Seeing the Light

[video:  Maru sees the light.]

Understanding that we are fragile and our lives can be snatched from us any moment is a staple of Buddhist thought. Gaining that understanding is thought to be key to awakening; some monks meditate in cemetaries or worse, charnal grounds. (The link leads to an interesting Wikipedia article, but you probably don't want to know.)

During some Zen retreats a beautiful text may be intoned by a voice from the dark outside the zendo, encouraging us to to understand that the great matter is the fragility of our lives, and we should not waste one minute of our precious time on retreat.  Along this line, here's this from an article about one of the great Teachers who brought Zen to the West, and was known for a sense of humor.

Maezumi Roshi's style was warm, dynamic and direct. He lettered a sign on the zendo reading, "If you want to clarify the Great Matter of life and death you are welcome. Otherwise, better get out!"

 So I would have said I grasped this intellectually - but Zen is never satisfied with that.  Mind is only a piece of heart-mind.  And yesterday I got a body blow that took me deeper with it.

As you know if you follow this blog, we've been to four funerals in about three months - three friends, and Tom's father.  Two of these friends were way younger than me, and their deaths shocked a lot of people.

Another couple we know has had a string of frightening events.  In April the man had his first heart attack; last month the woman took a fall that fractured her pelvis, and means she is in chronic pain and has to use a walker; yesterday we learned that the man had fainted and hit his head, and is hospitalized. Why he fainted is still being investigated.  These are older (than me) people, entering their eighties but vigorous and engaged in life, who had already had to abandon a planned trip.

The woman leads the collage group I am in, and the way we work together in silence has led to a sense of intimacy in the group.  Maybe that was why the news hit me so hard.

The way it hit me was that my body feels soft, and it is as if I can see by x-ray vision my small bones and their significant deterioration. It's that sensation, and that enhanced perception of my fragility that has me reeling.  As much as I've been reminded of my age, as near as I've been to dying, first from cancer, then from kidney failure, I didn't feel it until now.  Or if I did, I'd forgotten.  Our bodies really are soft, our skin a very thin defense; we are constantly invaded by germs and viruses and cancer cells that would like to use us as a host. I knew that, but I didn't feel it.

So I find myself remembering that chant.  Here is one version. 

Let us be respectfully reminded:
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by, and with it our only chance;
each of us must strive to awaken.
Be aware! Do not squander your life.

How we Grow (Old)

The women in my art group and I agree that the reason we grow wiser with age is that you get lots of learning opportunities.  You fall down and break something and get to experience disability and chronic pain.  Your vacation plans fall apart when a quietly ailing parent begins to refuse food. I think that whenever one of these moments arrives, you decide whether to be with the truth of it or to work harder to maintain your illusions about yourself. 

I think the best thing I've learned yet is to keep letting things go. You can think of meditation as practice in that:

inhale deeply
exhale, let it all go
rest at the bottom of the breath

But this is easy compared to the things you have to let go of in life practice.  Name one.  Okay.  Travel.  Uh-oh.  Should have gone to Paris when I could.  Definitely.

But losing that came later.  Earlier came - you know - losing youth.  Maybe not at 30, maybe it was at 40.  Women worry about losing our figure; men about losing hair.  But also a certain sense that you can roam, can change your whole life, do great things.  That there is lots of space, lots of time.
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I was moving slowly with writing this when Tom came into my study with his phone, his sister on the phone, his father died at 6:00 this morning.  This is after months of slow, inevitable decline; we have been waiting, especially this last week, when he began refusing his medicines.  He was almost 93 years old.

Then it became clear to me what I wanted to say about old age.  We have a chance to learn that a great deal of life is not in our control.  Life is not us moving around, deciding our future; the world keeps moving big blocks around that affect us and change our lives. Sickness, our own, others.  The inevitable aging of every part of our bodies.  Death, sudden or slow, of people who matter to us.  And we cannot escape this. Time once more for The Five Remembrances, which are posted at the bottom of this blog.

The Fast Lane

Over the last couple of weeks I have had to face the condition of this body-mind - I don't say "my" body because it's pretty clear I'm just renting it from the universe.  I'm getting afraid of getting that final eviction notice.........
And of course, it's not just about that deteriorating spine, cervical, thoracic, lumbar, the osteoarthritis has covered every base.  It's -

Distraction.  Did it take me half an hour to figure out how to put the Google calendar gadget on my home page? then, how to add to it?  And why was I in my e-mail anyway, that caused me to see it?

Actually, that is not off the point at all.  The point is, I'm old.  I'm not just getting old - you could say I'm getting older; I'm old.  Case in point, why do I still have my regular glasses on?  I need to wear my computer glasses when I'm at the computer or I make my neck hurt trying to look through the screen at exactly the right angle.  I can't do that bifocal tilt.  Like I said.....
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And now it's an hour or two later.  1:00 pm, to be exact.  Lunch at 2:00 and I haven't worked on my collage for this week, except in my mind.  It was more important to catch up with my friend Laurie, and to pack a hospital survival gift basket for Tina, who is in intensive care in the heart unit, I'm sorry to say.  She is 76, I believe, and has struggled with breathing problems for years now.  Death will be a relief from that.  She doesn't want visitors, so I'll drop the basket off.  Someday I'll write to tell you guys how to pay a hospital visit.  I do know how.  But I am not only respecting Tina's stated wishes, I also know hospitals are danger zones for me, on immunosuppressants.  So I don't insist.

And my e-mail just beeped to inform me that Sarah's funeral is next Saturday....I can't figure out how to add it to the Google calender now.  Pause to add it to my phone calendar, at least.  It will send me an alarm to remind me, too.  How does any old person get by without a smart phone?....

And got an e-mail from the museum about a lecture on Degas' dancers next week, and I have the perfect friend to go to with it - an artist and a dancer (though no longer dancing on her feet).  Left a message with her.

I was going to say, it's been very very very very hard to accept being this old, as if it happened all of a sudden, though it didn't.  The back thing has scared me, that's the truth.  MRI this Friday eve, so we will have you know, more information.  Then options.....And I think maybe this post ends up showing not only how it is to be old in your body, but also how you begin to constantly lose people you love, and that will go on until all your friends and family are dead, though I dearly hope never to lose my daughter and grandson (still, it can happen).  It's constantly acclimating to the changes in yourself, which feel right now like a snowball rolling downhill.

The Great Parade of Losses

[image from the blog What do I Know]

It has been a week today since Sherlock died. During that time I turned to the writings of Lama Surya Das, and bought his book, Letting go of the Person You Used to Be. I like to read in bed, and am addicted to fiction, especially mystery novels, but last night I read this serious book while I waited for my melatonin to work.

The Lama, who was born in New York, has a casual style, and the book starts out deceptively simple. You know, there's only the same old truths. But I kept reading, and last night came to something I'd never thought about in that way - how our lives are a parade of losses. The Lama presented the stories of several people whose losses were so tangled or severe that you wonder how they will get through. Then he invited readers to begin a journal about our own losses, all of them. Not just the people and pets you loved or tried to love, but the crushed hopes, the loss of security, everything.

I sat there and right away counted on nine fingers important losses in my life. Pretty much the deaths of people and animals. I was surprised how big the list was. Then I got drowsy and went to sleep.

What has been interesting is this morning. I had to get up with an alarm for an early doctor's appointment, so I was out and about in the beautiful May greenery with a quiet mind. Into that mind more losses kept popping, things I hadn't thought about that really mattered. Losing the health I had at 18. Losing my figure at 40. Then losing it more definitively. Losing the state essay contest because the judges felt a high school senior couldn't have written that essay without help. Losing the security of mother love, then again, of trust in my father, then losing it again, every time painful. Losing a notebook full of poems. It was amazing.

It made the Lama's point: that life is not a good time that is occasionally interrupted by loss - life is constant loss. The truth behind this is that it is the nature of organic life to be born, mature, generate, and die. It always dies. All of it.

I thought about how I lost the lilac this year. My ankle was really bad at the time the lilac out by the ravine bloomed, and I was sternly told to stay off it. This was a case of taking it seriously, or I would end up in a cast and on crutches. But I did decide nevertheless to risk the uneven walk in the back yard out to the lilac bush - it is something Tom can't do. And I cut lilacs and buried my face in them the way you have to.

They lasted just a few days in the house, their scent reminding me of Aunt Eileen, how she brought me a huge bunch of lilac the spring after Cassie was born, how we lost her to severe brain injury.

I thought about asking a neighbor to cut more lilacs for me, and some for herself, but then Sherlock was suddenly sick and nothing else mattered. That's a different story and maybe it's the biggest story, how when someone we love dies, all our important problems assume their rightful proportion. In any case, I didn't cut lilacs again, just watched them through the window. So, lost this year's lilac, almost.

But I still have Siberian iris glowing purple from an astonishing sympathy bouquet. They are on their last blooms. I will lose them. I used to have a bank of iris like that at the old house. It was so beautiful when they bloomed that cars would stop to admire them. Lost that garden with the house. So it goes.

Thus

[image: Jack Kornfield]
Some days it is impossible to feel inspired or light-hearted. That’s what this week has been like. Lots of extra work getting ready for Tom’s big birthday party coming up, so I didn't have time to write. An MRI on my obdurately painful ankle Tuesday. Blood pressure has dropped very low, no explanation. Results of major blood draw Thursday show my kidneys have not recoveredand my anemia is not responding to Procrit shots.
Have developed night sweats, waking up drenched - why?

Now it’s Friday, and I just had PT again for the least of my worries, the muscle spasm in my back that won’t give up. (We noted the good news, though - I can put on a tee-shirt without pain.) The sports doc wants to see me Monday to explain the results of the MRI thoroughly. Uh-oh.

I am actually not so worried about the ankle and what is causing this pain, something that did not show up on an X-ray. I am much more worried about how my kidney functions dropped to 11%, and how this seems to be my new plateau, at best. I really hoped to stay sort of well.

While Chad did physical therapy magic on my back, I told him I know the spasm might be affected by anxiety about having to go on dialysis again. He is a very level, factual guy. He listened to the short form of my story, in which dialysis two years ago turned out worse than I could have dreamed. He told me anybody would naturally feel anxious. Bless him. I wondered if he was religious.

So it was with this that I sat down in a chair to do the final part of the therapy, the moist heat. I love this. I looked through a Real Simple magazine, with special interest in the story about 42 ways to find joy. It turned out to be 42 items you could buy. Like a knit sleeve for your takeout coffee, instead of that old cardboard sleeve. I had a pretty hard time equating this sort of tiny, passing pleasure with joy, and put the magazine aside. I thought, Some people don't get it about the economy and consuming things.

Into this voice, the thought popped out that I really believe I can't fight the massive karma of low-functioning kidneys, which overwork and tend to burn themselves out. Either they will get worse and worse and kill you, or something else will. And I thought how hard I resist that knowledge. Like, "I know I'm going to lose, but dammit, I won't admit it. I'm fighting." What kind of sense does that make?

As I sat there enjoying the heat on my back, I remembered something from a tape of a talk by the Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield. He told about going into the hospital room of a man he knew who was dying. They looked at each other, and he said to the man, "Thus."

It was an audiotape, but I could imagine the gesture that went with that. I think he said the man smiled, and said, "Thus" back. When I heard this many years ago I didn't quite understand it; so it stuck in my mind.

Thus or Just this, things Buddhists say, meaning, this is reality now. Here it is.

Sitting in my chair I imagined Jack walking over to me and saying, "Thus." This kidney thing is your reality. I was taken by a warm feeling. At first it wanted to spring out in tears - I cry easily - and then it just expanded in my chest. Thus. I saw the reality. There was nothing there to fight - you just cope, no big deal. It had the fresh green feeling this day has, on which spring has finally come, with day after day of sunshine promised, so that here in Ohio we can pretend we live in California and life is easy, the way the folks out there do.

When Good-time Charlie's Got the Blues

[video from Purelistener on Youtube]
Sometimes it seems that the worst happens to us, like a painter who is stricken blind. Such a thing is a change to accommodate for one person, a disaster for another. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Losing,” which says she can tolerate anything but losing her partner. That partner later committed suicide.

Loss is tolerable in proportion to our internal statements. “I love to paint” is so different than “I am an artist, painting is my life.” There’s one of those “I am” statements, in which we try to define and capture our identity permanently. But no identity is permanent.

We all lose that most precious thing, our lives. I have felt lucky to have to face death through a series of health misfortunes, and then a handful of chronic disorders that represent the wearing out of my body. As these conditions came upon me (all of a sudden, a broken foot, or gradually, kidney failure) I had to give things up. Actual activities, like driving, or dreams. I think we all know that giving up dreams is harder. You always thought that someday you’d visit Greece or be struck by the thunderbolt of great love; maybe both at once.

At 66 I am at the age of watching people die, first the generations before me, now friends my age. The most wrenching death was my mother, though she was in her eighties and had lost much of her self to dementia. She did not want to live after my father died. Still, she struggled against her own death for years, even as she was partially paralyzed and deaf and her veins were breaking down. She talked until the last morphine shot in a hoarse, unintelligible voice, unwilling to give up talking. I think she saw her voice as her very self. Alcoholics lead increasingly isolated lives, as they relate more and more obsessively to their desire to avoid pain. The brief, haphazard connections made at parties and bars are no substitute for being authentically woven into the fabric of life. Putting your own feelings first leads to an essentially lonely life.

Years ago I took the song “Good-time Charlie’s got the blues” from an album, and learned to play and sing it. It captures the sadness of the alcoholic lifestyle into which I was born, and actually, the kind of moment we all face now and again.

Maybe it is also very Zen. Charlie is not wallowing in his sadness, especially not in Elvis’s country rendition. He describes himself with the detachment of the third person at a moment shaped by many forces: “Everybody’s gone away.” He’s still got pills to ease the pain, but “Can’t find a thing to ease the rain.” There is a sense of accepting that. Sometimes you can’t.