How Do I Make Peace with Aging, Illness, and Death?
A contemplative way of meeting the hardest facts of a human life, and the steadiness that can hold them.
Sooner or later, life brings us face to face with things we would never have chosen. A body that is slowing and changing. A diagnosis, our own, or someone we love. The death of a friend. We spend a good deal of energy, understandably, arranging our lives so that we don’t have to look at any of this directly. And still it waits for us, because avoiding a truth has never yet made it untrue.
There is an old story in the Buddhist tradition about the young man who would become the Buddha. He was raised in a sheltered palace, protected from anything unlovely or unwell. One day he slipped past his caretakers and out through the gate, and for the first time in his life he saw someone old and frail, then someone gravely ill, and then a dead body lying on the ground. He was shaken to the core. And then he saw one more person: someone moving through the same world with a deep and radiant peace, at ease in the midst of it all.
Those four encounters are traditionally called the heavenly messengers: aging, illness, death, and the possibility of a peaceful, awakened heart. It’s worth pausing on that word, messenger. It suggests that aging, illness, and death are not only threats to be fended off, but bearers of something, carriers of a teaching, if we’re willing to receive it.
Our first instinct, of course, is aversion. We brace against these things, push them out of sight, and turn away. That’s completely understandable, and it also tends to make the suffering worse. There is another way to meet them. In your imagination, you can invite each one in, the way you might welcome a guest to sit down and share a cup of tea, and ask it plainly: what do you have to teach me, here, at this point in my life?
These truths lose some of their terror when we stop treating them as intruders and begin treating them as teachers.
None of this is about rising above it all, or getting cosmic in order to escape the ache. It’s tender to admit that you’re getting older, if you are. It’s tender to face illness in your own body, or in someone you love. Meeting these messengers well begins right there, with that tenderness, and with resourcing yourself enough to be able to let them in at all.
In the rest of this piece, I’ll explore how to actually be with these realities: how to feel them fully rather than flinch from them, how to counter the mind’s pull to fixate on what is hardest, and how two ancient qualities, equanimity and love, can hold even this.
