“Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care” by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast

“Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care” (Wisdom Publications, 2016) is a collection of poetry and essays edited by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast, and graced with a foreword by His Holiness the Karmapa. Inspired by his own grandmother’s dying journey, Ellison co-founded the New York Zen Centre for Contemplative Care, which operates based on the contemplative teachings of Zen Buddhism as outlined in this book. As the introduction states, “[t]his book isn’t about dying. It’s about life and what life has to teach us. It’s about caring and what giving care really means.”

“Awake at the Bedside” is an excellent overview of the contemporary history of palliative medicine, suitable for people considering or already working in the helping professions, as well as laypeople who are currently navigating this system as a patient or family of a patient. The book also includes a significant selection of poetry that offers insight into the experiences of people whose bodies are dying. Other topics include applying the Ten Precepts (Buddhist code of personal and collective conduct leading to enlightenment) to contemplative care; encountering the shadow side of one’s personality at the end of life; the nature of suffering and healing; and creating sacred space around death.

Sensei Robert Chodo Campbell and Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, co-founders of the New York Zen Centre for Contemplative Care
(Credit: westchesterbuddhistcenter.org)

Particularly significant essays include “Watch With Me: The Founding of St. Christopher’s Hospice,” written by Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the first modern hospice. She expresses the need to blend family, community and spiritual considerations with end-of-life medical care, as well as the patient-centred care that hospices are becoming known for championing in the medical field. She also speaks of the importance of being a faithful, unattached and compassionate witness to a person’s dying process.

“Awake at the Bedside” offers insight into the inner workings of hospice and palliative medicine as much as it asks readers to cultivate the skillfulness to bear witness to a dying person’s process of taking leave of this world. Other authors offer meditations on the dying process that can be explored by those whose bodies are ill, as well as anyone willing to encounter their mortality with wide open eyes. Some essays challenge readers to ask themselves how they need to shift internally to encounter their own dying time in a peaceful and confident way.

Contemplative care in practice at the New York Zen Centre
(Credit: linkedin.com)

A key recurring theme in this book is the concept that health is more than a medical, empirically measurable status. In Judy Lief’s essay “The Healing Encounter: Meeting One Another in the Space Between,” she writes: “We are all healed. We start out healed: we are fundamentally healed, and we have never been un-healed. Basic healthiness is our fundamental nature. The world heal is not just connected to getting over a disease, it is connected to the word whole… The world heal is also connected to the word holy. So it evokes the recognition of the sacred quality of this precious life.”

For those who are dying, who will die, and who are willing to be faithful witnesses to this whole unavoidable affair, this book is for you. It’s real; it’s raw; it’s clear-sighted; it gives useful tools for the mind and heart; and puts it all into a modern context that is immediately relatable. If you were looking for a steady, knowledgeable and heartfelt companion through a time of groundless and uncertainty, “Awake at the Bedside” will keep you in good stead through those long and sometimes lonely nights of waiting and witnessing.