V DTH

FIELDS: Lucky because there is time to prepare, whether you are a practitioner or not. The usual notion in the West is, “Oh, so-and-so is very lucky that they died in their sleep or had a heart attack or sudden death.” But cancer is particularly good because you usually have time to contemplate the whole thing and work with it. Part of the Kagyu Ngundro practice [of Tibetan Buddhism] involves repeating the Four Reminders. The second, in the translation that Trungpa Rinpoche used, is

Death is real,
Comes without warning
This body will be a corpse.

Death is the only certainty in our lives. Yet much of our culture is organized to help us ignore death. So from that point of view, a terminal illness can be very helpful to your spiritual practice. But that leaves you with the questions of what to do and how to handle it. There are healing teachings that address staying alive but at the same time, there isn’t this denial of death. Still, this idea that dying is a wonderful experience is a sort of double-edged sword: it is, or can be, but most of us want to stay alive as long as possible. Certainly I do.