Learning to Die

All my life I have been surrounded by things I’d rather not know too much about, so I have come to feel that truth made naked without purpose is really a wanton.

The Kraken Wakes, John Wyndham

Since we’re all going to die some day, we might consider imagining as sooner than too late imagine our passing through the end of life. Perhaps that imagining is done easier within group practice. Homework will be assigned.

Don’t worry, everyone will pass this class. All of us must pass (on).

This morning I place a refrigerator magnet to the front-and-eye level where I seek my ice cubes. As soon as I get used to where it is I won’t see it anymore. Perhaps if I write about it, I’ll better remember the significance of what’s on it. It’s papered over with a handwritten summary from a page in one of my Buddhadharma meditation books that expands the significance of the Tibetan word Gom.

Most of us put off thinking about our own dying, there’s little surprise in that. I’m a hospice nurse. Does that factor in what I think about today, and every day? On what am I meditating? (Om, what am I edit-ating)? You’d think my job mattered, but I’ve been doing it for quite a while, like seeing that refrigerator magnet and then no longer regarding it. Accordingly, I think about material things, mostly. No joke. Of course material things, since stuff is all around me. This Android tablet is in front of me longer than I’m on the meditation cushion, so I must think of it as a means of waking up, of guiding me to Enlightenment. I suggest as much in my blog post titled “Credo”. Either that, or I’m wasting my precious human existence.

“How’s your day looking for a meeting?” I’m asked. Sorry, I’m totally booked for weeks, chasing the impermanence of forms/ material images, sensations, perceptions, mental activity and consciousness. Those five mental factors that give rise to craving and clinging to illusions that have been grabbing me by the throat. How does next month work for you?

Days I dress in nursing scrubs help me ignore wardrobe fashion. I imagine me as a 1960’s Chinese worker-Everyman without Communist tyranny, moving among free neighborhoods we wishfully call communities. Others see a less particular me, more of a generalized nurse. What I see is more or less our human-made world, the richly clad or poorly-adorned people who occupy the built urban environments, surrounded by their material possessions: cars, fashion, pets. They move on foot or by various conveyances. All material things seem assembled for fashioning and displaying the intended personea. Except when behind tinted car windows, seen more in poor neighborhoods than in privileged streets.

Tinted windows seem to hide identity more for protection than for spiritual motivation of modesty. Unless the tint is worn like Cool Joe sunglasses, meant to provide an element of sex appeal mystery. Sometimes hiding behind fashionable sunglasses is ridiculous. I’m thinking of you, Nebuchadnezzar crew, come down into the Matrix to step out of your ’65 Lincoln Continental suicide doors, looking too badass for your own good.

Yes, what I see most all day and every day are cars. Generally the ass end of cars. Vanity plates. Model and makes. Whether or not I can see a driver. Condition of the cars, bumper stickers or window stickers. Whether the car is signaling or breaking or driving on the shoulder in order to pass up a few more fellow drivers before they attempt to cut in to the right lane on the expressway. Sometimes I see no cars at all because I’m talking on the phone and deep into my imagination because of this. Or because I’m mentally following a recorded book being expertly read by a skilled performer.

One audio book I picked up for a dollar at my library sale rack is about the way we drive and what that says about us. The guy reading it sounds like a dweeb, and starts out talking about becoming a “late merger” like so many others he’s fumed at, just to save a few minutes during the commute. I lost interest and haven’t been able to get past Disc One. Or perhaps I’m meditating on becoming a late merger myself. On the other side of the bumper in the picture below, it says “I am not in a hurry”.

Anyhow, back to the Great Merger (into the Beyond), or capitalism mergers, or whatever else we might be meditating on these days. The pictured quote might be read as an either/or choice: We either use our cars safely, or as killing machines. Instruction is best begun simply, with easy bifurcated choices. In this respect major religious leaders guide their faithful from fear of the unknown to a reason-built journey across desserts, wilderness, ignorance.

Journeys to firm and well-grounded certainty last long, their paths being many. But most cannot mature or come close to understanding of things as they are. So sure of too-simplified beliefs (like a Prosperity Gospel), such as it’s merely believed, we’re soon fighting from a reflex that senses danger to our very existence when others believe differently. Or we take away land and call it just to destroy a people because they’re poor who practice different beliefs. (It’s probable that naked thievery comes first, the difference of faith merely soothes consciences.) A sitting United States president even said explicitly, You’re either for us or you’re against us. These primary color toys of reasoning are very easy to see and hold, especially during (never-ending) war ‘on terror’. The so-called guidance seems simple to follow, these infantile bunny slopes of thought. All we have to do is go shopping.

What if we took someone living the life of faith who also tried to understand life. Let’s consider Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, whose first book happens to be titled Either/Or. It’s his first book, remember; very enjoyable and in some places laugh-out-loud funny. Especially hilarious is a chapter called “The Rotation Method”. Although this walk-about Bachelor enthuses, (practically insists) on the solution to the root cause of All Evil, he plays literary and mental jokes throughout this book. Soon we hear of playful exercises about stopping in and out of the middle of a play, or reading only an interior section of a book, and varying one’s activities so that we might, first and foremost, avoid the most deadly of human catastrophes: Becoming Bored!

At heart, he is a religious man. Perhaps he’s thinking “The devil finds work for an idle mind”. In that case I must be among the virtuous. I haven’t yet found the time to read James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work.

And yet, being idle is no picnic. Certainly not in America, the land of hyperactivity. Like Lt. Colonel Kilgor, so certain that he knew he was going to get out of the war without so much as a scratch (only in Hollywood), said in Apocalypse Now, “Do you want to wait here for six hours [for the tide rise, to surf this beach]?” “You either fight, or surf!” Either/Or again. Choice-less choices. You either carry a rifle and go murder some Vietnamese, or you get blown up out there on the waves, cutting one way and the other. Both ridiculous, but at least it’s doing something.

Without setting aside time for deep thinking, for prolonged contemplation of everyday dilemmas, how can we know more deeply what weak leaders present so simply? And so Søren Kierkegaard developed his arguments upon deep and deeper readings into Christian scriptures, presenting more and more of his discovered existential dilemmas we face within his successive books. You don’t find dilemmas with either/or thinking.

Reading, understanding, meditating. These are the necessary successive stages toward a certainty. This is hard work, something we’re not accustomed to. Not in this age of distraction.

I talked with one of my patient’s daughters yesterday for about 90 minutes. We covered her typical biographical obsessions, not a wide range of topics, although she told me more about her late mother. I’m glad (this time) that I charted while we talked. Typically I think it’s respectful when I give fuller attention. Throughout this time her phone pinged and rang every few minutes. After a while I ‘ignored’ them but I’m sure the sounds affected us, distracted us. I thought of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. The electronic sounds seemed like bumpers to our pinball thoughts; added force doesn’t bring us anywhere new. She seemed to ring up her points, answer her own questions, confirm her pre-considered decisions. Same old pointless pin ball game. At least I had the open chart and unknowns in it to question her. And I left, this time, with completed documentation. Score!

But we’re not learning much about how to die now, are we?

I CAN share this one nugget of wisdom culled from the years of watching people die. This might ring a bell for you during a fierce illness. Before people can let go of their life, they succeed in letting go of distractions. If there’s time. Everything that has nothing to do with dying is successively let go, one degree of involvement with matter after the next: ideas, forms, things, nutrition, memories, breath.

There’s something to become familiar with, your breath. A good place to start! Now your meditation can be portable, breath goes with you everywhere you go. Until you stop going and keep shavasana (corpse pose). This is a Hatha Yoga pose we can practice today.

When someone takes their last breath, it usually takes about 3 minutes before they’re actually dead. So give them a few minutes. And give them some quiet. A peaceful sendoff seems a good thing. Unless you believe hearing gospel music, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) gives the dying better directions. I won’t fight you over what you believe, but tend to leave death rooms filled with screaming tears and-all-about-me hysterics.

As for me, I break for fellow beginners while finding again my way home. I tend to lose my turn-off when I’m trying to read someone’s wise bumper sticker. I then become familiar for a minute or two longer during this life, and usually enjoy the ride.