A Letter to Someone Who Is Dying

Dear friend,

You are not doing this wrong. There is no right way to die, and whatever you are feeling today, terror or a strange calm or boredom or rage at the ceiling, is a way that a human being feels when facing this. You do not have to be brave for anyone. You do not have to be serene. You do not have to have made your peace with everything by some date. The people who love you would rather have you honest than composed, and if some of them would not, that is their fear talking, and you can let it be theirs.

You do not have to believe anything, either. Not a god, not an afterlife, not a doctrine. And you do not have to finish anything. If all you can do today is lie here and breathe, that is enough.

You are allowed to still want to live. Wanting to live and preparing to die are not opposites. Hope for the treatment if you hope for it. Be furious about the unfairness if you are furious. And let the other thing be true too: that this may be the last part, and that there is a way to walk it.

You are allowed to be afraid. But the fear is a feeling, and it is not information about what death is. It is what a mind does when it cannot see past a door. When I was thirteen I nearly drowned in freezing water, and the fear told me that on the other side there would be nothing, or something terrible. What I found was not nothing, and it was not terrible. So when the fear comes, and it will, let it come without believing everything it says.

The old masters describe what will happen. Your body will settle. It will get heavier and quieter, and the senses will withdraw one by one, like a house going dark room by room in the evening. Then the breath will stop. And then, they say, there is a moment, for everyone, whatever they believed, when the mind falls completely still and the nature of the mind shows itself plainly, clear and open, like a sky in autumn with no cloud in it. It is not a stranger. It is the very awareness that has been with you your whole life, the one reading this now, with nothing in front of it for once.

When it comes, do not run. Do not grab at anything and do not push anything away. Whatever appears, however bright or strange, let it be what it is, and rest. You already know how to do this. It is what you do at the end of every out-breath, in the small pause before the next one comes on its own. If you rest in that pause a few times a day between now and then, you are practicing for that moment, and you cannot do it wrong.

If you cannot practice, if the pain or the medication or the exhaustion makes it impossible, that is all right too. Let someone sit near you. Let someone read to you, quietly. You are not required to perform anything.

My older sister died of liver cancer when I was a teenager, and I was beside her. There are things I wish she had been told about the people around her. That we did not need her to comfort us, though she tried. That our helplessness was not her fault. That when we were silent it was not because we had nothing to say but because we had too much. If the people around you are clumsy, and they will be, it is love that is making them clumsy. You can forgive them in advance.

And there are things I wish I had said to her, which I say to you now in case no one else has. Thank you. I am sorry for the ways I fell short. I forgive you, and there is nothing to forgive. I love you. It is all right to go when it is time.

Whatever is aware of these words right now has been with you your whole life, and it is not leaving.

With love,

Nick