A 1977 essay by George Plimpton explored how men of letters imagined the end of life:
Allen Ginsberg, who wrote that he was spending an increasing amount of time in the “company of Buddhists,” allowed that for him there was very little difference between death and the deeper levels of meditation; he made it sound like a form of relaxation. “Dying,” he told me, “I do that every time I sit down on my Zafree [which turned out to be a meditation pillow, thank Heavens], abandon my mind, observe thought-form fading, and the gaps between thought-forms, and breathe out my preoccupations. At the moment, one ideal death would be sitting on a pillow with empty mind.”
John Updike also rather liked the idea of suspension. “Thoughts on dying? I can’t decide if I’d rather go after the thirteenth or the fourteenth line of a sonnet; the thirteenth would give you something to do in the afterlife. By the same reasoning, while the ball is in the air, off the face of a perfectly swung five-iron, and yet has not hit the green where it is certain to fall.”
The Dish 