During my 25 years as an emergency physician, I attended the transition of many souls. Death, I learned, is a profoundly sacred and instructive experience.

People in modern western cultures rarely attend their loved one’s transition. They often pay someone to be there instead.

They rarely prepare their loved one’s mortal remains for burial or cremation. They pay someone to do it instead.

Consequently, few feel their loved one’s powerful soul nearby as they transition or while such sacred services are being performed.

We distance ourselves from death by making it as quick, as easy, and as painless as possible rather than embracing it as an instructive, edifying, and vital part of our eternal journey. Pain, fear, and avoidance are understandable, but we shouldn’t allow fear to rob us of what may be the most spiritual experience of our lives.

We sanitize death and outsource the tender interactions that accompany it. In so doing, we prematurely and unnecessarily sever the profound connections that transcend mortality. We place an artificial end on an endless relationship.

In the 19th Century, many experienced a closeness to their deceased loved ones because they cared for their remains in their homes in what was sometimes called the “death room.”

Now we call it a “living room,” and send our loved one’s remains to a mortuary to have someone else provide that care. We don’t want even the notion of death in our homes because we’ve forgotten death is the brilliant path to rebirth, eternity, and exaltation.

If we choose, we can be more involved. We can spend more time at the bedside. We can go to the mortuary and assist in preparing and dressing our loved one’s body. And we can be alone with them in stillness.

Death is a profoundly intimate and spiritual process. Don’t sanitize it. Honor it.