Joan Halifax Roshi is a Zen priest and founder of the Upaya Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Ironically, I didn’t meet Joan when I lived in Santa Fe, but when I took a class with her in graduate school on working with the dying. My experience with those who are dying has been limited in some ways to my work as a chaplain-in-training at a hospital outside of Boston. In other ways, I believe we are all dying, all the time, and the sooner we realize this, the easier it becomes to live with ourselves peacefully.

Joan has some lovely reflections on the words we leave with others when we die in When Goodbye is a Gift.

In this article, she writes:

I have often sat by the bedside of dying people with their relatives close, waiting for those “last words.” The threshold between life and death imparts poignancy to the utterances of the dying. Some believe the veil between this world and the next is thinnest at this time, that we can somehow penetrate the mystery of death through their experience.