After the Loss

So a loved one died, or you got divorced, or you didn’t get the job you wanted. Unforeseen health challenges make real your mortality. The recognition you worked so hard for went to someone else. The childhood fantasy of what your life was supposed to look like failed to materialize. Mounting losses threaten to topple over and bury you in a landslide of broken rubble. How do you keep going? How do you teach yourself to give a damn? Is there any way to rediscover your original, childlike enthusiasm and zeal?

Of course there is. But it isn’t easy. Healing the wounds inflicted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune requires a steady effort and the many hands of a community. Our innate tendency to isolate has to be overcome through sheer will power. And the paradox is this – healing and wisdom rise up from within our own nature, yet they are drawn to the surface by the pull of the love we share with each other. We rend in monologue; we mend in dialogue. We heal ourselves, but only when we give ourselves over to something beyond ourselves.

A lot of us walk around grieving. We are ringed round with loss. We are born wanting, and it’s inevitable that multitudes of our endless needs go unmet. We want those we love to live forever. We want the recognition, admiration, or at least acceptance of our peers. We want our friends and family to love us on our terms, not theirs. We want different bodies, different hair, and different settings in which to show off our new fabulous forms. We want more money, more things, and a solid gold guarantee that none of it will ever be taken away from us. These endless cravings orchestrate a steady background hum of anxiety, depression, and resentment that characterizes so much of modern life. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In her 1969 tour de force On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages common to people in grief. Since then many others have amended and elaborated this typology, however, it still stands as a useful guide for people in grief. And that means all of us.

The first stage is denial and isolation. In grief and loss we tend to withdraw. It’s often rooted in embarrassment – we want to conceal the overwhelming emotional disintegration bursting through our carefully maintained façade. And on a more compassionate note, we simply don’t want to burden anyone around us with our pain – they’ve got their own to deal with. Or worse still we just plain refuse to acknowledge the facts before us. We wear our denial like armor.

The second stage is anger. Our unprocessed grief curls up like a snake and strikes at any convenient target – our loved ones, the doctors, the medical establishment as a whole, the bureaucracy that always accompanies death and dying, or even total strangers. How much road rage and domestic violence, I sometimes wonder, is the inappropriate purging of bottled up grief?

The third stage is bargaining. We’d do anything for a do-over. We blame ourselves and wish we could go back in time and make different choices. If only we had done this. If only we had said that. Knowing what we know now, every past decision and action gets subjected to the withering scrutiny of our self-loathing, judgmental second-guessing.

The fourth stage is depression. When it finally becomes clear that there’s no going back, a certain doom descends on the landscape. They really are gone. We really didn’t get that job. Our marriage failed. We really are getting old. Sickness and death will soon come for us. Why bother?

The fifth stage is acceptance. If we’re lucky, last long enough, and gain enough wisdom to arrive at this fifth and last stage, our hands unclench, our face softens, and we turn our attention away from what we’ve lost and toward the embarrassment of riches raining down around us. We suddenly see the whole wheel turning – the birthing, the living, the dying – as a beautiful river. Which part is the good part? The cloud? The rain? The mountain stream? The headwaters of the river, or the wide delta that merges into the sea? The cloud dies in the rain, the rain dies in the river, and the river dies in the sea, yet nature never grieves these changes. It knows that forms arise and fade, but the One from which all forms arise and to which all forms return is itself eternal and formless. Therefore emergence and dissolution is to be celebrated in all of its stages. Death is not wrong. It is not a mistake to be corrected. Why do we celebrate birth so joyfully and lament death so somberly? If we really understood the whole wheel, wouldn’t we honor birth and death equally?

In the face of loss the only sane stance is gratitude, and the mother of gratitude is acceptance. Instead of cursing the death of a loved one, we ought to be grateful they were ever born – especially in the case of a parent. I suppose it goes without saying, but if our parents hadn’t been born, we wouldn’t be having this whole grief problem. In other words, it is the very act of birth itself that ushers us into this terrible ordeal, this business of death, loss, and grieving. You can’t have one without the other. If you want to be born, then say hello to death. Life is death-defined.

This then is what it means to reach acceptance. We look the facts of living and dying in the face and we make peace with it, all of it. Sadly, many people die before they reach the stage of acceptance. They stay rooted in denial, anger, or depression. Sometimes those deleterious forces form the engine of their demise. Addiction, depression, suicide, and violent crime have many causes, but they clearly have roots in our inability to reach the acceptance stage. Prison is full of people who struggled to bring their inner lives into accord with the outer truths of existence. They gave into anger, rage, fear, addiction, and violence. Those outside of prison are not that different. We just haven’t been caught yet.

In some cosmic way it makes sense to say that each of us is responsible for our own inner lives. But claims like that are also cavalier and overlook the deep-tissue trauma that drives people to think and act like they do. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that “we are driven to action by our own natures.” And our natures are impacted and molded by our environment. Our hunger, our thirst, our sexual drives, our longing for love, acceptance, belonging, and self-expression all play a part in the formation of our consciousness and the forging of our choices and actions. Still, underneath all of these tiers of influence I believe we are free. No matter what, in each now moment we have a choice. I choose to believe that. I have to believe that. We may be driven by our natures, but we are not determined by them.

When we choose community, when we say yes to the messiness of relationship, when we forgive ourselves and others and learn to see with the eyes of love, we are renewed and restored to the center of our own lives. We come home to the beauty of being alive. But no one can move through these stages for us. We must put one foot before the other. There is a way to live after the loss, and we must take it.

My Mom

The hospital bed took up most of the living room. The steady hum of the oxygen machine masked the murmuring voices from the other room. Light from the summer garden poured through the windows. I took her head in my hands and kissed her forehead. She was drifting in and out. I kissed both of her cheeks. The smell of her warm skin broke my heart. It wasn’t going to be long. I told her I loved her and thanked her for being my mom. Her eyes opened and in a flash of recognition she smiled. For a moment we were together again, mother and son. The room fell away. We were young, happy, free, and eternal, beyond the grip of terrible time. Then her face softened, her eyes closed, and she drifted back into a dream. She died the following evening. She was 88 years old.

When my father died two years ago I knew what to do. I grieved, and I got back to work. I didn’t fall apart. I had my mom to think about. My brothers and I focused on her. There was a sense of relief at his passing because Alzheimer’s is a pitiless bully – death by a thousand cuts. The night he died it felt like a weight was lifted off of us. Now he was free from the betrayal of his brain and body.

But this was different.

My mom was diagnosed and eleven days later was gone. And now the home we all grew up in is empty. No one lives there anymore. It’s just a place we’re from.

The death of a loved one comes in waves – the initial, irreversible news, then the disbelief. You forget and remember and forget over and over again. It takes time for your brain to catch up with the truth. A holiday comes and you reach for the phone to call them. A scrap of paper brushes your hand in a drawer releasing a flood of memories. The smell of celery or the sound of a spoon stirring a cup of tea and bam, your throat catches and you excuse yourself to cry in another room. The wound stays fresh for a long, long time. You tell everyone you’re alright, but you aren’t.

In times like these you go back and sift through memories. You wish you had more. You can’t believe how much is gone. And the little that’s left takes on the burnished glow of treasure.

We lived a few blocks from my elementary school and sometimes I’d walk home for lunch. A cheese sandwich, maybe curried fried rice (my favorite), with Sheriff John on TV if she was in a good mood.

Always sewing. The crinkle of thin paper dress patterns from Vogue, Simplicity, and McCalls pined to large swaths of fabric on the dining room table. Her bending over and carefully cutting the cloth with special scissors I was never allowed to use. The sound of a sewing machine from the other room while I played with my toys on the floor. The clients who came by for a fitting.

The whine of my dad’s Honda 50 coming down the street right after I got home from school. Him coming through the door, the whole energy of the house shifting. They were always happier together than apart. My mom and dad having tea, talking in low tones about the mysterious things married people talk about.

The smell of dinner. Mom showing me how to cut up a cauliflower, core a cabbage, or mince onions. Stirring a pot of tomato soup. How to make roux and béchamel for the turnips. The darkening sky outside. The ritual of food and fire and the family table.

My two brothers were eight and ten years older so it was usually just me and my mom. She’d take me everywhere – grocery shopping, the department store, and in the early years before we got our own washer and dryer, the laundromat. She’d let me put the dimes in the slots. She showed me the right way to fold a shirt. She understood these things, and they seemed important, so I paid attention.

My mother was fearless in a way that I was not. I was passive, withdrawn, and contemplative. She had to muster assertiveness for two.

She made me take piano lessons. I was not consulted. It was mildly amusing at first, and then it got difficult. My weeks were filled with dread knowing that the next piano lesson was coming and I had not yet perfected this week’s scales. Sometimes the pressure motivated me to work harder. Other times it drained me of resolve and I resigned myself to my piano teacher’s withering glance and disappointed sigh. Outwardly I conformed as best I could, but inwardly I had some serious questions about the adult world. Why were they always taking on difficult tasks and setting themselves up for failure? Why didn’t they just sit back and enjoy life as it was? Why were they always trying to change and grow and learn and create?

Then it happened. My fingers obeyed. I heard music where once there was only embarrassment and inadequacy. And I realized I was doing it – those were my fingers making the music, my hands, my arms, my mind, my heart, and I was overwhelmed by all the possibilities that unfolded from this realization. I suddenly understood that I was unlimited, that I was capable of anything, and that discipline, will, and conviction nurture and cultivate the seeds within us. We do not become who we really are until we struggle up through the soil of our indifference, our sloth, our fear of failure. On the other side of the pain is an unspeakable beauty, a beauty unobtainable by those who love only comfort, only easy, only staying the same.

My mom got me a surfboard and wetsuit and drove me to the beach. She knew her introspective, day dreaming son needed an adventure. My friends and I loved the beach, but surfing was a quantum leap away from the Styrofoam belly boards and inflatable rafts we rode as boys on those long summer afternoons. Surfing is what men did. Out in deep water. And with her encouragement I began. Surfing became the center of my life throughout my teens and twenties. I learned a lot on the water. But mostly, again, I learned that fear is an obstacle to joy. Once I made the ocean my friend and learned to navigate, even celebrate her powers, my fear lifted and all that remained was beauty. The ocean taught me that it was safe to fall in love. Even with all of the tumbles and breathless disorientation, you always come up for air. And under the wide California sky you know that you are home wherever you are, and that everything always changes, and people die, but the big show never ends. Again and again we are affirmed in our love. The ocean never leaves us. And the final revelation – we are loved only as much as we surrender to it. Love is not controlled or calculated. There are no pro and con lists. There is only acceptance and surrender.

My mom brought me into the world. But that was only half of it. More importantly, she taught me how to live in it. I miss her, even though she’s right here in every cell of my body, in my discipline, my courage, and my creativity. Her living room is empty now, but she lives in the fullness of all the lives she shaped.

Cloud Shadows

[This piece was originally published in my "A to Zen" column in the May/June 2014 issue of Unity Magazine under the title "The Wisdom of Embracing Change," and is reproduced here with permission.]

The ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu lived alone in the mountains. Legend has it that when his wife died, his Confucian friend Hui Tzu made the difficult journey up the mountain to pay his respects. When Hui Tzu reached Chuang Tzu’s hut three days later he found his old friend singing, banging on a kettle, and dancing naked around the fire. Hui Tzu was mortified. This was certainly not proper decorum in the aftermath of such a grievous event, and not befitting a philosopher of such renown.

Hui Tzu stepped into the clearing and chastised the old man.

“Chuang Tzu, how can you behave so outrageously? Proper etiquette demands that with the loss of a spouse one wears black and behaves solemnly for one year. And here you are dancing naked around a fire banging on a kettle and singing at the top of your lungs.”

Chuang Tzu looked at his old friend.

“Three days ago, when my wife died,” he said, “I fell apart. I sank to the ground, curled up into a fetal position and didn’t move for three days. I wept and gasped for air like a fish out of water. Then I realized that it was time to get up. My wife was not my possession, therefore she could not be “lost.” Each of us arises out of the field of pure potentiality and takes form for a while. Then we return to the great field of formlessness. Why mourn?  I did not mourn before she was born, why should I mourn now? Instead, I celebrate the time we had together. Now when my eyes fill with tears they are not tears of sorrow but tears of gratitude for the depth and beauty she brought into my life.”

Behind this apocryphal story lay a very important theme – things change. And wisdom is acceptance of change. Maybe it’s just that simple.

The Buddha taught that impermanence (anitya) was one of the fundamental qualities of reality. Not only does everything change, but everything changes into everything else. Each composite thing is built from bits and pieces of formerly composite things. Therefore everything is part of one, vast, interconnected web of being. Nothing is self-caused. Everything is dependent on everything else. Thich Nhat Hahn calls it “inter-being.” This boundless interdependency links each of us into the whole whether we’re aware of it or not. Forms may come and go, but the whole is intact. Learning to love the whole as much as the parts is the engine of our awakening.

A year ago I had the honor of performing a memorial service for a friend whose son had died of a drug overdose. All funerals are hard, but this one was particularly painful. The deceased was a vibrant, outgoing, talented young man, as well as a recovering opiate addict. He was doing well. Then he slipped and made a dosage error. His mother found him dead in his bed three days before Christmas. I recently spoke to her and asked her how she was doing now that it’s been over a year. She said it was hard. The first six months she could hardly breathe. Then slowly and for no particular reason the suffocating grip of grief began to lift. Nothing would ever be the same, but the strange clarity of peace began to penetrate and illuminate the sorrow. She misses him every day, and it will never be right that he died so young, but in her dawning wisdom she knew – everyone dies, it’s only a matter of when, and we do not measure the value of a life by its length but by its depth.

A cloud casts a shadow that passes swiftly over the surface of the earth, here and then gone. A cloud is just a coalescence of ice crystals and water vapor high in the atmosphere. It isn’t really a thing, but a collection of elements taking momentary form, sometimes even a recognizable form – a feather, a flower, the face of a loved one. Then high winds rend it apart, its form dissolving in the light of the sun. And the shadow vanishes.

As he lay dying the Buddha told his monks, “Remember this, all forms are impermanent.” Suffering, he taught, was the natural result of a cognitive error – the mistaken notion that we own any of this. Everything we have is borrowed, and we must give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning. Living in the wisdom of impermanence enables us to be fully present in this now moment, the only moment there ever is. By coming out of the fog of the delusion of permanence, we awaken into reality – a place of love and interconnectedness that the mind and its ego attachments can never access. By saying yes to transition, we say yes to the unambiguous beauty of being alive.

Transience

“You can’t step in the same river twice.” ~ Heraclitus

         This just in from the Department of the Painfully Obvious: everything changes.

         The transient nature of life puts us in a precarious position.  Lulled into complacency by the apparent solidity of the world, again and again we are shocked, shocked I say, by life’s sudden transitions – the terrible phone call, the cancer diagnosis, the death of a friend.  Like Charlie Brown we fervently believe that this time Lucy will hold the football in place.  But every time we go to kick it, it isn’t there.

         Intellectually we know that everything born dies, every day turns to night and every song fades into silence.  But like a sharp pain this awareness is dulled by the narcosis of forgetfulness.  Like nodding drunkards we fall over and over into the unconscious illusion that all of this will last, that we have more time, that there is always tomorrow.  Actually, there isn’t.

         There is only now.

         And when you reach out to grab it, even it is gone, replaced by another now moment.  That’s why grasping is so futile.  There is nothing to grasp.

         In Buddhism this fundamental fact is known as anitya or impermanence.  But don’t take Buddha’s word for it.  Life itself provides us with an ever-growing mound of incontrovertible evidence.

         If one follows this reasonable premise to its logical conclusion, we arrive at another core Buddhist teaching, shunyata.  Shunyata is usually translated as “emptiness” or “the void,” but those approximations distort as much as they reveal.

         What shunyata actually conveys is the fundamentally indefinable nature of reality.  Whatever all of this is, it is beyond all concepts and cannot be turned into a thought, let alone a word.  Shunyata is the field of pure potentiality out of which all forms arise and to which all forms return.  Yet shunyata itself remains ever formless.  So in that sense it is empty of fixed forms.  But it is most definitely not nothing.

         Shunyata is like a clear sky and things are like clouds.  Clouds arise and take form, last a while, then disperse, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly.  This is the nature of all things.  As he lay down to die, the Buddha left his students with one last thought.  It was something he had said many times before, but given the situation, he thought they ought to hear it one last time.  “Remember this,” he said, “all forms arise and all forms fade.” 

         Knowing this enables us to navigate the strange and beautiful arcs of our lives with a modicum of dignity and joy, knowing that we don’t own any of it, it is all borrowed, and we must give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning.  Even in the face of the transience of all things it would be wrong to conclude that nothing matters – quite the contrary.  Everything matters, and more than you ever thought possible.

         Every fleeting moment has a magical quality, a sacred ordinariness that we mostly miss, caught as we often are in dreams of yesterday and tomorrow.  Only when we come back to this now moment do we tap into the real. 

         There is no such thing as the past.  What we call the past is just a thought, a memory of a previous event, captured and pinned like a dead butterfly on a cork board.  Time spent wallowing in the past is time stolen from the now. 

         The future is even less real than the past because it hasn’t even happened yet.  It’s just speculation and fantasy.  Dwelling in the future, whether in pleasant fantasy or torturous worry, is also time stolen from the now.

         We cannot change the past.  It is forever out of reach.  The future is equally elusive and beyond our grasp.  What we call the past or the future is only a thought and thoughts by their very nature exist only in the now.  We are only and forever rooted in the now.  Now is the only place we will ever be.  This is where we think, act, feel, love, share, and have our being.  And yet most of us spend very little time here, caught forever in thoughts of the past or the future.

         Buddhist practice seeks to draw us out of our thought-world and back into an immediate awareness of our authentic nature.  But what is it going to take to get us out of our head and back into our heart?

         Meditation, devotion, prayer, service, loving-kindness, empathy, compassion – these are the core practices of all spiritual traditions.  As the Tibetan saying goes, “Want to go to hell?  Think of yourself.  Want to go to heaven?  Think of others.” 

         Before this kind of advanced practice can really take root – it takes great courage, stamina and habituation to truly be compassionate – a good way to jump-start your road to spiritual recovery is to get out in nature.  It’s difficult to stay stuck in your head when you’re walking across fallow grassland in a cold winter wind under a deep blue sky with a murder of crows swirling around you in Van Gogh spirals, the smell of rain on distant mountains awakening ancient bonds nearly forgotten in the discordant isolation of city life.  For one blessed moment you are pulled out of your precious thought-stream and suddenly find yourself standing still with both feet on the ground at the center of the universe and everything is turning in one endless web of interconnected being.  There is no path, there are no crows, there is no you – there is only the achingly beautiful totality, all of it shimmering with infinite significance, all of it radiant with loving-kindness.

         Another good way to begin awakening is through music.  Of all the art forms music most plainly reminds us of the fundamental emptiness of reality.  It’s invisible and ungraspable.  It exists only in this now moment.  We do not control it.  We experience it fully only to the extent that we are able to come out of our thoughts and enter the present, allowing its myriad waves to wash over us and rock us gently into sweet surrender.  Music, all music, is about seduction.  It pursues us until we relent.  And when we do, we are rewarded with reverence and communion – reverence for the sacred nature of all that is and communion with our own unity with the sacred.  In the depths of music the secret of our infinite value is revealed, not as a thought, but as a direct, immediate experience that transcends thought.  This is why we listen to our favorite music over and over again.  We long for that union, that affirmation of our deep and abiding significance, our ultimate oneness with the source.  The harmonies and rhythms of music wordlessly replicate the intricacies and nuances of reality itself, and in this reproduction we behold a mirror in which we can better see ourselves.

             When things change, and they will – when those we love are taken from us, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly and without warning, when we find ourselves all alone in a field with nothing but the wind to hold onto, we are drawn into a powerful and liberating awareness.  We see through our tears that no matter what there is an unbroken light, an unchanging love that binds it all together, despite the apparent transience.