Thomas’s loss was made worse by the fact that he was isolated. He took a promotion and moved. But he couldn’t sustain himself by himself; he quit his job not long afterward and returned to Oregon.
He remembers three things said to him soon after the death that eventually became “game-changers,” and they weren’t the “soft, sweet, reassuring” comments. Kyogen, who was Thomas’s religious teacher as well as mine, asked him if he was meditating. Thomas replied that it was too painful. “And he said, ‘You must turn toward it.’ I knew this! But he said it to me at my darkest hour, when I was most afraid, when I was petrified at seeing the reality of this. Another thing he said to me, later on, when I was talking about what a wonderful man Kevin was, he said, ‘Yes, and when we remember Kevin, it’s important that we remember all of Kevin.’ ”
James and Friedman recommend writing a detailed history of the relationship: highs, lows, successes, failures, resentments, joys. Finally, James and Friedman suggest writing the dead person a letter (never to be shown to anyone): a “completion letter rather than a farewell letter.” The relationship as it was is over. Completed. The relationship, however complicated, was whole, had a beginning, middle, and end, had good times and bad. C. S. Lewis, in his short, devastating memoir about the loss of his wife, wrote, “Bereavement is not the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon.”
The third thing Thomas remembers helping the most is something I said to him a few days after the death. “I would say to you on the phone, ‘Why did I leave that night? He was not in good shape. Why did I stay gone for three and a half hours? Why didn’t I turn around and come back? Did he do it on purpose? I should have known better. What did I not see—what, what, what?’ And you said to me in a very firm voice, ‘These things happen and you don’t get to be different.’ It had become a theme: it shouldn’t have happened; why hadn’t I known? That was your point. People miss things. This is just the quandary of life and it’s as messy for you as for anybody else. Who are you to think that you are exempt from this? It was almost like being slapped through the phone. But it was the right medicine at the right time.”
I don’t remember this conversation; we spoke a lot on the phone in the first few weeks. I can imagine saying this because I believe it—that we want so desperately to revisit the moment when everything changed, and change it back, change it into something else, change ourselves, change the one who died. It’s just that what we want isn’t what happened. I can imagine saying this, because I know I’ve needed to hear it said.
He tells me now, that after three years, “I was just exhausted, carrying this around, and I thought I had to do something.” He started therapy and one of the first things the counselor had him do was write to Kevin regularly.
***
After my mother died, I went through a gradual recovery. All James and Friedman are telling us is to consciously do what people have always done with death. Experience it. I talked to her, I looked at photos, I read letters, I talked to myself, I talked to (and I am sure that I bored) my friends. I told a lot of stories, silently and out loud, about my mother at different times of our life together, her past before I knew her, how she handled her illness, her career as a teacher.
Our relationship improved. We didn’t argue anymore—which is to say, I didn’t argue with her anymore. She listened to me and I told her secrets. As time went on—years, decades—my ideas about her and myself, about mothers and daughters, changed. My memories grew a bit rosy; I had fantasies about what my life would have been like if she’d lived longer. She’d have known her grandchildren, enjoyed her retirement. In my mind she outlives my father and we go to Reno and she gambles all day and we drink martinis by the pool in the summer evening. Happy fantasies. But I know they are fantasies; they are no longer regrets.
Kobayashi Issa was a famous Buddhist haiku poet in Japan’s Edo period. After two of his children died in a short time—two of many losses he would suffer—Issa wrote this poem:
The world of dew
is a world of dew,
and yet, and yet
Dew, fleeting and fragile, is the nature of life. While we understand, somehow, that this is precisely what love is—that the china bowl is beautiful precisely because it will break, that we love each other because we do not live forever—we can barely imagine what that means.
A common phrase on nineteenth-century tombstones went: “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” A part of us holds back from love, always protecting itself, selfish, uncertain. After a death, there is no longer anything to fear. At last. At last, we lose that which we want most to keep. Then there is nothing more to lose. Then the human fears that drive us apart—our concern for the opinion of others, our pride, our shame—are revealed to be so very small. We see what really matters. And when we contemplate the one we have lost, our hearts are free of hesitation, holding nothing back. Grief is the opportunity to cherish another without reservation. Grief is the breath after the last one.
12
Joy
On the day I helped to sort Kyogen’s bones, I came home tender and raw. But I felt well. I felt remarkably strong and well. The heavy, demanding no—the No! that had consumed me—dissolved like cloud and smoke. I was riding a slow wave in a warm ocean. I had held my teacher’s bones in my hands, and I had heard him laughing: his demented titter and his great guffaw and his happiness. That night, in the strange hypnagogic stillness before sleep, I had a waking dream. I saw his life in a flickering rush: his face both young and old, laughing, serious, silent, thoughtful; his slow, nodding attention while I talked; his dead body; the decaying leftovers; the coffin sliding into the furnace; the tray of bones. All this flashed past me, disappearing as I watched. We are a loose collection glued briefly into a provisional thing called self, and all such things are bound to dissolution. How could this be otherwise? I can still hear him chuckling beside me. What did you expect? he asks. And I laugh, because he’s right. These bits of bone. How obvious and whole.
When I first began to practice Buddhism, I was told a traditional story about a wanderer who was chased off a cliff by a tiger. He caught a root and dangled there, listening to the tiger pace and growl above him. When he looked down, there was a tiger below as well. Then he noticed a wild strawberry growing from a crevice nearby. What to do but pluck it? He ate with relish. In some versions of this story, the strawberry is just out of reach unless the wanderer lets go of the root.
I was startled to discover recently that Tolstoy tells this story, too. In his version, a person escapes from a wild animal by jumping into a well, only to discover that a dragon lives at the bottom. He hangs on to a root between beast and dragon and sees that a mouse is nibbling at the root. Then he sees a few drops of honey on a leaf and leans over to drink. Tolstoy recounts this fable in despair, but I remember being strangely consoled when I heard the story. I was in my early twenties and I was healthy, but I was plagued by anxiety. I could see that strawberry, but I couldn’t reach it. It was some years more before I realized how close the berry is, and that all that was missing was my willingness to put out my hand.
We are nothing more than a collection of parts, and each part is a collection of smaller parts, and smaller still, the things we love and all we cherish only aggregations. We are put together from other things and will be taken apart and those things and what we become will in turn be taken apart and built anew. There is nothing known that escapes this fate. And knowing the answer does not stop the question from being asked. The blocks were built up; they will be taken apart the same way; we are nothing more. And yet we are something more; this is one of the mysteries, I know. I cannot point to the answer or name it, except in the limited and awkward ways I have already tried. There is something more, and it is the totality of this nothing more.
What do we call beautiful? New flowers in spring, autumn’s brilliant color, the cast of twilight across a mountainside. Beauty is most poignant at the momen
t it begins to fade. Twilight disappears as we watch. We love our endangered lives, these swift, fleeting lives, changing before our eyes. Life as it is. Luminous, everyday, extraordinary life. Do we always know that with every birth comes a death? That the most tender and complete meeting has to end? We see the beauty of all that will break and leave us—a brief touch, a breath, a glance, a sip of water, the glowing leaves falling from the trees, the ones we love, and our own life. Strawberry. A single strawberry, plucked from the earth, damp with dew and red as a heart.
In the spring, a few months after Carol died, I was thinking of her. I thought of her every day that season. Spring in Oregon can be so lovely, you catch your breath between one step and the next. I had spent a few days in the rolling hills not far away from where she’d lived, and been struck by how insistently the world was calling out. So many voices. I found a little lime-green frog in the shower, and watched a bald eagle circle over the meadow for a long time. I saw a hatchling of ants and weeded the lettuce, all the time listening to the voices of the world. Flowers and insects, grass and birds and people calling out, Here I am.
When I got home, I found a message from David. He’d written to say that a bird had made a nest on Carol’s grave and laid four small white eggs. The nest was beside where her pillow would have been. Carol’s pillow had been made into a nest. I thought, She would love it, and then I thought, Maybe she does. Maybe she is laughing at us all right now, saying, Here I am. She is gone away and isn’t coming back, but instead: Ant. Frog. Eagle. Egg.
I’ve never felt better.
—LAST WORDS OF DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS SR.
Appendix 1:
Preparing a Death Plan
We make a death plan because we can—for our own peace of mind, and as an act of compassion for the people nearest to us who will be left, quite literally, holding things.
Where and how do you want to die? Plan for your ideal. It could happen! You may prefer your own bedroom or a small cabin in the woods. Think about all the details. Do you like wind chimes? Do you like Judge Judy? Do you want to watch Duck Soup? Make a deathbed playlist (and don’t forget comedy). Do you want any religious services? Should religion be banned? Do you want to be touched, and by whom? How much solitude do you want? Who is not to be admitted?
And once you’ve made a lot of these decisions, choose one or two people to be the gatekeepers. Who is willing to turn Aunt Agatha away, play the Ramones at high volume, and dress you in that cunning miniskirt at the last moment?
Everyone needs a will, no matter how much they own. The will must be signed and witnessed and dated. Your will describes in detail the way your money is to be distributed and any specific bequests and donations. It should name an executor you trust to dispose of your body and your possessions as you ask. Does your will explain what should happen to your personal possessions? To whom do you want to leave photographs, works of art, letters, jewelry, and diaries? Is there anything you want destroyed? What happens to your prize roses, your lingerie, and the old family photos? Many authors have declared that unfinished manuscripts, journals, and notes should be destroyed. Terry Pratchett declared that the hard drive holding his unfinished books was to be smashed by a steamroller, and so it was done.
You might write letters to your family members and friends and put them in the same folder. They don’t need to be long or fancy letters; just say goodbye and maybe add a little advice or encouragement. Write new letters every year. You may want to compose your obituary.
Don’t forget pets. Don’t forget outstanding bills, automatic payments, online accounts and passwords, and all the people who need to know you died. Remember electronic dating profiles, Second Life avatars, the bridge club, the gym, and the dentist. Who can get access to your calendar? If you are someone else’s health care representative, include that information in your death plan, because they need to find someone else now. Who has access to your checking accounts, brokerage accounts, and safe deposit box? (Is your will in your safe deposit box? Bad place for it.)
If you are a professional who keeps confidential records—a teacher, therapist, lawyer, accountant, minister—do you have a written plan for how to handle those records? Do you have a list of clients to contact and a partner to take over your appointments? Who pays the bills and does the books for the business? Think about office keys, passwords, file cabinets, and storage units.
The following document is intended to help you consider the details that may be important to you in your final days. Give copies to your physician, executor, family members, health care representatives, lawyer, and religious teacher.
MY DEATH PLAN
Contact Information
Legal name: _____________________________________
Phone number: ___________________________________
Today’s date: _____________________________________
Emergency Contacts
Name: _________________________________________
Phone number: ___________________________________
Email: _________________________________________
Relationship: ____________________________________
Street address: ___________________________________
Name: _________________________________________
Phone number: ___________________________________
Email: _________________________________________
Relationship: ____________________________________
Street address: ___________________________________
Primary Care Provider
Name: _________________________________________
Phone number: ___________________________________
Organization: ____________________________________
Specialist Doctor
Name: _________________________________________
Phone number: ___________________________________
Organization: ____________________________________
Documents
I have an advance directive:YESNO
Location: _______________________________________
I have a POLST (physician’s order for life-sustaining treatment) form:YESNO
Location: _______________________________________
I have a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order that is separate from the POLST order:YESNO
Location: _______________________________________
I have a health care power of attorney:YESNO
Location: _______________________________________
I have a financial power of attorney:YESNO
Location: _______________________________________
I have a will:YESNO
Location: _______________________________________
I would like to be an organ donor:YESNO
Any restrictions (eyes only, all organs, etc.)? ______________
______________________________________________
I would like to be a tissue donor (middle-ear bones, heart valves, corneas, bones, etc.):YESNO
End-of-Life Wishes
I would like to die in the following place: ________________
______________________________________________
As I am dying, I would like visits from: __________________
______________________________________________
I would like visits dedicated to formal religious practice from (please describe): __________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
With respect, I do not want to see: _____________________
______________________________________________
When I am close to dying, I would like the following forms of support and comfort (people, readings, rituals, music, food, scents, sights, etc.): _____________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
If pain can only be controlled with a do
se that sedates me to the point of being unable to engage in conversation:
I do want my pain completely controlled even if I am sedated:YESNO
I would prefer to be awake and manage a moderate level of pain:YESNO
When death is imminent, I would like the following rituals or services:
________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
At the moment of death, I would like the following rituals or services: _______________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
After death, I would like the following rituals or services: _____
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
Disposal of My Body
After my death, my preference for handling of my body: ______
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
My preferred funeral home or crematorium: ______________
Advice for Future Corpses_and Those Who Love Them Page 19
