This is December 4 2022. And last week, I had the privilege of sitting at the bedside of a 99 year old man, as he was dying. And I wanted to offer some comments about that. I had received an email from a longtime member of the Sangha, and a senior student, Susan Culpeper. In that she mentioned that she was flying to Florida to be with her father, who had just been moved into a hospice center there. I asked where in Florida, and she said, Port Charlotte, which is just an hour down the coast from here. I offered a visitor and she took me up on it. Susan had come to Rochester, for the ordination in October for the ordination and just to reengage with the Sangha. She had been through a long year and a half grueling recovery from major major surgery, and was her first chance and in all that time to connect physically in person. But she came down with COVID while she was at Chapin Mill, and so she never made it to Arnold Park, for the ceremony. So this was, this wouldn't be my first chance and yours for us to see each other in person. And for my part, I needed a Sangha fix. There's no one. No one in the Sangha down here. And it was there was an opportunity for me for sure. So the hospice, the hospice was a very nice place. Spacious, quiet, very responsive, staff of volunteers, quiet area around the inside and outside, kind of rural Florida or on the outside. If you have to die, I'd say this would be a good place to do it. I said earlier, I use the word privilege and it is a privilege. Well, it's a privilege also, to visit for me it's a privilege to visit people in the hospital. Why I've wondered that myself. When I go into hospitals as a visitor. I, I always feel somehow uplifted. And this is the best way I can understand it. That when you're visiting someone in a hospital, you're in visit, you're visiting them in a in a reduced state that is you're visiting them when they're in a vulnerable state. And vulnerable. means open. receptive. receptive, receptive, not so much to any words of mine. It okay if they have questions, people in hospitals? If they have questions, then I'm glad to reply as best I can based on my experience, and maybe even based on my familiarity with Zen Teachings, the Dharma. But when I say receptivity, on their part, openness on their part, it's more to the, these basic facts of existence, which Siddhartha encountered when he left the palace, according to the story, and his, his wandering through the dusty plains of northern India. He came upon a sick person, an old person, a dead person, and they say a monk, sort of by contrast Oh, Ah, as I see it. So it says in the account for the first time, well, he was 29, he would have lived in ancient India, in an environment, even the palace where would have been multiple generations of family. And so we don't need to take this literally, it was at the age of 29, he didn't see for the first time, a sick person, he would have been sick himself, surely by the age of 29. sick person, an old person, even the dead persons, the dead are not tucked away in India. And that time, certainly not in that time, the way they tend to be in this country in Western culture. But as I understand it, that for the first time Siddhartha really saw a sick person, an old person, and a dead person. He had, he had gone beyond what for many of us is a denial of these basic features of human existence, all existence, not just human, he would have been protected to a large extent from these things, but now, on his own out there he be the impact, as I understand it, the impact would have been a different order entirely. And it really got to him. When we are in a hospital, we have to face lack of control of the body and its functions to some degree or the loss of the illusion of control. We can often find our way through much of life with sort of, probably unconsciously, the sense that we are the we're in charge of the body to some degree, through diet and exercise and other aspects of the way we live. But then, even even if we are very scrupulous about diet and exercise, and so forth, at some point, we're going to realize that it's not all up to us.