Growing older, getting sick, and dying are tough subjects we usually like to avoid – even if we’ve admitted to ourselves that they’re inevitable. The Buddhist practice of maranasati, or death awareness, helps us to confront these hard realities head-on, as a particularly powerful means of liberating ourselves from the attachments that cause us to suffer.

This book is the fruit of Larry Rosenberg’s years of practicing and teaching death awareness. Using a text known as the Five Subjects for Frequent Recollection, he shows how intimacy with aging and morality can be a means to liberation: when we become intimate with death, he writes, we also become profoundly intimate with ourselves, with others, indeed with all things.