I Don't Like Thinking About Death

(peaceful music) Headspace Studios. (peaceful music continues) (peaceful music) Hi, it's Dora. And welcome to "Radio Headspace." So, during my earlier days in nursing school, I spent a few months on a geriatrics unit, immersed in hospice care, surrounded by people at the very end of their lives. And I remember there was a man on the unit who was on his deathbed and no one came to see him. No friends, no family, just the nurses, and sometimes me. And I remember standing there thinking, a whole life, a whole life lived, and here at the very end of it, no one to bear witness to it. That image and that feeling has never left me. And it made me start to think, really think about our relationship to death and how we talk about it or don't. About what we do with the fact that this is all coming for us, every single one of us, and yet most of us are doing everything we can to look the other way. (peaceful music continues) My relationship with death started long before nursing school. I was six, maybe seven years old when my aunt, my mom's youngest sister, passed away. And when she died, I was called into the room to say a prayer, to rest her hands over her heart. And I was a child. I had no framework for what I was being asked to hold. I didn't fully understand where she was going or what came next or who was gonna take care of my cousins now that she was gone. And what was interesting is that my mom still has some of my schoolwork from that time, pages where I'm writing about being in the hospital, about my aunt going to heaven, about thinking of my cousins and how they must be feeling. Really just a child trying to make sense of something enormous in the only language that she had. And yet something about being brought into that room, being trusted with that moment rather than being shielded from it, settled into me in a way I didn't have words for until much later. I think it gave me something, an early wordless understanding that death is part of life, that it arrives for all of us, that it is something to be with rather than something to run from. And I think that is why years later, standing on that geriatrics unit, I felt tenderness rather than fear. That experience with my aunt had already begun teaching me something about how to be present with the hardest truths of being alive. (peaceful music) One of the oldest, most traditional practices in mindfulness is actually the contemplation of death, the deliberate gentle practice of sitting with the reality of our own impermanence. Because when we can do that, even just a little, something shifts. The things that don't matter start falling away on their own. The things that do matter come into this almost...