Death has an energy. It is thick as sludge, heavy as iron, and pulls you down into yourself like an imploding building.

Death is a process, not an event, despite medical and legal imperatives to give it a date and hour.

Death is not a self-evident phenomenon. The margins between life and death are socially and culturally constructed, mobile, multiple, and open to dispute and reformulation.

Death--some form of termination--is the universal ending of all living things; but only man, by virtue of his verbally reportable introspective life, can conceptualize his own cessation.

Whether or not enlightenment is possible at the moment of death, the practices that prepare one for this possibility also bring one closer to the bone of life.

Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed.

Death will get you sober.

Even if those who take their own lives feel they have no choice--indeed, they often tragically believe their family and friends will be better off without them--the death rarely appears inevitable to those left behind. Feelings of anger and guilt and abandonment invade them, as if love should or could have prevented what happened. Survivors relive, over and over, the last days and months, even years, before the suicide, seeing now the signs that were missed, which they believe they should have recognized.

In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, "Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us."

When death occurs, death as you know it, the universe embraces you and takes you to its heart.

If thou hadst a good conscience thou wouldst not greatly fear death.

There is no single best kind of death. A good death is one that is "appropriate" for that person. It is a death in which the hand of the way of dying slips easily into the glove of the act itself. It is in character, ego-syntonic. It, the death, fits the person. It is a death that one might choose if it were realistically possible for one to choose one's own death.

Now death is death! and yet is not one death

Another death? Stabbing is not the same

As shooting! Would you say a strangled man

Was drown'd? The end is one, the means are many,

And there the difference lies!

The death anxiety of many people is fueled ... by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential. Many people are in despair because their dreams didn't come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true. A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.

Life is hard, but death is even harder.

Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man ... it can only separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have passed onwards, but ... there is no such thing as Death at all.

Death, I am told, is as easy and as simple as going to sleep and then awakening. Our etheric body slips out of the physical body, carrying the mind with it, and we awake to our new surroundings to find our friends and relations ready to help and instruct us in our new life. Death is simply the severance of this etheric body or structure from the physical body. The physical body returns to earth, and the etheric body, controlled by the mind, continues to function in the etheric world which, though within and also without the physical, yet cannot be appreciated by us so long as we are inhabitants of the physical body. Our range of sight and touch is too confined for us to appreciate these finer vibrations.

What happens when the thought of death occurs, this very simple and basic thought about death, that I will most certainly die, and that you will most certainly die, is that all these other questions are stripped down to basic, that the very basis for knowledge and existence is shivering, whether one is trembling in tears for another or oneself shivering in anxiety and awe. Hence, at the end we return to the place where we began, at the graveside.

Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that remarkable capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.