I’m the one who’ll die here

From a conversation with friends at Bright Earth buddhist sangha.

From time to time I fall into a pattern of waking around 3am, often when there’s some conflict or turmoil at work in me. I had one of these wakeful nights last week. As I lay there in a familiar pool of unease an odd thought came to me.

I’m the one who’ll die here. So it’s OK.

Why did glimpsing the certainty of my own death feel so reassuring? Are there are other I’s, then, besides the one lying here?

The answer’s a quietly resounding yes, I think. But exactly what that means feels less clear, now, than it did lying there in the dark. I suppose it has to do with the gap between the selves we perform before one mirror or another, and the person those selves omit to mention, or actively conceal.

Funny how something can make compelling sense in the middle of the night, then you try and say it aloud in the morning and it’s all a bit laboured. But what lodged this passing night-thought in memory was the curious sense of reassurance it brought.

Whatever happens, I’m the one who’s going to die here. So despite all the fuckups, the stuck habits, the missed opportunities, things are OK.

I remember a beautiful passage in Shinman Aoki’s little book, Coffinman: Journals of a Buddhist Mortician, where Aoki shares the realisation which crept up on him as he dressed corpses for traditional Buddhist funerals. Aoki speaks of the deep peace that he began noticing on the faces of the dead. All of them. How, as he worked alone with their quiet faces, he came to a new understanding of nirvana. He saw that it was a fulfilment which comes to all of us, not as a result of our striving, nor of what we’ve ‘made of ourselves’. Just an inescapable homecoming, a peace which our death cannot fail but return us to, whatever sort of life we happen to have lived.

Lying in the dark what struck me as if for the first time was that every single thing that is ‘me’ will end when I die. All of it. And in a manner that requires no shoring-up or work on my part, I am quite literally “grasped, never to be forsaken” by the truth of this conditioned life’s inevitable end.

And this utterly reliable death is already here with me now, as I lie awake in the dark, its intimate presence inextricably woven into this life’s every moment.

…

As I’ve tried to write down what happened last week another memory has surfaced, and they feel entangled so I’m to going to run them together here.

Three and a half years ago. I’m sitting alone at night with my dying mother-in-law, Christine. Already in steep decline, Christine has just found out that she has terminal cancer, with only a few weeks to live. This first night-watch with her is also the first time I’ve seen her since she learned this.

As we chat quietly about her dying, Christine says she sometimes wishes she’d paid more attention to the spiritual. “You now, going to church and stuff”. We wonder about this together. Supposing she had? Would her having done so have made any difference at all to what lies immediately before her now? Would having doing so have made it more or less real? It seemed clear to both of us that it would not. And the sense of confirmation that I found in this, anyway, feels much the same as the one that came back to visit me last week.