• Tag Archives death
  • Pain

    Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

    When a friend is in pain, the pain travels.  In its journey from one friend to another, the pain may not lessen, but its burden may grow lighter.  Such a journey is underway now with a friend whose wife has received distressing news, the kind of news we know about yet still hope will never be heard among the people we know and love.  Cancer.  It has such a brutal, dangerous, threatening aura.  Black.  Shot through with jagged points.  Hearing the word in the mouth of a friend sets the inner self back.  Creates a sense of fear and loss, loss even before any loss, a type of loss that may be the final stage of innocence, the end game of our immortality.

    Then there is turning to face the truth, to talk to the doctors, to sort out the words, the feelings, the possibilities, the dangers.  And choosing, choosing about matters of life and death. Decisions no amount of prayer or meditation or forethought prepare us for, decisions about our own life, its length, its end.  Or, worse, the life of a loved one.  Hope?  Of course, hope always has a role, a horse in the race.  But there are other horses, too.

    My heart has been heavy ever since I learned this news, an existential dread, the kind always there, under the surface, the knowing, the knowing about predatory nature.  Yes, she is our mother; yes, in all ways, yes; but, like Coatlicue of whom I wrote a few days ago, she not only gives life, but she takes it back.

    Cancer is not evil.  It has no intention.  It is.  It is a force majeur, an act of blind fate.  And yet.  We can, sometimes, turn it back.  Cancer’s aura has gotten a bit dimmer of late, a degree of lethal certainty has leaked away as drugs and drug regimens, research and surgery have chipped away at its powers.

    So, I invite you to do the kind of thing in which you believe for my friend’s wife.  A kind and generous universe will know how to direct your message.  We all need love, love from places we know and places we don’t.


  • Good-Bye, Ike

    Winter                                                      Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

    The oldest cousin on my mother’s side died on Christmas Eve.  Isaac, Ike, Jones always had a special place in the family as the first child of my mom’s five siblings.   The last of mom’s siblings, my Aunt Roberta, died several years ago and we cousins became the older generation.  Now, for the first time, death has invaded our numbers.

    Ike’s death was, in many ways, a blessing.  A victim of a nasty spinal condition that left his head permanently inclined forward, Ike suffered a bad fall in March and never really recovered.  In the end his lungs gave out.  We weren’t close, perhaps he was the most distant of all the cousins, but he’s still family, part of us and now part of our memories.

    No one really knows what death, the most shrouded ancientrail is like.  Does life just wink out with the last breath, the last heartbeat, the last brainwave?  Jews believe the spirit stays around the body for a few days, thus the careful and personal treatment a corpse receives in traditional Jewish practice.  My friend, Gyatsho, believed that after 49 days his soul got a new incarnation based on karma and the attitude near death.  Many people in the obituaries believe the dead meet Jesus, or go to heaven, or greet family and friends who died before them.

    You never see it in the obituaries but some believe in a place of eternal punishment, the last fork on the ancientrail leading to hell.

    I have no idea what happens after death though the most likely thing to me is extinction.  We simply become no more as a Self, eventually dispersing our elements back to the universe from which they came.

    The Greeks, it seems to me, had the most cogent idea; that is, we live in our deeds, our family, our legacy.  Even so, for most of us, the legacy will not amount to much, perhaps a generation’s remembrance at Thanksgiving meals, family reunions.  Then, we’ll become one of those sepia photos  a later generation will pick up and say, “Who was this?”

    Or, perhaps not.  It’s possible that the internet has become an engine of immortality, allowing our words, pictures, even our consumer habits to live on, perhaps in the cloud?  In this case perhaps my great-grandchild will access Ancientrails much as you do, reading of one life, at least the bits and pieces that end up on a page or in photographs.  What might we call this?  ByteLife.  CyberMemory.  Life in the Cloud.  SiliconeForever. (no, wait, that’s those breast implants.)  Life According to Electricity.


  • A Few Notes

    Samhain                                             Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    In no particular order, though there must be one, at some point, here a few notes I’ve taken from reading, living.

    1.  Death happens.  To all of us.  Whether we fear it or welcome it.

    therefore, it’s best to befriend death, to live with it as a counselor on your left shoulder, keeping you honest, authentic, true.

    2.  Love beats everything else that comes before death.

    therefore, it’s best to live a life loving as many and as much  you can.

    3.  Certain things get in the way of love:

    attachment to money, to particular things

    a need for power

    an unwillingness to be vulnerable

    untrustworthy behavior

    therefore,

    it’s best to clean up your act.

    4. Passion is the next best thing after love.

    passion requires clarity about self

    clarity about self requires self-knowledge

    self-knowledge undergirds both passion and love and allows an unblinking relationship with death

    5.  Therefore,

    It’s best to get your butt to the Temple of Apollo,

    Cross under the lintel with gnothi seauton written above it

    And get to know who you are.  No, who you really are.

    6.  When you know who you are, your passions become obvious.

    7.  With passion your life before death has value, vigor, oomph.

    8.  With passion love retains its edge, its ability to cut through any thing left and carve your true you out of it

    9.  This all may be hard, but it doesn’t have to be.  You can do it.


  • Death

    Lughnasa                                         Waxing Back to School Moon

    The thing about death is, it is forever, unlike life.  Once entered there is no return.  It is that one way disappearance that creates the chaos of grief, the sense, the realization that something has been done that cannot be undone.  There is no longer any action to take, no remedy to try, no act of contrition that will change things.  There is here, the living, and there, the dead.

    Death comes to humans, dogs, mice, birds, lizards, fish, death comes.  We living things are alike in facing the cessation of our agency, the end of all the striving.

    Life has death as its forever dance partner, the danse macabre.  It is a dance like those marathons from the 30’s where the dancers slump along near the end, barely holding each other up as the sun rises and the music slows.  The dance hall begins to take on its daytime character, the cracks in the ceiling come out, the floor has not been mopped, the romance of the contest and the hall slip away and we are left with the one partner who will never let us go.

    Death is not life, whatever else it may be.

    Tibetan Buddhist thought has a wonderful, I would even say exemplary, way of approaching death.  The photograph here, a partial of a Yamantaka statue, illustrates it iconographically. “Yamāntaka is a Sanskrit name that can be broken down into two primary elements: Yama, the name of the god of death; and antaka, or “terminator”. Thus, Yamāntaka’s name literally means “the terminator of death”.”  This statue shows Yama in cosmic embrace with his consort, thus wisdom and compassion become one.

    Meditating on Yamantaka, so I was told by a Tibetan Buddhist, involves imagining your own death in as real a fashion as possible.  The intent of the meditation is to eliminate the fear of death, either in the body or in what Buddhists call the subtle body.  When we achieve an acceptance of our own death, we become free.  This is, if I understand the Buddhist thought correctly, also a path to enlightenment.

    Of course, a Buddhist would see this in the context of Buddhist doctrine, with which I am not familiar, but I have embraced this image and this understanding as an important part of my own spiritual journey.


  • Hilo: Grief Is A Price You Pay For Love.

    Lughnasa                         Waxing Back to School Moon

    9 years ago Kate and I bought two small whippet puppies, sisters, and named them after two towns on one of our favorite spots on earth, the Big Island of Hawai’i.  The larger of the two, Kona, took her name from the west facing town on the Kohala-Kona coast, the side of the Big Island which has some of the most luxurious resorts in all of Hawai’i.  Hilo, the smaller girl by about half, took her name from the east facing island town of Hilo, a blue collar town of Japanese and Hawai’an workers, a bit rough around the edges and the site of more than one tsunami, the most recent in 1964.

    We held them on our laps a lot when they were puppies and even after they were grown they would, from time to time, lobby for us to hold them that way again.  Hilo would 600hilogarden_0128hop eagerly into my lap, sit there for a minute or maybe less, then stand up, moving here and there, trying to achieve some location that felt right to her.  Most often she would jump down.  She had her opinions about all sorts of things and acted on them.

    In the morning before we opened their crates Hilo would lead Kona in a high pitched whining chorus with dips and doodles, plaintive and loud.  When upstairs she would bark to be let out and to be let back in.  Though the smallest of all our dogs, she let none of the others take her spot on the couch or get near her food.  She was not ornery, but she was clear about boundaries.

    When I went outside to garden, Hilo went with me, sometimes standing right where I wanted to work.  I would gently lift her out of the way and continue.  After I got the bees, Hilo would come right into the bee-yard with me while I worked.  She would stand there, bees buzzing all around and watch me, sometimes lying down in a sunny patch.

    An enduring memory from her young puppy hood came when she and Kona dug under the southeastern corner of our fence.  I discovered her not long after they escaped, but she was on the other side of the fence.  I called her name, Hilo.  She looked over her shoulder, gave me a sweet, delighted look, and took off on a path through the forest–away from me–at a full suspension gallop.  She was so happy.

    She had some negative kidney function numbers earlier in the year and by the time of her physical in June, they had gotten worse.  Roger Barr told us she had probably two months, nothing to do but allow the disease to play itself out.  We changed her diet, starting giving her rimadyl for pain when she started wicketing.  We extended his two months to three, but she died this morning, just over 9 years old.

    Hilo was my friend and close companion.  Often, she would take a nap with me and curl up in the crook of my arm.  When I was outside, she was, too.  She came when I called her, after those early days, and sat with me while I read.  She was a vital, distinctive voice here and I’ll miss her.

    Grief is a price you pay for love.


  • Departures

    Lughnasa                             Waxing Artemis Moon

    Spoke with the folks at Dadant.  They found my order and have begun to ship the honey extractor and other parts of the Ranger extraction kit.  5 boxes from different locations.  Sounds like they’ll arrive before I have to pull the honey.

    A wet, cooler morning with a hot day later and tomorrow to follow.  We continue on our stormy way.  Minnesota, that’s right, our Minnesota, leads the nation in tornadoes this year.  By a lot.  We have had 50 more than either Texas or Oklahoma.  Maybe tornado alley has found me and wants me back.  Paul Douglas says it’s due to a blocking slump in the jet stream that holds weather patterns here that would normally be further south.

    Kate and I watched a Japanese movie the other night, “Departures.”  In it a young cellist gives up the cello after his orchestra dissolves.  He and his wife move back to his home in a small town by the ocean.  There he applies for a job listing seeking a person to help with departures.  A misprint.  It should have read departed.

    I don’t know how common the rite of casketing is in Japan, but it involves, in essence, performance of what we consider an undertakers job (the cosmetic part, not the embalming which seems not to be part of the job) in front of the mourners.  The body is then placed in a coffin, also called encoffining, and transported to the crematorium where the equivalent of a graveside service occurs.  The whole process seems humane, accepting of death and the reality of grief.

    As with most Japanese movies I’ve seen that have funerals, this one has a comedic side, too.

    The movie pulls the heart, not in contrived ways, but in its honest depiction of difficult human moments, sensitively portrayed.  Highly recommended.  Available on Netflix.


  • Carpe Diem

    Summer                                      Waning Grandchildren Moon

    Over to Rum River Central Park this morning inspired by Emma.  Her death reminded me life flees behind us as the ancientrail of our lifetime grows longer and longer.  This day is all we ever have, so we cannot allow habitual, customary or rigid behaviors to steal it from us.  I had grown away from my every morning exercise at Rum River Park or, in winter, at the park behind the Rum River branch of the Anoka Library.  I don’t even remember when that transition happened.  When the treadmill and the resistance work came into the house, I imagine.  They are not exclusive of each other, inside workouts and outside.

    Here’s one solution I’m trying now.  Three days a week interval training on the treadmill and resistance work alternated with three days of a steady pace outside, either on foot or on snowshoes if we get enough snow.  I used to do the snowshoes every morning in the winter when we had good snow.

    The Rum River time this morning was not without problems.  Biting flies, mosquitoes and the variability of the trail all made it less than desirable.  Plus, I’m not in as good as a shape as I was when I did it before.  Bug  juice will solve one of those problems and increased resistance and weight loss the other.  The variability of the trail will become a plus again, as it was in the past, as I get used to it again.

    Carpe diem.


  • Emergence

    Beltane                                            Waxing Plating Moon

    Her crate is cleaned.  Her body taken for cremation.  The bowl in which I fed her has joined the other big bowls, no longer needed for our smaller whippets.  Emma was a big girl, tall and ropy muscled in her prime.  There is still, or do I imagine it, a faint odor of death, a sweet sick smell, not decay.   Hilo and Kona, who’ve known only life with Emma, appear subdued, but it’s never clear to me how much dogs grieve, although I know they do.

    Driving back from the vets this  morning, I realized, as I have before, but never quite like this time, that the moments of life are precious and fleeting.  When life ends, whatever, if anything (and I doubt it) happens, happens in a manner  out of conjunction with this reality.

    I resolved to get out in the beautiful Anoka County parks more, to wander the back roads and wild areas here as I have in the past, but have largely given up.  Not sure why.  Emma may not have been human, but she was loved and loving, a mammal, warm blooded, feeling, a thinker, conscious of her own life, and her death reminds me of these gifts, the true and miraculous, the precious, and yes, the sacred gifts of life itself.

    A thinker I’m becoming more acquainted with wants to redefine sacred as the emergent properties in the world.  Life is emergence at its most complex, its most mysterious, its most wonderful.  What is emergence?  It is the remarkable, unexpected something more when the sum of our body’s chemical components come together as a vital organism.  We’re not worth much, broken down into our chemical constituents, but with life we become a treasure, a unique contribution to the ongoing fabric of the universe.

    To that understanding of the sacred I say, “Namaste.”


  • Death Came Calling

    Beltane                                     Waning Flower Moon

    Yesterday death came to call.  Dizziness and nausea took over my body while my mind raced back to October, 1964, trying to inhabit, again, the mind of my mother as the stroke hit her, trying to imagine the transition from vitality to powerlessness, wondering what thoughts came to her as she fell to the floor in the basement of the United Methodist Church.  Pushing this thought back, far from me, get thee behind me death, I wondered if she had done the same, imagined that this was like all the other times, a bit more severe than most perhaps, but surely something that would lift.  It didn’t.  She died a week later.

    Death had come to call on me as a reminder of the future in the guise of a dark moment of the past.  All that work on Latin, I thought.  Then, just as quickly, would you have done something else?  No.  The answer is no.  At that moment a peace settled over me, if this was my time, so be it.  It’s just fine.  If not, I’ll get downstairs and study my i-stem nouns and ablatives.

    Then, today, in a lecture, Nietzsche posed a hypothetical:  What if a demon came to you and said, “You will live and relive your life.  All of it.  The pains and the sorrows, the joys and accomplishments, all of it, even this visit from me.  And you will relive it not only once, but over and over.”  What is your response?  If you can say, Thank you, oh divine one, then you have lived an authentic life and have come to rest with who you are.  Nietzsche called this the myth of eternal recurrence.

    I find I’m on the Thank you side of the demon question.  Yes, I’d like another helping please.

    Much of my attitude toward life seems to have its roots in Nietzschean thought.  Strange that I’m just now discovering this.


  • The Moratorium Years

    Spring                                   Waxing Flower Moon

    As the moon makes its circuit from its crescent form in the west to its fullness in the east, it passes over the skylight in our living room, at about half full.  It was there tonight, shining and visible to me as I sat in my chair.

    To get my sunglasses back I had to park in University parking, then wend my way through skyways and the labyrinth that is the University of Minnesota’s medical complex.  In several buildings there is the school of dentistry, the medical school, a hospital, a heart hospital and a children’s hospital plus numerous organizations that have some relationship to the world of medicine.

    There were kids with backpacks leaning against stoplights, chatting in small groups, a girl sitting cross-legged on a high wall reading a novel, signs:  Are you bipolar?  Pediatric Grand Rounds.  University Brain Tumor Center.  What a time, those university years.  Hormones on high, ambition oozing, a heady mix of freedom and new ideas all combine to create the combustible reality that is and has been college for several decades, perhaps even centuries.

    A grand time and one I wouldn’t revisit.  Getting older has much to commend it and among its sweeter pleasures is a certain calmness, a centeredness impossible, at least for me, to obtain when I was in college.

    Kate came back from work tonight with sad news.  Her colleague Dick Mestrich, who has been battling multiple myeloma for 2 years plus, has begun to die.  He’s Kate’s age and had just begun retirement when he got sick.