Reading through all this thread and pondering, I happened upon this article by Judy Lief on helping those who are preparing for the end. It was actually shared at the same time as one of @Andrew’” ‘swritings on how to help those who are dying as part of one of Mingyur Rinpoche’s courses on the bardos. I found it especially pertinent that “not giving advice is a key instruction - just like we are training in client-centered therapy.
“Not Handing Out Advice
We could begin by accepting people as they are rather than trying to change them. It is quite common for people who are sick or dying to be bombarded with all sorts of advice. They are magnets for it. People who would not ordinarily go around telling their friends how to conduct their lives suddenly transform into pundits and experts once their friends fall ill. We are so anxious to help that we don’t wait to be asked; we just launch in. And we have all sorts of opinions and criticisms as to how our friends are doing and how they should be handling their situation. It is easier to hide out in those opinions and become judgmental and demanding than to let go of our expectations and ideas and be left with nothing to hang on to. But that nothing-to-hang-on-to point is where we can actually make a connection.
It is not easy to resist this urge to fix things and make them go our way. However, all those demands place a terrible burden on others. They are based on rejection, not acceptance, and they create barriers that separate us from one another. We could work to reverse that pattern by accepting the sick or dying person as she is without trying to make her please us by how she goes about things. That might not sound like much, but it is rare. Especially when someone is sick or in a weakened state, it is common for people to pile in and lay heavy trips on her. So merely to have someone visit who doesn’t immediately start with “You should do this, and you should do that; you should feel this, and you should feel that” is a gift. It is unusual to encounter someone who doesn’t immediately hand out advice.
Seeing the Ordinariness of Death
Beyond that, we can help by not taking the view that death is a big mistake. Daniel Callahan, the medical ethicist, once said, “Despite the casual talk in our culture of death as ‘a part of life,’ I believe that, in reality, the dominant view is actually that of death as an outsider.” In our culture, unfortunately, death is often seen as a mistake, a failure, a breakdown. Something has gone terribly wrong, and everybody feels it. The person dying feels that she has made some big mistake and is disappointing everybody by dying—and the people around her feel angry, as though she had failed them in some way by forcing them to have to deal with this messy and painful situation. There is no recognition of the ordinariness of death, no acceptance of the fact that it happens to everyone.
Death is natural to life. It is not a mistake, sad though it may be. When we encounter death in our lives, for whatever reason, death just happens to be what is going on. It does not help to make a dying person feel guilty that he is dying or that he is doing something wrong. He should not need to apologize to us for dying or try to hide it from us because it is too embarrassing. It is more helpful to respect death as it is—a powerful and challenging experience that is at the same time quite ordinary and to be expected.”