I wrote this article for Tergar's Blog. It was published on September 20, 2025.
I once signed up for a Tergar interview to ask a simple question: “Do you have any tips about how to do this?” The “this” I was asking about was a seven-week silent retreat, but the answer I received became a guide for any challenge, especially aging.
The response was: “Go empty-handed. Open to whatever is happening… Take it loosely and lightly, and don’t get ahead of it. Show up. Relax as much as possible, and the rest will carry you in its power.”
As important as the message, the words were shared with warmth and care and a wellspring of experience.
As I digested the words and the tone, I felt a shift from being afraid of myself to feeling more confident. I consciously decided to trust life in all its uncertainty.
In a recent monthly teaching, Mingyur Rinpoche shared a story about a woman who asked to meet with him to discuss aging. She expresses how upsetting it is to see her wrinkles in the mirror; angry, she throws and breaks the mirror. Rinpoche laughs – “No more mirror, but wrinkles still!” and then tells her about his grandmother. “[She] has wrinkles. For me, my grandmother is beautiful. She is full of kindness. I see each wrinkle as wisdom and experience. The wrinkles are beautiful.” I laughed as well with this wonderful reminder that aging cannot be changed, but one’s view can. I want more wisdom. I need more wrinkles!
My physical therapist is in her early 40s and wears hearing aids. When I noticed them, she smiled as if it were a compliment, saying she doesn’t miss much of what her patients ask. I remembered her and her view, as my audiologist recently said I was borderline hearing-challenged and hearing aids would help. Without hesitation, I said yes. My perspective had shifted; instead of seeing hearing aids as a sign of aging, I now see them as a sign of genuine interest in understanding and connection.
Aging lessons come in other forms. A teacher is a loved one’s passing.
When my son died unexpectedly, hearing it was a cutting through to a vast open space. I realized the preciousness of a human birth. Since we know we will die, and do not know when that will be, his too-soon departure painfully showed the gift to grow old and a stark reality about what we own. All we have is now — this moment.
Two years ago. As my husband lay dying on a bed next to ours in our home, the atmosphere was quiet. Peaceful. Having lost the ability to speak, I knew it was time to remind him he was dying. The reminder would not be a surprise. Having a longtime practice of whispering lovingly into each other’s ears, we teased about whispering something at death: “Honey, you’re dead. Time to go.”
Empty-handed. Open to whatever is happening. Relaxed. Let the experience carry you…
As the moment of my husband’s death approached, I leaned over and said, “You are dying, beautiful man. You are leaving us, our life, your family and friends. You are leaving the home where you noticed moon shadows on the walls. You are leaving this place with large windows that regularly invite you to look at nature and phenomena’s purpose: to open to what is before you. All this will no longer be. At the same time, something continues. There will be continuity of your positive relationships and experiences — some, but not all, reckoned and resolved, and imbued with the teachings. Your greatest generosity is about to unfold: to give all of this to the next.”
I said there will be visual dreams and movie-like hallucinations, and an experience of leaving the body. Honestly, I didn’t know what he was experiencing, but I could encourage him to face what was happening just as it was, rather than trying to run away.
The strength to utter these words with confidence grows in study and practice. Time taming the mind. Time training the mind. Time spent with companions on the path, sharing openly and personally about how the taming and training are going while living the dharma. Retreats and sessions on impermanence, appreciation, gratitude, devotion, and interdependence. Repeating lessons again and again. All of us are infused with the love of others and fortified with lineage, as Ocean Vuong said in his recent Thrive Daily interview.
I was not frightened by his dying, just as I am not scared of my aging. The teachings suggest that there is little difference between his dying and my body’s process toward dissolution, except that he was closer to the event.
Snipping three peonies, I place them in a vase without realizing a teaching was arising. Beginning as youthful, tight, blossom balls, its petals thick and overlapping, designed for opening, things changed. A week or more passed before I noticed the petals’ texture thinning like aged skin. Fragile translucence. And an openness that defied gravity, revealing its center looking like the cosmos, if we let our imagination go a bit.
Eventually, the delicate petals fell off one by one, then all at once, scattering on the counter.
I sometimes imagine myself as an aging peony blossom — like this one, gloriously expressive of life as it is, living whatever is happening, and enlivened at the edge of transformation.
