The Buddha says not to focus on people. Focus instead on the good actions you’ve done. He says that your good actions will actually be like relatives welcoming you to the new life.

Question: Can you form the hope to be welcomed at the moment of death, the grand passage, with “people” you’ve loved or the “people” for whom you may have some devotion or teachers who have put us on the path of the Dhamma? I have lots of gratitude for these “persons.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: There’s no need to put the word “person” or “people” in quotation marks. There is the belief sometimes that the Buddha teaches that there are no persons, but actually, he teaches that there are persons as long as there’s the process of becoming. We keep on taking on the identity of people, of persons, through our attachments and clingings as we go from life to life to life. It’s only when you reach nibbāna that you go beyond being a person.

Now, the question concerns the hope for being welcomed by the people you love or to whom you’re devoted: You have to be careful, because sometimes the people you have loved are not in really good destinations. They may have gone to a lower destination. If you tell yourself, “I want to be with them,” that aspiration might pull you down to their lower level.

Second, the fact that you loved each other in this lifetime doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to love each other in the next lifetime.

In Thailand, I knew of a monk and a nun who were meditating one time, and each saw that they had been married in a previous lifetime. So they disrobed and picked up where they’d left off. Apparently in the previous lifetime, they had loved each other very much, but in this lifetime they separated eight times and had eight children. When I met the woman, she looked pretty miserable. This is why the Buddha says not to focus on people. Focus instead on the good actions you’ve done. He says that your good actions will actually be like relatives welcoming you to the new life.

~ "Facing Aging, Illness, & Death: The Central Teaching of the Buddha"

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