In Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, The Last White Man, a white man named Anders wakes up one morning “to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” He struggles to come to terms with his new identity as, all around him, white people start waking up with dark skin and violence explodes. The novel is an exploration of race and social justice, as well as a moving meditation on how we face change—from the end of a way of life, to the death of people we love, to our own mortality. “The impulse to deny when change comes is natural,” says Hamid. “It isn’t wrong in the sense that the change can be quite overwhelming, but it’s an impulse that’s worth interrogating because I’m not sure it serves us particularly well.” Disturbing, thought-provoking, and ultimately uplifting, The Last White Man is about how accepting endings can make way for new beginnings. 

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Hamid attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He began his first novel, Moth Smoke (2000), at Princeton in a creative writing class taught by Toni Morrison. Three more novels followed: The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and Exit West (2017). He has also published an essay collection, Discontent and Its Civilizations (2014). Hamid’s books have received much acclaim, including being shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and adapted for film and television.

From his home in Lahore, Hamid spoke with me over Zoom about letting go of old selves, not falling prey to nostalgic politics, and how storytelling can help us find meaning in an impermanent world.

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Bardo is about the death of an old way of being. In The Last White Man, Anders wakes up brown, and, in a similar way, you were catapulted into a different life after 9/11. What was that like for you? In my personal life there have been a number of moments of sudden transition. In 1974, at the age of 3, I moved from Pakistan to California because my father was doing his PhD at Stanford. When I was 9, we moved back to Pakistan. Then, at 18, I returned to America to attend Princeton. I went to law school at Harvard, got a consulting job in New York City to pay off my loans, and was transferred to London in July of 2001. Then the September 11^th terrorist attacks happened. I was a brown-skinned guy with a Muslim name, but in the 1990s, if you lived in certain cosmopolitan cities, and you had a reasonably high income and had gone to elite universities, you weren’t exempt from discrimination but at least reasonably unbothered by it most of the time. Yet suddenly I was being viewed with suspicion. I was being pulled out of the line at the airport and kept at immigration for five hours, people changed seats when I got on the bus, and I thought, “This is so weird, I’m still me.” I hadn’t changed, but people were reading onto me an entire ethno-religious, racial belief system.

The bardo teachings say that when we die, it can take up to four days for us to admit we’re dead. Anders initially clings to the hope that a return to his old life as a white man is possible. After 9/11, was there a period where you wanted to go back to the life you’d known? At first, I kept hoping for things to return to normal. It’s like what you’re saying about it taking up to four days to accept that one has died, or that one has changed states. I think there’s something to that. There’s a spiritual kind of Wile E. Coyote phenomenon, where you’ve walked off the edge of the cliff and you think you’re floating there, but you’re really plummeting to the bottom of the valley.

After a while, I began to ask myself if the normal I wanted to return to was such a desirable situation. Should I instead scrutinize more closely how things are and the degree to which I myself have been complicit? This gave birth to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, my novel about a character who works in New York City around 9/11, went to Princeton, and feels he has to make a choice. Should he be Pakistani, should he be American, should he connect with Islamic sensibilities? 

But even after that novel, something lingered, related to how race works and how we imagine it onto each other, particularly with the rise of so many ethno-purist or ethno-nationalist ideologies. Not just in the United States, where there’s Trump’s Make America Great Again alliance with white nationalism, but the Brexit movement in the UK and Erdogan’s Turkishness and Putin’s Russianness and the resurgence of the Taliban. It’s happening in way too many places to be a coincidence. That’s why I decided to write a novel about a man who wakes up dark, to look at the feeling of loss, this tendency to desire purity, while at the same time to engage in an imaginative transgression, to go outside my position and imagine somebody else’s. 

What’s our relationship to loss, and how do you explore this in The Last White Man? Dealing with loss is something that we are as a human society utterly failing to do well. One reason is that when you have a capitalist paradigm, and in that paradigm the idea is that everybody is motivated by self-interest—and if we behave according to our self-interest, we’re performing our economic and our societal function—collectively this will create some degree of greater good. Now, the danger is that when you reinforce this self to such an extreme degree, you leave yourself vulnerable to the human predicament, which is that the self ends, that we are temporal. Whether or not you believe in the idea of a soul, certainly this particular container, and what we conceive of as our life, comes to an end. That presents us with a kind of horror: After all this cultural focus on the self, how do we grapple with the fact that the self ends? 

We’re left incredibly vulnerable, especially because many of the traditional means by which we’ve confronted this situation have eroded. When my uncle was being buried, I stood in his grave and received his white-shrouded body; I remember the smell of the dust and the sense of somebody being lowered to my hands. Rituals like this that continually remind us of our temporality are withering away, and religion itself is being repurposed increasingly into a kind of tribal flag that we use to signify allegiance to a group. As religion takes on a political role, there’s less space within it to provide guidance on things like our eventual end. 

So we’re confronting a complete tragedy and breakdown in humanity’s capacity to accept loss. At the same time, we’re encountering a more rapidly changing world. In Pakistan today there’s unprecedented rainfall. I just spoke to my 85-year-old grand-uncle and he’s never seen anything like it—sixteen inches of rain falling in four hours in an arid part of the country. Whether it’s how the planet is responding to colossal changes that we’ve imposed upon it, or technological shift as we experience it with social media and our jobs, we’re living in a world of dramatic and accelerated change. We’re unmoored in a time of unbelievably strong currents, and as a result, we see the rise of a nostalgic politics, and that politics says: Let’s go back to how things were. This politics is occurring everywhere, on the back of the self-centricity of our current economy and the weakening of our cultural modes of dealing with change and mortality. The Last White Man is really about that. How does one cope with loss? What can be gained from loss? The novel is a bit like a eulogy. It’s a story of the ending of something. But it also suggests that every ending is a beginning, and by focusing with so much fear on the endings that we face, we’re perhaps missing an openness to the idea that there could be some beginnings, and they might be worth exploring.

In bardo, we can move on only by accepting that something has ended. Because Anders and his partner, Oona, are experiencing impermanence but not giving in to fear and denial, they can more easily make their way forward. Well, that’s right. Anders has lost his mother, and his father is deathly ill. Oona lost her father when she was younger and loses her brother just before the novel begins. They’re grappling with the loss of people very close to them, at the same time that they’re losing their whiteness and becoming dark. In their refusal not to see and not to feel, each makes it possible for the other to refuse not to see and not to feel. It becomes not just a bond but a bridge, not just between them, but between where they are now and where they might go. They can better approach the future in the company of someone who shares this bond. 

Anders and Oona find meaning in the face of what can seem like meaninglessness since everything changes and everything ends. And we see something similar with Anders’s father, who finds meaning as his death nears—can you talk a bit about this? One of the traditions I turn to as a cultural and literary touchstone is the Sufi tradition, within Islam. In Sufi literature is the idea of love, and what love allows. One of the most famous examples is the moth circling the candle flame, where the moth is drawn to the beloved, which is the flame, and recognizes that to consummate this love is to lose oneself. A cessation of the self occurs as one approaches the beloved, a transcendence of the self instead of a reinforcing of the self.

In the novel, I wanted to explore a love story like this between Anders and his father. Anders’s father is trying to approach his death as an act of giving to his son: My son is lost. He’s had so much difficulty in life. How can I give my son something in this moment? His father decides what he can give Anders is a sense that it’s possible to die well, and a sense of courage and dignity from that. 

How does storytelling relate to finding meaning and value in our lives? I imagine there are two main strands to storytelling. One is that the future is based to a significant degree on the stories we choose to believe in. Stories have a magnetic power that shifts the needle of where we’re heading. Some of my novels, particularly Exit West and The Last White Man, have been about exploring the end of things, various kinds of apocalypse. In The Last White Man, it’s a world where we’re increasingly defaulting into exclusionary groups that believe in their own purity. But what if it became impossible for us to distinguish each other by race? How can we reopen an imaginative space of optimism? Looking for a plausible, optimistic future is important because pessimism is reinforcing of a reactionary, nostalgic, political trend. So storytelling is important at the level of how, as individuals and as societies, we head to where we want to go. 

Then the second strand comes in. Written fiction is important because, unlike when you watch television or a film and encounter a world that looks like the world we inhabit—people look like people, birds look like birds—a reader of a novel isn’t a viewer. The reader sees a white field with black letters, punctuation marks and spaces, and creates out of that people and emotions and images, feelings and sounds and sights. The reader is engaged in a profoundly creative act. I don’t think novelists actually write novels. They write half-novels that are prompts that readers then animate into what they experience as the novel, and which is unique to each reader-writer pairing.

Written fiction allows readers to create imaginary domains in a way that, in most of life, we don’t get the chance to do. And it allows them to experience their own act of imagining, and what it reveals about themselves in a place free from the gaze and judgment of others. When you read a novel like The Last White Man, you’re imagining into existence these characters and this world because much of the novel isn’t there. How should you feel about these people? Where is this set? What’s happening in the neighboring countries? How bad is this? You imagine these characters, imagine this situation, and hopefully become aware of your own imagining. And then you reckon with questions like: How does that make you feel? What does it show you about how you imagine things, since we do imagine race into existence? Can you be more volitional in your imagining afterwards? 

Bardo means “between-state.” In your writing, you explore what it means to be in-between—literally, psychologically, and emotionally. You’ve moved around a lot, and now divide your time between Lahore and New York. Do you feel like you’re “in-between” or in the center? Or both? In my more, shall we say, contented moments, I feel more like both, that I encompass more than one place and more than one sense of belonging. In my more despairing moments, I think that I’m alone, and that I don’t belong to anything. The two feed off each other, because when I feel despairing, I sometimes remember that many people must feel like this and, weirdly enough, being alone is a connection to other people who feel alone, who feel just as much a sense of: Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is this all about? 

Being of two places is a connection to everybody because we’re born of two parents, and we all have a younger time and an older time. And regardless of whether we move geographically, we’re all constantly migrating from one second to the next, one year to the next, one page to the next.

The post Every Ending Is a Beginning appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Novelist Julie Otsuka’s third book has been over ten years in the making. Averaging roughly one novel per decade, Otsuka, a former figurative sculptor and painter, packs exquisite detail into her slim volumes—her latest work, The Swimmers, clocks in at a lean 176 pages. Each paragraph of her books reads like a miniature painting, and every word has been carefully chosen, right down to the pronouns. The Swimmers begins in the first-person plural, a narrative style Otsuka honed with her previous novel, The Buddha in the Attic, which followed the lives of Japanese “picture brides” coming to America in the early 1900s to marry men they had never met. This time, the we belongs to the titular swimmers, members of an underground community pool.

For the swimmers, the pool offers refuge from the disappointments of life on land: backaches, injuries, heartbreak, divorce, despair, “the usual aboveground afflictions.” It is a place where things make sense, if only for the duration of a few meticulously counted laps. Outside the pool, the swimmers occupy a range of roles and professions: failed painters, HR managers, untenured professors, a former Olympian, and a retired lab technician, Alice, now in the early stages of dementia. But at the pool all these identities drop away and members are neatly sorted into three categories: “fast-lane people, medium-lane people, or the slow.” In the water, they are, however briefly, at home in the world, as signs of old age, illness, and decrepitude slip away—rubber swim caps mask gray hairs, elegant strokes hide onshore limps, and it no longer matters how much they remember or forget. And as the world above undergoes change after change, both torrential and mundane, the pool remains fixed, predictable, “always a comfortable 81 degrees.” Free from the precarity of everyday life, the swimmers can experience the fleeting ecstasy of weightlessness as boundaries between them and the water dissolve: “It’s nirvana.”

And then a crack appears. Though barely noticeable at first, the crack soon ruptures the familiar predictability of the swimmers’ underground refuge, as suddenly their sanctuary is imperiled. With characteristic humor and grace, Otsuka chronicles the swimmers’ responses to an abrupt, inexplicable loss of control as the crack infiltrates their psyche. We see the obsessive mind at work in vivid detail, with grasping and aversion on full display: some swimmers begin to defect, unsettled by the crack’s sudden appearance; others start monitoring it compulsively, shifting their routines to be closer to it. A lingering unease follows them into their aboveground lives: they lose their keys, their concentration, even their friends. As the cracks multiply, experts are brought in to determine their provenance, but they can find no satisfactory explanation. Eventually management is left with no alternative but to close the pool. The swimmers, deprived of their haven, are plunged back into their lives aboveground.

With the closure of the pool, the narrative shifts abruptly from the swimmers’ collective voice to the story of a single swimmer, Alice, now unmoored from the one place where things made sense. As Alice’s dementia progresses, her unnamed daughter documents what she remembers—and what she does not. These catalogs of forgetting reveal the slow erosion of Alice’s grasp of reality, as the cracks in the pool give way to cracks in memory—to the fracturing of Alice’s very sense of self. Where the swimmers’ torrent of we’s in the previous sections was incantatory, almost hypnotic, mimicking first the pleasure of total immersion in the water and then the all-consuming nature of anxiety, here the repetition is more subdued, melancholy, eventually heartbreaking. A witty depiction of the human desire for control unfurls into a quiet portrait of the devastation wrought by dementia and the ensuing grief and regret of a daughter who has returned too late.

Loss of identity is not a choice but an inevitability.

And then the rhythm breaks and starts again. As Alice’s grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, she is moved to Belavista, a “long-term, for-profit memory residence” located in a former parking lot off the freeway. In a bleak critique of the commercialization of care, Otsuka writes from the perspective of the institution addressing its newest member. Belavista’s bureaucratic we eerily echoes the swimmers’ collective voice, and features of the pool’s controlled environment recur, sometimes uncannily: There are just as many rules and regulations, though now they are much more sinister. The temperature is just as predictable. And the experts are just as clueless. Like the pool, Belavista erases distinctions based on age, profession, and identity, though this dissolution no longer carries a quality of ecstasy; instead, the anonymity is just another reminder of the residents’ progressive decline. Loss of identity is not a choice but an inevitability. As Otsuka quips, “with each memory shed you will feel lighter and lighter. Soon you will be totally empty, a void, and, for the first time in your life, you will be free. You will have attained that state of being aspired to by mindful meditators across the planet—you will be existing utterly and completely ‘in the now.’”

At Belavista, Alice’s mind continues to unravel, and Otsuka shifts perspective one final time, centering on Alice’s relationship with her daughter in a tender and quietly devastating coda. There is no cathartic resolution, no clean correspondence between the novel’s halves, no tidy message or explanation to be extracted. Nothing coheres exactly right. The pool is rarely revisited in the book’s later sections. Yet somehow, taken together, the pieces offer a profound meditation on the ways we structure our lives—through laps, through relationships, through memory itself—and what happens when those structures disappear, whether they are wrenched away or simply slowly disintegrate. The novel reveals the uncertainty that lurks even where we feel most secure, and its litanies of loss make visceral the grief of impermanence and erosion of self. Though The Swimmers resists reduction to a trite moral or platitude, perhaps it points us toward care: for ourselves, for each other, and for the everyday objects and routines that make us who we are. Otsuka’s writerly devotion to the mundane details that constitute a life teaches us to be present to the small things, no matter how trivial they may seem, before they eventually—inevitably—slip away.

The post A Break in the Rhythm appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I traveled with my dad—‘H’, as we called him—in the back seat of the car. It was the same route we’d driven a million times: to Tesco, to drop me off at the station, to drop me off at the airport, to drive up the M25 to my sister’s at Christmas. It was a suitably cold, drizzly afternoon, our destination emptied of people by rain and virus.

Our tiny group trudged through the rain to a large oak tree, the designated spot. The whole place appeared to have been designed by computer. I took the plastic lid off the long cardboard tube, which was both disturbingly heavy and disturbingly light. I broke the paper seal and there was ‘H’—as fine as flour, as white as rice—and I poured him in pluming, wind-blown arcs across the grass. There was a stiff breeze and I had to take care to avoid him being blown back over my new trainers.

Out of everything connected to my dad’s death, this was the most grotesque—that we found ourselves acting and speaking as though living, breathing, vibrant, chuckling, grumpy, boozy, Sudoku-filling, paper industry prodigy ‘H’ had become lifeless white ash sinking in semi-circular lines into cold wet grass on a gray September day.

Believing in Father Christmas is one thing, but to believe that a person is a pile of ash who somehow continues in that form! And yet we actually said things like, “He’ll be happy here under this oak tree,” and, “Would you like to go and visit ‘H’ under his tree?”

Family and friends seem to find nothing controversial in the frequently expressed hope, “May he rest in peace.” Yet it implies doubt about the outcome—the suggestion, clearly, is that our loved one might not “rest in peace.” The implication: they might become “a restless spirit”—a ghost, no less; perhaps a zombie! In our age of (selective) political correctness, no one finds this offensive.

Similarly, many of us seem to feel obligated to say, “He passed.” Where to, “the other side?” We’re back among the ghosts! When a soap bubble bursts, did it “pass,” or did it cease to exist? Or we say, “He passed away,” to persuade ourselves that he is not dead at all, not even “resting,” but has embarked on a mysterious journey, like Bilbo Baggins of Bag End. It doesn’t help to be confronted by these delusions of mass pathology and denial at a time when the mind is already reeling.

On the other hand, it did help to know that my dad would have perceived the whole ash-scattering event as risible. I remember him saying something like:

“I don’t give a hoot what you do with me when I’m gone, I won’t be there!”

Indeed, even without the virus, it would have been difficult to have any kind of church “service” knowing that the person being honored would have considered every aspect of the process a meaningless (and expensive!) farce exploiting minds less rational than his own. After the cremation, we had played a selection of his favorite songs and had a drink. Did it “honor the dead” to play, “It’s Not Unusual,” by fellow Welshman Tom Jones?

That night, looking up at the ceiling in the pitch black of the room where he had died, I didn’t “honor” my dad, because I don’t really know what that means, or why it’s relevant, in reference to the death of a loved one. I did find myself reflecting on Ernest Hemingway’s version of honor and heroism, of “grace under pressure”— an old fisherman battling sharks to save his prize catch; a civil war volunteer fighting a suicidal rear-guard action to save his comrades. It seemed to me that real heroism is much more mundane.

Real heroism is trundling to and from Tesco every day, for years, in a little red car to do the shopping when you were once a shooting executive star. It’s falling and cutting yourself horribly because your 87-year-old skin is so thin, and just getting up and carrying on. It’s carrying the empty bottles and rubbish down a flight of stone steps day after day because it has to be done, even though you’ve fallen many times in the house and falling down the steps would be fatal. It’s losing every last one of your friends, until you are the longest-surviving member of your local club, and the village is empty of familiar faces, and just carrying on. Heroism is sitting on a sofa, day after day, watching daytime TV, because there’s not much else you can do, when you don’t believe there’s much point to anything anyway because you’re an atheist, and just carrying on.

‘There Is Darkness and Nothing Else’?

After my dad died, three related phenomena were clearly evident: a storm of thoughts in my head, a searing pool of emotional pain in my heart, and a witnessing consciousness observing both.

Here’s a storm-chasing snapshot of my mind the night after he died. Without himself becoming infected, my dad had been stuck in a COVID-ridden hospital for the last four weeks of his life, unable to see any of us:

‘“I better go, Davy; I’ve got two scoops of ice cream waiting to be devoured. Bye!” My god, those were the last words he ever said to me! How on Earth can he have died within 24 hours of being let out of hospital? Why did they let him go, if he was so ill? They said his heart was at 25 percent capacity, his kidneys the same or worse. He had no idea if he was even on steroids or not. How will we take care of mum during the lockdown? She’ll be alone in the house having lost her partner of 65 years. Sixty-five years! And now she’s alone at the age of 85! How must that feel?! How can we get medical help to her without her getting COVID? She almost fell over this morning because she hadn’t slept. Are we going to lose both of them in the same month? “Please, you can just pick me up and take me home—I’ve been stuck here for weeks; I can’t take it any more. Just take me home.” He must have been suffering horribly to say something like that. “But there’s no care package, if you just leave, Dad; you’ll be on your own.” We should have just taken him out, we shouldn’t have just left him there. How is it possible he could just die within 24 hours of being sent home? Will I end up being poured in white plumes across the crematorium grass? Who am I kidding? Of course I will! How will we take care of mum now? “I’ve got two scoops of ice cream waiting to be devoured.” Mum’s alone for the first time in 65 years! He said to her: “Try to remember the good times.” How could he die the day after coming home?…’.

And so on. This painful, endlessly cycling thought-storm was waiting for me in the treacherous wee small hours of the night. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote so beautifully:

Day’s pain, muffled by its own glare

burns among stars in the night. 

— The Complete Poetical Works of Rabindranath Tagore 

And this burning emotional pain was the second phenomenon: intense sadness, anxiety, and anguish in the center of my chest. This pain was, of course, provoked by thoughts. But the pain, in turn, fuelled more thoughts.

Surging thoughts, pain, and then a mysterious third phenomenon: my awareness, my consciousness, watching both. 

Indian spiritual teacher Osho told a wonderful story of an epiphany on the theme of this witnessing consciousness:

‘One of the great philosophers of the West, C.E.M. Joad, was dying, and a friend, who was a disciple of [mystic] George Gurdjieff, had come to see him. Joad asked the friend:

‘“What do you go on doing with this strange fellow, George Gurdjieff? Why are you wasting your time? And not only you… I have heard that many people are wasting their time.”

‘The friend laughed. He said:

‘“It is strange that those few people who are with Gurdjieff think that the whole world is wasting its time, and you are thinking that we are wasting our time.”

‘Joad said: “I don’t have much longer to live; otherwise I would have come and compared.”

‘The friend said:

‘“Even if you have only a few seconds more to live, it can be done here, now.”

‘Joad agreed.

‘The man said:

‘“You close your eyes and just look inside, and then open your eyes and tell me what you find.”

‘Joad closed his eyes, opened his eyes and said:

‘“There is darkness and nothing else.”

‘The friend laughed and he said:

‘“It is not a time [for me] to laugh, because you are almost dying, but I have come at the right time. You said that you saw only darkness inside?”

‘Joad said: “Of course.”

‘And the man said:

‘“You are such a great philosopher; you have written such beautiful books. Can’t you see the point, that there are two things—you and the darkness? Otherwise, who saw the darkness? Darkness cannot see itself—that much is certain—and darkness cannot report that there is only darkness.”

‘Joad gave it consideration and he said:

‘“My God, perhaps the people who are with Gurdjieff are not wasting their time. This is true, I have seen the darkness.”’ (Osho, The Razor’s Edge, e-book, 1987)

It is true! There is the darkness—the storm of thoughts driven by intense emotional pain in the chest—but there is also a witnessing presence observing the darkness. The darkness is not observing itself. The darkness and that which is aware of the darkness are not the same.

When this witnessing awareness focused on the thoughts in my head, they proliferated and the emotional pain in my chest increased. By contrast, when the witness focused on the emotional pain, something very different happened. At first, the pain actually seemed to increase, because I was facing it directly for the first time. But as I continued to divert attention away from the thoughts to the pain, as I delved into the pain as deeply as possible—feeling the sadness, the anguish—my thoughts were deprived of the energy imparted by attention and started to subside. As the thinking subsided, so did the thought-driven pain in my chest. The more I focused on the painful feelings, the less energy was available to maintain both thoughts and pain.

Even this slight improvement was a relief, an encouragement. I continued to focus on the pain, which lessened even more. Thoughts continued to pop into my head, of course, but they now had less emotional pain to feed off and so couldn’t reinforce that pain so easily.

Eventually, it reached a point where I was enjoying watching, feeling the pain; I didn’t want to stop. In fact, I was no longer sure if it really was pain now. What was it, then: pleasure? In the immediate aftermath of my dad’s death? It seemed almost indecent!

The darkness and that which is aware of the darkness are not the same.

As the pain continued to reduce and thoughts lessened, a moment came when I was so focused on feeling that a tiny gap appeared in the chain of thoughts. Through that gap, a minute but intense point of bliss sparked in my chest. It was a blazing, ecstatic spark of love and delight.

I focused attention on this tiny spark, which dissolved, spread, and deepened, so that it formed a shimmering pool of bliss and love across my chest and upper back. It wasn’t that I felt love for anyone in particular. Rather, love was there and I felt love for whichever person popped into my thoughts, or for whatever object popped into my sense perceptions.

The burning anguish had now completely disappeared. I felt ecstatic delight, happiness, peace—I was overflowing with a loving warmth. This loving bliss—why not call it loving bliss rather than the tautological “loving kindness,” as if we’re reluctant to admit we feel bliss?—stayed with me for the rest of the day. In reference to this experience, I made this short entry in my journal four days after my dad had died:

‘Bliss in the afternoon meditation.’

This is an example of one tiny moment of nonattachment and it was the result of passive observation, not an act of will.

Attachment and the pain of attachment are ultimately made up of thoughts—when we stop focusing on thoughts and start focusing on perceptions, sensations, and emotions, the thoughts subside. When a tiny gap eventually appears in the chain of thought, an internal source of love and bliss ordinarily obscured by the cloud of thought is able to blaze through this gap in the clouds.

This doesn’t mean giving up parental or filial love to diminish attachment, and it doesn’t mean mollifying sadness by ascribing emotions to a pile of ash; it means an outpouring of love that flows to children and parents, and in fact, to everyone and everything.

Other attachments then begin to fall away. Ambition for sensual pleasures, attention, applause, fame, and gain starts to lessen because we know their pursuit generates vast clouds of thought that painfully obscure our inner bliss. When we have tasted this authentic delight even once, our priority instantly becomes that of refining and deepening the art of self-observation.

Unspoken Secrets

I’ve written about my experience, not because I think it is in any way exceptional—millions of people have been experiencing this and far more profound results from meditation for many thousands of years. I’m sharing it because it has radical implications for our whole approach to suffering and happiness.

Like so many of us, I grew up in a culture that persuaded me to believe that my emotions were too much for me to handle. Powerful forces in our society encourage us to view anxiety, craving, sadness, and grief as illnesses that require therapeutic and pharmacological intervention. That may indeed sometimes be true in the case of severe depression, for example. But there is a deep problem here.

In his important book, Undoctored – Why Health Care Has Failed You And How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Own Doctor, US cardiologist Dr. William Davis blows a loud whistle on modern health provision:

The unspoken secret is that providers prefer treatment over prevention, expensive over inexpensive, patent-protectable over non-patent protectable, billable procedure over non-billable procedure, BMW over Toyota Prius. . . Healthcare is a business, a big business (the biggest business of all in the United States), a business that continually seeks to grow its revenues and profits. 

— William Davis, Undoctored (Rodale, 2017)

The logic of this will be familiar to anyone who has been following Media Lens over the last 20 years, and it surely rings true for anyone who has interacted with Western health care.

The damning conclusion from this courageous insider reads:

In other words, neglect the cause, profit from the treatment. It is the unspoken but defining mantra of modern health care. Health is not part of the equation. 

This helps explain why so many of us have been persuaded to believe that we can’t cope with our emotions, perceived as overwhelming, unmanageable. Our militarized culture even uses the term “panic attack” to suggest we are being assaulted by some vicious enemy.

But these are our emotions; they are part of us. They contain crucial information, deep wisdom about the wrong paths we are taking. Very often, they are psycho-physical dissidents challenging the follies and ambitions of our ego, utterly detached as it is from the reality of our bodies and the rest of the natural world. The head is full of hot air, dreams; the body and its emotions are rooted in reality. Feelings are far more honest, a portal to truth.

There is a terrible price to pay for medicating, silencing, and numbing our emotional dissent. The whole lesson of so many mystics over millennia is that the art of living involves precisely overcoming our head-trapped numbness, in becoming acutely sensitive to the cryptic messages of our feelings, no matter how painful. The more closely we listen, the more deeply we understand. Not just great but entirely unimagined treasures may then pour into our life and world.

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As a body of literature, English-language haiku has rarely produced poems with the mythic depth or historical resonance that one expects from the best Western poetry. This will change as our poets learn to use the techniques of Japanese haiku to explore the symbols that inform their own cultural experience.

Cypresses have long been associated with mourning. The Orphic gold tablets found in Greek graves describe a white cypress near the entrance to the underworld. In ancient Rome cypress branches were hung on the doors of homes in mourning. Even today, cupressus sempervirens is the most common tree in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cemeteries.

The poet can leave a lot unsaid because of these associations. She doesn’t have to describe the graveyard, for instance. The words grief, stone, and cypress establish the scene. The light beneath the tree is dim, the space liminal. The stage is set for a magic that only nature can perform.

The transformation of an inanimate object into an animal is one of the oldest tricks in haiku. The most famous example is by Arakida Moritake (1473–1549), a poet who became the head priest of the Inner Shrine at Ise:

A fallen blossom
returned to the branch?
But no…it’s a butterfly!

The poem relies upon a misperception, which is corrected in a delightful way. What is the message? The line separating the living from the dead is largely a matter of perspective.

There is none of Moritake’s lightheartedness in Rees’s haiku (inspired by the season word frog). But the corrected perception is still there. Lost in mourning, she finds a place to rest her eyes in the gloom of the cypress shade. A small stone at her foot seems to express the intractable immobility of her sorrow. Then it moves . . . and her grief moves with it.

It is important to note that the poet’s grief has not been erased . . . only eased. The humor of the poem (and there is humor in every good haiku, however dark or uncanny) lies in the fact that a little frog performs this act of redemption, rather than something grander.

It doesn’t take much to show us that the world is constantly renewing itself, provided we are attentive to the cycles of nature. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is stuck. When something is lost, something is always given.

It’s not over until it’s over—and it’s never over. This is the wisdom of haiku.

♦

The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku.

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On a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle Editor-in-Chief James Shaheen and co-host Sharon Salzberg sat down with writer and interfaith minister Barbara Becker to discuss her new memoir, Heartwood: The Art of Living with the End in Mind. When her closest childhood friend was diagnosed with cancer, Becker set out on a quest to live a year of her life as if it were her last. Drawing from a variety of wisdom traditions, Becker explored questions of what it means to be mortal and how turning toward death can help us live more fully. This journey eventually led her to train as a hospice volunteer and interfaith minister, accompanying patients at the bedside and helping families make sense of their loss.

During her conversation with Shaheen and Salzberg, Becker discusses many of the losses we tend to ignore—including miscarriage. Becker, who has experienced two miscarriages herself, believes strongly in the power of speaking openly about grief and loss. Over the years, she has arrived at a deeper sense of healing after her own miscarriages through seeking out communities of loss and participating in Buddhist rituals of mourning. Read parts of her journey below, and listen to the full episode here.

Finding community in loss

About 20 years ago, I had two miscarriages. At that time, we just didn’t talk about miscarriage in this society. For the most part, we were completely silent about that kind of loss, so much so that I hadn’t known that my own mother had experienced a miscarriage as well. As time went on, I found out that both of my grandmothers had also lost pregnancies and that my great-grandmother had died in childbirth. I was completely cut off from this long chain of interconnected loss because of the way we isolate ourselves in silence.

Years later, I decided to post about my own story on Facebook. On October 15, the National Day of Remembrance for Pregnancy and Infant Loss, I shared the names of the daughters I had lost, Arden and Adele. I was surprised by how many of my friends, men and women, wrote the names of their own losses in the comments. I think we all needed that space to finally say what had happened. There’s such community in loss, and sometimes it comes as a great relief to know that what we experienced is a common occurrence. It’s so important to know that we’re not alone.

Opening the door to compassion

After my first miscarriage, I signed up for a meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. At that point in my life, I was aware of the mindfulness movement writ large, but I wasn’t deeply aware of Buddhism. I had a sense that I needed to walk toward the loss I had experienced rather than run away from it, and I couldn’t think of a better way to turn toward it than to go on a meditation retreat.

On the retreat, my mind was monkey mind, jumping all over the place, reliving the miscarriage and the procedure to empty the contents of my uterus. Everything was coming back—all the gore and all the heartbreak. When this was happening, I spoke to one of the teachers, who shared with me that the real key to meditation was to watch the contents of my monkey mind without judgment. That was the first time that I experienced that space of compassion toward myself. I felt like doors opened during that time. I sometimes think that it’s the hardships of our lives that bring us closer to the big understandings. I have now been practicing for 25 years, and I give thanks to Arden and Adele, the children I never had, for bringing me to the dharma.

Slowing down through ritual

When I lived in Japan, I witnessed the ritual of mizuko kuyo, a ceremony honoring the water children, or children who are never born. The idea is that we are very much of the water, from conception to the waters of the womb, and then over time we solidify and become hardened adults. In Japan, many people who have lost children turn to the bodhisattva Jizo, a being who returned to this world for the benefit of lost children and travelers, guiding them into the next realm. In many temples, there are small Jizo statues dressed up in little outfits and they may be accompanied by images of children. These statues symbolize losses, from abortion or miscarriage, from stillbirth or a young child.

One year at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, we organized a mizuko kuyo ritual where we folded origami cranes in honor of all of our losses. It was such a moving experience. I went with my husband, Dave, and we each folded a crane, one for each of our lost children. The act of slowly creasing and uncreasing these little pieces of paper brought focus and attention to the loss we had experienced years before. There was a lot of silence and a lot of tears in the room that day. Even to this day, those little paper cranes hang across the entrance to the zendo, offering another reminder of how the dead truly are still a part of our life. 

This is one of the powers of ritual—holding space for people whose lives we might not know that much about. It is important to commemorate them all. For me, the primary benefit of ritual is that it slows us down in a world that is moving at warp speed. Rituals invite us to be quiet and still. And they teach us that we are connected through time and place. A Lakota elder once told me that when he goes out and looks at the stars at night, he sees them as the campfires of his ancestors. To be that connected to a sense of history changes us on an elemental basis.

♦

More on pregnancy loss from the Tricycle archive:

Healing from Miscarriage

Diary from the Bardo: A Reflection on Miscarriage

Putting a Face on Loss: An interview with the filmmakers of Mizuko

The post Honoring the Water Children appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At times, pain can reach such a powerful level that it can be devastating. In spiritual life, we might call it the dark night of the soul. In interpersonal life, we call it grief, and this intense emotional experience does not limit itself to the loss of someone who has died. It can occur as the experience of nearly any kind of deep loss. I learned that in a poignant way from a man who was deeply suffering.

A young soldier who had been deployed in Iraq came to IMS [Insight Meditation Society] within two weeks of having been released from the army. He was a beautiful person. He had enlisted for a few dif­ferent reasons: a recent romantic heartbreak, a yearning to get out of town, and deeply felt ideals about love of country. Not only had he landed in an active war zone, he had also experienced massive disillusionment and real horror at actions he witnessed. I had never met someone in as active a state of traumatic distress as he was, outside of an actual traumatic situation occurring on the spot. His startle reflex was extraordinary; he lived on tenterhooks. His need to take measures to feel safe was absolute. His incredibly sweet nature did regular battle with his mistrust and persistent monitoring of others.

The intensive, silent retreat he’d signed up for wouldn’t have been the ideal environment to begin processing that recent experience, so we worked with him on a parallel track—more relational, emphasizing grounding exercises and especially self-compassion. 

His later diagnosis was PTSD, but it could equally have been described as moral injury or a soul wound. The lead teacher of the retreat he entered was my colleague Rodney Smith, who had also founded and run two hospices. I was talking to Rodney about the soldier one day when he said to me, “Sharon, don’t you see? He’s grieving.”

Once I understood his mistrust and hypervigilance and alienation as grief, it registered within me as heartbreak, which I, too, have often felt. His pain didn’t seem as distant as a diagnosis like PTSD. Consequently, I was better able to be a friend and teacher to him.

To grieve, whether for a person, a set of ideals, or our hopes and dreams, is to watch reality, once so solid-seeming, become molten. It’s hard to get oneself to take the next step in a dissolving world—where will our foot land when it seems nothing will support us? How do we move toward inner or outer change?

To start with, here are some footholds for our next step, thanks to two insightful writers.

“Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them,” says writer Martín Prechtel. “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” Seeing grief in this way helps us respect what we are going through, rather than being mired in shame and discouragement on top of the pain we already feel.

What happens if we recognize the love inside of grief? Journalist Dahr Jamail writes about his grief for the planet on Truthout, a nonprofit news website:

Each time another scientific study is released showing yet another acceleration of the loss of ice atop the Arctic Ocean, or sea-level-rise projections are stepped up yet again, or news that another species has gone extinct is announced, my heart breaks for what we have done and are doing to the planet. . . .

Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing. . . . My acceptance of our probable decline opens into a more intimate and heartfelt union with life itself. The price of this opening is the repeated embracing of my own grief. . . . I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive. I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable as the biosphere declines.

♦

Excerpted from Sharon Salzberg’s book Real Change (Flatiron Books, September 2020)

Join Tricycle for “Grieving Mindfully, Together,” a live virtual COVID grief circle on October 14 led by Sharon Salzberg and psychologist Dr. Sameet Kumar, a grief counselor and author of Grieving Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss.

The post What Happens If We Recognize the Love Inside of Grief? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Grief can either be used as a tool to bring us closer to ourselves, and thus to each other, or it can tear us apart. We are so busy running from loss, like a child hiding from the boogeyman, that we don’t care who we knock down along the way, so long as sorrow stays far enough behind. But loss doesn’t need to be feared, and neither do we, ourselves. When we choose to use mindfulness and meditation not only to become aware of our own grief and how it impacts our life but also to accept the inevitability of loss and of failure, we open ourselves up to new possibilities. We open ourselves up to beauty. To connection. To liberation and justice.

♦

From Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow by Breeshia Wade © 2021. Reprinted with permission of North Atlantic Books.

The post Loss Doesn’t Need to Be Feared appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When 2020 began, our routines felt familiar, well within what we thought of as “normal.” We felt a relative sense of security. Then the pandemic struck like a storm out of the Bible, a plague beyond what we could have imagined. The world turned on a dime, and suddenly governments worldwide were mandating lockdowns, and we were all sheltering in place. 

Where we live in Boston, April and May brought a surge of COVID-19 infections and deaths. An email Marnie received during the shutdown began: “I am writing with a heavy heart to tell you. . . .” It was about a friend from her meditation group who had been hospitalized and then died a few days later from the virus. That week, there were almost no non-COVID-19 stories in the news, as the US pandemic death toll surpassed 100,000. 

In a column in the New York Times, David Brooks asked readers how they were holding up. In the first few days, he received 5,000 replies. “I think I . . . expected a lot of cheerful coming-together stories,” Brooks told NPR. “But what I got shocked me. It was heart-rending and gutting frankly. People are crying a lot . . . It tends to be the young who feel hopeless, who feel their plans for the future have suffered this devastating setback, a loss of purpose, a loss of hope. Then the old, especially widows and widowers, talk about the precariousness of it, the loneliness of it. They just feel vulnerable, extremely vulnerable. While a lot of people are doing pretty well, there’s just this river of woe out there that really has shocked me and humbled me.” 

Now we see that aspects and qualities of grief and grieving are universal, whether you have suffered an individual loss, or are experiencing losses on a global scale. Individually and collectively, we are grieving. We’re experiencing large, difficult feelings, even if we don’t recognize them as grief: sorrow, fear, anger, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, or disorientation. These troubling emotions, sensations, and mind states are the ways we humans respond to loss. 

We feel the loss of family members, friends, and neighbors we loved, celebrities and public figures we followed. We’re missing the person we were and the way we lived not long ago. In the midst of this invisible, highly contagious virus, we grieve the loss of a kind of innocence. As we don our masks and gloves, we fear being infected or infecting others, and wonder what impact these changes will have on our worldview and our emotional well-being. 

We grieve the loss of our work and economic stability, the familiarity of seeing our kids go off to school, and the ease of chatting with friends and even strangers. We grieve for shuttered offices, factories, and gathering places. We grieve for elders in nursing homes, family members who cannot visit one another. In the midst of national protests over police brutality and systemic racism, we bear witness to the deep grief of the African American community and other communities of color who suffer a disproportionate share of deaths and infection in the pandemic. 

And yet, despite all the towering amounts of grief we are holding, many of us harbor our own “great palace lies” about grief. We may believe that grief should last for only a fixed and fairly brief period of time, or that the “grieving process” should proceed in a particular sequence. In 1969, psychiatrist and renowned researcher Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote a popular book about the five stages of moving through dying and death. Decades later, Kübler-Ross and coauthor David Kessler wrote a book in which they worked with the same stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—to explain how people move through the grieving experience. 

Even at the time of writing their book On Grief and Grieving, the authors acknowledged that Kübler-Ross’s ideas about stages were widely misunderstood. She did not mean to assert that there is only one prescribed timeline or a unique sequence of emotions and experiences (denial, anger, and so forth) that most people would predictably follow as they grieved.

And yet, Kübler-Ross’s ideas gained traction and have continued to penetrate popular culture with far-reaching and, for some people, painful consequences. In my bereavement groups, I often hear people worry aloud that they have missed an important stage or even plaintively ask if they are grieving “correctly.” 

But the reality is that grieving has no predictable stages or particular timeline. Grief has as many different expressions as there are people who grieve. We all share some common and universal experiences, yet each of us moves through grief in our own way and in our own time. Russell Friedman, author and cofounder of the Grief Recovery Method, describes grief as “(a) normal and natural emotional reaction to loss or change of any kind.”

Your grief will last for as long as it lasts. Some of us experience grief as a series of waves. One day you feel distraught and immobilized. The next day you find the unexpected strength to do an errand. Perhaps you walk down the aisle of a supermarket, thinking that you are having a good day. And then, you see something that reminds you of what and whom you’ve lost. Your heart is broken open by something as ordinary as a can of tuna. 

You could think of grief as a passage. You are torn from the life you knew before. You are not who you were, and you are not yet who you will become. You are, in a very real way, between identities. This experience—profoundly different for each of us—is confusing and agonizing, and it may also be a doorway for transformation. 

Though this may be hard to believe or accept at first, grief can be seen as an invitation to grow and, eventually, to find meaning in suffering and in the experience of loss. A heart that is broken open offers a precious gift—a chance to become more authentic with yourself and with other people. 

When you try to turn away from grief, when you hope to bypass or escape it, grief persists. Painful emotions—such as sadness, anger, or fear—linger and may even seem worse than ever. Until you stop running, begin to name or acknowledge and lean into all you’ve been through, and build a friendly relationship with grief, you’ll almost certainly continue to suffer. 

Alan Wolfelt, author, educator, and grief counselor, puts it this way: “ . . . the pain that surrounds the closed heart of grief is the pain of living against yourself, the pain of denying how the loss changes you, the pain of feeling alone and isolated—unable to openly mourn, unable to love and be loved by those around you.” What would it mean to live instead with an open heart, denying none of your pain or grief, mourning in whatever ways feel appropriate and comforting, being loving and loved by those around you? 

Holding grief close, as a companion, allows for opening to love, compassion, hope, and forgiveness. Author and grief therapist Francis Weller writes, “When we don’t push the pain of grief away, when we welcome and engage it, we live and love more fully.”

Grief Meditation: A Practice 

Sit quietly for a few moments and settle into the meditation by noticing the subtle movement in your body as you breathe in and then out. Say slowly, to yourself, the following phrases: 

May I welcome all my feelings as I grieve. 

May I allow grief to soften and strengthen my heart. 

May I hold my sorrow with tenderness and compassion. 

A Few Contemplative Suggestions 

Spend a few moments reflecting on any “rules” or expectations you carry about grief: 

• What do you think grief should look like?
• How long do you think grief should last?
• What do you view as a normal or abnormal way to grieve? 

Consider where you acquired your beliefs about grief: 

• Which beliefs serve you?
• Which beliefs could you release or let go? 

♦

Adapted from Opening to Grief: Finding Your Way from Loss to Peace by Claire B. Willis and Marnie Crawford Samuelson. © 2020 Claire B. Willis and Marnie Crawford Samuelson. Used with permission of Dharma Spring Books. 

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Miscarriage is a loss that can feel both utterly devastating and enormously complex. No language captures the combination of shock, anguish, and overwhelming sadness a woman may experience in the aftermath, especially if it was a desperately longed-for pregnancy. Or, if she was ambivalent about the pregnancy or didn’t want it at all, she may feel a confusing mixture of relief and sorrow, two feelings that are hard to reconcile.

Every miscarriage is unique, but most include an element of horror. A woman may have to make several terrified trips to her doctor’s office for blood tests measuring her levels of pregnancy hormone (a pattern of decrease indicates a miscarriage). She could be at a routine prenatal appointment and during the ultrasound hear silence where there should be a heartbeat. She may wake up in the middle of the night hemorrhaging. Many first-trimester miscarriages take place at home, whether in a few hours or over several days. Either way, the miscarrying woman has to witness the fetus come out of her body and decide whether or not to flush it down the toilet. Women in later stages of pregnancy will need to undergo intrusive but necessary medical procedures to remove the fetus and pregnancy tissue.

Adding to the heartache is the fact that miscarriage is somehow still a taboo subject. Even the most benevolent loved ones may not know how to respond to a woman who has lost a pregnancy. Well-intentioned, they may nonetheless react insensitively, immediately asking medically related questions about why it happened (frequently there is no answer); matter-of-factly suggesting that “at least it wasn’t later in your pregnancy”; or saying nothing at all out of fear of upsetting the grieving woman or concern that she may feel intruded upon. Women are rarely encouraged by family members or friends to tell the story of their miscarriage. They may therefore feel reluctant to talk about it either to avoid reliving the trauma or because they think the graphic details would be an imposition on the listener. All this is vastly isolating.

The length of one’s pregnancy doesn’t determine the intensity of grief; the depth of attachment does.

Miscarriage may bring a deep need for spiritual consolation—to reduce isolation, make meaning out of the loss, and figure out how to move forward. While the dharma can be profoundly helpful, it can also cause harm if not put to use skillfully. If you have miscarried, please keep in mind that not all teachings will be appropriate for where you are right now. It’s important to use discernment: one person’s medicine is another’s poison. Don’t try to apply anything that doesn’t resonate or makes you feel worse. Moreover, the content of this article may not match how you experienced pregnancy loss at all. That certainly does not make your experience any less valid.

One of the hallmarks of Buddhism is its recognition of the truth of interdependence—that everything arises due to multiple causes and conditions; nothing exists on its own. In terms of relationships, interdependence can be thought of as a profound web of interconnectivity that is ever present. We can falsely perceive ourselves as fundamentally separate from others, but there are moments in life that create an unexpected opening, so that we catch a glimpse of this ultimate reality. It can be powerfully transformative: as we realize how truly connected we are to others, our loneliness recedes, we feel lighter and more resilient, and we move forward in our lives with a greater appreciation for our shared humanity. Compassion toward ourselves and others flows more freely.

The loss of a pregnancy, while shockingly painful, can be one such time. One of the best-known Buddhist stories, the parable of the mustard seed, illustrates this point precisely. A woman whose only child dies is overwhelmed with grief, and in her great suffering she goes to the Buddha for help. To her relief, he says that he can indeed help her, but before he does so she must bring him a single mustard seed from a house that has not known death. As the woman searches from one house to the next, she realizes that such a place does not exist, because the death of a loved one is an inescapable reality for everyone. In that flash of illumination, the woman recognizes that the pain she is feeling is or will become familiar to everyone. Her experience is fundamentally knowable by others. The misperception of separateness from others dissolves. Her despair begins to heal.

Grief over the loss of a pregnancy is every bit as real as the mother’s pain that is depicted in the parable of the mustard seed. One could retell the story, replacing the death of a child with the loss of a pregnancy, and the conclusions would be the same. Unfortunately, because of the silence around miscarriage, women who have lost pregnancies are often left alone in grief, desperate for relief and unaware that many others deeply understand their pain. Moreover, they may even be confused about how “real” their suffering is. Because miscarriage is not publicly identified as a trauma, women who have miscarried are left without a context for understanding their experience; thus, many mischaracterize their intense feelings of loss and distress as an overreaction. The well-intentioned but insensitive exhortations from loved ones to “move forward” or “remember, now you know you can get pregnant” can inadvertently reinforce this belief.

It may be that like the mother in the story, each woman has to go on her own journey toward mutual recognition and healing. Connection is certainly out there to be found: pregnancy loss is such a common event. Among any woman’s friends, family, or acquaintances are others who have miscarried. It is essential that women be given opportunities to tell the story of their miscarriages, including all the graphic details of blood and physical pain, the shock of medical emergencies, whether they saw the fetus or not, and their feelings of desperation and powerlessness. This is the raw material of experience, which the path of Buddhism is meant to help us open to fully. Yet it is very hard to open fully to things that we keep hidden. Women who have miscarried also often need to hear the stories of other women, because these stories validate the extent of their suffering as real and meaningful.

Moreover, the intimate bond that is created through mutual storytelling can replace the sense of being isolated in grief with that glimpse of ultimate reality: we see the profound connection to others that we so often miss in daily life. One effect of that glimpse is a spontaneous sense of buoyancy and resilience accompanied by the natural flourishing of compassion, the desire for both ourselves and others not to suffer. The compassion women feel toward themselves begins to grow as they become more familiar with their own and others’ experiences. They can acknowledge that they have, in fact, been struggling with something meaningful. The tendency to cope by minimizing one’s suffering is abandoned; for example, by accepting the truth that it doesn’t matter how brief one’s pregnancy was. The length of one’s pregnancy doesn’t determine the intensity of grief; the depth of attachment does.

What’s truly amazing about such a glimpse of the ultimate is that when it happens, the sense of intimacy that is available to us can extend far beyond our individual friends and family members; in fact, it can transcend space and time. Once a woman loses a pregnancy, she is linked to every woman throughout history who has also experienced such loss. It is certainly not a sisterhood anyone would elect to join, but it can be a powerful context for feeling into the vastness of our possibility for connection. In this way, what started as a terrible and painful loss can become an unexpected opportunity for evolution.

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“Travel is the root of sorrow.” – Yüan Hung-tao

In this world where everyone dies, where every song ends, where every achievement is undone, where every treasure is lost, all of us are left behind. All of us leave. But everywhere and always there is the hum of continuing. Though always incomplete, always there is the sound of love, forever and at the core unfinished. We talk, write, make gestures and marks to slow, to hold back, to share, to join, if only momentarily, the torrent of things lost.

II

I had talked on the phone with my friend Martin, who was in the hospital, at about 4 p.m. The heart surgery a day and a half earlier seemed to have gone well. Now he said something was going very wrong. He sounded ragged. He was also upset because he thought they were trying to put him into rehab and no arrangements had been made. His sister was looking for a place. He thought they were trying to kick him out on the weekend.

I told him to close his eyes and not move. Pretend to sleep. “If you’re sleeping, they can’t dump you,” I said. Then I heard a young woman telling him some stuff. “Are you here to help me?” Martin asked. “No,” she said. “Then what are you doing?” he asked. She told him, but I couldn’t hear. “OK,” he said. He sounded like he was struggling not to succumb to confusion. “Do you want me to come over?” I asked. “No, I’ll call you back,” he said.

At 1:30 in the morning, one of Martin’s stepsons called me. He struggled to find a way to say what had just happened, then could not escape it. “Martin just died. His heart stopped. They tried to resuscitate him, but they couldn’t.”

Debbie, my wife, is asleep. She’s got a big concert tomorrow; she was also very deeply fond of Martin. I wake her and tell her that Martin is dead. We cry and then just hold each other. It’s the suddenness, the ripped fabric. And the disbelief. It’s impossible to imagine a life where our dear friend, someone I see weekly and speak to many times more than that, is not part of it.

III

Martin and I met more than 45 years ago when we attended teachings by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Over the years, depending on proximity, sometimes we saw each other often, sometimes not. It is a basic truth in the Buddhist tradition that all existence is marked by three characteristics: impermanence, suffering, and the absence of any complete and self-existing self. Everyone who studies the Buddhist path knows this. But the continuous flow of these three together carries us, each and all, on indeterminate journeys. The three marks are inseparable and do not provide us with the kinds of certainties we wish for. They do not provide us with any means of control.

IV

Several days before Martin died, another friend, Peter Serkin, a pianist of unique inwardness and courage, sent me his recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother” (BWV 992). One well-known story relates that it was written in 1704, when Johann Sebastian’s older brother Johann Jacob Bach left home to join the Royal Swedish Military Band as an oboist and piccolo player. Johann Jacob was three years older than Johann Sebastian, and both had endured their parents’ deaths and the uncertainties that followed.

The piece consists of six parts, each bearing a descriptive head: (1) A plea by friends to dissuade him from traveling; (2) Imagined misfortunes that might befall the traveler in foreign lands; (3) His friends lament; (4) The traveler is not dissuaded; his friends come and say goodbye; (5) The post horn signals the coach’s approach; (6) A fugue in imitation of the post horn. I listened to it often in the next weeks and read more about it than I might have otherwise. (One Bach specialist argues that the date, title, and dedication as described in the story have been misinterpreted.) It was exactly the sort of thing I would have discussed with Martin.

Johann Sebastian would live quite quietly but ultimately achieve wide renown as an organist, Kapellmeister [chamber music director], and one of the very greatest composers in Western history. His older brother’s life was quite different: full of adventure, but later forgotten. After joining the marching band of the Swedish king Karl XII, Johann Jacob accompanied the strange young military genius on his astonishing conquests in northern Europe. He was also present when the army froze almost to death during the Swedish invasion of Russia and was ultimately crushed in the battle of Poltava in Ukraine. When he left home, could the younger brother have imagined the extraordinary events in which Johann Jacob would be swept up?

V

As part of the process of being in a body, we are constantly visualizing ourselves in the middle of our world. Our ongoing visualization moves with the same initial dynamic and expanding structure as a mandala. There is a focal point, and around it, sustaining and sustained by this focus, are the front, back, sides, above, and below. We visualize how, driving to the mountains, we will first turn left, then right, then stay on that winding road for, oh, maybe 25 minutes or so. We visualize what we will do when the guests arrive for dinner. We visualize ourselves in our lives repeatedly and with innumerable variations.

Our embodiment exists far beyond the limits of skin. Our mentality inhabits—is located in—a form, albeit a shifting one. It is incomprehensible that this (our) form, with its colors, textures, smells, moisture, hairs, perceptual capacities, digestive system, apprehensions, expansions and contractions, parasites, appetites, can appear as a single thing. Why and how does an unceasing flow of memories and desires take one entity as its focus?

The solitary body is a figure in a tapestry and cannot be isolated from other figures, landscapes, colors, lines, threads, stories. And so when a single figure is removed, is excised, dies, there is an unraveling, a feeling at both edge and center that our embodiment is coming apart. The uniqueness of the vanished one is the dark horizon of our fragile and temporary lives.

VI

Martin had studied mathematics, logic, philosophy, music; supported himself as a software analyst (“the most brilliant man I ever worked with,” according to a colleague); had played in rock ’n’ roll bands; did time in a federal prison for selling psychedelics (but once convinced a New York lawyer that he’d been in jail for practicing dentistry without a license); was a jazz soloist (piano); went to countless classical concerts; read everything. In the last few years, he had worked to soften his abrasive and sometimes overpowering conversational style: “I really could be less hurtful.”

He had also become increasingly absorbed in photography. Mainly he was interested in wide black-and-white landscapes and in portraits. He studied, went to exhibits, posted his pictures online, corresponded about them. His portraits of younger people had a kind of freshness and wonder about them; those of older people were not flattering yet somehow deeply sympathetic. (He took my picture many times, and the results, even when others liked them, made me uncomfortable. Now I wonder how I would have looked in subsequent portraits. I’m very aware that I’ll never know.) A friend said: “Martin’s pictures are so filled with isolation.” Martin was someone who had been repeatedly and deeply wounded, and this may have accounted for both his sharp defenses and his ability to sympathize with the wounds of others. Many people came to rely on him. He kept many secrets.

VII

I can’t get used to his absence; it is a hollow in the day that I cannot negotiate. Now, as I speak of him, something I had intended to tell him about becomes suddenly vivid.

My wife and I were recently at a New Year’s Eve performance at the Paris Opera Ballet. The performance was somehow exceptional, beyond what the somewhat routine cast would usually have presented. There was a special kind of urgency. We realized that it was the last performance of the male principal and marked the end of his long career with the company. All the cast members were giving their utmost to make this a worthy moment. At the end, the retiring principal stood on the stage as gold light and cascades of sparkling stars engulfed him. The audience clapped and clapped. He had never been a dancer at the very highest level of distinction, but everyone understood that a career marked by dedication, discipline, and generosity was ending. They applauded without stopping and held up the time of his departure for an hour.

VIII

After the Swedish king’s catastrophic defeat at Poltava in the summer of 1709, Johann Jacob Bach followed Karl XII into exile in Turkey at the court of the Ottoman ruler, Ahmed III. The sultan gave the king funds and a palace in the town of Bender, and built accommodations for the Swedes who were part of the king’s entourage. Johann Jacob spent five years in this luxurious exile. The king went often to Constantinople, where he provoked the sultan into declaring war on Russia. Johann Jacob, accompanying the king to the capital, improved his skills as a flutist under the tutelage of Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin, a French virtuoso particularly renowned for his fast playing, who was in Constantinople as part of the French ambassador’s entourage. But the sultan finally tired of Karl XII’s extravagant demands and forced the remnants of his army to return to Sweden. Johann Jacob took a place in the court orchestra.

The king himself remained in Constantinople for a time. In 1714, Karl XII made a famous 15-day ride across Europe, from Turkey to Sweden, to resume his place in the capital. The next years were full of court intrigues and smaller wars with Sweden’s neighbors. In 1718, he invaded Norway for the second time in as many years. He led an army of 40,000 men in besieging the fortress of Fredriksten, but as he was inspecting the siege trenches, he was shot in the head and died. He was 36 years old. It is not known whether Johann Jacob accompanied the king on his final battle.

The rest of Johann Jacob’s life was uneventful. He was retained in the Swedish court orchestra by Karl XII’s sister, the shy but very musical Queen Ulrika Eleanora, and then by her husband, Frederick I. His life ended in comparative peace in 1722.

Johann Sebastian would have been 37 at the time of Johann Jacob’s death. He would enjoy 28 more years of a prodigiously productive life. His contrapuntal art would encompass unimagined depths and complexities. When he wrote the Capriccio on his brother’s departure, things would have seemed simpler. They could not know what kind of lives they would have, or that they would never again see each other.

How much did Johann Sebastian Bach hear of his elder brother’s extraordinary adventures? Musicians at the time circulated from court to court, church to church, and loved a good story as much as anyone. It is also not impossible that Johann Sebastian met Buffardin in 1724, when the celebrated flutist is thought to have come to Leipzig to play a concerto Johann Sebastian had written for him. If so, he may well have heard about his brother’s life and perhaps even about his death in 1722. What could he have thought, learning of the picaresque existence of the brother about whose departure he had fantasized with such Breughel-like vitality 20 years earlier?

IX

The internet was full of expressions of grief at Martin’s unexpected death. There were many loving recollections and many wishes that his journey proceed well. A mutual friend asked me to officiate at the funeral, but a previous obligation made it impossible to get there until after the ceremony started. “Could you send something for someone else to read?” our friend asked. I wrote the following.

I do not know what it means when people say, this person is making their transition.

Winter has never met summer.

Fall will not see spring.

I do not know what people mean when they say we will help that person continue on her or his journey.

I do know, that in our time with Martin, we have had a heart friend, a heart father, a heart lover, a heart brother. We have known an inspired person, an inspiring person, an artist, a person of brilliance, an ace comedian, a kind and good man.

I do know that now we and Martin have reached the parting of the ways. Our time together is over.

Where our dear friend has gone, or if now he is even slightly the same being we have known and loved, no one knows.

But what we all know is that the love we have experienced and given is true love. And we know, because it cannot be otherwise, that true love never dies.

We are so grateful for Martin. Wherever or whatever he may now be or not be, We cannot stop loving him.

X

Dangerous vacancies now appear in my mind-stream. I cut in front of ongoing traffic, unaware. Thoughts launched do not arrive. I drift into pools of stillness. Cups fly out of my hand. A sleeve rips on a doorknob. I cut both thumbs on points of a broken crystal. For a moment, the stream seems to move backward. A gap opens, a whisper, incredulity. A feeling of here and not here. An echo of music. Now the brash, uncertain world of living requires ongoing attention.

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