all this thing around here. You’ve got to take a different attitude about my death. Well, that’s hard. But if everybody helps me, and we do—we’re all one body—they all come around and say, Congratulations, you’re going to die! Liberation! Liberation now, you see?

Because, just before you die—look, I know very well a skillful priest, handling a person dying, can do this for them. But he has to talk very, very, very straight. And he has to say, Listen, these doctors—don’t you pay any attention to them. They’re trying to amuse you and deceive you. You’re going to die. This isn’t terrible, but it’s just going to be the end of you, as a system of memories. And so you’ve got a great chance—right now, before it happens—to let go of everything. Because you know it’s going to go, and this is going to help you. It’s going to help you let go of everything. So if you have any possessions left, give them away. Give everything away. And if you have anything to say that you felt you ought to say before you die—that you are kind of hanging on to and it’s bothering you—say it.

I don’t mean, necessarily, a last confession. But say—it’s said that Adlai Stevenson, shortly before he died, said that he’d been making a monkey of himself because he didn’t agree with the government’s policy about something or other. You know? He had to get that off his chest, because he had a little thought in the back of his mind that things were catching up with him. You see? So the moment comes when this thing called death has to be taken completely. Not as some ghastly accident. Something that—oh, your friends are going to stay away because you’re awful. I mean, sometimes, when people die, are in a very unpleasant physical condition. They don’t smell good, they don’t look good, and so on. But an enormous amount can be done with scientific methods to make things reasonably tidy; from a purely sensory point of view.

But the main thing is the attitude that death is as positive as birth, and should be a matter for rejoicing, because death is the symbol of the liberation. There is a wonderful saying that Ananda Coomaraswamy used to quote: I pray that death will not come and find me still unannihilated. In other words, that man dies happy if there is no one to die. In other words, if the ego has disappeared before death caught up with it. But you see, the knowledge of death helps the ego to disappear because it tells you you can’t hang on.

So what we need—if we’re going to have a good religion around, that’s one of the places where it can start. Having, I don’t know—nowadays, I suppose, they’d call it the Institution for Creative Dying. But something like that. You can have one department where you can have [a] champagne cocktail party to die with, another department where you can have glorious religious rituals, and priests, and things like that; another department where you can have psychedelic drugs, another department where you can have special kinds of music. Anything, you know? All these arrangements will be provided for in a hospital for delightful dying. But that’s the thing: to go out with a bang instead of a whimper.