She never met a stranger

There are some people in your life, like Colin, with whom you feel you have a unique friendship, that you were somehow extra special to them and they to you. Then they die, whereupon the mass outpouring makes you realize there were umpteen people who felt that way 😂  Iben Clausen is one of those people.

We do go back a long way – I was 18 when we met, she was 45. I don’t want to tell her story or memorialize her because there are people better placed for that, including the three sons she was so proud of, or her partner of the last 32 years. I’m simply going to share some of what she meant to me. As I texted to a concerned friend:

Funny how you can feel at peace and a sense of loss at the same time. 💔🩵

Her death was right out of central casting, a good one, and I attribute that to how she lived her life. I think a good way to honor and remember people we loved is to try and adopt their best features – in Iben’s case,this was an emotional openness and love for everyone she met. You can sort of see it in these few pictures I have room to share (how do you describe love in words, anyway, it doesn’t really take words.) Talking of photos, Iben was a Very Photographed Woman – people liked taking selfies with her, she was a minor celebrity, all because of her obvious love.

We shared a lot of happy times, family times, including Christmas Eves holding hands and dancing around the tree with the Danish song “We are the ooligans, we are the ooligans, we are the ooligans vati voshka!” I owe her more delicious meals than I can count. She and I first met through her son at York University, and went on to spend time together in Pocklington (she had a house near Madhyamaka Centre) and on visits to Switzerland.

From 1996, it was due to her that my ex and then me ended up in Florida for over a decade, when we saw each other all the time. Not unrelated, she was instrumental in bringing Dharma to Florida, and any number of Floridians will regale you with stories about her down the decades. (The first Kadampa classes in Switzerland were also held in her living room.) She and Harlow let me do months of retreat in Harlow’s house. She visited me in Colorado and, most recently, was very solicitous about my move to London, often asking me, “Are you happy there? I just want you to be happy.”

Visiting her in Florida in 2024, Iben was keen to introduce me to all the new people she had met since I left, with the opening line “This is my daughter”; and I in turn considered her my second mom. Most recently I spent a long weekend with her and 30 other Clausens in Ticino, where we’d gathered for her 90^th birthday celebrations. That was a month ago. Until now, she has never been out of my life.

Healing the world

Iben could and would talk to anyone, anywhere, so shopping with her could take a while. She shared this trait with my first mother, actually, the difference being that Iben would talk about herself whereas my mom would ply people with questions. But although Iben talked about herself a lot, it never disguised the genuine love and interest she had for whoever she was talking to. She made lifelong friends wherever she went.

Paradoxically, Iben didn’t have strong self-confidence in some ways. She told us she was shy, something no one would believe but she would swear was true. She would say delightedly, “So and so really loves me!” but with such innocence, really, and because, to be honest, she wasn’t wrong – to know Iben was (usually) to love her.

Iben was a healer – she wanted nothing more than to heal everyone she met, and she often managed it. She went through some arguably wacky phases (and don’t we all), but overall helped a great number of people through her creativity and fearlessness, in her oldest son Bjorn’s words “establishing her own way of treating people with a kind of applied kinesiology, the Menla system, in which she helped so many people find release from negative patterns of mind.”

She had the gift of intuition, diagnosing people correctly when doctors had no clue, and healing them with the help of the Buddhas, especially tuning into her favorite Medicine Buddha, in Tibetan known as “Menla”. I saw her do this many times, and have met people who will tell you they owe their lives to her. Only ever a phone call away, she would get her lovely Harlow to send me care bear packages of supplements and vitamins whenever I mentioned the slightest ailment.

She was not a huge animal lover, funnily enough – she didn’t hate them, obviously, just didn’t find them that interesting. I, however, continued to ply her with kittens because I fostered hundreds of them in Florida and Colorado, and although she didn’t understand this part of me at all at first, this is a snapshot from the visit where I think she finally got the appeal.

Love makes you happy. And Iben was a very happy person most of the time. She had her trials, tribulations, and traumas, like anyone who gets to 90, but she was not self-pitying and she did her best just to get on with it. This is a feature of that “silent generation”, shared by my parents, that I appreciate overall, even though it sometimes meant repressing stuff. (I guess we all need to find the middle way between whining and repression.) Like I said, Iben was happy, appreciative, grateful, even joyful, and this increased visibly over the decades that I knew her, in tandem with her love. Like the suns all over her walls in Florida, she was positively radiating in Switzerland and in the weeks leading up to her death. Her excitement for turning 90 and her appreciation for everyone who came anywhere near her made her 90^th birthday into a beautiful and meaningful occasion, despite her growing confusion, and despite us all knowing that we were probably saying “Goodbye”.

Talking of the post-war generation, my parents spent many fun times with her and Harlow, and they all continued to ask after each other with interest long after they’d gotten too old to visit. Her sickness and death, even how she looked in her last days, reminds me of my own mother. Despite her generally far worse condition, my mother has now managed to outlive Iben as well as any number of other younger, more healthy people. Sickness and death give us no rhyme or reason, we will all have our own stories around them, not that we’ll remember them once we’ve left.

I will share something about my first mother, Sally, here, as people often kindly ask after her, and I find the timing interesting. A couple of weeks ago, the same time that Iben was getting ready to go, my mom had some moments of unusual lucidity. Pagma the Buddhist nun was visiting from America, and in front of my seemingly out-of-it mom I was explaining to her how I did Tara practice with Sally every morning I was there. (This is not least because Geshe-la said my parents had a strong connection to Buddha Tara.) I then left the room, whereupon my mother opened her eyes and said distinctly, “I meditate”. She looked intently at Pagma, as if willing her to understand. When I asked her later if she had indeed said that, she turned to me with an emphatic, “Yes!,” again surprisingly holding my gaze. The next morning, when my Dad greeted her as usual, she looked him straight in the eye and declared, “I’m okay”.

Iben’s auspicious death is a hopeful reminder for me that Venerable Geshe-la promised he will take care of our family. We may all have to watch our parents grow sick, old, and dead, if we don’t go first; but there are a lot of Kadampas who will attest to Geshe-la easing this passage, sometimes in remarkable ways. Six years my mother has been immobilized in bed. I don’t know how her final days will play out, but I continue to imagine her heading for the Pure Land, in fact already in Tara’s orbit. Who knows what strings the Buddhas are pulling behind the scenes – we only see what our minds allow us to see. Given that nothing is outside the mind, I try to keep an open mind and pure imagination.

“And you are all here! I love that!”

I suppose if I want you to take anything away from this article it is that love is what is important – it is important in living our life and it is important in leaving our life.

It’s not rocket science, loving others. Iben demonstrated this. We need the determination to love someone, and then it comes. We can sometimes overanalyse when it comes to generating virtuous minds, and Iben inspires me with the sheer simplicity of her having decided to love everyone she met, whereupon she did.

If we’re not there yet, Geshe-la offers a couple of profound but simple considerations to help us make that decision – one being the many benefits accrued from cherishing others (including being happy all the time) and the other the kindness others have shown us. You can read about that in The New Eight Steps to Happiness. 

I mentioned that thing about animals partly because it ties into this – there must have been a time when I decided to love every animal I saw because I tend to wish them well on sight, even insects. Many humans find it easier to love animals than humans. But it was the other way around for Iben, most likely because she hadn’t yet decided to include other species.

In 2004, talking about Eight Steps to Happiness, Venerable Geshe-la said:

Cherishing others means believing that their happiness is important, their freedom is important. Never neglecting their happiness and freedom. Always fulfil and accomplish their happiness and freedom. Consideration for others. Learn first with those around you, that makes always your relationships pure and long-lasting, no problems, you find a peaceful life. You will find a happy life, even temporarily, because you love your friends, your children, your parents, relatives, and those around you. Then gradually you love everybody, cherishing all living beings. You can learn this.

Iben lived by this. What more do you need? Anything more, she can now learn in the Pure Land.

Transference of her consciousness

Iben was a disciple of Venerable Geshe-la. She may not have been the most scholarly student and, despite attending many classes over the years, she rarely discussed the teachings. But she was a Buddhist through and through, with a deep faith and love. A few days before her death, she took a picture of Geshe-la from Julie’s hands and held it for a long time, bringing it up close to her face with all the remaining strength in her arms.

I started a conversation with her in Switzerland last month about what it’d be like in the Pure Land after she died, at which point she smiled, mysteriously, “I came from the Pure Land and I am going back to it.” In her last few weeks back in Safety Harbor, Iben was given the best possible care anyone could hope for by Harlow, Marty & Chuck from the Tampa Bay Sangha, the palliative care nurse, and Julie (who’s been an absolute heroine). The day before she died, Julie propped the phone up by Iben’s pillow for what ended up being my last conversation with her.

Over the 16 minutes, I spoke along the following lines:

“Iben, this is L. I love you so much. I am praying for you all the time.

Geshe-la and the Dakinis and Medicine Buddha are ready to take you where you need to be. Just go with them happily. You have nothing to fear.

I am very happy that you are about to go to the Pure Land, which is so much better than here, and where you will be able to love so many people and be loved.

And please get it ready for us, too. I have no doubt we will meet again and in very wonderful circumstances.”

As I often do with my own mother, I also described how blissful it will be to fly around in a body of light, no suffering anywhere, with the ability to send emanations to help everyone. And I quoted from Heruka Tantra:

For such practitioners, death is just mere name –
They are simply moved from the prison of samsara
To the Pure Land of Buddha Heruka.

A day later, Kadam Morten, teaching large retreats abroad and checking in between sessions, decided he wanted to do a powa practice for his mother, even though she was not yet dead. He asked Harlow to join him, and they did it together. They then left the room, and two minutes later she died. What immaculate timing.

The palliative nurse also told Julie that it is very common for people to wait to be on their own, even for their relatives to just run out to the restroom, before they depart. “They prefer to die alone”. What do you make of that?

Transference of her body

An hour ago, Julie told me how a huge man, “as gentle as a feather”, had just picked Iben up in a white sheet doubling up as a shroud, only her head visible, and carried her effortlessly through the house to the stretcher. He looked like Julie’s dad, Lloyd, a champion bodybuilder who had helped Iben stay fit as she got older, and whose strength she delighted in; and we reckoned Iben would have been tickled pink to have been swept off her feet one last time. Then, nodding at the hearse, he asked Julie:

“I’m sorry, there’s already another body in there, is that gonna be ok?”

To which Julie laughed:

“How fitting. Even in death, she will make a new friend.”

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Your prayers for Iben, Harlow, and her family are most welcome, as are any memories you care to share. You are also invited to her Powa:

POWA PRAYERS & CELEBRATION OF THE BEAUTIFUL LIFE OF IBEN LADEFOGED

September 19, 1936 – October 23, 2026

Sunday, November 1, 2026

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time, USA)

Kadampa Meditation Center Tampa Bay

201 6th Avenue South

Safety Harbor, FL 34695

Attend Online via Zoom

For those unable to join us in person, the Powa prayers and Celebration of Life will also be available via Zoom.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83029122993…