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From a Buddhist point of view, the best way to prepare for death is to enter into the immense vision of bodhichitta and think big. By doing so, the power of your practice will escalate exponentially. One of the main problems most of us have with our view of life and death is that we don’t think big; even Buddhists can be small-minded and petty. By arousing and applying bodhichitta, our limited perception of the world and everything in it becomes far more expansive. Small-minded people only think about themselves, this life and their immediate environment. On the few occasions they manage to think beyond themselves, it is rarely further than their own family. Only when death draws near do such people begin to realize just how narrow and selfish their lives have been, how few of their achievements have any real or lasting value, and how many of the projects that took up so much of their time and energy were either entirely insignificant or failed to come to fruition. From this point of view, if there were just one life, death really would be a “now-or-never” situation. So is it any wonder that at death the small-minded are convinced they are doomed to eternal failure? What they lack is a long-term vision and purpose that ranges over many lifetimes. If they had developed the determination to bring all sentient beings to enlightenment, however many lifetimes it took, they would feel quite differently.

— Living Is Dying by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse