Frank Ostaseski: Accepting the Invitation
The enduringly wise Buddhist teacher, Frank Ostaseski, is a leading figure in the contemplative care for the dying, having co-founded the acclaimed Zen Hospice Center. In 2004, he established the Metta Institute, which offers innovative training and education for compassionate end-of-life care. His book, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, explores the wisdom that emerges from embracing mortality, which guides our conversation today. Frank invites us to consider how we approach the small endings that occur in our everyday life—how do you say goodbye?—along with the practice of listening intently. Ultimately, though, our conversation circles what it means to surrender to circumstances we cannot control. Let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM FRANK OSTASESKI:
The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully
Frank’s Website
The Metta Institute
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Well thank you for your book. It's beautiful. And I wanna sort of open it up by saying that yes, obviously you work with and hold the hands of many who are dying. 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.
FRANK OSTASESKI: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, if we were to look at Syria right now, we would find out that 55 million people are gonna die in the hour that we're recording this podcast.
ELISE: Is that true?
FRANK: Yeah. Globally. But you know, there's a famous story in the Mahata, one of the old Hindu texts that says, you know, what's the most wondrous thing in the world? And the sage answers, what's the most wondrous things in the world is that all around us, men and women see that people are dying and yet they think it won't happen to them.
ELISE: It's true, it's true. The other day, I have two small children and my six-year-old asked me how many days he had been alive, and so I Googled it, and then I Googled myself and it's something like 12,000 days. It's kinda an insignificant number of days, right? And yet I'm already halfway through, most likely, if I'm lucky. We're not here for very long, and yet we spend most of our lives trying to defer or deny the eventual reality that will be going.
FRANK: Yeah, 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. It's not waiting for us at 80 years old or 90 years old, or whatever number we imagine. It's with us right now, you know, in the marrow of every passing moment
ELISE: Yeah. And you've obviously been present at so many people's passings. And I'm curious for your perspective, I've had this conversation with, with several people who have been in attendance at hundreds, maybe thousands of deaths, and Rabbi Steve Leaver talks about it as like, for most people falling asleep after jet lag, like there's like an acceptance or relaxation that it's those of us who are still living, who tend to carry the most anxiety, I think is what his point was. I don't know if that's been your experience or not.
FRANK: you know, Elise, I've stopped imagining there's a way that people die. You know, everybody dies in a really unique way, just like everybody gets born in a unique way. Right? There's not some generalization w can make about it. 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. We can talk about that some more, but that's, I think that's true. 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, dying in remarkable ways that they couldn't have imagined that they would meet them. And that's fascinating to me. Really fascinating to me, that means death has got something in it that's actually helpful to us.
ELISE: That's a beautiful idea. I mean, you write, “lessons from death are available to all those who choose to move toward it. I have witnessed a heart opening occurring, and not only people near death, but also their caregivers, they found a depth of love within themselves that they didn't know they had access to. They discovered a profound trust in the universe and the reliable goodness of humanity that never abandoned them regardless of the suffering they encountered.” It's a beautiful idea, that as we start winding down, in some ways it's an opportunity to get much bigger right? To to grow in those final moments.
FRANK: Yes, provided were not surrounded by fear. That's really important, you know that what's in the neighborhood matters, you know, so who's around us at the time of our dying, whether it's, you know, professional healthcare providers, or family or friends. If they're really afraid, then that can have a really big effect on the person who's dying. So what's in the neighborhood matters. It really matters.
ELISE: In 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 to for patient, she wants to medicate her. And you're like, I think maybe you need to medicate yourself. So do you find in the neighborhood, in the room, and obviously it depends immensely on what's happening, but who are you tending to or trying to manage most acutely?
FRANK: Well, I'm a little suspicious of people who say they have no fear of dying, honestly, because in most cases, the people I've been with have at some point had some fear. You know, I come from a Buddhist tradition. In that tradition, we say there are three gifts you can give. You can give gift of the teachings, gift of a material object, and the gift of no fear. So that's really a precious gift to be able to give to someone. So when we started the Zen Hospice years ago, you know, we didn't have a big plan. We just thought there was a natural match between people who were 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. And so that's what we started and sometimes it was the person who was dying and sometimes it was their friends or family. Our job was to provide a kind of devout listening. And when you listen devoutly as you're doing right now, we tend to draw out the truth from the other person, I think, and that's a remarkably important aspect of this process of being with dying.
ELISE: Beautiful. How do we do that for people when they're still alive?
FRANK: Well, listen, without preparing the next thing you're gonna say, before you, before its your turn. That's one of the things, right? Kind of non-judgmental quality that helps enormously, of course. Get curious. You know, one of the qualities that I think is most important at the time of dying in life for that matter, is being curious. How come you think. Why? Wow. Tell me more about that. I never thought of things that way. That's a live, beautiful, joyful way of living. Yeah. I mean, you know, think about kids and you know, you have children and so, you know, when children play, they don't play for a purpose. They just play. Right. My granddaughter came over the other day and she said, grandpa, let's play. And I got out the basket with all the puzzles and the drawing things. She said, no, grandpa, I wanna play. And, and what she meant is, I wanna imagine, you know, I wanna be curious. And so suppose we were that way around people who were dying. Suppose that was the way we led our life. Not necessarily always focused on the outcome, but drawn to discovery. Drawn to discovery.
ELISE: Yeah, 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? Or do you feel like in the process of, of being with people, particularly in a palliative care setting or hospice setting, where there 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?
FRANK: Yeah, it's a really great question. 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. But yes, of course there are people who need to unburden aspects of their life in which, through which they've caused pain or maybe regrets that they're carrying into their dying process. But, you know, one of the things that I saw time and time again is that the big questions on people's hearts are, am I loved? And did I love well? And if those are the two most important questions at the end of our life, well, aren't they the most important questions? I mean, why wait until we find ourself in our deathbed to respond to those questions. So I think, I think often those are the cases then are always expressed that way, of course. But that's often what's on people's hearts
ELISE: Yeah. That's beautiful. I mean, you talk about words in a couple of places where, you know, you tease these concepts apart, you write, “we confuse forgiveness with forgetting. We are afraid that if we forgive, we will forget and the harm may happen again.” And I would imagine that there, of course, is some, in many instances, some acrimony or some perception of a wrong. Essentially, you seem to be suggesting that there’s the promise of peace, without letting go of what that experience meant to you. Is that fair?
FRANK: Yeah, I think so. I mean, again, I'm inclined to say that people are gonna do this in really different ways, and as you suggested in, in the little part that you read, forgiving is not the same thing as forgetting. It's not condoning bad actions. It's not saying, oh, it's all okay that you know you are abusive to me, that's not at all what I'm suggesting. You know, what I'm suggesting is it's too painful for us to keep carrying around this burden. This pain of this bag of suffering that we are dragging behind us. And so for ourselves, for our own benefit, we forgive. And again, not condoning forgiving it, it hurts too much to keep someone out of my heart. Yeah. And so this is why I think in the end all forgiveness is ultimately self-forgiveness because we wanna sit down on our suffering.
You wanna set down your suffering, that's really what's happening in the process of forgiveness. But there's many steps before we get to that, that experience. I mean, there can be anger and depression and, and numbness and all manner of other things that come into this process. And when we forgive, it doesn't necessarily mean reconciliation. You know, forgiveness doesn't necessarily mean we even have any contact with the person who's harmed us or who we've harmed. That's something's different. Forgiveness is touching what hurts with some degree of merciful awareness. That's the way I would talk about it. Yeah.
ELISE: It's beautiful. I think too, you said merciful awareness and there's that energy of mercy, which comes from Merck or Mercantile or there's an exchange associated with it too. And it's a sort of like at the heart of love in some ways, right? And so maybe, maybe it's also just in those instances about finding and extending mercy.
FRANK: Yeah, but most especially to our seldom I would say, I mean, the other thing we confuse forgiveness with is justice. And we may forgive and never find justice, you know? We want the other person to pay for their harm to us. We want them to apologize, to take responsibility for what they did, and that may never occur. And the question is, you know, how much are we gonna hold our, how much are we gonna hold onto this thing? 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. But forgiveness is setting down the hot coal because it's burning your hand, and you don't wanna do that anymore for your own benefit, for the sake of your own wellbeing.
ELISE: So beautiful. 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. 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.” And that, 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.
FRANK: Sure. 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 when. We just sort of collapse into this experience feeling futile. Like there's nothing we can do about it, you know? 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. You know, I studied with Klu Ross way back in the day and she was a mentor of mine and I'm very grateful to her. And you remember those famous five stages that she had? Well, the last of which was acceptance. You know, I trust what she was trying to do. She wasn't saying it was a linear path, by the way, but acceptance isn't the end. It's just the beginning. You know, James Baldwin said, 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. And 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. You know, what I see at the end of life in the process of people often is a kind of chaos that comes after acceptance and it scares the hell out of the family members who are the friends because this person is not behaving in the way they were, or maybe they're temporarily afraid. And what I see often if those people are well-guided and they're well accompanied, is that that chaos that fear often gives way to something appreciably different than acceptance, which is surrender.
Acceptance is kind of a choice. We say, I accept this. That's the way they are. Surrender feels different. It feels like, we're not just distancing ourself from something, but we're expanding around the thing that was giving us trouble. So it doesn't have such a stranglehold on us, in a way. And with acceptance, comes a gateway to something appreciably deeper, which is the possibility of transformation, the possibility of using the situation that we find ourself in, as if it’s a step in our growth and our further discovery of who we are.
ELISE: That's so beautiful. 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, and within illness and dying and the way that we our favorite metaphors are war, right? And battle and fighting and destroying and eviscerating cancer, disease, whatever it may be. It's all about winning somehow and losing. And you think about a word like surrender, which is such a beautiful word, and I don't think well understood, culturally and immediately people are like, well, I'm giving up. Is that what you're asking? And 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.
FRANK: Yeah. 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. I'm so fed up with fighting. She said, every time I fight with a reality, I lose. Yeah. And so that's really what we're speaking about here. It's not about deciding on a treatment plan or, you know, not wanting to attend to our health. It is not about that. It is about recognizing that there is a reality that that we are coming face to face with. How do we wanna meet it? Huh? With, with fight with. I mean, look at our, you know, you know this better than I look at our healthcare system. All the language that we use in there, it's what you've just been describing, badly. He fights the disease, you know, after a long battle with cancer, he died. Well, why couldn't it have been after a loving time with his family in his final days, he let go.
ELISE: Yeah. And this is we also, in the way that we describe ourselves as having diseases, right? Like I have this thing and then we battle this part of ourselves. And I'm not saying I love cancer, but to identify it with it in that way, and then attack it also feels violent towards ourselves in some ways or 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.
FRANK: Yeah. Well, there's a bigger issue behind this, which is that we tend to think of becoming sick as a punishment. We think it's a mistake that we get sick. You know, it's like that quote I was using earlier about all around us, we see people dying in it and e think it won't happen to us. And we have a culture that, you know, keeps death at arm's length. You know, we even put rouge on people in the coffin, you know, all ways of, of pretending that it isn’t happening. So, yeah, I think that sometimes when we think of illness as a punishment is set of a natural part of our experience, we feel we've done something wrong.
ELISE: Isn't the very root of illness evilness.
FRANK: You mean the root of the word?
ELISE: Yeah. I think it comes from evilness. But yes, it's this how could this happen to. To me, right? And it's like, well, how could it not happen to you? Why, why you, and why not you?
FRANK: Although that's a very difficult thing to say to someone who's got, you know, metastasized cancer, they're gonna say, the hell out of my room, they'll slap you with a wet fish and tell you to get out.
ELISE: I'm sure. Or they don't need your services. Right?
FRANK: Here's, here's something that I could add to this. You know, a few years ago I had a series of strokes. I had actually had five of them over a period of months. And and the doctors often spoke to me about recovery. You know how my, you know, neuro pathways would eventually recover and the brain was a very plastic, you know, flexible organ, et cetera, et cetera. And I kept saying to them, thank you very much for this, but I'm not that much interested in recovery. And they were shocked. And I said, I'm much more interested in discovery. I'm interested to see what can I discover in this situation, in this, you know, injury to my brain as a result of this illness? What has it got to show me? And that wasn't being Pollyanna, you know, it was hard. But entering into my experience, my illness, experience of illness, with that sense of discovery was very useful. And it showed me what would help me in my brain's recovery. What were literally the tasks that I should do that would help my brain to cognitively recover. So discovery, I think, is really important. That's that curiosity we were speaking about earlier, coming back into play. You know, how do we meet this situation? You know, I don't always know. So I'm willing to wait and see what it shows.
ELISE: Yeah, it's interesting. I just wrote this story for the O Magazine about wholeness being the new wellness, 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 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, is admirable of course, but it's this focus on physical health and optimization and I think where we conflate these two concepts in a way that is potentially devastating when you're not well and, but you can still feel whole. You know, you write about wholeness to be whole, “We need to include, accept, and connect all parts of ourselves. We need acceptance of our conflicting qualities and the seeming incongruity of our inner and outer world. Wholeness does not mean perfection. It means no part left out." I think that's such a beautiful idea too, thinking about you in the context of suffering from a stroke and not necessarily fixated on being exactly how you were or back at full force, Frank. But who are you now? Like you can keep that wholeness, you can grow that wholeness even as wellness winnows.
FRANK: Yeah. Beautiful. No part left out, right? I mean, when my daughter and I would go shopping, you know, we'd go to consignment shops, right? And you know, I'd go in with her and she'd find a really cool blouse or something and I'd look around the store for something else. And I noticed as I was shopping for a leather jacket or scarf, there would be these tags. And on the tags they would say $9.99 as is. And I just love them. You know, these tags. I think we should get them for each other, you know, and give them as, as you know, holiday presents to each other as is. I take you as is. I mean, there's incredible gift in that, that, you know, with all of your foibles and all of your neurosis, I love you and take you as is. You know, what an extraordinary gift that would be to give to each other. You know, no present would need to be attached to that tag.
ELISE: Yeah. That's beautiful. Did you see, this might be a non-starter, but did you see Limitless, the Chris Hemsworth documentary? Did you watch that by any chance?
FRANK: No. I'm sorry. I didn't see it.
ELISE: No, no worries. It's just, it's interesting in, in this context because in it, it's five episodes of Chris Hemsworth. Pushing his bodily limits and biohacking and longevity and, you know, all of that stuff. And then at the end he learns how to die. And it's a beautiful, it felt like a interesting slight of hand of like all this like fasting and cold water exposure as he is like trying to outrace his own mortality. Anyway, you might find it interesting. 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, what would it look like to live in a culture that wasn’t trying to constantly outrun death?
FRANK: Yeah, I mean, probably you and me too, don’t really want to die at this moment? You know, there's people in our life that we wanna be with, we love, we wanna, you know, hang around with for a while longer. I'm not, I'm not romantic about dying. I think it's the hardest thing we'll ever do, you know, and I think it's an absurd gamble to imagine that at the time of our dying, we're gonna have the physical strength, the emotional stability, the mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime. I think that's an absurd gamble that I don't recommend any of us taking. So, let's practice now. Let's develop a relationship with the way things end in our life now. I mean, it doesn't have to be the big one. It doesn't have to be the big ticket item. Just how do you end things, you know?How do you leave a party, you know? How do you end a meal? You know, what comes up for you as you ending? Who taught you to meet endings that way? And is it satisfying for you? Do you want to keep meeting 'em that way or do you wanna change the way you meet endings? Yeah, there's a lot for us to learn just in that simple practice of exploring how we meet endings.
Yeah, I think it's got a lot to offer us. And to your question, you know, wholeness doesn't need to reject wellness, of course. And wellness same. Doesn't need to reject wholeness, but it's not the whole picture. You know, wellness is not the whole picture. 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, you know, also encountered. Wholeness is no part left out. As you said, you know, it's not about being perfect. 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. It's just I take you as is. What a gift to give to ourself. I take you as is. Yeah.
ELISE: Even just hearing that is relieving.
FRANK: Yeah, it is, isn't it? You, you just feel your shoulders drop and everything relaxes a little bit. Like, oh, what a possibility I could take myself as is, you mean I don't have to keep driving myself insanely towards some outcome that is probably not very practical in the first place.
ELISE: Yeah. 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 avoid your description: “Do you leave either emotionally or mentally before an event is over?” That's me. “Or are you the last one in the parking lot watching as the final participants depart? Do you feel sad and get teary, teary-eyed about endings or anxious? Or are you indifferent, isolating yourself and withdrawing into a protective cocoon?” It's really interesting. Yeah, I'd never actually thought about that tendency or that aversion. And as I get older and, and I recognize, I mean, I was talking to an, one of my best friends from high school. We live in the same city on opposite sides. I rarely see him. And I was like, hopefully I'll see you in 2023. And we were laughing and then I was like, God, it's been years, you know, but this is, this is the reality of life, right? Like you end up not having that many more goodbyes with people that you love.
FRANK: Yeah. So I'm curious, Elise, you said you duck outta parties, right? Where'd you learn that?
ELISE: I'm sure from my parents, my parents were always the first one at parties. 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. Or maybe I learned it as like a social nicety in high school or college because you didn't wanna draw attention. So the fact that you were leaving the party, you know, there's that, that's like a big cultural, but I think I'm uncomfortable with that level of intimacy, ultimately is really what it is. I don't wanna linger.
FRANK: Some of it is that inner turmoil we have and a lot of it's just what we got conditioned to do. You know, I was with friend of mine and she's. Well known. And she was with another friend at a party and she said, oh, it's time to go. And he said, okay. 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. Oh, I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to talk. Maybe next time we can talk again. Oh, I was really happy to be here together. Even though I didn't visit with you, I was glad to see your smiling face. And he went around to everybody in the party and said, This is a man by the way, who's lived with metastatic cancer for many years and other life-threatening illnesses. 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. Yeah, and that's a practice, you know, we've been talking about living fully and you know, getting ready for death and I think it's a practice. I think all these little things matter
ELISE: Yeah, no, I'm with you. 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 is 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 or insight about them, like why he loves them. And it was, he did some examples and it was so beautiful. But in this moment I'm like, I need to let endings matter. And it's funny, my oldest son, he is nine 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 8, 9, 10 times. And he does the same thing to my husband. And we're always like, when I wonder when he'll find that embarrassing and then at the same time and then he leaves and he comes back and kisses me again. It's so amazing. 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 every time. Or is that overkill?
FRANK: I don't know. I mean, I don't have a moral standard about how you're supposed to meet endings, you know? know, I just don't, I have very few stands like that about anything. But what's interesting to me is how do you do it and what do you notice in how you meet endings and are you happy with that? And if you're not happy with it, well, we're not wedded to our past. We don't have to stay in our suffering. We can make changes. We can, you know, introduce another way of meeting this situation. So I don't think leaving the party quick is bad. I just think it's the way you learned and, and you know, look and see. Just look and see. That's my whole encouragement. Look and see.
ELISE: 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, 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.
FRANK: Yeah. I'm hesitating for a moment, mostly because I don't like giving advice. What I like is being with people and having them discover their own answers to things. Yeah. So sometimes it, you know, yes, of course we would wanna say, please don't leave this until the time of your dying to do this work. You know, that's what I was saying earlier. It's an absurd gamble, but I'm suspicious of forgiveness that comes too quickly. That where we are just, you know, we think it's a good idea and so we forgive and we haven't really forgiven, you know, you know, then we talk to our husband and we say, you know, I'm still forgiving you for that. You know, and it's just, it hasn't, it wasn't real. It was, it wasn't sincere. So I just look and see what am I carrying around that I don't need to carry around? 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. And so some juncture you decide, I'm gonna open the closet, I'm gonna take all that stuff out, and I'm gonna look at it and see if I still wanna keep it. And in a way, that's what forgiveness is. You know, it's like, what have I been carrying around? Do I need this? Do I need to do this? Does it help me in any way? You know, to not forgive, you know, what does that do to my heart to not forgive? When does it, how does it affect the way I conduct other relationships? 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. You know, 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, in their regrets. I see them trying to understand what matters.
I mean, there are processes to help people kind of review their lives and they're great. And oftentimes people proceed through them in a very linear way. Where were you born? What school did you go to? Et cetera. Which is kind of boring actually. So I ask counterintuitive questions, you know, I say, what's the one thing you wish you could remember? And that throws us out of our linear thinking, our cognitive frame and causes us to imagine and to reflect, or I say, what's the one thing you remember about your mother or you wish was still here? And they tell me the smell of her. They don't say, oh, you know, she took me to school every day, they say the smell of her, you know, and the feeling of her sear sucker dress. And so I think these are the things that, you know, get lodged in our psyches and, and are really important to us. They’re gateways to deeper understanding.
ELISE: What do you think happens when we die?
FRANK: I don't know. I mean, really, I don't know. You know, everybody's got answers to this. Every religion has an answer to it. I'm a little uncertain, you know, because I think all of those answers have merit 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. 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. You know, it made them very frightened and had a sense of punishment and being out of control. Here's a story that you might enjoy, there was an older woman I knew she was a Christian scientist, deep faith, and I asked her that question, cause I asked everybody this question, what do you think happens after you die? And it's not that there's a right answer, I just think it's good to get it out into the. And so she said, I'm just gonna lay my head in the lap of Jesus. I said, you sound very confident in that. She said, I do. I am confident. And then her granddaughter came to visit and her granddaughter had been reading some books about what happens after you die and you know, near death experiences and all sorts of things. 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.
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. Grandma became terrified. Well, yeah, 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 and now, and he had died before and now this image she had of putting her her lap, her head in the lap of Jesus had been shifted to, oh my God, Edgar's gonna be there and it's gonna continue for eternity. So I'm very careful about not imposing my ideas about what happens after we die, because I don't know how or where they're landing in that person's history.
But I asked everybody, and it's interesting, you know this one, this one guy who was very logical, he was math mathematician. He was dying. And I said, what do you think after happens after you die? He said, nothing. I said, nothing. And he said, yeah. I said, what's that like? Nothing, because I'm curious. I keep asking. And he said, nothing, nothing happens. I said, you mean like you can't smell anything you, he said, no, you can't smell anything. You don't have a nose. I said, oh, well can you hear anything? No, you can't hear anything. You don't have ears. And he went on like this. And I said, well, what kind of nothing? Is it like a dial tone, you know?
And he said, no. 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. I said, oh, that sounds okay. Yeah. And so I thought he was gonna be just fine. And it turned out his dying was just fine. He didn't have a religious story about it. He was just, this was the way he’d been trained in his life, you know, everything mixes with everything else. One thing becomes something else. Yeah. And so, you know, that's different than the person who is terrified. Yeah. So it's an important question to ask, but not to impose my ideas, but not to try and reassure someone with my idea because that doesn't help. Then I'm just laying another standard on them, and it's hard enough to die without dying according to someone else's standard.
ELISE: Yeah. Oh, it's so interesting. And it's a different, a different take on that question, but when we were talking about, there’s the bio, right? And then there are the assets of your life or the physical stuff. And then we think about the way that people continue, when we let them, continue to live on in our minds, in our stories. And it's never that, right? It's the, the quality of our relationship with them, the memories or moments we shared. And in that way, that's one of the, the ways that I perceive immortality really, that there is a legacy of of action and influence on people who are still here. And yet, for so many death is so painful, which I understand that we'd rather never talk about people who have died. We let our stories die.
FRANK: Sometimes. I mean, I think that as a culture, we're also afraid of asking people about their loved ones who've died. You know, we don't wanna upset them, you know? So, you know, they come to a party after their mother's died and nobody asked them how, gee, you know, how'd it go with your mom? How you doing? You know, because we don't wanna upset them. I think a subject we haven't launched into yet is grief, you know, and the necessity for grief. And I'm not just speaking about our wild tears. I'm speaking about the many phases 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.
The thing is that grief is the way we love people after they've died. That's what it is, you know, it's like a love that has no place to go. And I think it's really important that we find ways of including this, both in our own lives, but also in the, in the lives of our friends and family that we ask about it, that we share about it. We don't immediately take over, well, when my mother died, it was just like this. You know, we really inquire, we wanna know, we wanna know what's true for this other. We don’t need to fix them. You know, someone said the the soul doesn't need to be fixed, it just needs to be witnessed. And I think that's true in the time of grief. It's like a constellation of experience as grief. It's not one thing. It's not just sadness. It's all these other qualities that I was mentioning, you know, fear and anger and, you know, all sorts of things. They’re part of a constellation of experiences we call grief.
ELISE: Yeah, no, I agree. And I feel like we make grief very isolating culturally out of that fear. Reminding someone somehow of something and it's like, well, this, these people, this grief is present. It's not like someone goes to a party and they're like, oh my God, I forgot my mom died. Or my brother, whomever, it may be, my husband. Right. And you've reminded me, it's present. I remember many years ago I interviewed Lucy, Paul's wife, who wrote When Breath Becomes Air and it was such a moving conversation and, and she said something, she was like, you know, one of my greatest fears is that people will stop talking to me about Paul and that our daughter will won't hear about her father anymore. And that's how he lives for her. And I thought that was such a beautiful idea and a reminder to all of. As you said, mention it, check in, share stories that that person might not have access to or memories because it's a, a now finite pool.
FRANK: Have you experienced a death in your life of someone close?
ELISE: My brother's husband, who was my best friend, died and will be six years ago. He died suddenly in his sleep. He was 39. And yeah, it completely changed my life, completely.
FRANK: In what way?
ELISE: Oh. It just put me into conversation with the universe and it put me, you know, in terms of my own spirituality in a place where it wasn't acceptable to me to lose Peter or talk about him in the past. 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. And it just, it really pushed me to think about death and, and how the most remarkable person could just be gone, most healthy. Did Barry's bootcamp that morning healthy, person was suddenly gone. And yes, a cultural intolerance for grief, all of it. 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 darkness or shadow or the cycle really of life like this. This is life. And to disavow that reality is to live at half-mast, you know?
FRANK: Half a life.
ELISE: Half a life.
FRANK: Well, that must be must, I can only imagine, that was difficult of course, because he was relatively young and it was a very sudden death, there was no preparation for it. Taken by surprise shock. And that's part of the grief too, right? Those qualities as well. Yeah. 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, et cetera, but we don't think about this kind of legacy that you got from Peter. You know that, that in a way, even like you said, it sounds strange to say that, 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. And that came through his death, that was part of his legacy, his gift to you in a way. And we're not trying, I'm not trying to be Pollyanna about it, but it's part of the legacy. And when people die, they leave a legacy for us.
ELISE: A thousand percent. And I, it's not, when I say I live his life, my life is in many ways nothing his life in terms of what he did. And it's not that I'm trying to fulfill some sort of obligation on his behalf, but when I think about his quality as a person and his generosity, just all of Peter, it’s like and it's not also as a what can I do to make Peter proud of me? It is sort of a how do I, how do I live this? How do I live 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? Cause I wouldn't say, death obsessed by or morbid in that way.
But I am now deeply disinterested in looking away. I know that was strange negative, but I think I want people to feel whole. I want them to walk through their lives whole. Peter was whole. That's the other thing that was, that was so interesting about his death is that and again, not to sound Pollyannish about him either, but he was a very intact person and in a way that was very beautiful, I guess.
FRANK: 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. I mean, you're speaking about Peter in a very vibrant way. Yeah, and it's not holding onto him, it's not clinging to Peter in a way. It's just like, this is what he left me. This is what he taught me. This is what I learned from his very existence and from his dying. And so the relationship continues. And that's a really important thing to recognize when we talk about grief because it's there, you know, at first we feel there's tremendous loss and we feel fragmented, et cetera. And then there's a way in which we do come to a kind of wholeness where we. We don't have the stranglehold of grief around us anymore. You know, we're not, you know at first we're not able to function. But then at some other juncture, and it's not just time saying, the time heals is crap.
ELISE: Yeah. Agree.
FRANK: But what happens is we recognize that that person is with us and we have an internal relationship with them, and so we can go through the world and carry them with us in a certain way. Yeah, and you know, you probably talked to Peter from time to time. You know, you're not crazy. That's a really, you know, wonderful thing to do. It speaks to the love that you shared in your relationship.
ELISE: Yeah. And it's interesting too because I'm not a sentimental person. I'm really comfortable with death in many ways. My dad's a doctor. I like grew up working in the hospital. I'm not scared of medicine or death, but it isn't. There are, 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 and when it is them. I know you said you don't like to give advice, but my best advice is to stay connected. Well, it's more painful to not, in my limited perspective.
FRANK: Well, it sounds like what you're suggesting is that Peter's death and what you've explored in this territory. The death has, shows us what matters most. Yeah. I say she's the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. So that sounds like, well, that's what you're describing now is, you know, Peter's death reminded me to live my life without reservation, you know, and to live fully and with integrity and purpose and, you know, to do what really is meaningful to me.
ELISE: Yeah, absolutely. Well thank you. Thank you for all of your work and for your beautiful book. Which no one needs an invitation to read. No one needs an invitation to read The Five Invitations. You don't need to be helping someone die or facing your own end to get so much beauty. And wisdom, and I love the quote that you even started it with to, to what we were just talking about, “Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us. Mostly they are passed on unopened.” That's a real key quote, so beautiful.
FRANK: Well, thank you for, for doing this. I mean, thank you for serving your listeners in this way, you know, it's brave to bring this topic forward cause like I said earlier, everybody's running in the other direction, but for one reason or another, you came to it today straightforwardly, you know, and I applaud you for doing that. I think it's great that you did that.
ELISE: Thank you. Thank you, Frank.
FRANK: You're welcome. Take care.
ELISE: 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, a powerful way. I think it’s one of those words that gets tossed around without really thinking about what it is. He writes about “Ordinary hope disguised as expectation is fixated on a specific outcome. This hope gets conflated with the desire for a certain future result. It becomes object-focused. It takes us outside of ourselves.” And he argues, that instead of that type of wishful thinking, he writes, “To discern the real value of hope, we must draw a line between hope and expectation. Hope is an optimizing force that moves us and all of life toward harmony. It doesn’t arrive from outside; rather it is an abiding state of being, a hidden wellspring within us. When the mind is still and awake, we can see reality more clearly and recognize it as a living, dynamic process. 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.” I love that idea, it’s beautiful, particularly that it’s a collective energy. It’s this beautiful optimism and a hope for all of us. I’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening.
