By Elisabeth Ollagnier

When you accompany a patient until his death, you are walking together on the final piece of life's path. The patient chooses the one he wants to accompany him. He chooses someone with whom he feels a closeness, without considering the person's position or status. All that a terminally-ill patient has been and experienced in his entire life are carried into this present moment. The patient, it turns out, is identical to us, and our relationship with him or her will be as authentic as our awareness of the fact that we too are going to die.

This parent, this friend, this terminally ill person at my side is at a very important moment in his life. He and I are alive only because we have been loved from the first moment of our lives. We have been taken care of, fed, surrounded, protected for our entire lives. All of these gestures are imprinted in our bodies and minds. They reassured us through our first fears and our first contacts with life. The love we received then, we continue to seek everywhere. Love is a universal language, the language of an animal taking care of its young.

Before anything else, a terminally-ill patient is a living being. She brings to us her richness. In our relationship, we meet one another at all the levels of our evolution; sometimes as an adult, sometimes as a child. This other person is to be discovered and understood. If we are attentive to what he tells us through words, movements, bodily expressions, and silences, we will understand him, and we can meet him.

Our role is to provide the patient with a space to reconcile within himself any guilt, which can be a heavy load and is usually the result of an incomplete understanding of the circumstances that created the guilt. Dying is a time to prepare for departure, to confirm one's legacy in a concrete way. It is a time for her to express her message, to tell friends and relatives what they have meant to her. We can reflect together on impermanence, knowing that even after we pass away, we will remain in the heart of others for a long time.

Meditation on Solitude

The following meditation is for the dying person who feels abandoned due to his illness and the extensive periods of solitude he faces while lying in bed. To counter this feeling, we can offer to fill his room with all the people, animals, and plants who have done something for him without his knowledge. With his eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the hospital, and following the breath, we begin to relax.

We invite the sheets that cover him to reveal their true nature. We invite the fields where the cotton was planted to come into the room. We see the gifts of the Earth open to us—the calm Earth, fully abandoning itself to give its riches to us. We invite the laborers to come and work in the fields as they are used to doing. We look deeply into their efforts. They do not see the sheets on this bed that cover and protect us. We see that some of them work with joy, because during the day things are all right. And how others work with sadness, worries, pains, or other problems they are facing in their lives. These laborers play an important role in supporting all of life and should be deeply appreciated.

We invite the cotton seeds to come into the room. We look deeply into their gifts, the way they sacrifice themselves to work, push, and develop into a fragile plant that emerges from the ground, to support us who are at the other end of this chain.

We invite the Earth, steadily, graciously providing food for us.

We invite the sun which doesn't discriminate in any direction, doesn't choose to shine on any particular person or plant. It gives of itself unceasingly.

We invite the air which nourishes us with oxygen and other gases. It transports the pollen from flower to flower, and creates the wind that takes off old leaves and branches from trees.

We invite the rain, which gives itself totally to the ground, mixing with the earth, feeding the plants, and becoming rivers.

We invite the insects and their unceasing work for us and the universe. In their ignorance of what they are doing, they fertilize and aerate the soil, transport the seeds, and so on.

Then we have the cotton flowers and the cotton in the fields. We invite the people who pick the cotton, transport it, spin it into thread, make the cloth, sell it, manufacture sheets, and use it for this patient's bed to enter the room.

We can look infinitely at what life really is, finding other images, and continuing to go deeper. When we do so, there are no longer any doors or windows. There are no more closed spaces. There is the universe in the bedroom and the bedroom in the universe. All men and women, plants and animals, live in this sheet. We are indispensable to their lives, and they are indispensable to our lives.

I have seen many faces lighten up as they look around the room where each thing has taken on a deeper meaning. We practice together like this once a week until the patient takes charge of her own meditation on whatever object she chooses. Then she continues the meditation practice herself. The guided meditation is done with a constant reminder to slow down, relax, and breathe.

Meditation on Immobility

Among the patients I meet, most of them are dependent on people who help them out of bed, get bathed, use the toilet, walk, eat, etc. In the section of the hospital where I work as a massage therapist, there are forty beds, out of which only six people can move independently. Ten of them no longer grasp the reality around them. All we can do is love them and make them aware of our presence by embracing them.

In our civilization we teach activity. We have difficulty accepting times when we must stop and not do anything while others continue to work. With this idea we reject becoming ill, as it goes against society if our illness doesn't allow us to be of service and to be recognized by our work. Therefore reconciliation with our immobility is necessary.

The patient and I do a meditation together. Either sitting or lying down, with closed eyes, and breathing slowly, we invite nature in: From the majestic and beautiful trees to the humble blade of grass, we invite you to be reborn in our memory now. We invite all the beauty that is asleep in ourselves to emerge.

We are aware of their still and immobile beauty, and their movement in the wind. We are aware of the work they do for us, providing oxygen for us so we can live.

We thank you in all of our body. We thank you through the whole of our body. Through slow, deep breathing, we taste the fresh air when it comes in and the warm air when it leaves.

We thank the trees, plants, and flowers. Listening deeply while approaching nature, we hear the soft murmur, like a low note humming. We listen even deeper, and that is thanks.

Thank you for the air we give back that has been processed in our bodies, the carbon dioxide that returns as food for the trees. Because we breathe, nature breathes. We can see the immediate utility of simply sitting here and breathing.

We stay for a while together under the trees, facing the fields, exchanging our thanks until they merge, until no one is giving anymore and no one is taking. It is just one being, and there is no need to move.

Elisabeth Ollagnier is a massage therapist who applies many mindfulness practices to her work with the terminally ill. This essay, translated from the French by Jean-Paul Benabid and Carole Melkonian, is based on a talk given at Plum Village during the Summer of 1990.