This body is not me; I am not caught in this body, I am life without boundaries, I have never been born and I have never died. Over there, the wide ocean and the sky with many galaxies all manifests from the basis of consciousness. Since beginningless time I have always been free. Birth and death are only a door through which we go in and out. Birth and death are only a game of hide-and-seek. So smile to me and take my hand and wave good-bye. Tomorrow we shall meet again or even before. We shall always be meeting again at the true source. Always meeting again on the myriad paths of life.
Thích Nhất Hạnh, `No Death, No Fear´
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
Maya Angelou
Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.
Patti Smith
It has been a week of bereavements. On Monday, a dear friend of the family left this incarnation after a long, difficult, final illness. He was a charismatic, creative, pioneer of models of social inclusion, had dedicated his life to their realisation, and had, throughout his life, shared his exuberance for life and his loving-kindness with countless people, including myself and many members of our family.
In a message to my younger brother who had been very close to Patrick Lydon’s final journey over the past year, I wrote that `every bereavement carries the echoes of all previous bereavements´, and may thus stir up emotions and feelings from the past.
Having written this, my mind went back to the final months of my Dad’s life in the summer and autumn of 1977. At sixteen, I was the oldest child at home and spent much of my time at his bedside, in conversation, reading to him, and attending to his needs. Over those months, though I did not realise it at the time, he was sharing a very precious gift with me in showing how we can embrace the end of our incarnation in gratitude and with both dignity and humility.
This gift remained hidden from me at the time, as I had, in my boyhood naiveté, unconsciously decided that through my love and kindness, he could be saved. When that did not transpire, I was filled with the rage of my failed defiance to such a degree, that I was not able to grieve.
The grieving process got underway a few short years later on the untimely death of my mother. She, too, had had all the trials and tribulations that come with dying of cancer, though hers was a journey marked by struggle. This time I observed the dynamic from afar, from Germany, to where I had emigrated some time before. I did get to be with her in her final hours, however, and recognised embedded in her struggle, great dignity here too, along with poise and humour.
In the intervening years, some very close friends and mentors have passed away, often under difficult circumstances. Each time, I asked my self how I could cultivate in my own being, the characteristics I so treasured in these friends; the lightness of being in Werner, the kind, warm pragmatism of Gerhard, the true serenity of Ron. In this manner, their presence lives on in me.
As the years went by, I discovered that grieving is not so much a matter of `doing´, but of `being´: Sitting with the transience of all of creation, including the physical absence of loved-ones, and the acceptance and integration of the inevitable ending of my own incarnation. Paradoxically, this last point led to a palpable increase in vitality, as I went about my day to day business. It became clear that the best way of honouring those who had gone ahead, was to live my own life to the full.
Just over three years ago, our eldest of ten siblings, a brother in his mid-sixties, died suddenly of heart failure. There was a great gathering of siblings in Charlottesville, Virginia – his chosen new home – , to bid him farewell. My focus here was more on celebrating his life and, after a very brief period of grieving, moving forward to remembrance. Subsequently, he was present in my morning meditation every single day for over a year. This presence was, and remains, a thing of beauty in my life.
Then, on Friday, came the news that one of the great spiritual teachers of our times had left this incarnation peacefully, in Vietnam, at the age of ninety-five. Thích Nhất Hạnh, or `Uncle Thay´ is a man from whom I have received instruction and guidance over the last fifteen years.
Like all great teachers, he led by example. `You can wash the dishes, if you can wash the dishes,´ he once said to a perplexed visitor who wished to help him with the household duties. His point was that anything done with motivations from the past or in the future was the absence of presence, and presence was the only reality. In that presence, we realise out true essence. He encouraged us to ring a bell at the top of every hour, simply to be reminded that our true element is this presence, and to help us remember this truth, should we have forgotten.
He also taught us that the material world is in a constant state of transience, and urged us not to try to clasp on to anything, but rather to return to the present moment, again and again. This he regarded as the source of all loving-kindness. He wrote that `world peace is the sum of every human being making peace with themselves´. What a beautiful way to describe that for which we all yearn, deep down inside!
So the gift of this week is the reminder of the essence of life; being in the world but not of the world, grabbing life with both hands and living it to the full, however it unfolds, in the recognition that we are pure love. Our task is to manifest this potentiality as best we can, and to remove those things in ourselves that hinder us from doing so.
I have been unpacking Mum and Dad´s gifts slowly, layer by layer, over the years. Many more gifts have been showered upon me in the meantime. This week of bereavement has helped my recognise, once more, how blessed my life is.
As Uncle Thay was wont to say: `When the cloud has become rain, the cloud is not lost.´
