. . . This teaching about [the nature of] mind reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother toward the end of her life. She was dying. I knew it, everyone in our family knew it, but we didn’t talk about it because my mother didn’t like to think about it. But once, when we were having bagels and lox at a little deli near where she lived, she said to me, casually, as if it were a matter of mere curiosity, “What do Buddhists think happens when we die?”
“Well,” I said to her, “it depends on who you think you are. If you think you are just this body and mind, just these memories and experiences and relationships and thoughts, then death is very bad news. Because when you die you will lose all that. But if you think you are also more than this, something you don’t understand but somehow feel and have confidence in, then when you die that something — which was never born and can’t die — never goes away. And that would make it easier and happier to die.”
Norman Fischer
from When You Greet Me I Bow