As I supported him so, and rubbed his silky back, I thought of my mother and the story she had told me of her mother's long illness. How my mother filed her dying mother's fingernails, trimmed the cuticles just so, buffed the nails to a high sheen. How her mother smiled at her pleasure, and in pain. My grandmother was dying, and my mother was helping her. Death happens to us, but dying is something we do.
Death is a biological event, a moment in time, almost always painless.
Dying most often extends through time, encompassing sensation, emotion, and process - and sometimes great pain. But dying is an opportunity unlike any other which life provides. Ken Wilbur's story of his wife Treya's dying time and his participation in that process, told in his book Grace and Grit , is a magnificent testament to the opportunity hidden within death. At dying time we take a deeper look at what death represents to us. According to Robert J. Lifton, humans have a basic need to feel a sense of continuity and connection with the future - and that need is challenged in this time of uncertainty about the outcome of the human experiment on the planet.