Woody Allen once said, "I'm not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens." And the sentiment isn't uncommon. Many of us living in western cultures have conditioned ourselves to deal with the reality of death by not dealing with it at all -– not just fearing it, but avoiding the subject entirely.
But changing the way that we think about death can empower us to live more meaningfully in the here and now, according to Koshin Paley Ellison, Buddhist monk and co-founder of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, a meditation center, end-of-life guesthouse and educational facility in Manhattan.