Death

We spend a lot of time avoiding any discussion of death. Very few of us have any desire or interest in preparing for death. It’s a scary subject.

In his light-hearted book The Body (2020), the travel writer Bill Bryson breezes through all the problems of our bodies and ends with a brief discussion about death in the final chapter, entitled The End.

He starts the chapter on death with an anonymous quote:

Eat sensibly. Exercise regularly. Die anyway.

This is a near-perfect description of the absurdity of our built-in survival instinct – we just don’t want to die, and we’ll do almost anything to prolong ‘life’, however much it costs, and whatever the impact is on others.

Whether all that effort to prolong life is worth it can only be decided by the relevant players in that person’s ‘life story’. But prolongation should have a point beyond simply survival for another day.

This blog site is dedicated to understanding what happens on death and preparing for that moment. But if a person is not interested in the details of death, then at least pinning up Bryson’s quote on one’s fridge (or some other place we regularly frequent) would be instructive – at minimum we should try not to waste our lives in triviality.

Enjoy it, learn from it, it’s not just about survival, paying bills and arriving at work on time. We tend to take life (and ourselves) too seriously, and amongst Bryson’s deluge of facts in his book, he reveals that the average number of years a gravestone is visited after death is a mere fifteen. In Britain, most people are now cremated anyway. We’re forgotten surprisingly quickly as life moves on.

Bronnie Ware’s 2011 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, which she wrote after spending time in palliative care, includes the top “regret of the dying”, which is:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

That is as instructive as Bill Bryson’s great quote.

But the fact is that we are terrified of death. Largely because no one knows precisely what will follow death of the body.

Bryson references Jenny Diski’s essays on death in 2016 for the London Review of Books (she was dying of cancer), where she admits the ‘excruciating terror’ of knowing one will soon die.

Consequently, many take desperate steps to put off the inevitable. Bryson produces statistics from America of the lack of life-time gained from treatment for terminal illness against the shocking costs of doing so (mainly because people are already very old when they contract deathly illnesses like cancer).

Jesus had something to say about death. He said that “the dead know nothing”. What he meant by that is that no new knowledge is gained after death. We do our ‘learning’ while in a physical body (unlike what we hear from some podcasters who reveal that we are given ‘all knowledge’ or ‘all is revealed’ after death).

Soul development is done while alive, and that is important as ‘mind’ is all we have after death. We ‘lose our bodies’.

So we must live life fully but purify our minds before we die as far as we can. Jesus talked about this too, saying “become like a child” before we die, by which he meant purify our minds back to how we were when we came into this world.

This means dropping all our ‘accumulations of life’, such as attachments, addictions (including the physical ‘addiction to being human’, as Robert Munroe said), emotional weight, image, sense of self-importance, and so on.

We don’t know where we will go after death (Swedenborg said ‘only God knows that’) but that journey is dictated by the state of our minds at death. As Sogyal Rinpoche said in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

Whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now, that is what we will be like when we die, if we do not change. That is why it is so absolutely important to use this lifetime to purify our mind stream, and so our basic being and character, while we can.

30 September 2025.