The Mirror of Death: What Death Teaches Us About Living

We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives pretending that the one thing guaranteed to happen to us will somehow not happen.

We plan careers. We insure houses. We save for retirement. We worry about cholesterol. We photograph ourselves looking younger than we are.

But death?

That conversation can wait.

And yet almost every great spiritual tradition has spent thousands of years telling us precisely the opposite: death is not a subject for the end of life. It is a subject for life itself.

My father used to say to me, “Shawn, the only guarantee in life is death”

There is a particularly uncomfortable line in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

“Most people die unprepared for death, as they have lived unprepared for life.”

That sentence stayed with me.

Because perhaps our discomfort with death isn’t really about death at all.

Perhaps it exposes something about how we are living.

Death as a mirror

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition presents a beautiful idea: death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected.

Think about that for a moment.

If I knew with certainty that I had only a year left, what would suddenly become important?

And, more interestingly, what would suddenly become completely unimportant?

The argument I had last week?

The person I am refusing to forgive?

The email that irritated me?

The promotion I desperately want?

The possessions I keep accumulating?

Death has a strange ability to reorganise the hierarchy of life.

Things that appeared enormous become tiny.

Things we barely noticed become enormous.

A conversation with your father.

Dinner with your mother.

Holding your child’s hand.

Sitting silently beside someone you love.

Perhaps this is why contemplating death has traditionally not been considered morbid.

It is a calibration mechanism for living.

We are already passing through little deaths

Then comes an idea I found even more fascinating: bardo.

We commonly understand the bardo as the intermediate state between death and rebirth. But the Tibetan understanding is much wider.

A bardo is a transition. A space between one state and another.

And if that is true, we encounter bardos constantly.

The person you were before marriage disappears.

The person you were before becoming a parent disappears.

A relationship ends.

A career ends.

You leave a home.

A child grows up.

Someone you love dies.

You wake up one morning and realise that the person looking back from the mirror is no longer the same person.

Life is full of tiny deaths.

The Tibetan tradition describes four great bardos: the natural bardo of this life, the painful bardo of dying, the luminous bardo of dharmata, and the karmic bardo of becoming.

But the idea underneath them may be surprisingly practical.

Existence is not a collection of permanent states. It is a sequence of transitions.

We keep trying to hold the frame still, and tight.

But life keeps changing the photograph.

So why practise while we are alive?

There was another thought that initially sounded almost abstract to me.

We are told that it is important to become familiar with the nature of our mind while we are alive, so that when death arrives and everything familiar falls away, we are not encountering ourselves for the first time.

And suddenly I thought about prayer.

Many of us were taught prayers as children.

The same words.

Again and again.

Sometimes hundreds or thousands of repetitions over a lifetime.

Why?

Perhaps repetition does something deeper than simply helping us remember the words.

It creates an anchor.

When the intellect is frightened, confused or exhausted, you do not have to invent something to hold on to.

You return to what has already been planted inside you.

It is almost like creating a pathway through a forest while there is still daylight, so that if one day you have to walk through that forest in darkness, your feet already know the way.

That changed the way I thought about repetitive prayer and chants.

Perhaps we practise certain things in life precisely because there may come a moment when we no longer have the life to practise them – and that is when we will need it the most.

To die without regret

Milarepa reduced an entire philosophy to a remarkably simple sentence:

“My religion is to live and die without regret.”

Maybe that is the real challenge.

Not simply:

Am I prepared to die?

But:

Am I living in such a way that I could?

Because death is an unusual mirror.

It doesn’t really show us death.

It shows us life.

And perhaps that is why we are so reluctant to look into it.