What can I say? Even the Dalai Lama likes this book! And, absolutely, so do I.
Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care edited by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast, and published by Wisdom Publications is a powerful addition to the literature on end of life care, both for those dying and those who accompany them. I would say most of all for those of us who are becoming aware of the complexities of aging, sickness, and, the always there truth of our lives, mortality.
There is a strong Buddhist cast to the book. Weingast is a long time Buddhist meditation practitioner, now affiliated with the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Central Masschusetts. I believe he brings the fine editorial eye that both collected an arranged the variety of writers that make this book into a coherent whole. Ellison is a long time Zen student and teacher, and it feels his insights probably drive the deeper perspective that serves as a thread running through the whole book. Actually the coherence of the collection is a tribute to a shared vision of compassion and care and competence. Something I felt on every page.
Awake at the Bedside is organized as an anthology, collecting reflections, instructions, meditations, and poetry. Taken together it is a welcoming into the mysteries of our always ending lives.
For reasons that are probably not so mysterious in our contemporary culture Buddhists have found themselves at the heart of end of life matters. It started, I think, in a public way with the Zen Hospice project in San Francisco, which began as a visiting program associated with the Hartford Street Zen Center in the late 1980s and then with its renowned residential hospice beginning in 1990. It is continued in many places such as the hospice-training program at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And on the East Coast the principal expression of this Zen approach to end of life care is the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care.
The Zen center was founded by Robert Chodo Campbell and Koshin Paley Ellison and was originally affiliated with the Zen Temple in New York, the Village Zendo, and in recent years with Dorothy Dai En Friedman, a successor to the renowned author and Zen teacher Peter Matthiessen. These connections are obvious throughout the book.
Early in Awake at the Bedside we are given the poem by Kozan Ichikyo
Empty-handed I entered/the world,
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going –
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
From there that entangling is explored.
Awake at the Bedside is a heartful companion for the companions of people who are dying. It is an extended meditation on the power of presence. As someone commented, this book isn’t really about dying. Rather it’s fully about living. It brings practical advice, plenty of it. But there’s something more to it. It digs deep into our hearts, and guides us gently toward the fullness of lives that are conjoined with death in what is ultimately a celebration of the wholeness that we are.
I strongly recommend it.
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