Death has only begun to affect my life in the last few years. Prior, I rarely thought about death and what it entailed, and I felt detached when others would talk about the passing of their loved ones. However, I began to think more about death when my grandpa was dying in the hospital during my senior year of high school. I didn’t see him too often, since we lived in different states, but I still felt a bond to him unlike that of anyone else in my family. My family and I had driven up to Michigan from Pennsylvania to visit him in the hospital, and I remember waving goodbye to him as I rounded the corner to leave, him going out of eye’s view. It didn’t sink in then that that would be the last time I would ever see him. Death has so many unknowns and finally being exposed to it scared me. Did my grandpa go to heaven and is looking down on me, or did he just die and that’s it? Was it the death he would have wanted?
From this program, I have learned that death doesn’t have to be this scary, taboo topic. Everyone dies, and as Sunita Puri simply put it, change is life’s only constant. We spend so much time trying to avoid the inevitable death that we forget that the end of our lives can be comfortable and even enjoyable if planned properly. Thinking back to the first assignment for this program, I remember a man who was receiving hospice care who died only a few hours after an interview in which he said that the past few weeks had been the best of his life. This entrance into the program spoke volumes to me; a man was able to have an end-of-life experience that he found to be more fulfilling and meaningful than the rest of his life. He wasn’t scared to die because he had found meaning in death and planned for what would happen to his wife and his farm when he passed.
Sunita Puri found solace and meaning in death when she visited a Vietnamese Buddhist temple. They had painstakingly piped colored sand on the platform to create an intricate pattern that they had swept away the next Sunday, handing out little bags of the sand to the people in the temple. This struck a nerve with Puri. She was reminded of the impermanence of life and a quote by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh that says, “impermanence does not necessarily lead to suffering. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” After the death of my grandpa, death seemed like this thing that you fought with all of your might until you couldn’t hold on anymore. It was something to be scared of. After this program, I have a completely different outlook on death. Death is freeing but also fulfilling. Death is reckless and exciting. Death is whatever you want it to be. Life will never be permanent, but that is what makes it so beautiful.