The following quotations on death were like inner companions during the course of my six months of chemotherapy treatments. While I did not read them frequently, I would find them, at times, ironically and paradoxically, helpful internally in keeping me focused on an inexplicable desire and wish to live as fully and meaningfully with this given life. While these quotations may also seem familiar to the readers, they hold a special significance for my life journey into and towards healing and acceptance of our life's unpredictable changes. I share some of these "words of wisdom" which have illuminated and nourished my recent experience with illness and healing process, which continues.

1. Death is more universal than life: everyone dies but not everyone lives. - anonymous

2. I don't mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. - Woody Allen

3. Get used to dying before death arrives, for the dead can only live and the living can only die. - an old Mexican refrain

4. Of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme. - Shakamuni Buddha

5. Meditations on death are means of purifying the mind in order to gain a crucial revelation of the meaning and significance of life and death... Death meditations may strike some as a morbid preoccupation, a falling in love with death rather with life. Yet the deep acceptance of death as the teacher of life divests these reflections of any macabre quality. The purpose of death meditations is to instill in the meditator the confidence to walk unafraid with the ever-present prospect of death, for one never knows when it may come and take us. The denial of death, so common in our culture, inevitably strengthens the fear of it and underscores what Socrates said about the unexamined life not being worth living. Actually, pondering and meditating on death is part of the religious practice of every major religious tradition. - Philip Kapleau

6. After all, it is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once. - Voltaire

7. Death is not destruction or annihilation or disappearance. Rather, it is freedom that we experience at death - perfect, total freedom, freedom to go on, and it is liberation from suffering. I am often reminded of the fact that the sutras put the Pure Land (of Amida Buddha) in the west. When the sun sets in the west, this is likened to death. But in the morning after its seemingly total disappearance, the sun appears again. So it is always like that - it goes away and it comes back. And so it is with the Pure Land: all who go there keep coming back, manifesting in every possible way, for the benefit of others, so that really there is nobody in the Pure Land. - Rev. Hozen Seki

8. The practicer of true shinjin (true faith)... abides in the stage of the truly settled, for he or she has already been grasped (by Amida Buddha), never to be abandoned. There is no need to wait in anticipation for the moment of death, no need to rely on Amida's coming. At the time shinjin becomes settled, birth (in the Pure Land) too becomes settled; there is no need for the deathbed rites that prepare one for Amida's coming. - Shinran Shonin