Frank Osteseski Interview
from Sound & Spirit program "Facing Death"
Sound & Spirit host, Ellen Kushner: This is Sound & Spirit; this time looking at the ways we face death. Following a twenty-five hundred year old spiritual tradition, Zen Hospice Project has been serving San Francisco's poor and homeless, helping them through their final days. Frank Ostaseski is the founding director.
Frank Ostaseski: It's very difficult to go into a room where someone's dying, and not pay attention. Because death is so powerful, it galvanizes our attention, it causes us to um, come into this moment with a kind of honesty and directness. And, uh, when we begin to see just how ephemeral everything is...how everything that arises passes away... Every relationship, every love-making, every thing that we love... When we see just how precarious this life is, then we come to see how precious it is.
S&S: At the Zen Center Hospice you have people coming in to die, many of whom don't have family, don't have connections, don't have a spiritual tradition... How do they fit into that ideal that you've just described?
FO: Maybe it's important to mention that the people who come to live with us at the hospice, often don't care beans about Buddhism. And we aren't interested in fostering any particular dogma. The dying will get the individual's attention. What we've got to do is create an environment that sends the message that, "We are here, we're not going away." We will be with this person throughout their process.
S&S: It seems to me that trust is, is critical in care for the dying, because so much of dying is, about giving up your control of yourself.
FO: Absolutely... You know, when we lose someone in our life that we love, we have a great pain. But the person that is dying, is losing everything. Their relationship to their body is shifting tremendously. They may feel terribly helpless, sometimes untouchable... And how we meet that experience is really important.
S&S: Do you help people with breathing as they die? Almost the way you do with a mother giving birth?
FO: Sometimes...we can help people with breathing as they die. One instruction that we often give our volunteers is to sit by the bedside and begin to pay attention to one's own breath...not in some detatched way, but being present for the individual who's dying, [and] also come into contact with one's own breath. Then we ask them for a period of time to follow the breathing of the person who's dying: to breath with them as they breath in, you breath in, as they breath out, you breath out. Then we ask them to come back to their own breath, noticing their breath but including in their awareness the breathing of the person that's dying...so that they can have a sense of connection with this individual without losing their own seat, so to speak. So that's useful for the caregiver.
For the person who's dying, we try and encourage them simply to let their attention in a very gentle way rest on the inhale and the exhale. It encourages them to be in this particular moment with a high degree of concentration and attention. This way they can meet whatever arises without being so swept away.
S&S: Is there in the Zen tradition...a right way to die?
FO: I hope not... Uhh, the right way to die is for the individual to find their own unique way through this process. Here's a very concrete example... There was a man who was staying with us in our hospice, he had lived on a park bench behind City Hall until he came to stay with us at the hospice. And one day I was asking him, "What do you think it will be like when you die?", because I'm very direct with people. And he turned to me and he said, "It's going to be alright, because I'm warm, dry and inside. And my friend here," and he was talking about the volunteer, "My friend here will be there to shut my eyes." Now that's very simple...you know. Is this conscious dying? I, I don't know... I only know that in that particular moment, that he was very, very, very comforted by our presence. Having said that, I, I want to also comment that we shouldn't get lost in some romantic notions of dying either.
S&S: [softly] Yeah...
FO: In this case, this man's death was quite beautiful, and uh very peaceful and pleasant to be around. But of course it isn't always that way; The habits of our life create a kind of momentum and carry into our death. There's one young woman I can remember working with whose mother came to see her and they'd had a very estranged relationship, very, very painful. And her last words to her mother were, "I hate you! I've always hated you..." And then she died.
There was tremendous suffering in the room. [pause] It was not a romantic death. There was tremendous pain. [pause]
S&S: Hmmm... [pause...] Let me ask you one more question, if I may...
FO: Sure.
S&S: Which is... You... How has your experience working with the dying at the Zen Hospice Project and your own spiritual practices made a difference in the way you think you'll face your own death?
FO: I don't really know. And that's the, probably the most honest answer I, I could offer. I'm a little less afraid than I used to be.
S&S: Less afraid, even though you've seen so much that most of us really try to avoid seeing?
FO: I'm considerably less afraid because I've gotten to see that great pain can be managed. I've gotten to see what happens when the mind is really confused as people die. And also seen, even with a confused mind I've seen people be quite peaceful. So caring for the dying is also very much a way of serving myself.
I do think that each of us has the capacity to embrace another person's suffering as our own. And that we have so over mystified, over-professionalized this care of the dying that we've become frightened of it. But we know how to do this, and we've just forgotten. And I think that our work has to be to remind each other in a way of what we already know.
S&S: Frank Ostaseski is the founding director of Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco. I'm Ellen Kushner. You're listening to Sound & Spirit from PRI, Public Radio International.
This interview was part of the Sound & Spirit program "Facing Death".
For more of Ellen's conversations check Interviews in the section Above and Beyond.
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