The other week at work, my one (older) (blocky) (Tibetan) coworker asked me how my uncle who’s been in poor health has been doing – her brother has been in bad health, too, and a while ago we were both taking time off of work and traveling to see them around the same time – and I broke the news to her that he had passed away this winter, that he had kept how bad he had been getting from the family because he didn’t want us to worry, and then the next thing we know he was in the hospital again, and now he’s gone.
“I’m sorry,” she was like.
Then, she was like, “All die, not all at the same time, but all die, some now, some later, but all die.”
. . .
(I’ve noticed that [Buddhists] can make little offhand comments that really emphasize the prevalence of death and suffering in ways that people from other religious traditions just don't, especially not when someone who they're talking to is undergoing a bad situation. But, I guess that's the tradition.)
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