Making Friends with Death: A Buddhist Guide to Encountering Mortality

This book takes you through a simple but elegant process. You learn how to talk about death. It sets forth a 6 stage process for dealing with death. The author is a buddhist. Everyone can gain knowledge from this book. It teachers you to see transitions. Life is full of them - until it's not. Then what?It can help you frame your discussions about what happens in death. Why death? Why now? If not now, when? I ramble slightly, but when is just a passing of time.Why did I read it? I was dealing with carrying the suicide of my son. This book provides an interesting set of Hope & Fear strategies. Again, increasing your ability to carry it. It is topic that is as old as life itself. For believe it or not you will be missed. Your physical space will be missed. Gone.Consider the early tomes on the matter - perhaps Memento Mori - The Art of Dying.You will be glad to have read this - that is a fact.

Judith Lief, a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, guides readers first to develop a personal awareness of death (including through guided contemplations to help us understand our own beliefs and fears about death), then to accept our own vulnerability (including instructions in tonglen practice), and finally to be better able to help those who are dying (including very valuable specific advice about how to be with those dying as well as a discussion of pitfalls and negative behaviors to avoid). This is a book that needs time to digest, as it leads the reader along a gentle yet focused progression of developing understanding, compassion, and empathy in the face of death and loss.

After nine people passed-over in my senior community in four years, I decided I wanted to learn more about death so I could learn better how to live. This book did it for me! Very easy read and easy to understand. I'm not Buddhist and really, I think the only real mention of anything Buddist is the meditation practice of Tongalen (sp?). It's a very good day-to-day use as well as your own thoughts and belief's about death and, for me, opened up a completely different view on suffering, death, and change in general. I'm very glad I have this book! It helps me live a fuller day-to-day life in being mindful in everything changing, and accepting it with a completely different look on life, gratitude, mindfulness, acceptance, and compassion.

I am a Buddhist. I expected a book on mortality. The book starts strong on the topic, but then takes a detour into Ms. Lief's experiences with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his meditation techniques. I bought the book to help my wife come to grips with the inevitable death of our dog (now 17 years old & suffering) so we could let her pass on, but my wife is not a Buddhist.

This book helped me to understand why it was possible for me simply to join each of my brothers for their final weeks of life and not do, say or make anything. I could just "be" with them. As the author says, once you realize that there is no space small enough, nowhere that you can hide and you must acknowledge that you/they will die, it is possible to just be. This is a gift to the dying and a gift to yourself.

Lief has written this book from a Buddhist perspective, but it resonates for any religion. Her premise is that coming to terms with the temporary nature of all life allows us to understand death as just another part of the voyage. However she does not just prescribe a frame of mind. She also provides us with techniques of mindfulness that allow us to reach this goal. The meditations and lessons in the book make real sense. In particular she addresses the underlying uneasiness of life, the Buddhist eighth form of suffering. Although it is universal, it is not inescapable according to Lief. This book opens a large possibility of life in our very admittance of death as part of it.

A wonderful jewel. A gift of clarity, simplicity, and wisdom. As someone facing death in the near term, it helped in so many ways to validate and expand what I had only intuitively seen partially formed. It does not rely on religious gimmicks or other barriers to direct experience but spoke to me in ways that are best understood by bringing the here now into the minutae leading up to the end of my life. I am recommending it to my wife to help her better deal with some of those around us who are freaking. No question of the enormous depth of ms. Lief's kind and honest exlorations into a world that frightens most at the front door.

I'm 76 and I don't feel too good--ever. Lots of pain and very low energy. Maybe depressed. I keep as busy as possible, eat right and exercise. I'm supposed to be in good health but am certainly ready to leave. So, I do the exercises in the book and return to the text from time to time--especially when I feel really bad and can hardly get through the day.

Very interesting, for me no new information but always interesting to read things again and just said in a slightly different way.