posted June 28, 2008 02:02 PM         

"The opposite of death is not life, it's birth."

I think that was was from: No Death, No Fear
by Thich Nhat Hanh
one of the books I was leafing through at the bookstore last night.

posted June 28, 2008 02:27 PM         

quote:

---

For the afterlife to have meaning, it has to be fully as satisfying as this life. Bringing money, power, sex, family, achievement, and physical pleasure to an end is not a trivial thing. Much that we love and depend on will be extinguished when this life comes to an end. And yet we can bring something to that moment. Many years ago when I was an inexperienced medical resident in Boston, an older couple was admitted to the hospital together. The husband was at the end of a long struggle with colon cancer. The wife, although she had a history of cardiac disease, was in much better shape. The two shared a room, and over the few days that I visited them, I could see how attatched they were to each other.

The husband lingered for days, passing in and out of consciousness, in considerable pain. His wife sat beside him holding his hand, hour after hour. Then one morning I came in to find her be empty --- she had died suddenly of cardiac arrest during the night. The husband was having a lucid period, so I told him the news, reluctantly since I was afraid of the shock it would give. But he seemed very calm.

"I think I'll go now, " he said. "I've been waiting."

"For what?" I asked him.

"A gentleman always allows the lady to go first," he said. He lapsed back into unconsciousness nad passedf away that afternoon.

He reminds me of what we can choose to bring to dying. Grace, calm, a patient acceptance of what's to come: These are all qualities that can be cultivated, and when they are, death is a test we will not fail. Our fault is not that we fear death but that we don't respect it as a miracle. The most profound subjects -- love, truth, compassion, birth and death -- are equal. They belong to our destiny but also to our present life. Ultimately the goal of this book is to bring death into the present and thereby make it equal to love.

To that end, I will continue with the story of Savitri, a woman who sought to use love to outwit death, as an interlude in our discussion of the afterlife. In the fullness of love there is a secret that she learned and we must relearn. Tagore hints at it quite beautifully in the following poem.

What Will You Give?

What will you give
When death knocks at your door?

The fullness of my life --
The sweet wine of autumn days and summer nights,
My little hoard gleaned through the years,
And hours rich with living.

These will be my gift.
When death knocks at my door.

---

posted June 28, 2008 04:20 PM         

Hey, you are on my cloud!

Read that book moons ago, and am reading it again...

The "spooky" thing is, what he has to say, just feels SO right...so, so, correct.

posted June 28, 2008 04:27 PM         

quote:

---

Finally Mr. Bornthorpe rose from his desk and beckoned us to follow him into the casket room. He flipped up two switches on the wall by the entrance, and the room became flooded with fluorecent light and the sound of canned organ music. We looked at some of the different caskets. One was propped open. It was made of cherry wood and had pink satin lining. A price tag dangled from on of the hinges: $18,000.

"Dad would be so ****** if he knew we were spending thousands of dollars on a box that is just going to be burned up, " Bud said pragmatically.

"He's not going down in a cardboard box, " snapped Sterling.

"Let's build the box ourselves," I suggested.

"Do you know how?" Bud asked. And they both wondered out loud, "Is that normal?"

"Why not?" I said.

I thought about the way our fatigue and grief had befun to make us vulnerable to the mortician's prodding suggestions that a family's respect for the deceased is measured by the amount of money they are willing to spend on the funeral. For some people it might be so. Respect for the dead comes in diverse forms in America. Among Tibetan Buddhists, respect for the deceased is defined in various ways, too. For example, a ceremony called "sky burial" is sometimes carried out, especially in the more stark areas of Tibet where the environment is harsh and tere are few resources. In sky burial, the body of the deceased is cut into pieces, rolled in grain, and respectfully offered to the birds. This is seen as a last act of extreme generosity on the part of the person who has died. Thinking about sky burial made the falsity of the funeral parlor seem very superficial indeed. We left there with firm resolve; I would draw the plans according to the measurements that Mr. Bornthrope provided, and then we would make the box.

---

posted June 28, 2008 09:31 PM         

Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.
Shawnee (Chief Tecumseh)

There is no death, only a change of worlds.
Duwamish

Life is instantaneous, and living is dying.
Buddhist

Life is a treasure hunt, love is the treasure.
Rosicrucian

The whole world is a dream, and death the interpreter.
Yiddish

Life is not separate from death. It only looks that way.
Blackfoot

What we do in life, echoes in eternity.
Latin

Sleep is the cousin of death.
Congo

Life is warfare.
Lucius Seneca

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.
Buddha

There is more time than life.
Mexican

Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth.
Thich Nhat Nanh

Let the dead bury the dead.
Western Koan

posted June 29, 2008 08:14 AM         

------------------
"Tender is my heart, for screwing up my life"~ Blur

posted June 30, 2008 07:01 AM         

She was in the hospice fading and seemingly unconscious and I sat by her bed every day just talking quietly and saying how much I loved her and then one afternoon as I sat there I felt as if the room was alive with spirits.
I could hear noises as if people were walking past me (the sort of sensation that you hear when you read a magazine in a railway station. You don't look at people but you are aware they are passing by)
And I thought "She is going to pass tonight"

Eventually I went home for a few hours sleep and asked the staff to telephone me.I was amazed when the hospice didn't ring and when I went back the next morning she was still there....at least her body was....I sat and watched this catheter still filtering urine but to be honest it was just like sitting next to an old overcoat she had shed and I knew she had already left.
She passed two days later but I knew that afternoon when I sat and heard those sounds that that was when she actually had passed.
The next two days where just a machine shutting down.