My wife passed this year from cancer. Looking back we had no idea how close we were to the end, and in the last few weeks her beautiful mind was influenced by the disease. I’m sure someone on HN is going through this at least adjacently and my recommendation is to not wait to the end to have important conversations. For those that aren’t going through this now, maybe for a little while live life like you are...it might inform your priorities and perspective.

My 17 year old daughter was already dealing with a life-altering chronic disease and losing her mom plus all of this pandemic bullshit has really made a mess. She broke down crying last night struggling over the idea of death and that everything seems to be pitted against her. It’s hard to know exactly what to say in those moments, maybe some of these words from a person at the doorstep will help her.

For what it’s worth we do have her seeing both a counselor and a psychiatrist but that only goes so far...at the end of the day it’s you and your thoughts staring at the ceiling while you’re trying to get to sleep for the 5am shift tomorrow.

Seeing your child dealing with loss is the hardest. In my case it overrode my ability to deal with my own grief. Eventually (glossing over the irrelevant details) he came out the other side, and is doing fine. And once I didn’t have to spend all my emotional energy on him I could look after myself.

Your daughter is 17 which may give you additional concern. My child was a few years younger but he missed all of that stressful middle-class “get the right classes, right prep and right scores”. It was simply not possible except a bit of going through the motions. But in the end none of that mattered and he ended up in a place where he probably would have been had he gone through those stressful gyrations. So my unsolicited advice is: if you can manage to support her in stepping off the treadmill and dealing with whatever is the highest priorities for her, she’ll probably ultimately be fine.

There are unfortunately no guarantees, but many people do make it to the other side, however horrible the path may be.

A friend of mine lost his wife a few months ago (she had really stepped up to help me). His three kids each reacted completely differently and I am amazed at his ability to accept the needs of each one.

>Seeing your child dealing with loss is the hardest. In my case it overrode my ability to deal with my own grief.

It really is the most difficult part of this process. If there's a silver lining it obliterated any remaining hubris I had over being able to explain the world to them. I do it when I can of course, I'm still dad, but I have also found a way to just be with them in the human experience.

Both of my girls are incredibly strong in their own ways. They are different, though, and are working through the process of recognizing those differences in each other and how it affects their response to grief and the world in general. My one remaining hope in life is that they find a way to strengthen their bond with each other and remain ride or die for the rest of their time on this plane.

> Looking back we had no idea how close we were to the end

This rings very true for me.

My dad died of brain cancer going on five years ago now.

He was diagnosed in 2014. They were clear the prognosis was not good. One or two years at best.

They removed the tumor as soon as they found it, and he returned basically to normal. There was a weird settling in of what it all meant and treatments that were meant to stall things a while.

But since the tumor was small, he was able to function and be basically his old self.

We had our first daughter in the fall of 2015. He was there to meet her. Everything felt like it was looking up.

Three weeks later, on my first day back to work, I got a call at 10:30. "The cancer is back." I took the day off.

At Christmas, he was definitely starting to act goofy and be more forgetful. We'd have to distract him so he didn't try to go plow the driveway or do things like that.

It became a question of "do we go up every weekend, or can we take this weekend off?"

And then at the beginning of February things started getting really bad and my mom moved him into a nursing home in town. That lasted for a little less than a week I think. Then it was clear this was the end.

So we came up in the middle of the week. Sat by his bedside for hours on end. Held his hand.

My dad had two things he'd always say about dying:

1. When someone comes to die, they need someone to hold their hand.

2. People need permission to die. Otherwise they will hang on way longer than they otherwise would.

So I held his hand for a couple days. And then on maybe the third evening, it became pretty clear he was deteriorating.

So I leaned over, kissed him on the head, told him that he'd done a great job raising me and my brother, and that it was okay and we'd be here till the end.

And then we watched him die. I think it was about 4am when he finally passed.

I never remember what day it was, but I do remember that Lent had just started and he died the morning of Transfiguration Sunday. Which the internet tells me was Feb 7, 2016.

There's a Deathcab for Cutie song, "Love is watching someone die." It's the truth. You have to love someone a lot to be there through that.

Anyway, to come back around, it all just went so much faster than you think it would. Especially towards the end.

It took a little over a month for "Dad's acting funny again" to turn into "Dad died last night".

Thanks for sharing this. When you're in the midst of everything it's important to temper the hope of healing with the reality that if that doesn't come you're in a very special, very limited window of time.

>2. People need permission to die. Otherwise they will hang on way longer than they otherwise would.

I wrote about this elsewhere, but my wife on a couple of occasions said 'I think it's time for you to let me go.' I didn't really understand what she meant by that. She was incredibly stoic and was happy to leave the words for me to interpret. I was still so wrapped up in trying to find a way out that I couldn't conceive of just letting go...it felt truly like those scenes in a movie where someone is hanging off of a building and your grip is the only thing keeping them alive. After she passed, her words gained new meaning to me and this was part of it. Permission to go, and permission to talk about the life that comes afterwards. Not figuring this out in time to alleviate some of her pain and let her share her dreams about the future without her is one of my biggest regrets.

> > Looking back we had no idea how close we were to the end

Happened to me as well, on several occasions.

My dad passed away just before New Year a few months ago. At the time I thought him going to hospital was going to be yet another scare, and he should just get his act together and eat properly and exercise. Never got around to it, and his last words were some gibberish.

I felt like maybe there should have been proper last words, but looking back there were. His terminal stage had actually started a few years before, at a bypass surgery. At the time he told me that if the surgery didn't work, he'd be happy to die. Life had treated him just fine, no big issues with anyone to report. Happy with having three kids and a couple of grandchildren. Nothing left to do.

And so the next three years passed with him not doing anything the doctors had told him to do, and we got used to periodic ambulance calls (heart attacks, blood sugar incidents). Somehow he made his life summary come true, nothing more to do.

On another occasion, one of my high school classmates passed away from cancer at 29. I knew he'd had it before, but then it seemed to pass, and being young I thought it wasn't a huge problem because he seemed chipper and full of zest. He had a girlfriend and a career. When it came back I figured I'd drop by to see him, but in a few weeks on my holiday. Ended up being sooner, for his funeral.

This utterly breaks my heart. I'm so sorry for your loss.

I too lost my mother to cancer and was there the morning I noticed hear breathing change and could tell she was about to leave.

It's hard to fathom when someone that raised you suddenly leaves your life. To this day I remember her last moments and my own wailing at both the moment she passed and when I crumpled to my knees as she was buried.

> It took a little over a month for "Dad's acting funny again" to turn into "Dad died last night".

I lost my mother from lung cancer so I can relate.

My dad on the other hand died without notice. I got a message on my phone one day when I was at work. It was a cop from my father's town. They didn't tell me why they were calling, but I knew something happened to my father because he was living on the edge. I took the day off and went home to call them back. He died a few days before at his home.

He was too young to die, but I think it was the best possible death, for him and for us. We didn't have a chance to "say good bye", but it doesn't really matter in the end.

The worst part of dying is anticipating death. I wish I could die accidentally.

I agree. I got a similar call that my dad was killed at work when I was in my early 20s. Due to the circumstances I'm not convinced it wasn't intentional on his part, and in some odd ways I get a bit of relief from that. It was devastating to me, but watching my wife and the mother of my children go through a tortuous 26 months of treatments, unrelenting pain, cycles of hope and despair, various indignities and ultimately passing in a confused state was orders of magnitude worse.

Similarly, the despair and agony is really what hit me most. Last autumn, my father began experiencing occasional cramps in one leg after a regular 75k bike ride. During the following month, the pain gradually spread throughout his body and increased in frequency, seemingly for no apparent reason, based on medical tests and scans. He slowly stopped eating as his body was being consumed day and night: he lost healthy weight at a rate of one pound per day. As muscle weakness spread and as he lost his faculty to walk, he grew steadily delirious with pain and lack of sleep. By the 1st of December, he was in hospital full time undergoing a barrage of tests to no avail; a diagnosis of ALS was given mid-month. During the following week, he spoke his last words. In the throes of his body collapsing, he would tear out IV and catheter. At the rate at which his situation was deteriorating, feeding tube and intubation coupled with restraints appeared cruel. He passed before the end of the year.

Thanks for sharing.

"Looking back we had no idea how close we were to the end"

This happened to me as well. My brother passed at age 47 in 2013. He was initially diagnosed with stage 2 colon cancer and things seemed to be going alright for about a year.

The issue was that the tumor was near a major blood vessel and surgery failed because they were afraid he would bleed to death.

Even after this failed surgery, we had hope with some experimental treatments. He lasted another year.

After a couple of rounds of chemo, he went from bad to worse within a couple of weeks. I had never experienced death like this before and it all came a a shock to me how quickly he passed away.

The worst part is that he fought the idea of death to the very end (I'm sure we all do). There were no plans for his one-man successful business and his wife had to get all of his passwords for important accounts when he was delirious from all of the drugs in his system and nearly on his death bed. He truly thought he would beat it.

The aftermath was like a bomb went off in our family.

His wife begged me to help her with his business on the day of the funeral. I realized he had been neglecting customers for 6 months+ (this is completely understandable, given his condition) and they were screaming for their money back. I spent many weeks/weekends/long nights cleaning up the business and getting the business back to a reasonable level, gaining back customers that would have been lost. This was all for free, to help her (and his kids) out. I explained to her that future work would not be free.

I also had to help her return all kinds of electronics that he bought while he was on chemo drugs. He managed to rack up $50,000 in bills because he would forget that he ordered something..and order 10 of them.

To this day, I'm not sure how she didn't notice all of these amazon packages coming to the door and thinking nothing of it.

After this was done, I told his wife that if she wanted me to continue with this business arrangement, I would need to be a partner in the business. She not only didn't want to do this, but told me I only 'answered emails' and didn't do any actual work, which was clearly not true.

She wanted to give me a free cell phone and pay me around $10/hour as compensation for future work. It was also explained that she had contacted a lawyer and it was stressed that all of the intellectual property from the business was not mine. Kind of strange to me to already assume I'm going to steal intellectual property from you when I just saved you many thousands of dollars and your business..for free.

At this point you may be thinking she's just naive and may not understand the work involved. She worked in the computer industry for a decade. This is how she met my brother. She understands the work it takes to run his business and only wanted to take advantage of me.

As an aside, my brothers business involves: tech support, software development of multiple products in at least 3 languages, and knowing the business. I have the ability do do all three, since I have been in the software/tech industry for the past 2 decades and have owned multiple successful companies. Him and I were very close and I had lots of knowledge about his business and what it entailed. We had ongoing tech discussions through email/chats/in-person for many years.

He was the one that bought me my first computer and was my mentor.

4 months later, she emailed me a contract with a proposal. I would get 5% of the profits for working on it full-time and her kids would own 100% of the business. This was a slap in my face and I declined the offer. With the declining profits in the business, this would have been like working at

The problem is that I would need to work on it full-time to actually save it from failure. If I signed the contract, only worked on it part-time, and it failed, I would be blamed. I also don't like to half-ass anything...especially when it comes to running a business.

She then proceeded to get anyone she could find to work on the business for free and started creating a wedge in my immediate family by spreading false information about the situation. She ended up roping in one of his clients, who had become a friend, to answer all emails for free.

She describes him as a 'good, christian, man'. The funny part is that she was never that religious..and I've known her for 25 years. One of her greatest traits is the ability to manipulate people. All of her friends are people that can do things for her. If she can't use you for something, you are cast off and ignored. She especially likes networking with anyone that has lots of money.

Fast forward to 2020 and the website is in terrible shape. A 7+ year out-of-date website that keeps getting hacked and badly mis-configured DNS records. I told her how to fix these on the first day, but my advice was ignored. I can only imagine how insecure the actual product is, since there have been no updates in all this time.

I also found out my other brother has been helping her for free and outright lying to me about it. I overheard a conversation a couple of days ago that they wanted to keep secret from me. He also has no idea what he's doing and badly butchered the site...but the price for his services is perfect (free).

I just wish my brother would have admit to himself that he may die and specifically write out his wishes for the business in his will. I think it would have prevented this entire situation.

I should probably thank him. It showed me that his wife is still the evil, conniving woman that she was many years ago and that she never really changed..she only got better at hiding it before he died.

But there's now these lingering issues at all family gatherings.

I now own two successful companies. I don't think I would have ever gotten to this level of success, even with a partnership in my brother's company and a business partner that would only fight me on every important decision.

Thanks for sharing your personal story. I think it’s important for everyone to realize that we are all human. Nothing more, nothing less. The world has become super competitive to the point that we all seem to forget this simple fact.

For me it's a bit cathartic, if it helps anyone see through the blind spots I had it's worth it.

I have found that in my own times of trouble and profound sadness that two books have helped me cope. The first one, which is admittedly hard to read when you are very close to a loss (better to inculcate yourself with it ahead of time if possible) is the Enchiridion of Epictetus [1]. The second is Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. What works for me will probably not work for you but I thought sharing my experiences with you might open a path of exploration.

You will overcome this. Your child will too. On a long enough timeline even the most profound grief reduces to an instance. Be well my friend.

[1] http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

Thank you, I will definitely take a look at these.

This is where faith steps in... There is wisdom in the ages that will help you and your daughter. Try and find a pathway of peace and guidance from the universe's deep pool of human experiences.

Agree. Not a religious person myself, but there are times in life when there are no answers, nothing that anyone can do, when fate is completely outside anyone's control.

When everything else fails, you have left only your strength of will against reason. And spirituality may be the only thing to give you that strength.

for me personally - the multiple times in my life when i have been in the process of putting someone in the ground - this kind of comment was right at the top of the list of the least helpful things people said.

Appropriate for some people, irrelevant or worse for others. I know you mean well and don’t intend to harsh on you, but I think your statement could much better have started “this is where religion might offer some solace”.

Every person has to make a different journey, and no tool is appropriate to everyone.

I agree, I just need to recalibrate my perspective. There are certainly those that have gone through this and worse, and faith has helped them and their loved ones.

My girls were raised Christian and I and my wife practiced and professed that faith our entire relationship. I haven't given up on the faith but I am so profoundly disappointed in the modern church that I need to go back to the root of it all and see how much it still resonates.

It sounds like you are disappointed in what people who are in the modern church, publicly speaking that you have access to, are saying. There will obviously be an availability bias on how we each perceive the "modern church".

If you don't believe in what the Bible says, then disregard everything below.

Try reading the Bible. As a whole. And if you have, do it again. Don't let individual versus taken out of context influence major decisions. Know who wrote each chapter (if we know that), who they were writing to, and why they wrote that chapter to put everything in context. I found I was reading too fast and missing major parts. Also translation makes a big deal - some words just don't translate properly - and a good Bible will have footnotes to explain the original word. There are lots of plans out there.

Then, I think, you will realize that what those in the modern church you are referencing are saying should disappoint all of us... and it's not in alignment with the Bible and Jesus' teachings, and you can see where they don't align. Not all churches are that way. Anyways go to the source (if you haven't already).

You nailed it. Exactly my plan.

Have you been to a Unitarian Church? They tend to do away with a lot of the politics and dogma and stick to the core and have better camaraderie than any other church I've been to. I'm an agnostic, but I'm always up for hanging out with cool, chill people. I mean if you're actually a believer and such it might be cool. Bahai meetings were the only other one I've been to that rivaled. They're the polar opposite of the BS laden evangelical movement trying to bring in politics and money to everything.

No but i've heard good things. May give that a try. Thank you.

> back to the root of it all

https://www.amazon.com/More-Than-Carpenter-Josh-McDowell/dp/...

https://www.amazon.com/Mere-Christianity-C-S-Lewis/dp/006065...

Yes! Gnostic revival! Make it happen!!

I'm not sure how to interpret what you have written but assuming good faith - there are things and states worse than death, particularly when analyzed from the point of view of the individual. It is widely considered humane to terminate the life of a suffering animal when no hope of recovery is possible. Such a thing could even be considered an act of love. Depending on a deeper analysis of free will and religion it is feasible that a God is both capable of controlling your death and simultaneously loving you. I'm not a serious believer so I will leave the free will discussion and points of doctrine to others.

Regardless of what you, downvoter, believes -

thinking on something outside yourself is helpful, even empirically. You might not agree with the specific flavour, but even something as bare and nonspiritual as Seneca can help.

Having a mental structure either exogenously adopted or of one's own construction to apply rationality to temporarily irrational losses seemingly is a very good thing for ones mental well-being. I've found great comfort in Epictetus and in the Bible although I follow neither dogmatically.

I'm sorry to hear of your family's struggles. Your advice is spot on and something I discovered during a 10-day Vipassana retreat. I wish I could say something to help your daughter or you. Maybe that beauty and happiness are possible in the smallest of everyday things even as we deal with horrific pain. It gets better somehow.

Thank you.

> It’s hard to know exactly what to say in those moments

often just being there for her is more important than saying anything.

Shit! I cried reading this. Take care and all the best of everything from me to you.

I just want to say I'm really sorry for everything you're going through. Life sucks overall right now so I can't imagine adding what you and your family are going through. I assume you and your daughter have a good relationship based on the situation but, if not, I'd try to be as vulnerable with each other as you can manage. It'll really help turn you guys into support structures for each other which is really helpful when things are as rough as they are right now.

Good luck to you and your family.

Thank you for the kind thoughts and words, and I totally agree with your recommendation. It’s going to take some time, but we’re moving in the right direction.

As someone without much of a relationship with my father, it really makes me really glad to see another father with a child who loves their dad enough to cry to them.

It sounds like you've been taking a lot of care of others. I don't see anyone else mentioning this in replies, but please make sure you're taking good care of yourself, too. If you haven't in a while and are able to, consider getting a good meal, taking a night off, or just doing something you enjoy doing for a couple days.

Hang in there.

Thanks buddy. Our relationship is good but on a few occasions I've heard each of them refer to it as some variation of distant. It breaks my heart because even if I did everything again I don't really know how I would fix it. It's possible I tried too hard to let them find their own way without undue influence from me, maybe a little bit of both is good there. I don't know, but if they choose to have their own kids I'm going to apply whatever I have learned along the way to be the best damn grandpa I can be.

Appreciate the well wishes. I am on a road of trying to take better care of myself as well, hopefully they will see that and be encouraged that the old man is here for the long haul.

This made me cry, very suddenly and unexpectedly. I know it will probably not mean anything tangible but I am so sorry for your loss. I hope you and your daughter are able to come out of this ordeal stronger than you went in.

It actually means everything. Thank you.

My mom died from Frontotemporal Dementia.

She was diagnosed and was dead with in a year. But she experienced symptoms for at least a year before. For about 1.5 years I don't think she really understood much of what we said to her, and of course the last 6 months she was basically a child.

Near the end I told her I loved her and she was a great mom, but I really should have told her that 2 years before. Its one of my biggest regrets.

Don't wait. Say it now.

I don't have anything to say other than I'm very sorry. I know it's not enough but I really feel for you.

Thank you, i really do appreciate it.

The nicest bit for me was where he talked about growing old being a privilege and not to lament every grey hair and wrinkle. Puts it in perspective.

As I often say, "Growing old sucks, but it is better than the alternative."*

*I can't take credit. I got it from someone else, but I don't remember who.

Well admittedly when you get older you tend to forget these things. :)

It varies. Got badly injured a few years ago. Had a period of almost a year of horrific agony.

At a certain point living was just a horrible punishment.

My grandfather says this, and meets his age with a reverent smile. It's so unburdening to embrace age. The fear of it is encompassing and I feel it on the edge of my mind at times.

But it is _so_ incredibly liberating to meet it with a warm smile and acceptance.

Age is not a punishment, it's a gift, a privilege, to carry the memories we have and to wear our lives on our face like we're able to.

"Everybody wants to grow old, but nobody wants to be old"

Thing is, we don't quite know about the alternative. The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns and all that.

Act 3 Scene 1 of Hamlet, by William Shakespeare: https://www.sparknotes.c

I’ve heard it ascribed to Oscar Wilde, although according to Whistler he probably stole it from someone himself.

It's clearly been around a lot longer than I realized!

It depends. We do have voluntary euthanasia after all, so perhaps the alternative can be better in some cases.

"who" doesn't matter. We are just meat bags passing on good ideas and thoughts.

I have to stash this gem somewhere safe. Thanks.

”But everybody dies, and there will always be places and experiences missing from anyone’s life – the world has too much beauty and adventure for one person to see.”

Damn gut punch...

I remember precisely when I had this particular epiphany. I was 12 years old, in love with books, and thanks to my parents who had signed a form, I had just gotten my first library card for the real (read: non-kiddie) section of the public library. Awed by the sheer number of tall bookshelves, intoxicated by the library smell and my newfound source of knowledge, I asked the librarian how many books they had, she said more than 100,000. I was duly impressed. But then I started thinking, and did some arithmetic on a piece of scrap paper.

And I realized that even if I read one book a day for the rest of my life, I would only be able to read a fraction of all the books on the shelves. Right there in the same room with me was provably unattainable knowledge. I could decide to read any book, but I could not read all of them. If I decided to read this book, then that other book would remain forever unread. Years before I would be able to put the words on it, I had stumbled upon a kind of incompleteness theorem, and I started to understand how small one's life actually is. This thought never left me.

I felt like this but towards reading all of wikipedia.

Opportunity cost.

I was 28 when my dad died. He was 58.

It has definitely shifted how I think about life and what matters.

If I live as long as him, I've already passed the midpoint.

Really helps you put things in perspective.

Everything he says in his article is more or less true - most of which we all already know.

Maybe the insight is that we forget what's important too frequently, and need a better mechanism to be reminded?

"Meditating on death" and "premeditation of future ills" is a big theme in Stoicism (and the broader 'Hellenistic Philosophy'). Seneca's letters have many different exhortations on "preparing for death". Some choice quotes:

• "Many people grasp and hold on to life, like those caught by a flash flood who grasp at weeds and brambles. Most are tossed about between the fear of death and the torments of life: they do not want to live but do not know how to die. Cast off your solicitude for life, then, and in doing so make life enjoyable for yourself. No good thing benefits us while we have it unless we are mentally prepared for the loss of it." — Seneca

• "Epicurus says 'It is a fine thing to learn death thoroughly.' Perhaps you think it is a waste of time to learn something you will need to use only once. But that is the very reason we ought to rehearse: if we cannot test whether we know it, we should be learning it always." — Seneca riffing on Epicurus (not to be confused with Epictetus, a Stoic; he even has a discourse titled "Against Epicurus")

• "As the water clock does not empty out its last drop only but also whatever dripped through it before, so our last hour of existence is not the only time we die but just the only time we finish dying. Death is not one event; the death that takes us is our last." — Seneca

• "Years are not given out by quota. There's no way to know the point where death lies waiting for you, you must wait for death at every point." — Seneca

• "Let death be before your eyes every day, and you will never have a base thought or an excessive desire." — Marcus Aurelius

• "The torment we feel comes about through our own agency, because we become alarmed when we believe that death is close at hand. But isn't it close to everyone, ready in place and every moment?" — Seneca

• "Think about arranging the present as best as you can, with serene mind. All else is carried away as by a river." — Horace

                 •••

Sources for quotations: Seneca's 'Letters on Ethics' (full set of letters, excellently translated by Graver and Long); the others are from 'What is Ancient Philosophy?' by Pierre Hadot.

"Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things."

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Having just turned 31 this hits home. I appreciate the positivity he could find in the twilight of his days. I can't help but feel I may lack the courage to face death the same way. His focus on gratitude really does seem to match what I understand to be the best way to find joy in the often bleak life we find ourselves in. There is almost always someone or something to appreciate in our lives.

My great fear is not dying but leaving the people behind who depend on me.

I mean as the only earning member of my family the scariest post part about dying is what will happen to family.

I don't have a big life insurance and not a lot of savings. So it gives me chills that my wife and daughter will have to fend for themselves or live a lesser life should I cease to exist suddenly one day.

Get some term life insurance. It is usually very inexpensive.

I really hope you can get enough life insurance for cheap, it will set your mind at ease. https://www.zanderins.com. The rule I've heard is get 10-12 times your income. If you're making 60k/year, that's 600,000 - 720,000 in insurance, which for a young-ish healthy-ish person is cheaper than most people expect.

rawls' social utility theory stated that by maximizing the welfare of the worst-off person, you improve all of society; at the time i learned it it seemed like a strange idea.

but then i thought: every moment in your life can be valued according to how much life you have ahead of it. the present moment is the most valuable; and the very last moment, the least -- you have nothing ahead of it. i thought: if you live your life such that the last moment, which is the least valuable in that sense, is as good as possible -- perhaps that would improve the totality of the rest of your life.

this has all been covered by the buddhist concepts on this thread but i thought it was interesting that we can come to this same idea somewhat independently. (maybe rawls was inspired by buddhism? i don't know.)

That "live today as though it's your last" was too dark for me. Fatalistic or something. To get out of my rut, I needed something forward facing, optimistic.

I eventually settled on "live every day as if it's your first." More of "new mind" mentality. I needed something that emphasized awe, joy, wonder, discovery. Vs the addict's group therapy cliche "today is the first day of the rest of your life."

FWIW, my first brush with death was 34 years ago. Having done the bereavement cycle a few too many times kinda moots the exercise. Needs to be done. But it's just a stepping stone.

Lots of things matter but nothing matters without relationships.

highly relevant: M. Scott Peck "The Road less Traveled", in a nutshell the relationship to ourselves is what gives us the ability to be in a fulfilling relationship with others. I wanted to emphasize this because too many I know (including my former self) would rather be with somebody else ("to fulfill them or -worse- "make them complete") than develop a good relationship with our "self" first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr...

Some nearby introverts quietly disagree then dream of hiking in the mountains in nature. I guess that's a relationship of sorts.

I've never really liked platitudes like "family is everything" and "nothing matters without relationships" -- they don't seem to come from a good place. People who lack these things may enjoy their lives every bit as much, what's the point of denigrating their life?

Every time it is me that ends up losing interest in the people around me. At some point I decided to recognize that if I was not going to put in the effort to build relationships then there was no sense in putting myself down for not having them built up later. But at the same time when I meet new people, no matter how many things we both like, if they are not purposefully inviting me over then I will stop caring about them and return to having no friendships again. That is entirely on me.

It isn't like they are bad people, but there are other things I will inevitably end up gravitating to instead.

But it isn't like I'm alone because I have other things to occupy my time. There are times that I did wish I had other friendships but I end up putting those feelings aside when I start working on something. For better or worse I am lucky to be able to say this. Some artists say they can only survive and keep working by being able to be alone for extended periods of time.

When I don't get too attached to anyone the pain of losing them doesn't really come. And the people I do care about I've actually made miserable and angry by the number of times I've brought up that I am going to die someday and that I'm trying to live in the moment with them and acknowledge the transience of being alive with them. At some point continuing to acknowledge the fact that being alive and having known them is a miracle in front of them is counterproductive, and in the end it probably doesn't make dying any less painful.

After doing all that I don't understand what else I can possibly do but continue being alive.

Likely projecting their own existential fear of loneliness. Fear is not a good place

“All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise and will become separated from me”— Siddhartha Gautama.

As a Buddhist we do “contemplation of death” meditation on a regular basis. It involves imagining our last few hours on our deathbed. It is a wonderful exercise to help put things in context. It makes you behave differently towards people you meet, even strangers.

Sometimes, when I talk to my 4 year old son, I imagine how we will have our last goodbye talk on my death bed. How we will both know that this is the last moment together, how we both will be mourning.

It makes me incredibly sad, and, at the same time it helps me to make better decisions in life. Choosing spending time with him instead of surfing the web for no reason for example.

I’d also invite you to contemplate the reverse: a last goodbye talk on his death bed.

I find contemplating the absence of others to be much more powerful than my own return back to the void.

I think that's a great point and I'm absolutely not going to do that - I can't bring myself to imagine my children will die before me.

Reminded me of this: http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/78realprosperity.html

In my sect of Buddhism, we don't do "contemplation of death" meditation. What we are taught is to consider our last moment before death, so we can approach it (which is the beginning of our existence in death) in the proper way. And that, in my understanding, boils down to establishing the correct foundation during our life.

I have spent hours mediating in graveyards.

Also helpful is the mediation on the 32 parts of the body to help you loosen your attachment.

https://www.imsb.org/contemplating-the-32-parts-of-the-body/

I meditate regularly, but I think this type of exercise is misguided and betrays the body-denying/denigrating bias that can be often found in religious traditions world-wide. It encourages an ignorant attitude towards the body: instead of contemplating the miracles of the muscular system, see it as amorphous flesh. Amplify the spurious association of the skeleton with the malnourished body it resembles, instead of marveling at the ingenious way it serves it's (many) purposes, and so on.

I generally agree with you that a lot of lineages, particularly the Theravada derived ones here in the west, might go overboard with body denial practices. The meditations from the Satipatthana sutra are great, but I feel like you can get caught in trying to prove everything is suffering if you don’t have enough grounding in other parts of Buddhist teachings because of them. Like all of the sutras it can point you in a direction, but we shouldn’t be caught up in them.

Personally, in my meditation practice, it was completely transformed and deepened when I began a dedicated asana practice and focused on giving my body what it needs to be strong and in touch with what it is saying.

You are not your body nor your mind. That is a core tenant of most Buddhist philosophy.

Not everybody is a Buddhist. Convincing somebody who has different beliefs involves more than restating one's beliefs.

You can test it out for yourself.

You don’t need to identify as a Buddhist to come to the conclusion that you are not your body.

That's like saying you are not your car; while you're driving the distinction is less important than keeping between the lines and watching for pedestrians.

I am a Daoist like everyone else is a Gravitist. You all believe gravity because you feel it work and it was explained and named to you. You feel Daoism and Buddhism work as well but no one has explained to to you.

You made the stronger claim that I am not my mind either, though. You do have to identify as something in order to come to that conclusion.

Ha! The identification is the delusion we are all afflicted with! If you were your body why can't you tell it to live forever?

… I don't know how to respond. Mu, I guess? As I see it, you are mixing several senses of the word "to be", and the resulting question is meaningless.

The pattern of my mind is physically instantiated (as all the ten thousand things are), and it happens to be so instantiated on a brain. That brain is housed in a body. The pattern can direct the shape and properties of the body only to a limited extent: there are heavy restrictions which happen to constrain the power that pattern (or rather, its particular instantiation on this particular brain) has over the body. (We call these restrictions "biology".) I could no more order my body to become immortal than I could order the ocean waves to stand still: they are both governed by the same laws of physics over which I have almost no control. I could probably make my body immortal by some sufficiently clever manipulation of the world (possibly involving waves hands wildly nanobots), but the brain did not come pre-packaged with high-fidelity fine-grained control over its environment; the pattern can interact with the world only by flapping around bits of meat, and these are a very blunt instrument, highly unsuitable for difficult tasks like "reverse entropy in this region of space".

Elliot Dallen said: "Life is for enjoyment."

True. In other words you shouldn't do the 32 body parts contemplation if you are not yet ready to drop attachment to life enjoyments.

You reminded me of the close of one of my favorite Philosophize This episodes on Authenticity: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GfkJEWnsNy4

Thank you so much! I have Shaila Katherine’s book “Focused and Fearless” but not completed the reading. She is an amazing teacher.

In similar vein, I recommend checking out The Bardo Thodol (AKA The Tibetan Book of the Dead) by Padmasambhava.

"And if I think everything belongs to me, How wrong I'll be, none of us have anything." — Broadcast

Not trying to be a jackass. I think this short, sweet, spiritual song about the material world and after is poignant. All the more bittersweet considering the untimely death of the singer.

Sounds similar to how the stoics spend time contemplating the absolute worst thing they can imagine happening because then anything after that is an improvement.

Doesn't this practice and especially the choice of adjectives make light out of something very serious and infinitely sad?

On the opposite, you'll appreciate those small moments more because this might be the last moment you have. Reminding yourself of death often keeps you from taking life for granted.

I think Americans hide from death too much. We try to put boxes around it. I say this as one. I envy cultures where they're more open and public about it. I'l say that New Orleans does something right. They have parade parties when a loved one dies.

Not at all. It encourages you to contemplate something that we will all face, and through contemplation, use the time you have, better now.

I'm the same age and not at all at peace with my mortality - the dominant feeling being envy of those who get to live after my death.

If I wrote a book with ghosts, zombies or other undead I would give the antagonists this as their reasons for hating the living.

Anyway that point about vulnerability is spot on. When I hug my SO I often reflexively blurt something among the lines of "softness is important", but what I really mean by that is vulnerability is important - this is something I had to learn from her and it's what helped me improve myself as a person.

I think: lose enough ego and entitlement, and you can not only find peace with death but even see it as a truly "happy ending" given the wondrous experiences of the uncountable people that will come after you (and what a petty, selfish distinction whose experiences those are is).

But that's not easy. It seems to take years of thinking about death almost daily and thinking about space and time[0] and history and stuff. And maybe psychedelics, although I never tried those yet.

0: https://youtu.be/5TbUxGZtwGI

I recently came across a quote that was en eye opener.

"Its better to be grateful than to be regretful."

Imagine that there's some form of brain time anomaly when you die, where your last moment stretches and you live on in a dream, with the dreams during your life being the test runs.

There's theories about DMT related to this.

Has anyone else read “Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer”?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23496164

It's not over, till its over.

"First, the importance of gratitude" - so true

Nobody ever dies from their perspective.

For those who would like to read, but stuck behind paywall: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/36666

Rainn Wilson's Soul Pancake has a long playlist of videos featuring dying people.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzvRx_johoA8ITQgxBpeJ...