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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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I m thrilled to welcome today s guest, the brilliant and wise Buddhist teacher, Frank Ostaseski, author of The Five Invitations.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context,
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the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks on their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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Acceptance is a kind of a choice.
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We say, I accept this.
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That s the way they are.
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Surrender feels different.
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It feels like we re not just distancing ourself from something, but we re expanding around the thing that was giving us trouble.
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So that it s not, it doesn t have such a stranglehold on us in a way.
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And with acceptance comes, is a gateway to something appreciably deeper, which is the possibility of transformation.
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the possibility of using the situation that we find ourselves in as a step in our growth and our further discovery of who we are.
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So says the enduringly wise Buddhist teacher Frank Osteseski, a leading figure in the contemplative care for the dying movement, having co-founded the acclaimed Zen Hospice Center.
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In 2004, he established the Metta Institute, which offers innovative training and education for compassionate end-of-life care.
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His book, The Five Invitations, Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, explores the wisdom that emerges from embracing mortality, whether you re contemplating the end of your life or not.
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This is what guides our conversation today.
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Frank invites us to consider how we approach the small endings that occur in our everyday life.
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How do you say goodbye at the end of a dinner?
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along with the practice of listening intently and looking for opportunities to forgive and make amends.
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Ultimately, though, our conversation circles what it means to surrender to circumstances we cannot control.
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Let s get to our conversation.
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Thank you for your book.
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It s beautiful.
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And I want to sort of open it up by saying that, yes, obviously, you work with and hold the hands of many who are dying.
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But this book, in so many ways, is about how to live, which is really only possible in some ways by acknowledging that it will end someday.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I mean, you know, if we were to look at Siri right now, we would find out that, you know, 55 million people are going to die in the hour that we re recording this podcast.
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Is that true?
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Yeah.
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Wow.
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There s a famous story in the Mahabharata that one of the old Hindu texts that says, you know, what s the most wondrous thing in the world?
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And the sage answers, what s the most wondrous thing in the world is that
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All around us, men and women see that people are dying, and yet they think it won t happen to them.
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Yeah.
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It s true.
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It s true.
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The other day, I have two small children, and my youngest, my six-year-old, asked me how many days had been alive.
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And so I Googled it.
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And then I Googled myself, and it s something like 12,000 days.
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It s kind of an insignificant number of days, right?
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And yet, I m already halfway through, most likely, if I m lucky.
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We re not here for very long.
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And yet,
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we spend most of our lives trying to defer or deny the eventual reality that we ll be going soon.
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Yeah.
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I mean, look, it s one of the things I wrote about in the book is that, you know, death s not waiting for us at the end of a long road.
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It s not waiting for us at 80 years old or 90 years old or whatever number we imagine.
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It s with us right now, you know, in the marrow of every passing moment.
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Yeah.
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No.
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Yeah.
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And you ve obviously been present at so many people s passings.
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And I m curious, for your perspective, I ve had this conversation with several people who have been in attendance at hundreds, maybe thousands of deaths, and that one Rabbi Steve Liebeter talks about it as like, for most people,
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falling asleep after jet lag.
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There s acceptance or relaxation.
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It s those of us who are still living who tend to carry the most anxiety, I think is what his point was.
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I don t know if that s been your experience or not.
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You know, Elise, I ve stopped imagining there s a wave that people die.
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everybody dies in a really unique way, just like everybody gets born in a unique way, right?
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There s not some generalization we can make about it.
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But yes, it s true that often the conditions of dying are helpful in bringing us to some kind of peace of mind, if you will.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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We can talk about that some more, but that s, I think that s true.
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Yeah.
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And so I see regular people, people like you and I, you know, some people who had never had any inner life or any psychological, you know, training,
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meet dying in remarkable ways, ways that they couldn t have imagined that they would meet them.
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And that s fascinating to me, really fascinating to me.
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That means death has got something in it that s actually helpful to us.
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That s a beautiful idea.
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I mean, you write, lessons from death are available to all those who choose to move toward it.
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I have witnessed a heart opening occurring and not only people near death, but also their caregivers.
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They found a depth of love within themselves that they didn t know they had access to.
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They discovered a profound trust in the universe and the reliable goodness of humanity that never abandoned them regardless of the suffering they encountered.
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Such a beautiful idea that as we start winding down in some ways, it s an opportunity to get much bigger, right?
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To grow in those final moments.
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Yes, provided we re not surrounded by fear.
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That s really important.
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That what s in the neighborhood matters.
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So who s around us at the time of our dying, whether it s professional health care providers or family or friends, if they re really afraid, then that can have a really big effect on the person who s dying.
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So what s in the neighborhood matters.
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It really matters.
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So when you and your experience tending to people, are you, and I love the story that you tell in the book of a nurse whose discomfort is palpable and she wants, for a patient, she wants to medicate her and you re sort of like, I think maybe you need to medicate yourself.
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So do you find in the neighborhood, in the room, who are you, and obviously it depends immensely on what s happening, but are you tending, who s most typically afraid?
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Who are you tending to or trying to manage most acutely?
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Well, I m a little suspicious of people who say they have no fear of dying, honestly.
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Because most cases, the people I ve been with, have at some point had some fear.
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You know, I come from a Buddhist tradition.
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In that tradition, we say there are three gifts you can give.
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You can give gift of the teachings, gift of a material object, and the gift of no fear.
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So that s really a precious gift to be able to give to someone.
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So when we started the Zen Hospice years ago, you know, we didn t have a big plan.
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We just thought there was a natural match between people who are cultivating what I might call a listening heart through the practice of meditation and people who really needed to be heard at least once in their life.
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So that s what we started.
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And sometimes it was the person who was dying and sometimes it was their friends or family.
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And our job was to provide a kind of devout listening.
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And when you listen devoutly, as you re doing right now, we tend to draw out the truth from the other person, I think.
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And that s a remarkably important aspect of this process of being with dying.
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Yeah.
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It s beautiful.
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How do we do that for people when they re still alive?
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Well, listen without preparing the next thing you re going to say before it s your turn.
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That s one of the things, right?
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kind of non-judgmental quality, that helps enormously, of course.
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Get curious.
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You know, one of the qualities that I most, that I think is most important at the time of dying, in life for that matter, is being curious.
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How come you think that?
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Why?
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Wow, tell me more about that.
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I never thought of things that way.
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That s a live, beautiful, joyful way of living, yeah.
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I mean, you know, think about kids and, you know, you have children.
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And so, you know, when children play, they don t play for a purpose.
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They just play, right?
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My granddaughter came over the other day and she said, grandpa, let s play.
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And I got out the basket with all the puzzles and the drawing things.
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She said, no, grandpa, I want to play.
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And what she meant is I want to imagine, you know, I want to be curious.
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And so, so,
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Suppose we were that way around people who were dying.
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Suppose that was the way we led our life.
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Not necessarily always focused on the outcome, but drawn to discovery.
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Drawn to discovery.
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I m Rachel Martin.
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After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.
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So we made a new podcast called Wildcard, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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Do you find, I m trying to imagine or put myself in that space, do you find that people need to unburden themselves or come to feeling complete in some way?
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Or do you feel like in the process of being with people, particularly in a palliative care setting or hospice setting where they re walking this path, getting closer, sensing the nearness that they re recognizing even more that there is nothing to unburden and that they re already whole?
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Yeah, it s a really great question.
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I wish there was a single answer to it, but of course there s not because we human beings are, you know, individuals, unique individuals.
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But yes, of course there are people who need to unburden aspects of their life through which they ve caused pain or maybe regrets that they re carrying into their dying process.
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But one of the things that I saw time and time again is that the big questions on people s hearts are, am I loved?
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Did I love well?
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And if those are the two most important questions at the end of our life, well, aren t they the most important questions now?
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I mean, why wait until we find ourselves on our deathbed to respond to those questions?
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So I think often those are the cases, they re not always expressed that way, of course, but that s often what s on people s hearts.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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That s beautiful.
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I mean, you sort of talk about words in a couple of places where you talk about, you tease these concepts apart.
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You write, we confuse forgiveness with forgetting.
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We are afraid that if we forgive, we will forget, and the harm may happen again.
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And I would imagine that there, of course, is some, in many instances, some acrimony or some perception
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of a wrong that s hard for people to... Essentially, you seem to be suggesting that there is the promise of peace without letting go of what that experience meant to you.
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Is that fair?
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Yeah, I think so.
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I mean, again, I m inclined to say that people are going to do this in really different ways.
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And as you suggested in the little part that you read, forgiving is not the same thing as forgetting.
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It s not condoning bad actions.
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It s not saying, oh, it s all okay that, you know, you were abusive to me.
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That s not at all what I m suggesting.
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You know, what I m suggesting is it s too painful for us to keep carrying around this burden.
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this pain of this bag of suffering that we re dragging behind us.
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And so for ourselves, for our own benefit, we forgive.
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And again, not condoning, forgiving.
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It hurts too much to keep someone out of my heart.
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This is why I think in the end, all forgiveness is ultimately self-forgiveness.
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Because we wanna set down on our suffering.
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We wanna set down on our suffering.
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That s really what s happening in the process of forgiveness.
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But there s many steps before we get to that experience.
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I mean, there can be anger and depression and numbness and all manner of other things that come into this process.
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And when we forgive, it doesn t necessarily mean reconciliation.
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You know, forgiveness doesn t necessarily mean we even have any contact with the person who s harmed us or who we ve harmed.
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That s something different.
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Forgiveness is touching what hurts with some degree of merciful awareness.
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That s the way I would talk about it, yeah.
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It s beautiful.
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I think, too, you said merciful awareness.
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And there s that energy of mercy, which comes from merc or mercantile, or there s an exchange associated with it, too.
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And it s sort of like at the heart of love in some ways, right?
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And so maybe it s also just, in those instances, about finding and extending mercy, if not forgiveness.
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Especially to ourselves, I would say.
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The other thing we confuse forgiveness with is justice.
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And we may forgive and never find justice.
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We want the other person to pay for their harm to us.
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We want them to apologize, to take responsibility for what they did, and that may never occur, never.
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And the question is, how much are we gonna hold on to this thing?
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I mean, the image that I sometimes give is holding a hot coal in your hand, and you ve been holding that hot coal for 30 or 40 years.
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Forgiveness is setting down the hot coal because it s burning your hand and you don t want to do that anymore for your own benefit, for the sake of your own well-being.
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So beautiful.
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And then to that end, you also write a bit farther in the book, a critical point here is that acceptance doesn t require agreement.
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We may still want to work to change our life circumstances, but you can t make a change until you first accept the truth of what is right in front of you eyes wide open.
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And it works with what you were just saying, the difference between accepting that something happened without condoning it, agreeing with it, or feeling like it s just, but also in the context of how we move forward, I would imagine, or even accepting the reality of the fact that we re dying.
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Sure.
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I mean, I think there s also an important distinction to be made between acceptance and resignation, you know, where we just kind of collapse.
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In resignation, we just sort of collapse into this experience feeling futile, like there s nothing we can do about it, you know.
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And there may not be anything we can do about the other person or the situation, but there is a lot we can do about our relationship to what s occurring.
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Same horror.
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Yeah.
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So, you know, and acceptance, you know, I studied with Kublai Ross way back in the day, and she was a mentor of mine, and I m very grateful to her.
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And you remember those famous five stages that she had?
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Well, the last of which was acceptance.
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And, you know, I trust what she was trying to do.
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She wasn t saying it was a linear path, by the way.
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I know.
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But acceptance isn t the end.
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It s just the beginning.
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You know, James Baldwin said something about, you know, there s a lot of things we can t change in this world, but nothing can be changed until we accept it, basically.
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So I think that acceptance is the beginning, and I think there are appreciably deeper states than acceptance that occur in the dying process, and occur in our everyday lives as well.
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You know, what I see at the end of life in the process with people often is a kind of chaos that comes after acceptance.
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And it scares the hell out of the family members or the friends, because this person is not behaving in the way they were, or maybe they re temporarily afraid.
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And what I see often, if those people are well guided and they re
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well accompanied, is that that chaos, that fear, often gives way to something appreciably different than acceptance, which is surrender.
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Acceptance is kind of a choice.
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We say, I accept this.
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That s the way they are.
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Surrender feels different.
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It feels like we re not just distancing ourselves from something, but we re expanding around the thing that was giving us trouble.
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Yeah, so that it s not, it doesn t have such a stranglehold on us in a way.
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And with acceptance comes, is a gateway to something appreciably deeper, which is the possibility of transformation, the possibility of using the situation that we find ourself in as a step in our growth and our further discovery of who we are now.
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That s so beautiful.
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And you think about surrender and you think about a lot of the problems that we have in our culture, one of which is our
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And within illness and dying and the way that our favorite metaphors are war, right?
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And battle and fighting and destroying and eviscerating cancer, disease, whatever it may be.
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It s all about winning somehow and losing.
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And you think about a word like surrender, which is such a beautiful word, and I don t think well understood culturally.
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And immediately people are like, well,
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I m giving up?
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Is that what you re asking?
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When really it seems like it s more about relinquishing control in some ways or allowing what is to happen and being with it rather than against it.
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Yeah.
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I mean, yesterday I was talking to a woman who is facing life-threatening illness, and she said to me, Frank, I m so sorry.
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I m so fed up with fighting.
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She said, every time I fight with reality, I lose.
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And so that s really what we re speaking about here.
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It s not about deciding on a treatment plan or not wanting to attend to our health.
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It s not about that.
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It is about recognizing that there is a reality that we are coming face to face with.
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How do we wanna meet it?
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With fight, with battle.
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I mean, look at our, you know this better than I, look at our healthcare system, all the language that we use in there.
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It s what you ve just been describing, badly.
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He d fight the disease, you know.
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After a long battle with cancer, he died.
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But why couldn t it have been after a loving time with his family, in his final days, he let go?
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Yeah.
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Also, in the way that we describe ourselves as having diseases, right?
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Like, I have this thing, and then we battle this part of ourselves.
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And I m not saying I love cancer, but to identify with it in that way and then attack it also feels violent towards ourselves in some ways.
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outside of this idea of acknowledging what is in that moment without denying the fact that you wish that what is in that moment didn t include cancer.
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Yeah.
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Well, there s a bigger issue behind this, which is that we tend to think of becoming sick as a punishment.
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Yeah.
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We think it s a mistake that we get sick.
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You know, it s like that quote I was using earlier about all around us, we see people dying and we think it won t happen to us.
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And we have a culture that keeps death at arm s length.
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We even put rouge on people in the coffin.
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All ways of pretending that it isn t happening.
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So yeah, I think that sometimes when we think of illness as a punishment instead of a natural part of our experience, we feel we ve done something wrong.
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Yeah.
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Isn t the very root of illness evilness?
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But yes, it s this, how could this happen to me?
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And it s like, well, how could it not happen to you?
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Why you and why not you?
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Although that s a very difficult thing to say to someone who s got metastasized cancer.
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They re going to say, get the hell out of my room.
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They ll slap you with a wet fish and tell you to get out.
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I m sure, or they don t need your services, right?
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Right.
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But here s something that I could add to this.
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A few years ago, I had a series of strokes.
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I actually had five of them over a period of months.
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And the doctors often spoke to me about recovery, how my neural pathways would eventually recover, and the brain was a very plastic, flexible organ, et cetera, et cetera.
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And I kept saying to them, thank you very much for this, but I m not that much interested in recovery.
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And they were shocked.
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And I said, I m much more interested in discovery.
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I m interested to see what does this, what can I discover in this situation, in this, you know, injury to my brain as a result of this illness?
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What has it got to show me?
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And that wasn t being Pollyanna, you know, it was hard.
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But entering into my experience, my illness, experience of illness with that sense of discovery was very useful and showed me what would help me in my brain s recovery.
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What were the, literally, the tasks that I should do that would help my brain to cognitively recover?
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So discovery, I think, is really important.
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That s that curiosity we were speaking about earlier, coming back into play.
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How do we meet this situation?
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I don t always know, so I m willing to wait and see what it shows me.
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It s interesting.
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I just wrote this story for the O Magazine about wholeness being the new wellness.
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And you talk about both wellness and wholeness, but I think you talk about wholeness really beautifully and thinking about that idea of stroke recovery and the way that
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SPEAKER_00
It feels like culturally we re getting to this point where one of the primary things that we prioritize or care about is wellness, which is admirable, of course, but it s this focus on physical health and optimization.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think where we conflate these two concepts in a way that is potentially devastating when you re not well, but you can still feel whole.
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SPEAKER_00
You write about wholeness,
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To be whole, we need to include, accept, and connect all parts of ourselves.
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We need acceptance of our conflicting qualities and the seeming incongruity of our inner and outer worlds.
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Wholeness does not mean perfection.
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It means no part left out.
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SPEAKER_00
I think that s such a beautiful idea, too, thinking about you in the context of suffering from a stroke and not necessarily being fixated on being exactly how you were or back at full force Frank.
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But who are you now?
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You can keep that wholeness.
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You can grow that wholeness even as wellness winnows.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, beautiful.
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No part left out, right?
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Yeah.
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I mean, when my daughter and I would go shopping, you know, we d go to consignment shops, right?
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And, you know, I d go in with her and she d find a really cool blouse or something.
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And I look around the store for something else.
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And I noticed as I was shopping for a leather jacket or scarf, there would be these tags.
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And on the tags, they would say $9.99 as is.
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And I just love them, these texts.
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I think we should get them for each other and give them as holiday presents to each other.
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As is, I take you as is.
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I mean, there s an incredible gift in that, that with all of your foibles and all of your neuroses and all of your mishegosh, I love you and take you as is.
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What an extraordinary gift that would be to give to each other, you know?
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SPEAKER_02
No present would need to be attached to that tag.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s beautiful.
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SPEAKER_00
I m interested just to also in that as is quality, what would our culture look like if we could let go of our wellness and recognize that we re moving towards wholeness and that the two are not, the one does not deny the presence of the other, but what would it look like to live in a culture that wasn t trying to constantly outrun death?
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Yeah, I mean, probably you and me too don t really want to die at this moment.
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You know, there s people in our lives that we want to be with, we love, we want to, you know, hang around with a while longer.
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SPEAKER_02
I m not romantic about dying.
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I think it s the hardest thing we ll ever do, you know.
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And I think it s an absurd gamble to imagine that at the time of our dying, we re going to have the physical strength, the emotional stability, the mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime.
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I think that s an absurd gamble that I don t recommend any of us taking.
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So let s practice now.
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Let s develop a relationship with the way things end in our life now.
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I mean, it doesn t have to be the big one.
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It doesn t have to be the big ticket item, death.
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Just how do you end things?
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How do you leave a party?
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How do you end a meal?
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What comes up for you as you end it?
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Who taught you to meet endings that way?
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And is it satisfying for you?
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Do you want to keep meeting in that way or do you want to change the way you meet endings?
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There s a lot for us to learn just in that simple practice of exploring how we meet endings.
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I think it s got a lot to offer us.
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And to your question, wholeness doesn t need to reject wellness, of course not.
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And wellness, same, doesn t need to reject wholeness.
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But it s not the whole picture.
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Wellness is not the whole picture.
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I m grateful for the good health that I ve had in my life, but I m also really grateful for what I ve learned from the illnesses that I ve also encountered.
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I ve also had.
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So, yeah, wholeness.
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Wholeness is no part left out, as you said.
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It s not about being perfect.
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It s not about having just exactly the right body and the right clothes, or the right partner, or the right house, or the right anything.
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It s just, I take you as is.
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What a gift to give to ourself.
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I take you as is.
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Even just hearing that is relieving.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it is, isn t it?
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You just feel your shoulders drop and everything relaxes a little bit.
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Like, oh, what a possibility.
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I could take myself as is.
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I mean, I don t have to keep driving myself insanely towards some outcome that s probably not very practical in the first place.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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And to go back to what you said before that, this idea of practicing endings, this part actually really gut punched me because I don t like saying goodbye and I sneak out of parties and sort of avoid your description.
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Do you leave either emotionally or mentally before an event is over?
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That s me.
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Or are you the last one in the parking lot watching as the final participants depart?
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Do you feel sad and get teary-eyed about endings or anxious?
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Or are you indifferent, isolating yourself and withdrawing into a protective cocoon?
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It s really interesting.
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I d never actually thought about that tendency or that aversion.
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And as I get older and I recognize, I mean, I was talking to one of my best friends from high school.
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We live in the same city on opposite sides.
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I rarely see him.
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And I was like, hopefully I ll see you in 2023.
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And we were laughing.
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And then I was like,
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God, it s been years.
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But this is the reality of life, right?
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You end up not having that many more goodbyes with people that you love.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
So I m curious, Elise, you said you duck out of parties, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
That s your MO.
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Where d you learn that?
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I m sure from my parents.
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My parents were always the first one at parties.
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You know, they re the people who are actually rude because they re on time and no host actually wants you to be there on time.
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SPEAKER_01
Or maybe I learned it as like a social nicety in high school or college because you didn t want to draw attention to the fact that you were leaving the party.
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SPEAKER_01
You know, there s that.
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That s like a big cultural
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But I think I m uncomfortable with that level of intimacy, ultimately, is really what it is.
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I don t want to linger.
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SPEAKER_00
Some of it s that, and some of it s kind of inner turmoil we have.
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And a lot of it s just what we got conditioned to do.
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SPEAKER_00
I was with a friend of mine, and she s
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well-known author, and she was with another friend at a party, and she said, oh, it s time to go.
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SPEAKER_00
And he said, OK.
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SPEAKER_00
And she headed for the door, and he went into the party and shook hands with everybody at the party and said, oh, it was really good to see you.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, I m sorry we didn t get a chance to talk.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe next time we can talk again.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, I was really happy to be here together.
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SPEAKER_00
Even though I didn t visit with you, I was glad to see your smiling face.
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SPEAKER_00
And he went around to everybody in the party and said goodbye.
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SPEAKER_00
This is a man, by the way, who s lived with metastatic cancer for many years and other life-threatening illnesses.
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I m not suggesting it s just that that s caused him to do this, but he had a different kind of conditioning, or he chose to make endings different in his life.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s a practice.
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We ve been talking about living fully and getting ready for death, and I think it s a practice.
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SPEAKER_00
All these little things matter.
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No, I m with you.
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SPEAKER_01
Similarly, I was talking to a friend for this podcast yesterday, and he was saying that he s made it a practice, instead of lionizing this very American tendency that we have to introduce our friends by what they do, potentially as reflected glory, his practice now that he s been implementing for years and years is to introduce his friends and then share an interesting fact
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or insight about them, like why he loves them.
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SPEAKER_01
And it was, he did some examples and it was so beautiful.
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But in this moment, I m like, I need to let endings matter in a way that I have.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s funny, my oldest son, he s nine.
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And I take, when I take them to school in the morning and the bell rings, he comes back to me twice and kisses me on the lips like eight, nine, 10 times.
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SPEAKER_01
And he does the same thing to my husband.
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SPEAKER_01
And we re always like, when, I wonder when he ll,
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find that embarrassing.
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SPEAKER_01
And then at the same time, and then he leaves and he comes back and kisses me again.
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SPEAKER_01
It s so amazing.
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SPEAKER_01
Not that we all need to go and kiss each other, but there is something amazing about marking a goodbye and telling people how we feel.
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SPEAKER_01
Every time?
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SPEAKER_01
Or is that overkill?
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
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I mean, I don t have a moral standard about how you re supposed to meet endings.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, I just don t.
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SPEAKER_00
I have very few standards like that about anything.
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SPEAKER_00
But what s interesting to me is how do you do it?
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SPEAKER_00
And what do you notice in how you meet endings?
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And are you happy with that?
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SPEAKER_00
And if you re not happy with it, well, we re not wedded to our past.
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SPEAKER_00
We don t have to stay in our suffering.
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SPEAKER_00
We can make changes.
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We can introduce another way of meeting this situation.
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SPEAKER_00
So I don t think leaving the party quick is bad.
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I just think it s the way you learned.
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And look and see, just look and see.
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That s my whole encouragement, look and see.
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SPEAKER_01
When you think about going back a bit in our conversation to when we were talking about forgiveness, it s not the same as forgetting and thinking about how many people I m sure you ve been present with who are navigating that at the end.
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SPEAKER_01
Do you have any advice for people to start that work earlier so that it s not a deathbed confessional or reunion, so they re not carrying that baggage for 30 years?
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SPEAKER_00
I m hesitating for a moment.
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Mostly because I don t like giving advice.
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SPEAKER_00
And what I like is being with people and having them discover their own answers to things.
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So sometimes, yes, of course, we would want to say, please don t leave this in the time of your dying to do this work.
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That s what I was saying earlier.
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It s an absurd gamble.
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SPEAKER_00
But I m suspicious of forgiveness that comes too quickly.
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SPEAKER_00
that where we re just, you know, we think it s a good idea and so we forgive.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we haven t really forgiven, you know.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, then we talk to our husband and we say, you know, I m still forgiving you for that, you know.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s just, it hasn t, it wasn t real.
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SPEAKER_00
It wasn t sincere.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I just look and see what am I carrying around that I don t need to carry around?
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SPEAKER_00
Or, you know, you have a closet in your house where you walk by and it s just static, you know, it s just too much stuff you ve piled in that closet.
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SPEAKER_00
And so at some juncture, you decide, I m going to open the closet, I m going to take all that stuff out, and I m going to look at it and see if I still want to keep it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And in a way, that s what forgiveness is.
3
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You know, it s like, what am I been carrying around?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do I need this?
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SPEAKER_00
Do I need to do this?
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SPEAKER_00
Does it help me in any way, you know, to not forgive?
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, what does that do to my heart to not forgive?
3
SPEAKER_00
How does it affect the way I conduct other relationships?
3
SPEAKER_00
So I look at it more from that vantage point, more than it s a strategy we should use so that at our deathbed, we won t have those regrets.
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SPEAKER_00
There have been some books written about people s regrets, and I think they re very legitimate, but at the end, I don t see people so tangled up in their regrets.
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SPEAKER_00
I see them- You don t?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, I see them trying to understand what matters.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there are processes to help people kind of review their lives, and they re great.
3
SPEAKER_00
And oftentimes people proceed through them in a very linear way.
3
SPEAKER_00
Where were you born?
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SPEAKER_00
What school did you go to?
3
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Et cetera, which is kind of boring, actually.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I ask counterintuitive questions.
3
SPEAKER_00
I say, what s the one thing you wish you could remember?
3
SPEAKER_00
And that throws us out of our linear thinking, our cognitive frame, and causes us to imagine and to reflect.
3
SPEAKER_00
Or I say, what s the one thing you remember about your mother, or you wish was still here?
3
SPEAKER_00
And they tell me the smell of her.
3
SPEAKER_00
They don t say, oh, she took me to school every day.
3
SPEAKER_00
They say the smell of her, and the feeling of her seersucker dress.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I think these are the things that get lodged in our psyches and are really important to us.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re gateways to deeper understanding.
3
SPEAKER_01
What do you think happens when we die?
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, really, I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
Everybody s got answers to this.
3
SPEAKER_00
Every religion has an answer to it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m a little uncertain.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think all of those answers have merit.
3
SPEAKER_00
And also, what I realize is that our stories about the way we die, or what happens after we die, shape the way in which we die.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I ve been with people who had stories of hell realms after they died, and that really shaped the way in which they died.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, it made them very frightened and had a sense of punishment and being out of control.
3
SPEAKER_00
Here s a story that you might enjoy.
4
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There was an older woman I knew, she was a Christian scientist, deep faith.
4
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And I asked her that question, because I ask everybody this question, what do you think happens after you die?
4
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And it s not that there s a right answer, I just think it s good to get it out into the open.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so she said, I m just gonna lay my head in the lap of Jesus.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, you sound very confident in that.
4
SPEAKER_01
She said, I do, I am confident.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then her granddaughter came to visit.
4
SPEAKER_01
and a granddaughter had been reading some books about what happens after you die and, you know, near-death experiences and all sorts of things.
4
SPEAKER_01
And she said to her grandmother, Grandma, you don t have to worry about what happens after you die because I ve been reading these books.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they say that after you die, everybody who s died before you will be there to meet you, to greet you and welcome you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Grandma became terrified because the story that no, but she hadn t told anybody, but she told me was that her husband, Edgar, had been beating her most of her life.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he had died before.
4
SPEAKER_01
And now this image she had of putting her head in the lap of Jesus had been shifted to, oh my God, Edgar s going to be there and it s going to continue for eternity.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I m very careful about not imposing my ideas about what happens after we die, because I don t know where they re landing in that person s history.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I ask everybody.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s interesting.
4
SPEAKER_01
This one guy was very logical.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was a mathematician.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was dying.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I said, what do you think happens after you die?
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, nothing.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, nothing?
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, what s that like?
4
SPEAKER_01
Nothing.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because I m curious.
4
SPEAKER_01
I keep asking.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, nothing, nothing happens.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, you mean like you can t smell anything?
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SPEAKER_01
He said, no, you can t smell anything.
4
SPEAKER_01
You don t have a nose.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, well, can you hear anything?
4
SPEAKER_01
No, you can t hear anything.
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SPEAKER_01
You don t have ears.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he went on like this.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I said, well, what kind of nothing?
4
SPEAKER_01
Is it like a dial tone?
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, no.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, who and what you are, all your molecules mixed with all the other molecules in the universe, and that s what happens after you die.
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SPEAKER_01
I said, oh, that sounds OK.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I thought he was going to be just fine.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it turned out his dying was just fine.
4
SPEAKER_01
He didn t have a religious story about it.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was just, this was the way he d been trained in his life.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, everything mixes with everything else.
4
SPEAKER_01
One thing becomes something else.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, that s different than the person who was terrified.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s important to ask, but not to impose my ideas, but not to try and reassure someone with my idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because that doesn t help.
4
SPEAKER_01
Then I m just laying another standard on them.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s hard enough to die without dying according to someone else s standard.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a different take on that question.
4
SPEAKER_00
But when we were talking about sort of there s the bio, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And then there are the assets of your life or the physical stuff.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then we think about the way that people continue when we let them continue to live on in our minds, in our stories.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s never that, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It s the quality of our relationship with them, the memories or moments we shared.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in that way, that s one of the ways that I perceive immortality, really, that there is a legacy of action and influence on people who are still here.
4
SPEAKER_00
And yet, for so many, death is so painful, which I understand, that we d rather never talk about.
4
SPEAKER_00
people who have died.
4
SPEAKER_00
We let them, we let our stories die too.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think that as a culture, we re also afraid of asking people about their loved ones who ve died.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, we don t want to upset them, you know.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, they come to a party after their mothers died and nobody asked them, gee, you know, how d it go with your mom?
4
SPEAKER_01
How you doing?
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, because we don t want to upset them.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, I think a subject we haven t launched into yet is grief, you know, and the necessity for grief and how grief, and I m not just speaking about our wild tears, I m speaking about the many faces of grief, you know, our fear, our feeling like we re walking through molasses, you know, our heaviness of grief, many, many qualities that it has.
4
SPEAKER_01
The thing is that grief is the way we love people after they ve died.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s what it is.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like a love that has no place to go.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s really important that we find ways of including this, both in our own lives, but also in the lives of our friends and family, that we ask about it, that we share about it.
4
SPEAKER_01
We don t immediately take, oh, well, when my mother died, it was just like this.
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SPEAKER_01
We really inquire like we wanna know.
4
SPEAKER_01
We want to know what s true for this other person.
4
SPEAKER_01
We don t need to fix them.
4
SPEAKER_01
Someone said the soul doesn t need to be fixed, it just needs to be witnessed.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s true in the time of grief.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like a constellation of experiences of grief.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not one thing, it s not just sadness, it s all these other qualities that I was mentioning, fear and anger and all sorts of things that are part of this
4
SPEAKER_01
constellation of experiences we call grief.
4
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
No, I agree.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I feel like we make grief very isolating culturally out of that fear of reminding someone somehow of something.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, well, these people, this grief is present.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s not like someone goes to a party and they re like, oh my god, I forgot my mom died, or my brother, or whomever it may be, my husband, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And you reminded me.
4
SPEAKER_00
present.
4
SPEAKER_00
I remember many years ago, I interviewed Lucy Kolonathy, Paul s wife, who wrote When Breath Becomes Air, and she was saying to me... I know, she s a great person.
4
SPEAKER_00
She s wonderful.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was such a moving conversation, and she said something.
4
SPEAKER_00
She was like, you know, one of my greatest fears is that people will stop talking to me about Paul and that our daughter won t hear about her
4
SPEAKER_00
her father anymore, and that s how he lives for her.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I thought that was such a beautiful idea and a reminder to all of us to, as you said, mention it, check in, share stories that that person might not have access to, or memories, because it s a now finite pool.
4
SPEAKER_01
Have you experienced a death in your life?
4
SPEAKER_00
I have.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, someone very close.
4
SPEAKER_00
My brother s husband, who was my best friend, died.
4
SPEAKER_00
It will be six years ago.
4
SPEAKER_00
He died suddenly in his sleep.
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SPEAKER_00
He was 39.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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It completely changed my life.
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Completely.
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In what way?
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Oh, it just put me into conversation with the universe.
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And it put me, you know, in terms of sort of my own spirituality, in a place where it wasn t acceptable to me to lose Peter.
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or talk about him in the past.
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And so it put me into a situation where I did whatever I could, and I still do to maintain an active relationship with him, in my mind, and the way that I live my life.
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And it just, it really pushed me to think about death and, and how the most remarkable person
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could just be gone.
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Most healthy, did Barry s boot camp that morning, healthy person was suddenly gone.
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And a cultural intolerance for grief, all of it.
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This feeling that you don t live, really, and in so many ways, sounds like a perverse thing to say, but in so many ways, I m so grateful for his death, like, profoundly deepened my life by even forcing me into conversation with
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darkness or shadow or the cycle really of life like this this is life and to disavow That reality is to live Sort of at half-mast, you know half a life half a life half a life
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Well, that must be, I can only imagine that was difficult, of course, because he was relatively young and it was a very sudden death, it sounds like.
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Yeah.
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Yes.
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There was no preparation for it, it doesn t sound like, yeah.
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No warning.
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So you re taken by surprise, shock.
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And that s part of the grief too, right?
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Those qualities as well.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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You know, it s curious to me that in this culture we speak a lot about legacy and, you know, contributing to a university or, you know, our children as legacy, etc.
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But we don t think about this kind of legacy that you got from Peter.
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You know, that in a way, even like you said, it sounds strange to be grateful, but actually, you know, he opened up something in your heart, it sounds like, you know, that maybe needed to be opened, or at least you ve come to learn from its opening in a way.
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And that came through his death.
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That was part of his legacy, his gift to you.
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way.
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And we re not, I m not trying to be Pollyanna about it, but it s part of the legacy.
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And when people die, they leave a legacy for us.
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Yeah.
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A thousand percent.
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And I, it s not when I say I live his life, it s I, my life is in many ways, nothing like his life in terms of what he did.
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And it s not that I m trying to fulfill some sort of obligation on his behalf, but
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when I think about these quality as a person and his generosity and it s not also as a What can I do to make Peter proud of me?
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It is sort of a How do I live this?
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How do I live?
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this experience in a way that also helps other people or Hopefully opens up more conversations like the one that I m having with you because I wouldn t say I m
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death-obsessed are morbid in that way, but I am now.
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deeply disinterested in looking away.
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I know that was a strange negative, but I think I want people to feel whole.
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I want them to walk through their lives whole.
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And Peter was whole.
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That s the other thing that was so interesting about his death is that, and again, not to sound Pollyannish about him either, but
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He was a very intact person and in a way that was very beautiful, I guess.
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Yeah, I mean, and as you re reminding us all, beautifully, I would say, is that the relationship with someone doesn t end because they die.
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Right?
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I mean, you re speaking about Peter in a very vibrant way.
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And it s not holding on to him.
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It s not clinging to Peter in a way.
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It s just like, this is what he left me.
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This is what he taught me.
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This is what I learned from his very existence and from his dying.
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And so the relationship continues.
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And that s a really important thing to recognize when we talk about grief because it s there.
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At first we feel this tremendous loss and we feel fragmented, et cetera.
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And then there s a way in which we do come to a kind of wholeness
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where we don t have the stranglehold of grief around us anymore.
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At first, we re not able to function.
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But then at some other juncture, and it s not just time, saying that time heals is crap.
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Yeah, I agree.
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But what happens is we recognize that that person is with us, and we have an internal relationship with them.
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And so we can go through the world and carry them with us in a certain way.
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And you know, you probably talk to Peter from time to time, you know, you re not crazy.
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That s a really, you know, wonderful thing to do.
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It speaks to the love that you shared in your relationship.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And it s interesting, too, because I m not a sentimental person.
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I m really comfortable with death in many ways.
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My dad s a doctor.
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I grew up working in the hospital.
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I m not scared of medicine or death, but I m sure anyone who s listening has that person or can imagine those people where you re like, not them, as long as it s not them.
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And when it is them, I know you said you don t like to give advice, but my best advice is to stay connected.
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It s more painful to not, I think, in my limited perspective.
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Well, it sounds like what you re suggesting is that Peter s death and what you ve explored in this territory
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that death shows us what matters most.
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I say she s the secret teacher hiding in plain sight.
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So that sounds like, well, that s what you re describing now.
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Peter s death reminded me to live my life without reservation and to live fully and with integrity and purpose and to do what really is meaningful to me.
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Frank and I didn t get to this today, but he also writes about the idea of hope and expectation in a really beautiful way, very powerful way, because I think that s one of those words that we toss around that without really thinking about
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what it is, and he writes about ordinary hope disguised as expectation, as being fixated on a specific outcome.
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This hope gets conflated with the desire for a certain future result.
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It becomes object focus.
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It takes us outside of ourselves.
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And he argues that instead of that type of wishful thinking,
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He writes, to discern the real value of hope, we must draw a line between hope and expectation.
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Hope is an optimizing force that moves us and all of life toward harmony.
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It doesn t arrive from outside.
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Rather, it is an abiding state of being, a hidden wellspring within us.
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When the mind is still and awake, we can see reality more clearly and recognize it as a living, dynamic process.
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Hope that is active has an imaginative daring to it, which helps us to realize our unity with all life and find the resourcefulness required to act on its behalf.
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Love that idea.
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It s beautiful, particularly.
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that it s a collective energy, that it is a type, optimism sounds sort of cheap, but it s this idea of, we ll just call it a beautiful optimism and a hope for all of us.
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We ll see you next week.
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Thanks for listening to this week s episode.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at the Elise podcast.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack newsletter.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive on Sundays, or follow me on Instagram at Elise Lunen.
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Meanwhile, if you haven t already, please pre-order my book coming May 23rd.
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It s called On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, and it s an exploration of the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread, available for now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Cadence 13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valera Doval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next week.
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you