Roshi Joan Halifax's talk at Mayo Clinic

This is a fabulous, compassionate talk, Joan Roshi. Thanks very much for posting it because it gives me a thumbnail understanding of your work and how it affects our world.

Living is a great deal of fun. But I have been undereducated about what can be done about accepting death gracefully, and look forward to a little better understanding of it. Beginning with my own understanding of my attitudes.

I've begun to dissolve my fear in recent years. Including passing along a healthy attitude to my 10 year-old son. He asked me one day how I would prefer to die. I surprised even myself in answering, “With my eyes open, because it's a part of the experience of life.”

My interest in this traces back quite a long way in my “conscious” memory: I remember my first, tearful conversation with an adult about dying, with my father. I was maybe four or five and remember where we were, how we acted and which compass directions we faced. I remember exactly what he said, but what I remember most is the tender way he said it.

And in my son's life, I think was the first adult he talked about it with, too.

My teacher is dying, Roshi Joan Halifax.  She's almost nineteen– splendidly old for a 40#, mixed breed dog.  She is neither clouded nor lost in her old age, she looks at us with undiminished clarity, and she teaches me still.  It is her body that is ready.

My teachers have all been adopted dogs, shelter-dogs, strays.  All have brought with them essential, fundamental lessons for me over the years.  Eleanor is the longest living.  She has been fragile physically for several years, requiring increasing assistance, but has no major diseases, no evidence of pain or discomfort, other than frailty.

Eleanor is here, still at my side, showing me the way.  The true way, I daresay.  But I crumble and fall in the approaching life without her physical presence.  Almost two decades with this non-human teacher, living with her, growing with her, listening carefully, laughing at her quick-wit, watching her fire, and her peace.

I don't know if you read these comments, Roshi Joan Halifax, but I watched you speak at the Mayo Clinic talk last Friday.  A colleague from the MBSR Institute at UMass sent me the web link.  Chords were struck in my heart, as I listened to your wellspring of knowledge for death and life.  I face it more often than I would care to, having dogs for my best teachers, of course.  A curse, but a blessing, to be sure.  But still, as now, I stumble in the face of death, like many others.  What you teach at your institute is vital.  I hope to meet you someday!

Wonderful.