One thing to keep in mind every time you have some kind of Dukkha, whether it is small or whether it is a big one like this, is "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" Another thing to keep in mind is that we are the owner of our own Kamma, and whatever is supposed to come to us will come to us when it is supposed to.
Later on in the retreat we give a type of reflection in which the Buddha encourages us to definitely think that we were born of your Kamma, we are related to our Kamma, we abide supported by our Kamma, and whatever Kamma we will do, we will become the heir to that. In other words, we will get results from our own Kamma. And it is the same with everybody else, that they are the heirs of their own Kamma. This is a way to help develop more equanimity with life's difficulties. If I am supposed to die tonight, it is just the way it goes. For people who are upset when I die, why are they upset if I simply had to leave? We call it dying, we call it leaving, we call it passing away, all sorts of different words. How do we deal better with it, with the fear of it coming? It is to realize that it will come whether we want it to come or not.
Often this fear comes from "how can I survive after someone else has died. That person I loved died, how can I survive?" Someone like me and Rosemary, we have been married now longer than some of you have been alive. How am I supposed to survive when she dies? We are very interdependent. One way that helps me to let go of that fear besides my overall practice is just to look at my mother-in-law. She was married 45 years to her husband, very dependent on each other. When he died she had a very hard time with it in the beginning. We helped her get the Dhamma, she has done 15 retreats now. It has now been about 18 years since her husband died and she is going on quite well. Now my Dhamma level is greater than hers. If she can do better with a longer marriage and more grief, then certainly I should do ok, too. And that is one way that I work with my fears, with the example "that person did all right. Why can't I do all right, too?"
Now with the Dhamma itself, with reflecting on each of us being the owner of our own Kamma, then whom am I to argue with? Even the Christians have similar teaching, the Christians, the Jews, any theistic religion, they have the same type of teachings. Who am I to argue with, with God? God has taken away my friend. The Christians believe it is God's will. If they believe in this sincerely, they will have less grief after the person dies either. That is if they believe in this sincerely, and accept the will of God, which of course most Christians find difficult to do. And that is why there is so much grief expressed at Christian funerals and other faith religions.
When you go to Thailand and you go to a funeral, if it is a Theravadin Buddhist funeral you basically see almost nobody cry because they talk about death from when they are little kids. They take the baby up to show them the dead body before they burn it. "Look, there is Grandma, that is going to happen to you, too, one day!" I have seen it happen, they are taking the little kid up and they say something like this. It is just such an open subject over there and there is far less fear and worry around it, because they realize it is just part of life. And that is very important, we have gt to reflect that impermanence is part of life, that death is part of life. This helps us to let go of the fear of it, if we expect it to come. We teach you to reflect on death so that you are ready for it, so you let go of the fear around it. If you expect it to come and then it comes tonight for one of your loved ones, then you may reflect, "Oh, I thought this could possibly happen to them." This is very important to do, to let go of the fear of death.
Disease is the same thing, really, it is just another type of Dukkha. Sometimes it is even worse than death, right? Someone like Christopher Reeve who was quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. To have to live around him for 10 years or so, that would be very difficult for a lot of people. Had he died when he fell off the horse, of course then he would not have had that sort of difficulty. So when a person is diseased it is often even more of a problem, because it goes on and on and on, for many years.
One of our assistants at Wat Kow Tahm had to leave the season early this year, together with their partner, because their brother has cancer. They had seen him only a few month before, he is a little taller than me, built about the same, weighs about the same, but when they got home again he had lost 30 pounds, just in two months It is expected that he will die soon. This assistant is working with it very well, with everything that we taught them, they are doing all of the practice, they are doing very well, considering the circumstances. And they are becoming somebody who is strong for the other relatives to lean on, because so many of the others can't handle it. Their brother is also doing a little bit of meditation, they are helping with that, so is their partner, another one of our assistants. So they are helping, they are able to be very strong there because they had reflected about it, because they thought about it. Because they have seen we can't argue with the law of Kamma, just like Christians, too, "we can't argue with God". So to accept it, it is part of life. And we cannot guarantee that we are going to live until we are 70, 80, 90 years old.