Coping Without Heaven
Artwork: Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601–02)
Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas has long fascinated me because of the way it honors the body as a site of truth. Thomas does not accept explanations from a distance; he reaches forward, placing his hand directly into the wound. Caravaggio paints this gesture with surgical precision showing the finger pushing into the flesh, the visceral immediacy of contact, the shocked attention of the disciples around him. The painting stages a simple conviction: understanding comes through presence, not abstraction.
Over the past two weeks, as my grandmother’s health has declined and the rhythms of hospice have become the cadence of our days, I’ve been told variations of the same sentence by well-meaning people: “I don’t know how people cope with this without faith.” A nurse’s aide said it while adjusting my grandmother’s blankets. A pastor visiting her room said it with a kind of gentle disbelief, as if he were asking a sincere question. Each time, the assumption was clear: without heaven, death must be a void; without an afterlife, grief must be unmoored; without a supernatural story, I must feel lost.
But I do not feel lost. I feel present.
The experience of staying with my grandmother, of sleeping in the living room, listening for her breathing, watching her hands move restlessly through the dark, has grounded me more deeply than any promise of transcendence could. What anchors me is not belief in another world but attention to this one: her breath, her warmth, her slow withdrawal from time. In this space, my lack of faith is not a deficit but a form of intimacy. It keeps me close to what is real in the moment. It keeps me close to her.
Montaigne famously wrote, “To philosophize is to learn to die.” His point was not that philosophy makes death easier, but that paying attention to the nature of life inevitably reveals the nature of death. For me, that attention is not theoretical; it is lived in the folds of each day. The stillness of my grandmother’s body at rest, the slight rise and fall of her chest, the way her sense of time has dissolved. For me, these are not signs of abandonment by a divine presence. They are signs of the body’s intelligence as it releases its hold on the world.
Caravaggio’s Thomas needs to touch the wound to understand it. I find myself drawn to that same instinct: not to recoil from the reality of dying, but to meet it directly. To place my attention inside the experience rather than stand at a distance, guarded by metaphysical assurances. Heidegger suggested that taking death “into my life, acknowledging it, and facing it squarely” frees a person from the anxiety surrounding it. I understand this now in a way I never have before.
The vigil I keep at my grandmother’s bedside is not sustained by belief in what awaits her, but by reverence for what is happening to her now. The science of dying—the slow metabolic downshift, the neurological retreat, the irregularity of breath—does not diminish the meaning of the moment. It deepens it. It gives me a way to witness her final days without needing to escape into certainty. Meaning, as Nagel reminds us, “does not require eternity.” It requires attention.
Caravaggio shows Christ guiding Thomas’s hand as if saying: Look closely. Feel what is here. Do not fear understanding. My own coping grows from that same impulse. I am not lost without heaven; I am oriented toward the truth of the body, the truth of impermanence, the truth of love expressed through presence. In this way, doubt is not a wound but a way of touching what is real.
The Body’s Final Intelligence
Artwork: Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632)
Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson is a painting about knowledge. It is a painting about the human impulse to understand the body not as a divine mystery but as a material reality with its own logic. The surgical precision of Dr. Tulp’s gesture, the students leaning in as if the body itself were a text. It is a vision of human inquiry that feels deeply familiar to me in these weeks of hospice care. For even though my grandmother is not lying on a dissection table, I find myself studying her with the same attentive seriousness. Not clinically, but reverently. As if the body has something to teach in its final days, if only I am willing to watch.
Dying, I am learning, is not an abrupt event but a sequence, a choreography the body performs with ancient intelligence. It begins subtly: the need for sleep growing heavier, conversations becoming shorter, appetite fading into mere sips of water. These are not signs of collapse; they are signs of reprioritization. The body is conserving its limited energy for its most essential work. The unnecessary functions fall away. The center holds.
Byock observed that, “dying is not a failure of the body but its last display of adaptability.” That sentence has stayed with me because it reframes what we fear as decline into something more akin to a final act of coherence. My grandmother now sleeps nearly twenty hours a day. At first, this frightened me, as if each hour of unconsciousness marked another step away from the world. But I’ve come to see sleep as the body’s sanctuary, its way of turning inward, protecting itself from sensory overload as it prepares to let go.
The irregular breathing that once made me sit upright at night is now part of the rhythm I recognize. Sometimes her breath pauses—five seconds, ten—and then resumes with a ragged inhale. This is the Cheyne–Stokes pattern described in hospice literature: the neurological centers responsible for breathing begin to misfire, creating a wave-like pattern of respiration. In the moment, it can feel like a cliff edge, each pause holding the question of finality. Yet it is also utterly natural. It is the body’s final metronome, marking the slow withdrawal of life.
Her hands, so restless at night, moving against the sheets or reaching into the air, are another part of this pattern. What looks like agitation is often the nervous system’s way of releasing control of fine motor coordination. The movements may appear random, but they are part of the same biological coherence, the body letting go of precision as it prepares for stillness.
In these moments, I think of Rembrandt’s students huddled around the cadaver, each face illuminated by their desire to understand. They lean toward the open arm not out of morbid fascination but out of respect for the body’s inner architecture. I find myself leaning toward my grandmother in the same spirit. Her dying is not a puzzle to solve, but it is a process I can witness with clarity. Understanding becomes a form of love.
Einstein wrote, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,” but the mystery he meant was not the supernatural. It was the mystery inherent in the natural world. He meant the complexity that reveals itself when we look closely. And that is what these days feel like: a deep study in the mystery of the body, not to unravel it but to honor the precision with which it knows how to conclude.
When I watch my grandmother breathe, or sleep, or drift into silence, I do not feel abandoned by meaning. I feel invited into it. The body does not need heaven to be dignified. It carries its own wisdom in every declining function, every irregular breath, every retreat from the waking world. My role is simply to pay attention, to sit beside her as Rembrandt’s students did beside the opened arm: with humility, curiosity, and respect for what the body knows.
The Mind’s Retreat
Artwork: Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window (1822)
Friedrich’s Woman at a Window has always felt like a painting of inwardness. The figure stands before an open world—river, sky, distant ship—yet her posture curves gently toward the interior. Her body faces the light, but her consciousness is directed elsewhere. We do not see her face, and perhaps that is the point: she is present and withdrawn at the same time. She occupies a threshold space, part observation and part disappearance.
This is the image that comes to mind when I think about the psychological stages of dying. Not the well-known five stages of grief, but the quieter, less discussed cognitive transitions the dying person moves through. I see this in my grandmother each day. As her body slows, her mind turns inward. Her sense of time has dissolved. Morning and evening blend together. Conversations begin but do not need to finish. The external world—television, visitors, sunlight—drifts toward the periphery. What remains is an interior life that grows more spacious as her connection to the present moment loosens.
Kübler-Ross and Kessler note that “consciousness dims not as an erasure but as a turning inward.” This inward turn is not confusion in the pathological sense; it is the psyche’s natural process of retreating from external stimuli that are no longer essential. It is as if the mind begins closing its windows one by one, letting fewer impressions in, conserving its remaining energy for the quiet work of detachment.
Watching this unfold is both tender and unsettling. I sit next to my grandmother and see her eyes drift past the room, focusing on something beyond our shared environment. She might ask what time it is, then forget the question as soon as she asks it. She sleeps, wakes briefly, looks around, and goes back to sleep. Time for her is no longer sequential; it has become tidal. Presence comes in waves, unpredictable yet strangely peaceful.
In this, I am reminded of Friedrich’s figure looking out toward the horizon. The world is still there—the ship approaching, the river in motion—but her gaze does not engage its details. She is seeing through it rather than into it. My grandmother, too, seems to inhabit a perceptual threshold where the external world is still technically available but no longer central. Her priorities have shifted. Awareness has become diffuse. The once-sharp edges of cognitive engagement now soften like the gentle light in Friedrich’s painting.
There is beauty in this softening. It is not the beauty of vitality, but the beauty of release. The Beauty of the mind loosening its grip on the demands of orientation and coherence. Halifax describes this stage as a “psychological transition,” a shift toward symbolic and interior modes of awareness. The dying person may speak in metaphor, remember stories from decades ago, or simply drift into a silence that feels full rather than empty.
For my grandmother, this means she sometimes murmurs names or phrases that make sense only to her. She reaches for objects that are not physically present. She stares at the ceiling as though watching something unfold above her. In these moments, the boundary between memory and perception blurs. And yet, there is no fear in her expression, only a gentle absorption in whatever her mind is attending to.
This psychological retreat is often more challenging for the family than for the dying person. We want to anchor her back into the world. We want bring her back into our timeline, our conversations, our need for dialogue. But the mind’s retreat is not an abandonment; it is a recalibration. It is Friedrich’s woman turning away from the world outside the window, not out of loss or confusion, but because her attention is drawn to the inner landscape that now holds greater meaning.
Sitting with her, I realize that this inward drift is part of the body’s final intelligence as well. Just as metabolism slows and breath becomes irregular, consciousness also adapts, conserving itself. The mind knows how to die. And my task is not to resist that retreat but to accompany it with gentleness, recognizing that the horizon she looks toward is not a place but a gradual dissolution of the need for place.
In this way, the psychological process of dying mirrors Friedrich’s solitary figure: poised between presence and departure, looking toward a world we cannot see.
The Aesthetics of Vigil
Artwork: James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871)
Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 is less a portrait than an atmosphere. The composition is disciplined, stripped of ornament, almost severe in its restraint. A woman sits in profile, her posture composed, her dress a field of muted tones. The room around her is pared down to essentials—curtain, frame, wall, floor—each rendered in a narrow register of greys and blacks. The painting vibrates not with emotion but with attention. It is an image of waiting, of presence held within quiet limitation.
This is the aesthetic vocabulary of the vigil.
In these weeks of hospitals and hospice, I have found myself living inside a similar palette. Days and nights blend into tones of grey—softer in the day, darker at night—but all muted, subdued, deliberate. The world narrows to the interior of my grandmother’s home. The furniture we’ve known for decades, the hall light left on at night, the shadows cast by an unfamiliar arrangement of a familiar place. I sleep in the living room, the couch now a kind of watchtower. My ears stay half-awake, listening for changes in her breathing, the soft shuffle of her restless hands, the small sighs that drift through the dark.
There is an aesthetic quality to this waiting. Not romantic, not sentimental, but structured, patterned, composed. The vigil has its own architecture.
Whistler understood how to make silence visible. The slight tilt of the sitter’s head, the downward gaze, the stillness of her hands resting in her lap all communicate a sustained discipline of attention. Watching my grandmother, I recognize a similar posture in myself. The long moments of stillness, the way my body leans forward when her breath catches or pauses, the way I hold my own breathing in response. It is as if presence itself becomes an art form.
Simone Weil once wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It's a quote I think of often. Sitting with my grandmother, I feel the weight of that truth. The vigil is not active work; it is receptive work. It is the discipline of staying, noticing, offering one’s attention without expectation of dialogue or outcome. It is generosity as presence.
The irregular breathing at night becomes a kind of time signature. Her breaths lengthen, shorten, pause. They form a rhythm I’ve come to memorize, like a quiet musical score. There are periods of near silence—a long exhale, no inhale—and then a sudden return, a fragile recommitment to life. These breaths shape the hours, marking the passage of time more accurately than the clock on the wall.
Her hands, especially at night, move through the air with unconscious intention. They brush the blanket, pick at invisible threads, reach toward something beyond touch. These gestures remind me of the slight shifts in Whistler’s composition: the faint movement of cloth, the way the curtain just grazes the edge of the frame. Small disturbances within a field of stillness. I have come to see her restless hands not as agitation but as part of the body’s quiet estrangement from coordination. They are the final gestures of a nervous system loosening its grasp.
The vigil is a liminal space. It exists between action and stillness, day and night, presence and absence. It is emotionally saturated yet visually austere. Much like Whistler’s painting, it asks the viewer to sit with restraint, to seek meaning not in expression but in the disciplined quiet of the scene.
What has surprised me most is the subtle beauty in this quietness. Not beauty in the sense of comfort, but beauty in the coherence of it. In the the way the patterns of sleep, breath, and silence form a kind of composition. The dying body produces a rhythm, and those of us who sit beside it learn to move to its tempo. The vigil becomes an arrangement in grey and black, an art of paying attention to the subtle transitions of the body as it recedes from the world.
In this space, my naturalism feels like a kind of artistic lens. I do not need heaven to justify these moments. The meaning arises in the witnessing itself. The meaning arises in the muted tones of the room, the quiet discipline of care, the shared silence between breaths. The vigil is not a waiting for the supernatural. It is an attendance to the realness of the moment.
Art as Anatomical Metaphor
Artwork: Henri Matisse, Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg (1914)
When I look at Matisse’s Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg, I see a portrait not of a woman but of a state of being. Her face appears almost mask-like—smooth, flattened, with minimal modeling—as if the contours of individuality have softened into a more archetypal form. The palette is muted, nearly drained of chromatic intensity. Lines encircle her like currents or a faint halo, neither fully abstract nor fully representational. She seems suspended, porous, half in this world and half in another. It is an image uncannily aligned with the process of dying.
What strikes me most is the graying. The cool, desaturated tones replacing the warmth of living skin. In physiological terms, the dying body often exhibits a similar palette shift: mottling at the extremities, a cooling of the hands and feet, a gradual fading of the complexion. The vibrancy of life recedes, not abruptly but by degrees. Matisse captures this not through morbidity but through formal restraint. The colors dim. The lines thin. The world simplifies. The painting is a portrait of transition.
Her face, so smooth and expressionless, resembles what some hospice workers call “the mask of death.” Not a literal mask, but the way the features relax into a serene, emptied expression as consciousness drifts away from the external world. This is the neurological quieting of the face, the release of muscular tension as speech, appetite, and wakefulness diminish. Matisse, in paring the portrait down to essential lines and muted tones, mirrors this process with uncanny sensitivity.
Flam wrote that Matisse sought to “reveal not likeness but presence.” Presence is exactly what remains in the final days of life, even as identity—the accumulated habits, preferences, and expressions—begins to dissolve. With my grandmother, I see this in the way her face softens during sleep, the way her eyes open without focus, the way she sometimes looks past us rather than at us. She is present, but the presence is abstracted. She is here, and also moving through a landscape we cannot see.
The swirling lines behind Yvonne Landsberg’s head read almost as an aura. I see in them a visual echo of the inner world that becomes more vivid as the outer world recedes. In the psychology of dying, this inner world can include symbolic imagery, memories from long ago, or a sense of being accompanied by figures unseen by others. These experiences are not hallucinations; they are the psyche’s natural language as it transitions away from linear time and external orientation. Halifax describes this as “the symbolic vocabulary of threshold consciousness.” Matisse’s curvilinear marks trace this interiority with remarkable delicacy.
There is also something faintly angelic about the portrait that I love. Not completely in a religious sense, but in the way the figure seems lifted from the ordinary, rendered in a purity of line that suggests lightness, suspension, an unburdening of earthly weight. This corresponds with what I see in my grandmother’s final days: the gradual release of responsibilities, roles, anxieties, and attachments. The dying person becomes lighter, not physically but psychologically, shedding the layers of daily life. Their world contracts, but their interiority expands.
Matisse once wrote, “I do not paint things; I only paint the difference between things.” The difference between life and death—the subtle threshold where one becomes the other—is exactly what this portrait captures. The sitter is not portrayed as dying, yet the visual qualities of the work align with the phenomenology of death: muted colors, softened form, inward gaze, liminal space.
Watching my grandmother, I feel as though I am seeing a living version of this portrait unfold. Her features have quieted into a similar stillness. Her gaze is directed inward. The vibrancy of her presence has become distilled, reduced to essentials. She is less a character in the story of our family and more a figure moving toward abstraction. Moving toward a state where identity becomes memory.
In this way, Matisse becomes not just an artist but a guide, a cartographer of the threshold. His portrait teaches me how to see the dying process not as disappearance but as transformation, a passage from the detailed to the essential, from the chromatic to the tonal, from the expressive to the serene. It offers an image of death that aligns with my own experience of this moment: grounded, perceptible, quiet, and profoundly human.
The Myth That Nonbelievers Cannot Cope
Artwork: Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98)
Gauguin’s triptych Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? unfolds like a human life stretched across a single, panoramic field. The three clusters of figures represent birth, existence, and the approach of death. It does so not with narrative clarity, but through symbolic gestures and luminous, dreamlike color. The painting is a meditation on the very questions people often pose at the edges of life, especially when confronted with mortality.
Over the past weeks, as my grandmother’s health has declined, I’ve encountered a quiet but persistent assumption from several people: that without belief in heaven, I must be unmoored in the face of death. A service worker at the hospital said it gently, almost compassionately: “I don’t know how people without faith do this.” A pastor said it with sympathetic bewilderment, as though my nonbelief were an added suffering on top of grief. And in passing, those who pray with her assuming what waits beyond the veil for us all. Each time, the implication was the same: without a supernatural narrative to hold onto, death should feel like a void.
But death does not feel like a void to me. It feels like a fundamental truth.
Gauguin painted his triptych in the midst of despair, illness, and spiritual crisis, yet the work does not portray a universe governed by divine intervention. Instead, it presents a world held together by continuity, relationship, and presence. The painting asks its grand metaphysical questions, but it offers no doctrinal answers. The figures move through life’s stages not with certainty but with dignity. That is the space I inhabit: a worldview that allows for meaning without requiring metaphysical scaffolding.
As I've experienced, many people assume that without an afterlife, the experience of sitting with a dying loved one must be unbearable. But what I’ve found is the opposite. My naturalism grounds me in the reality of these moments. Without the promise of eternity, I am more attuned to the finite beauty of each breath, each shift in her posture, each day she is still with us. I do not defer meaning to a later realm; meaning is here, in the softness of her hands, in the cadence of her breathing, in the hours we share in the dimly lit room.
Philosopher Bernard Williams argued that “life’s transience is a condition of its value.” If we lived forever, nothing would matter as much. There would be no urgency, no tenderness born of impermanence, no need to hold these final days with such care. The very finitude of life intensifies its significance. This is what sustains me: not the denial of death, but the clarity that comes from facing it without illusion.
Gauguin’s figures at the far right of the painting, the cluster representing old age and the approach of death, are not depicted in torment. They are contemplative, introspective, grounded. One figure touches her head in a gesture that might suggest worry or wonder; another sits quietly, gazing toward something just outside the canvas. They are not reaching toward the heavens. They are attending to the reality of their condition. This is the posture I recognize in myself: the willingness to meet death with open eyes.
The comments I receive about faith are rarely malicious. They are projections. Confessions of how unimaginable death feels to those who rely on metaphysical narratives for comfort. “You must be so lost without the hope of heaven,” one person said to me. But I am not lost. I am here, watching the body’s final intelligence unfold. I find comfort not in supernatural promises but in the coherence of the world as it presents itself. In the way the body knows how to turn inward, how to conserve itself, how to let go.
Nagel reminds us that “meaning does not require eternity.” Meaning requires presence. And I have never been more present than in these days of vigil. My grounding comes from understanding what is happening biologically, psychologically, emotionally. It comes from bearing witness to the process rather than transcending it. It comes from loving someone through their final days without needing to imagine another, future, realm to give that love significance.
Gauguin’s triptych ends not with an answer but with an image: a figure standing in quiet contemplation beneath a tree, framed by deep blues and yellows. She is neither triumphant nor defeated. She is simply aware. That is how I understand death. Not as a doorway to a promised world, but as a continuation of the same natural processes that have governed life from the beginning. A final shift in the cycle.
What some interpret as a crisis of meaning, I experience as an invitation to clarity. I do not cope “without faith.” I cope through understanding, presence, and attention. These are not lesser forms of comfort. They are, for me, the most honest ones I have to offer.
Family, Grief, and the Shared Vigil
Artwork: Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child (1903)
Käthe Kollwitz’s Woman with Dead Child is almost unbearable to look at. It is not a scene of theatrical weeping or stylized lamentation. Instead, Kollwitz renders grief as a physical entanglement: the mother folding herself wholly around the limp body of her child, their forms pressed together with a force that is both protective and devastated. The etching captures something essential about relational mourning: grief is never abstract. It is embodied. It is contact. It is the collapse of distance between two lives at the moment one begins to slip away.
In these past days, as my grandmother drifts through the final stages of life, I have come to understand grief not as an event after death but as a presence during dying. Worden writes, “Grief begins the moment we are aware of loss, not the moment loss occurs.” This anticipatory grief moves through the house like a quiet weather system, shifting moment to moment depending on who is awake, who is resting, who is sitting at her bedside.
The vigil is not mine alone. It is shared across generations. My mother sleeps in the back room but is never truly asleep. Each sound pulls her up into a state of alertness. She has stepped into the role of caregiver and I see in her a mixture of exhaustion, tenderness, and something like duty shaped by love. Sometimes she apologizes for being tired, as if fatigue were a moral failing. But what she is doing is beyond simple caregiving; it is a return, a completion of the caregiving cycle she once lived as a daughter and was denied when her own parents died.
My father and brother rotate through the daylight hours. They each shoulder the emotional weight in their own way. My father through quiet steadiness and practical action. His love taking on the form of action and a need to fix. My brother through acts of service: showing up with breakfast, taking care of my grandmother's dog Otto, regular check-in's with me to make sure I'm ok. There is no single posture of grief. Kollwitz understood this: the mother in her etching does not grieve as a universal symbol, but as a specific woman whose sorrow is bound to the shape and weight of her particular child. Our grief is bound to my grandmother: her voice, her gestures, her past stories, her softness, her presence in the family’s long history.
What strikes me most is how relational grief rearranges the emotional architecture of a household. Time becomes communal. Responsibility becomes shared. We are all orbiting around my grandmother, each occupying a role that is both old and newly shaped by the situation. I sleep in the living room, not because it is convenient, but because it feels necessary to stay close. My brother and father step in so my mother and I can rest. Meals, conversations, and even brief moments of laughter have a different texture in these moments of bereavement: lighter, more fragile, but also more meaningful.
There is a moment in Kollwitz’s etching where the mother’s hand presses into the child’s back with an intensity that seems to say: I cannot keep you, but I will hold you until the last possible moment. This is the essence of relational grief during dying. It is the desire to hold on and the knowledge that holding on is no longer possible. The hands that once comforted now become anchors for a body preparing to let go.
With my grandmother, I feel this deeply. I hold her hand and feel its slightest movements, the subtle changes in warmth, the way her fingers sometimes curl and uncurl. I can feel the thinness of her skin, once so strong. These gestures are small, almost imperceptible, yet they carry emotional weight. They are signals in the larger choreography of decline. And by witnessing them, I am participating in her final transition.
What surprises me is how grief and love exist simultaneously. Neither canceling the other, both intensifying the experience of the vigil. This duality is present in Kollwitz’s work as well. The mother’s grief does not diminish her love; it reveals its depth. Similarly, our grief as a family does not overshadow the tenderness of these days. It clarifies it. We are grieving because we love her, and we are loving her because she is still here.
In this way, the vigil becomes a communal act of care. It is not heroic or dramatic. It is made up of countless small gestures: adjusting blankets, checking breathing, brushing hair from her forehead before planting a kiss, whispering reassurance even when she cannot respond. These acts are not religious ritual, but they carry ritualistic weight. They bind us together. They mark the passage of time. They help us orient ourselves within the slow, tidal movements of decline.
Kollwitz reminds me that grief is not something that happens after death. It happens in the holding, in the folding of one body around another, in the shared weight of love expressed through presence. In this house, we are all holding her in our own way. We hold not to prevent the inevitable, but to accompany her through it.
Compassion as the Grammar of Dying
Artwork: Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin), Bodhisattva of Compassion, Water-Moon Form, 11th–12th c., Chinese
The Water-Moon Avalokiteśvara sits in a posture known as “royal ease”: one knee drawn upward, the other leg relaxed, an arm draped effortlessly over the raised knee. The figure leans slightly, as if listening, yet the expression is composed, inward, soft. The body seems to rest and attend at the same time, like someone keeping vigil beside a bed. In Buddhist traditions, Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin) is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the one who hears the cries of the world. He does not intervene with miracle or judgment. He accompanies. His power lies not in altering fate but in witnessing suffering without turning away.
This, I’ve come to realize, is the closest analogue to the kind of ritual that has emerged in my grandmother’s final days. Not religious ritual, not promises of heaven or prayers for salvation, but the ritual of compassionate presence. The quiet choreography of small acts that honor the transitions of the body.
In Buddhist thought, Avalokiteśvara’s mantra is Om Mani Padme Hum. It is often rendered as “the jewel in the lotus,” though its meanings are layered and elusive. For those who recite it, the mantra is not magic. It is a rhythm. A sound through which the mind steadies itself. A vibration of compassion offered outward into the world. In my Religious, Not Spiritual framework, the mantra becomes something else entirely: an example of how humans use sound, pattern, and repetition to orient themselves in the presence of suffering. A human technology of attention.
The vigil around my grandmother has its own mantra, its own cadence, though none of us speak it aloud. Instead, the pattern emerges in action:
The gentle closing of the blinds in the evening.
The hall light left on through the night.
The careful repositioning of her body to ease her back pain.
The moistening of her lips when they dry.
The quiet hum of my brother making coffee in the next room.
My mother’s hand tenderly brushing hair back from her forehead.
My father stepping softly into the room to check on his mother.
My own hours on the living room couch, half-asleep, listening for the shifts in her breathing at night until exhaustion takes me.
These gestures form a liturgy, a ritual not of belief but of care. Every movement is deliberate, attentive. Not to alter the outcome, but to accompany her through it. In this sense, Avalokiteśvara’s role as the Bodhisattva of Compassion mirrors our own: we cannot change suffering or death, but we can remain present to it. We can lean toward its reality with the same calm, listening posture carved into this wooden sculpture a thousand years ago.
The Water-Moon form of Guanyin often depicts the bodhisattva gazing into a reflective surface—water or moonlight—symbols of impermanence, transition, and clarity. This reflective quality speaks to the inner life of the dying. My grandmother, drifting through long stretches of sleep and brief moments of wakefulness, seems to inhabit a reflective world of her own. Her consciousness dims not in fear but in interiority. She murmurs names from long ago, reaches subtly into the air, sees things we cannot see. The sculpture’s soft inward gaze captures this inwardness without invoking the supernatural. It is a state of mind the body produces as it withdraws from the demands of the external world.
In traditions rooted in Avalokiteśvara, rituals of dying are grounded in compassion rather than metaphysics. What matters is not a doctrine of the afterlife or next life, but the presence of those who remain. In my own understanding, I find this deeply resonant. I do not need faith in heaven to feel the gravity of these moments. Meaning arises through attention, through the small gestures offered hour after hour, through the willingness to sit in silence, through the work of simply being with someone as they approach the threshold.
If Om Mani Padme Hum means anything to me now, it is this:
May compassion arise in the center of the human heart.
Not as a spiritual attainment.
Not as salvation.
But as a way of being with another person in their final days, a steady presence that acknowledges the dignity of their decline.
Ritual, in this light, is not supernatural. It is profoundly human. It emerges from vulnerability, from tenderness, from the recognition that love is expressed not in grand gestures but in the quiet repetition of care. Like the bodhisattva carved in wood and pigment, we are not here to save. We are here to witness. To listen. To remain.
And in this posture—alert, gentle, open—we discover that presence itself is the most sacred offering we can make.
A Field of Becoming
Artwork: Mark Rothko, No. 14 (White and Greens on Blue) (1957)
Standing before a Rothko is an immersive experience. It is one that dissolves the distinction between viewer and painting. In No. 14 (White and Greens on Blue), large planes of color hover, drift, and overlap, creating a field that is both luminous and opaque. Edges blur; forms soften; boundaries dissolve. It is less an image than an atmosphere, an encounter with a state in which perception becomes a form of feeling.
This is the aesthetic that most closely mirrors the final days of dying: a shift away from the concrete and particular toward something more diffuse, more spacious, more abstract.
When my grandmother sleeps now, nearly twenty hours a day, she seems suspended in a Rothko-like field. Her consciousness is no longer anchored in linear time or external detail. She floats in a soft dissolution: eyes half open, drifting, the boundaries between waking and sleeping indistinct. The world around her, our conversations, the sound of the refrigerator humming, the movements of people from room to room, becomes background. She occupies a space of quiet interiority.
Rothko once said, “Silence is so accurate.” In the context of dying, silence becomes more than accurate, it becomes expressive. It carries presence, tension, tenderness. It makes the smallest sounds—the shift of blankets, the uneven rhythm of breath—resonate with profound significance. Silence becomes the medium through which dying communicates.
Color field painting, for Rothko, was a way of expressing the human condition without resorting to narrative or symbolism. His works confront the viewer with elemental emotional states—fear, awe, sorrow, transcendence—through pure form. In these final days, my grandmother’s presence communicates in a similar language. She no longer speaks consistently. She does not always respond to direct questions. But her body speaks in other ways: the depth of a sigh, the stillness between breaths, the gentle motion of her fingers. These gestures are elemental, stripped of the complexities of personality, distilled into the basic expression of being.
Watching her, I see how dying is not the opposite of living but a different mode of it. How it is a soft unmaking of form. The edges of identity fade. The sharpness of memory blurs. The need for orientation dissolves. Experience shifts from narrative to atmosphere, from chronological to tidal. Her presence becomes less a story and more a field: a gentle, fluctuating plane of breath, warmth, and silence.
Rothko’s color fields were also spaces of encounter. They draw you in, hold you, require you to stand still long enough for the subtle shifts of color and light to register. They are meditations disguised as paintings. Sitting beside my grandmother, I experience something similar: time slows. My breathing instinctively syncs with hers. The room becomes a studio of quiet attentiveness. I am not thinking in sentences or arguments. I am attending, feeling, witnessing.
This abstraction is not emptiness. It is fullness without form.
Some would interpret this dissolution as evidence of the supernatural. As souls slipping free, consciousness reaching beyond the body. But for me, this dissolution is simply the body and mind releasing their grip on the structures that once held a person in a defined shape. It is not transcendence; it is transition. Not disappearance; diffusion.
The threshold of dying is not a doorway but a gradient.
The colors in No. 14 do not end abruptly, they fade, bleed, and merge. That is how life leaves the body: not as a single event but as a gradual blending of presence into quiet. Each breath is a soft boundary between being here and letting go. The long pauses in her breathing do not feel like absences. Instead, they feel like the edges of a Rothko rectangle: diffused, uncertain, softened by intention and time.
Rothko’s canvases stand as reminders that the essential truths of human experience are not always found in detail, but in atmosphere. In the dying process, the person becomes less defined by identity and more by presence. Less by story, more by the quality of their silence. Less by what they say, more by the field of emotion they generate.
To sit with someone in this state is to enter the painting with them. It is to inhabit the same field, to feel its gradients of emotion, to hold still long enough for the subtle shifts to register. It is not mystical. It is deeply human.
The threshold is not a line. It is a color field. It is soft, luminous, dissolving.
The Meaning Found in the Natural Process of Dying
Artwork: Georgia O’Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree (1929)
Georgia O’Keeffe’s The Lawrence Tree invites the viewer to lie beneath a towering ponderosa pine and look upward into the night. The branches stretch across the canvas like a cathedral of limbs, illuminated by starlight. The perspective is disorienting at first. Not because it is surreal, but because it asks us to shift our position from standing to resting, from looking out to looking up. In that reclined vantage point, the world feels larger, more intimate, and more continuous all at the same time. The painting dissolves the boundary between the viewer and the sky; it suggests that meaning comes not from transcendence but from orientation. From where we place ourselves in relation to the world around us.
In these last weeks with my grandmother, I have found myself shifting perspective in a similar way. The experience of dying, especially when witnessed up close, reorients the emotional and philosophical landscape of one’s life. It dissolves the illusion that meaning must be rooted in the promise of another world. Instead, like O’Keeffe’s tree, it opens into the vastness of this one.
Sitting beside my grandmother’s bed, listening to the irregular patterns of her breath, I have learned that naturalism is not a deficit in the face of death. It is a grounding. It anchors me to the truth of the body, the intimacy of the vigil, and the reality that life’s value is intensified by its impermanence. Lucretius wrote, “Everything is change; nothing is lost.” I understand that now in a way I never have before. Her body is changing, her consciousness withdrawing, her presence softening but nothing of her is erased. She is becoming memory, becoming story, becoming the quiet gravity that will shape our family long after her final breath just as those who have passed before her do so now.
The vigil has taught me that meaning does not require eternity. It requires attention. The discipline of Whistler’s grey-toned compositions. The inward gaze of Friedrich’s solitary figure. The ritual stillness of the bodhisattva. The dissolution of Rothko’s color fields. The mask-like serenity of Matisse’s portrait. Each artwork in this gallery of last days has offered a different perspective on the same truth: dying is not a rupture in the natural order but an extension of it.
The beauty of O’Keeffe’s night sky lies in its continuity. The tree reaches upward, but its roots anchor it to the earth. My grandmother’s life has been like that: rooted deeply in the soil of our family, reaching upward through every story she told, every moment she nurtured, every quiet presence she offered. Even now, in her final days, her presence structures the emotional space of our home. We move around her like branches around a central trunk. Her decline does not diminish that structure; it reveals it.
I do not believe she is leaving for another realm. I do not believe she is stepping into a supernatural eternity. What I believe is that she is completing a natural cycle. It is the same cycle that governs the life of a tree, the flow of a river, the turning of seasons, and my own life. Her body is letting go the way all bodies do, with a kind of choreography that is both precise and mysterious. The meaning of her life is not contingent on what comes after. It is contained in the decades she spent loving, guiding, and shaping the people around her.
Susan Sontag wrote, “We love the world enough to leave it.” I think of that line now. My grandmother’s leaving is an act of the same world she loved: a world of roses, of Sunday dinners, of stories told at kitchen tables, of small kindnesses offered without fanfare to young people she never met. Her dying is not an interruption of that world but its final expression. The love she gave us makes this ending bearable, even as it breaks our hearts.
As I lie awake at night in the living room with her at my side, the glow of the hall light casting shadows across the wall, I find myself thinking of O’Keeffe’s perspective. Of looking upward through the branches into the vast, quiet sky. Death, seen through through this lens, is not a fall but a return. A release. A shift in form, not in essence. The tree remains rooted even as its branches extend into darkness.
My grandmother’s life remains rooted in us. And as she moves toward the threshold, I understand that nothing of her love, her stories, her gestures, her imprint on our lives, is lost. It becomes part of the larger canopy we stand beneath. A constellation of memory held in the same quiet night.