As a Buddhist we do “contemplation of death” meditation on a regular basis. It involves imagining our last few hours on our deathbed. It is a wonderful exercise to help put things in context. It makes you behave differently towards people you meet, even strangers.
It makes me incredibly sad, and, at the same time it helps me to make better decisions in life. Choosing spending time with him instead of surfing the web for no reason for example.
I find contemplating the absence of others to be much more powerful than my own return back to the void.
Also helpful is the mediation on the 32 parts of the body to help you loosen your attachment.
https://www.imsb.org/contemplating-the-32-parts-of-the-body/
True. In other words you shouldn't do the 32 body parts contemplation if you are not yet ready to drop attachment to life enjoyments.
You don’t need to identify as a Buddhist to come to the conclusion that you are not your body.
The pattern of my mind is physically instantiated (as all the ten thousand things are), and it happens to be so instantiated on a brain. That brain is housed in a body. The pattern can direct the shape and properties of the body only to a limited extent: there are heavy restrictions which happen to constrain the power that pattern (or rather, its particular instantiation on this particular brain) has over the body. (We call these restrictions "biology".) I could no more order my body to become immortal than I could order the ocean waves to stand still: they are both governed by the same laws of physics over which I have almost no control. I could probably make my body immortal by some sufficiently clever manipulation of the world (possibly involving waves hands wildly nanobots), but the brain did not come pre-packaged with high-fidelity fine-grained control over its environment; the pattern can interact with the world only by flapping around bits of meat, and these are a very blunt instrument, highly unsuitable for difficult tasks like "reverse entropy in this region of space".
Personally, in my meditation practice, it was completely transformed and deepened when I began a dedicated asana practice and focused on giving my body what it needs to be strong and in touch with what it is saying.
Not trying to be a jackass. I think this short, sweet, spiritual song about the material world and after is poignant. All the more bittersweet considering the untimely death of the singer.
I think Americans hide from death too much. We try to put boxes around it. I say this as one. I envy cultures where they're more open and public about it. I'l say that New Orleans does something right. They have parade parties when a loved one dies.