Yes, death is the end of a human life. And yet, the longer I contemplate death, the less obvious the boundary becomes where we can confidently say: here life ended, and death began. Where exactly is that point? Is it when the heart stops? When breathing ceases? When consciousness disappears? When the brain can no longer sustain what we call a personality? Or does death begin much earlier? at the moment when the person we have been can no longer continue to exist in the form in which they have existed until now?

Some traditions offer a very different way of looking at death. Death is not a single event. It is a process of dissolution. Beginning of life is a process too... Life is the process... Death is not anything different either... What once seemed solid and permanent gradually begins to come apart. The body loses its capacities. The senses stop connecting us to the familiar world. Our usual reference points disappear. Consciousness passes through successive stages of dissolution until the familiar construction of “I” can no longer hold itself together. But if we look closely, does this process really begin only on the deathbed?

We experience it throughout our entire lives. The child must one day disappear for the adolescent to emerge. The adolescent must cease to exist for the adult to appear. The woman we were at thirty may gradually become impossible at fifty. The body changes. Desires change. Relationships disappear. Families dissolve. Careers end. Beliefs we once built our lives around collapse. Sometimes an entire world disappears, the world in which we knew exactly who we were. And each time, something in us dies.

What is especially interesting is that death often begins long before we are willing to call what is happening a death. A relationship may continue for years after something irreversible has already happened within it. A person may continue going to work long after their former professional life has internally ended. We can continue living in a house that has stopped feeling like home. We can continue carrying a name, a role, a status, an identity that no longer contains the person we have become. The form still exists, but life has already begun to leave it. 

After that, a person may spend a very long time between worlds. And here we encounter one of the central concepts of the Tibetan tradition: bardo. The word is commonly associated with the state between death and rebirth, but Tibetan teachings use it more broadly. Bardo is an interval, a transition, a state between one mode of existence and another. And suddenly it becomes clear why The Tibetan Book of the Dead can be read as a book not only about the dead. It is also a book about us, because so much of human life is lived in bardo.

The old has already died, but the new has not yet been born. We are no longer who we were, but we do not yet know who we are becoming. The old identity has dissolved, while the new one has not yet taken form. These are often the states we find most difficult to endure because the mind demands certainty. It wants a name. Who am I? Where am I going? What happens next? How am I supposed to live now?

And so we often try to resurrect what has already died. We try to return a relationship to what it used to be. We try to recover an earlier version of ourselves. We attempt to revive old desires and force an old life to work again. Yet some doors close because the transition has already happened. From this perspective, the art of dying is, to a great extent, the art of recognizing irreversibility: seeing the moment when an old form has exhausted itself, refusing to cling to it, refusing to mistake dissolution for catastrophe, refusing to demand the immediate birth of something new.... and learning to remain in the space between.

In descriptions of the post-death bardo, consciousness encounters experiences it may fail to recognize. Fear, attachment, and habitual tendencies pull it toward what is familiar. The ability to recognize what is happening becomes crucial. And here an extraordinary parallel with ordinary life appears. We, too, repeatedly find ourselves facing the unknown, and repeatedly attempt to turn it back into something familiar. We return to old relationships. We repeat old reactions. We choose familiar pain over unfamiliar freedom. We build a new life out of the material of the old one because uncertainty can feel more frightening than suffering we already know how to survive.

The Tibetan perspective adds another essential layer to this: karma. Karma is not simply punishment or reward for our actions. It also refers to the momentum of habitual tendencies, the directions in which consciousness has learned to move, what it habitually reaches toward, what it habitually fears, what it chooses again and again almost automatically. This means that transition itself does not necessarily liberate us. We can lose an old form of life and create almost exactly the same one again. We can leave one relationship and enter the same relationship with another person. We can change countries, careers, partners, spiritual traditions, and continue living within exactly the same structure of consciousness. The form died. The pattern survived. And another cycle begins.

This is why the practice of death in the Tibetan tradition is simultaneously a practice of life: learning to recognize our own clinging before the final death arrives. Something disappears every day. Every inhalation ends in an exhalation. Every moment arises and immediately becomes something that can never return in precisely the same form. Our bodies are continuously changing. Cells die. Memories are rewritten. People enter our lives and leave them. The world in which we woke this morning is already slightly different by evening, and the person who goes to sleep tonight is no longer exactly the person who opened their eyes this morning.

Seen this way, death stops being the opposite of life. It becomes one of its fundamental processes. Life continues because forms are capable of ending. A seed must cease to be a seed for a sprout to emerge. The sprout must disappear as a sprout in order to become a tree. A flower must wither for fruit to form. Every new form becomes possible through the disappearance of the one that came before it.

Then... the question is not only when will I die? There are other questions that may be far more important while we are still alive: What in me has already died, while I continue trying to keep it alive? What version of myself has become impossible? What future no longer exists? What relationships, roles, beliefs, or dreams continue only because I am afraid to acknowledge that they have ended? What bardo am I in right now, and what am I standing between?

And there is another question: can I resist the urge to immediately become someone else? Because between death and birth there is a space. Emptiness. Uncertainty. Silence. It is precisely this space that we so often try to escape. Yet... the deepest initiation begins when a person becomes capable of remaining there, without returning to what has already died and without prematurely creating what comes next.

Then death becomes a teacher. It teaches us to see impermanence not as a philosophical idea, but as the very structure of reality. Everything that arises will change. Everything that takes form will eventually lose that form. Everything we call “I” is also in motion. Preparation for death, then, does not begin in the final days of life. It begins now... every time we allow something to end, every time we recognize what has become irreversible, every time we stop holding onto a form from which life has already departed, and every time we find ourselves between the old and the new and are able, for a while, not to know who we are anymore.

This is how, throughout our entire lives, we practice for the one transition that someday can no longer be postponed. And then the central question of death becomes the central question of life as well:

When the transition begins, will I recognize it? and will I be able to release what has already ended?

And the wheel turned again these days... will I repeat the same karmic circle? or I will go into something new? will you?