From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it's got you.

Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.

When I used to perform weddings, the image I always had was the image of a triangle, in which there are two partners and then there is this third force, this third being, that emerges out of the interaction of these two. The third one is the one that is the shared awareness that lies behind the two of them.

I feel vulnerable because my mind - because of the stroke, my mind doesn't focus. And then I feel vulnerable because I don't understand the world around me.

It was a lovely feeling, dying. I can remember being in the hospital, all wired up to tubes and thinking, 'If only you'd take these tubes out, it feels so nice.' It felt so - it felt like being in a bath of velvet. It was such a nice feeling. Everything felt so soft and floppy, and I wanted to go.

One often calms one's grief by recounting it.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.