The Awareness of Death is the Secret of Life. It’s the ultimate twist.
Teacher death met up with us the minute we were born, and is by our side every moment of our life. What death has to teach us is direct and to the point. It is profound but intimate. Death is a full stop. It interrupts the delusions and habits of thought that entrap us in small-mindedness. It is an affront to ego.
Death is a fact. Our challenge is to figure out how to deal with it, because it is never a good plan to struggle against or deny reality. The more we struggle against death, the more resentment we have and the more we suffer. We take a painful situation and through our struggles add a whole new layer of pain to it.
We cannot avoid death, but we can change how we relate to it. We can take death as a teacher and see what we can learn from it.
By means of meditation and by developing an ongoing awareness of death, we can change our relationship with death and thereby change our relationship with life. We can see that death is not just something that pops up at the end of life, but is inseparably linked with our life moment to moment, from the beginning to the end. We can see that death is not just a final teacher. It is available to teach us here and now.
When we contemplate in this way, our many schemes for getting around the reality of death, such as coming up with interpretations to make it more palatable, are exposed one by one and demolished. Death is the great interrupter, unreasonable and nonnegotiable. No amount of cleverness will make it otherwise.
Contemplating death is not an easy practice. It is not merely conceptual. It stirs things up. It evokes emotions of love, sorrow, fear, and longing. It brings up anger, disappointment, regret, and groundlessness. How tender it is to reflect on the many losses we have experienced and will experience in the future. How poignant it is to reflect on life’s fleeting quality.
You could say that death is your most intimate partner. It is with you all the time, completely interwoven into your daily activities. Since that is the case, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to make a relationship with it?
Contemplative practice challenges us to look deeply into our thoughts and beliefs, our fantasies and presumptions, and our hopes and fears. It challenges us to separate what we have been told from what we ourselves think and experience. We have all kinds of thoughts about what happens when we die and how we and others should relate with death, but through meditation we learn to recognize thoughts as thoughts. We learn not to mistake these thoughts and ideas about death for direct knowledge or experience. We learn not to believe everything we think or everything we have been told.
We can begin our exploration right where we are. We have already been born, we are alive, and we have not yet died. Now what? We might connect to our life in terms of a story or a history. For instance, we were born in such and such a time and place, we did this and that, and we have a particular label and identity. But that story is always changing and in process; it is not all that reliable. However, when our story is combined with a physical body, we seem to have something more solid, a complete package. We have something to hang onto and defend. We have something that can be taken away.
But what do we have to hang onto, really? Our story is not that solid. It is always being revised and rewritten. Likewise, our body is not one solid continuous thing. It too is always changing. If you look for the one body that is you, you cannot find it.
The closer you look, the less solid this whole thing seems. When we investigate our actual experience, here and now, moment by moment, we see how fleeting and dynamic it is. As soon as we notice a thought, feeling, or sensation, it has already happened. Poof! It is the same with the act of noticing. Poof! Gone! And the noticer, the one who is noticing, is nowhere to be found. Poof! When we contemplate in this way, we begin to suspect that this life is not all that solid—that we are not all that solid.
The more solidly we construct ourselves, and the more rigidly we identify with this construct, the more we have to defend and the more we have to fear. Looking at death in terms of such subtle underlying patterns may seem inconsequential, but it is not.
When we drop the battlefield approach—that life and death are enemies—we become open to an entirely new way of viewing things. Instead of this vs. that, us vs. them, something much more inspiring can take place. Experiences can arise freshly because they are immediately let go. Because they are dropped as soon as they arise, there is nothing to hold onto and nothing to lose. There is no battlefield, no winner and loser, no good guy and bad guy.
Simple formless meditation is a very powerful tool for relaxing this pattern of holding and defending. Working with death through our awareness of momentary arisings and dissolvings is a profound practice. It shows us that the life–death boundary is an ongoing and quite ordinary experience, and that this unsettling meeting point colors all that we do. If we can become more grounded at this level, we can become more open to what death has to teach us altogether.
Although death is an ongoing reality, there are times when it hits us particularly hard. It may be when we have a health scare or a near accident. At such times, we really wake up to the presence of death, and its teachings come through loud and clear. The heart pounds, the senses are heightened, and we feel extra alive. There is a stillness, as though time had stopped.
Maintaining an awareness of death makes life more vivid. In the light of death, petty concerns fall away and our usual preoccupations become meaningless. It is as though clouds of dust that have covered over something shiny and vivid have been blown away, and we are left with something raw, immediate, and beautiful. We have insight into what matters and what does not.
Awareness of death—hearing its teaching—cuts through the subtle clinging at the core of our experience. It cuts through our self-clinging and our clinging to others. This may sound harsh, but all that clinging has not really helped us or anyone else. Our clinging to others may have the appearance of real caring, but it is based on fear and an attempt to freeze and control life. It is a way of tuning out death and pulling back from the intensity of life. But if we develop more ease with our own impermanence and struggles with death, we can be more understanding of others and their struggles. We can connect with one another with greater genuineness and warmth.
Death turns out to be the teacher who releases us from fear. It’s the teacher that opens our hearts to a more free-flowing love and appreciation for life and one another. When we get stuck in self-importance and earnestness, death steps in. When we get caught in self-pity, death steps in. When we become complacent and take things for granted, death steps in.
Death spurs us forward with a sense of urgency and puts our preoccupations in perspective. Death lightens our clinging and mocks our pretensions.
Death wakes us up. It is our most reliable teacher and most constant companion.
~ Judy Leif
~ In Loving Memory of Brother Johnny Gan (10 Jan. 1948 - 14 Jan 2026) ~
One week after my brother was laid to rest, I decided to post a very well written piece on Life and Death by Judy Leif to accompany this 'eulogy' of sorts.
I got to know of my step-brother from a very young age- 5 or 6 I believe. With an age gap of 10 years, we weren't exactly best of friends. In fact it was quite the opposite. He often saw me a a threat to his status of No. 1 son as I was the legitimate son born out of wedlock while he was legally adopted. There were times when I felt his anger and wrath in the thick of passion in hockey practice or playing childhood games. He would erupt in violent verbal threats warning me to beware or to watch-out. I felt his misplaced animosity as strange as I've often wondered how little old me could be a threat to my big brother. So I took all of his occassional rage lightly but I was always respectful except when I would secretly and silently 'borrow' his Yamaha 125cc motorcycle for fun runs in the countryside sans helmet. Although he knew what I was doing with his bike, he often turned a blind eye and let me have my fun. That was how I fell in love with motorcycle riding and big bike ownership to this day.
Johnny was a solidly competent field hockey fullback who played for school, district and state. He inspired all of us to play the sport as family tradition. I initially played the position of full-back because of him although later in my career, I moved up to play attacking half. I didn't have the bulk to be a mountain of a full back like him. I was to play quick and nimble roles in attack and defence and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
One other gift he gave to us was the beautiful exposure to nature in the rainforest and hills that surrounded our homes. He took us butterfly hunting while we were barely knee-high to a grasshopper. The jungle paths, streams and waterfalls that we traversed for hours were terrifying at first but became beautifully engrained in us as we grew up appreciating nature and her beauty. Although I never acquired the deft skill of catching many butterflies nor putting them to sleep with formaldehyde or pinning the beautiful specimens into beautiful glass-frames of various shapes and sizes for sale to collectors in the British expatriate community.
Johnny was also one of the most hard-working people I know. Both physically and mentally.
Apart from his sportmanship, he was a hardworking ace student in the Sciences. I remember the day he was refused an engineering place in UKM despite several attempts, he was heart-broken.
He was a human dynamo when it came to performing household chores and climbing trees. He had several skills and methods devised to clear mountain loads of chores with ease. We of course struggled to keep up with chores of raking leaves, cutting grass or trimming the hedges or feeding the dogs and poultry. All of which were performed meticulously and diligently by my big brother. He never belittled or berated us for failing at anything he could do when we fell short. We were short compared to him in the first place.
Perhaps the best memory I have of my big brother's role in my life was the fact that he stood by my family and I, when we were enduring a grievous period of caring for Jon when he fell ill. Johnny and his family were constantly present to lend us unconditional support. I remember clearly, one night when Jon was lying in bed with no improvement, our family was crestfallen watching our son helplessly wasting away and I was clearly buckling under the weight of worry and anguish with no hope in sight. I slipped away silently to the balcony to be alone with my grief. Johnny noticed and came out to comfort me. For the first time, that night I cried like a baby comforted by my brother, his hand on my shoulder. I never felt so understood and loved by my brother as I did then.
As I stood over his casket on the first day of his wake, all the thoughts and feelings suddenly came flooding back and I bawled my eyes out in his presence once again. Once again he gave me permission to grieve. Deeply.
Thank you dear brother Johnny. I love you and I will miss you dearly.
Farewell for now.
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