“You can choose to experience your body as being wasted away by cancer or as being re-absorbed by Spirit.” These words spoken to him by Buddhist monk and teacher Shinzen Young radically changed my husband’s living and dying. They continue to change mine.

My husband was an Episcopal priest. On the Feast of The Epiphany January 6, 2002, we quietly celebrated the 40^th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. Twenty days later at 7:47 a.m., Saturday, January 26, he died as quietly from a virulent type of prostate cancer which had progressively and mercilessly attacked his bones for twenty months.

He will be remembered by many people for his grace-filled dying; however, he will be remembered by many more for his empowering and spirited sermons. He would skillfully and surprisingly interject rollicking, yet relevant, humor at the appropriate moment; then drop just as suddenly into communicating his strongly held belief that we are created to live fully, love wastefully and become all we are able to become. Listeners could easily ponder his message again later because he would focus on three points drawn from his understanding of that day’s Gospel reading, grounding these points in everyday life.

In memory of my husband, I intuit here the three points he would have extracted for a sermon based on Shinzen’s words: we have a choice; we are invited to participate actively; living and dying is a dance between two realities.

We have a choice. Our decision informs the way we live and, consequently, the way we will die. Do we acquiesce to or fight against the outrageous slings and arrow of fortune; or do we create space in ourselves for meaning to evolve? By clarifying the alternative understandings of bodily wasting away and re-absorption by spirit, Shinzen shocked my husband into recognizing that the choice belonged to him. Day after day as his life ebbed away, Lew consciously chose to let go more and more into the process of re-absorption.

We are invited into active participation. The creative, intelligent Energy we sometimes call God invites us into active and conscious engagement with the dying process rather than passive acceptance of, fighting against, or wandering purposelessly into death. Engagement with this Energy creates meaning from what could seem meaning-less. My husband’s process established a rhythm between inward and outward movements. I watched him become deeply contemplative as he reflected on his experience of living and dying. And I heard him deeply engage people willing to enter into the profundity of his experience as it intersected their own.

Living into dying is a dance between two realities. Shinzen calls these realities the cosmic and the personal. Cosmic: transcendent, mystical, transpersonal intimations of immortality beyond the five senses. Personal: fully feeling the vicissitudes of gradual and ultimate loss. My husband said, “Don’t tell me I am going to a better place. Here is good enough for me. I do not know whether it will be better; I only know it will be different.” Slowly, his dying became a both/and experience, moving from the paradox of the either/or to the reconciliation of both his inexorable and painful bodily wasting and his joyous and grace-filled re-absorption into Spirit.

On this side of my husband’s death, I am learning that the cosmic encompasses the personal and brings me to a peace that passes, yet also gives, understanding. I live in the midst of paradox and reconciliation every day. In a moment I can drop into the void of personal loss and trauma—and even there I find fullness of life. I discover the void is not empty. It is full of memory and meaning, angst and release, complexity and texture, exquisite sorrow and deep peace. My whole being can be wracked with pain as the two realities collide. For a time I am in a frighteningly altered state; my familiar personal reality becomes fluid and unstable. Each time this happens I am increasingly aware that I exist in both realities simultaneously, knowing and not knowing all at once: the bittersweet experience of living into dying.