Saturday, April 1, 2017

Thoughts on our daily walk with Death

We're always walking with Death--that's the truth built into the Buddhist acknowledgement of impermanence. Like so many,  I've gone through hours, days, weeks, months--giving D scarcely a thought, pushing the knowledge of my eventual demise to the back of my consciousness as I plunge into daily tasks and distractions.

There are always moments when the reality of impermanence breaks through--historical photos, for example. I feel a kind of poignance of looking at images of people going through their daily routines, seemingly oblivious to the preciousness of that fleeting moment. There are other times--reading obituaries and noting the age of the deceased. Is she older or younger?--as if that really had any relevance. Death can arrive anytime, anywhere, at any age; we all know that but tend to wince when reminded. And then there are other times--when someone I know dies. This month three deaths occurred in my immediate world. Shortly after the third one, my weekend Buddhist reading list came via an email from the magazine Lion's Roar. The article, "The Supreme Meditation" by Larry Rosenberg, focused on the theme of death. Although Western culture is structured to take us away from that awareness, he asserts, the key to living fully is embedded in keeping that awareness up front and center.

Of course, if death is always with us, it has many guises. I've passed a few frivolous moments imagining how often death would change his profile picture if he were on Facebook. I finally settled on an image that I saw on the cover of a children's book, Cry Heart But Never Break, featured in one of my favorite blogs. It's a gentle image; I so dislike horror.



The Buddhist tradition tends to be more in-your-face about it. This image, Zazen on Waves by Maruyama Okyo (1787), can be seen at Daijoji Temple in Hyogo, Japan.



Recently, visiting the Denver Public Library, I checked out The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski (Flatiron Books, 2017). I just finished it this morning and found it very useful--thought-provoking and well, calming. A teacher/caregiver who cofounded the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, Ostaseski interweaves stories of his experiences there with other examples of those five invitations, invitations to use death-awareness as a means of bringing us "closer to our truest selves". The invitations are: (1) Don't wait; (2) Welcome everything, push away nothing; (3) Bring your whole self to the experience; (4) Find a place of rest in the middle of things, and (5) Cultivate "Don't Know Mind". Click here for extended definitions of all of them.

As I attended two memorial services this month, I had a chance to think about these invitations and what they might have meant for those whose lives were honored. One of them was for Gerry S., the lawyer who gave me my first job when I came to Denver in 1976. He was an open-hearted man who at that time was just recently in recovery and discovering the joy of living without addiction. He had left a high-powered legal office to open his own practice. He was kind to me, offering a very relaxed work environment and passing on books and information about Colorado life. I think he knew how to live fully, especially within his large family and the AA community where he supported numerous others on the path to recovery. We lost touch after I left the job three years later. But now, decades later, when a mutual friend told me that he had passed away at the age of 87, I knew I wanted to attend his memorial and tell his widow how much his kindness had meant to me. I did that following a service at a small Anglican church in South Denver, packed with the many friends and family members who loved and missed him. I believe the stories and images showed a man who brought his whole self to the experience of living.

A week later I learned of the death of Angela S., one of my OLOC sisters. Dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis, Angela entered home hospice after treatments were no longer useful. Shortly before her death at age 76, she married her longtime partner, Cindy. I was not prepared for the very powerful discovery I made at her memorial service, held at the Church of the Beloved in a suburb north of Denver. Angela, who had grown up Roman Catholic, was part of the Catholic Ecumenical Communion, a faith community that creates an inclusive environment for Catholics who accept the liturgy but not the restrictive politics of the Roman Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, it is not recognized by the establishment church. But it was through this faith community that Angela's family and friends could bring their whole selves to the experience of honoring her life at the ceremony, officiated by a minister who was also a woman. And we could all find a "place of rest" in the inclusivity in which Angela's spouse and commitment to her community could be fully recognized.

There has still been no memorial service for Joanne K., the 85-year-old former neighbor I had visited weekly before her death last month. Perhaps there has been or will be a service at the local Catholic church she attended. We had started a friendly-neighbor relationship during my last year living at Camellia House, one which probably would have ended when she moved last summer. However, shortly before the move, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than 6 months to live. Joanne also had a secret that she had told no one else: she had loved another woman in her youth, a woman who left her, and it seems I was the only one she could talk to about this. Alienated from her surviving brother, she kept her secret from the 3 women who formed her social circle. With others, she was closed, often seeming snobbish but perhaps just not sure how to relate after a lifetime of closure and focusing solely on her career in music. During my visits I hoped to create space for her to open and remember, but she did not choose that path. She wanted to "stop thinking about it." One day she broke a hip, then had surgery, then on to rehab, but was suddenly transferred to hospital when she developed an infection. She was hours away from death the last time I saw her. Hooked to various machines, she labored to breathe and I held her hand for awhile. A friend was coming to accompany her transfer to a long-term care facility that afternoon, so I left. She died alone early the next morning.

The memorial services for Gerry S. and Angela S. gave mourners some closure--and no doubt some reminder of our own mortality, of the invitation to live more fully in whatever ways we find meaningful--through friends, family and/or communities. I wonder how many others leave life as Joanne did, still unresolved about the events and people who disappointed them. May her memory rest in peace in the lives she left behind.