DEATH PRAYERS

In my morning prayers, I always add the following two prayers:

“May my death serve to benefit others, as others’ death has benefitted me”

“May I know as deeply as possible that there is no life without death, and there is no death without life.”

I sometimes also pray for a good death and I specify what I mean by that—a death after a life where I’ve accomplished everything I came to the earth to do, when I have completed my contributions to beloved communities

Death is inevitable.  We all die; humans, squirrels, oak trees, birds, the grass that makes up my lawn, the rocks I avoid when I am hiking, the billions of microorganisms that support life in the soil.   If you are a theist, you believe there is some kind of divinity that doesn’t die, but I tend to think that even the Gods die, just as eventually our sun and the universe will die.  The time scopes are unimaginably different.  My father used to tell this joke about how one fly says to another “If I only knew this morning what I know this afternoon.” But if the time scales are unimaginably different—eventually the Appalachian mountains will be flat land—still everything will die.

So if our deaths are inevitable, then how do we want to live so that our lives and our deaths benefit others? One thing I absolutely believe in is that I want to live a life where I create space for others to step into when I leave (metaphorically die) or literally die. Every morning I express my gratitude for two specific people who have stepped in to replace me in responsibilities I have voluntary given up.

One last note.  I used to not believe in reincarnation.  By my 30’s I became agnostic about it. Now, in some sense, I believe in it. Not that I think there is some kind of soul that transmigrates and benefits or suffers from my actions in this life. Rather, the constellation of energy that makes me uniquely me doesn’t just disappear; it is still out there, floating around like the shards of the broken vessels in the Ari’s (Isaac Luria) cosmogonic myth.