Thoughts Happen

Dishtowel Memorial—Goodbye, Amber

 My hand halted a fraction of a second over the stack of towels in my kitchen drawer. I was about to pull out the dull sage green dishtowel that matched the stripes in its cream-colored hand towel mate, but I hesitated. Because they found another girl this week. Or rather, they found her body. The one who had been missing for so long, eyes peering from behind a shock of glossy brown hair asking “Have You Seen Me?” for over a year, was finally heard, calling her seekers to a remote, rocky grave near the Pala Indian Reservation.

And I just couldn’t bear to pick up that drab dishtowel. It was too heavy.

Heavy with a parent’s grief, heavy with generations upon generations of brokenness that plays itself out in sickness and violence, heavy with the collective load of a community that wonders if it can absorb just one more sorrow.

So I reached beyond to its neighbor, red and orange, purple and green in its vibrancy. And the colors said, “Believe in me” and I realized that I did.

And I hung the dishtowel which was more than a dishtowel on the oven door next to the pale hand towel with its heavy sage-colored stripes, to remember.

And then I realized—her name was Amber.

Salt of the Earth—Goodbye, Chelsea

A 17-year-old girl, Chelsea King, went missing last week after leaving on a run from a neighborhood east of here; her parents were on TV, pleading for any information. Search parties went out for days, and then the headline in the paper. Arrest made—man charged with murder and rape, although they still didn’t know where the girl was.

The more I meditate, the more I feel things. And it’s damn uncomfortable. No wonder more people don’t do it.

In the past few months I’ve noticed a shift in my perception. I think my boundaries are starting to blur, like the salt paintings I remember doing as a kid. We’d wet a piece of paper, sprinkle salt all over it until it stuck, dab a moistened brush into our watercolors and lightly paint onto the salt surface. Any design we made would instantly expand, the colors wicking through the salt for a blurry kaleidoscopic effect.

I feel like I’ve got too much salt on me.

 I’m sick to my stomach. The girl is a straight-A student, plays French horn, is on the cross-country team. “The kind of girl who wants to change the world,” her father says on TV. I think of my own daughter, and I just can’t take it all in. The parents aren’t strangers, Those Poor People, but for a few moments, they are me, and she is my daughter. My daughter missing. Not as if she is my daughter. She is my daughter.

Other people are seeming less Other to me lately. We watched the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics from Vancouver on TV, the day after the girl went missing, and a choir from Sochi, Russia, all tuxes and deep blue gowns, came out to sing their national anthem as part of the passing-the-flag ceremony. Before, I would have thought, “Look at those Russians,” but what went across my mind this time was, “Aren’t people interesting.” Their sapphire blue started to bleed all over me.

Yesterday, they find the body, buried in a shallow grave at the edge of a lake. Oh God, is all I can think. The Parents. But sadly, they have become Those Poor People again. My defenses have kicked in, and once again they are separate from me. What a loss.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/katietegtmeyer/ / CC BY 2.0

So, Dalai Lama—any last thoughts?

“What should one’s last thought be upon facing death?” was the question posed to the Dalai Lama by one of the 13,000 people in the audience at the Long Beach arena Saturday. His Holiness, somehow both regal and casual ensconced in his swaths of red and saffron robes in an impossibly enormous throne-like chair, thought for a few seconds and then proceeded to not answer the question.

Death is on my mind more than usual lately; two women I know have had their middle-aged husbands die instantly and unexpectedly from massive heart attacks within as many months. Each man left a wife, two young children and a community of close friends and acquaintances in shock at the sudden and seemingly random grasp of death.

No matter how hard I try to wrap my head around the fact that this is in fact completely normal, I’m just not buying it. Despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, my naive image of death as it is supposed to be is that one lives to a comfortable old age and then one day lies down to take a nap and never wakes up.

Even my cat didn’t die this way. So why should I still be so surprised when nobody else does?

More food for thought came in the form of Stan Goldberg’s piece, “The Hard Work of Dying” in the November 2009 Shambhala Sun. Goldberg describes hospice patients moving through the dying process, dealing with the difficult emotional work of simplifying their existence, forgiving, asking for forgiveness and letting go of dreams on their way to death.

The piece is concise yet extremely touching, sketching in brief, honest scenes both the successful and not so successful efforts of hospice patients stumbling through unknown territory. Yet it also played into my death fairy tale because they all know they are dying. Knowing is key, I tell myself, to proper preparation. In my death fairy tale I will know, too. But it will be Later.

I love how Pema Chodron puts it in When Things Fall Apart:“The one thing in life that we can really count on is incredibly remote for all of us. We don’t go so far as to say, ‘No way, I’m not going to die,’ because of course we know that we are. But it definitely will be later.”

But for my two friends’ husbands, Later became Now in literally a heartbeat. So then what?

Which brings me back to the Dalai Lama. While skirting the question of what our last thought should be, he reminded us of the importance of always coming back to the reality of impermanence. He advised us to be mindful of the many forms of impermanence we experience in life and even to meditate on it daily. This will give us familiarity with death, he said. Familiarity will reduce fear, and will make it easier. He ended by adding, “When the time comes for me, I hope I can deal with it well, but I don’t know.” A little ripple of nervous laughter floated through the crowd.

So.

Simplifying. Forgiving. Asking for forgiveness. Letting go. Can’t I just wait on these things until I’m actually dying? Oh right, I forgot—I already am.

Photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/musicphoto/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0