The Fall in Dharamsala

I was travelling in India when, on a hotel rooftop in Dharamsala – the Himalayan town that is home to the Dalai Lama – I suddenly lost my grip on the world and fell backwards onto a sharp concrete edge. For a while I remembered nothing about being human. I simply existed.

Later, in a night-time hospital, waiting for a neurosurgeon to read the scans of my brain, I realised I didn’t know how to think about death at all. Nobody had ever spoken to me about it. Recovering among Tibetan Buddhists, I learned that their culture talks about death throughout life. Months later, in San Cristóbal de las Casas in southern Mexico, I met another culture that speaks of death freely, through its Day of the Dead.

Since then I have wanted to spend my temporary time on something meaningful: understanding death well enough to help others live better.