Bardos and bodies

Cycles of death and dying; meditation; sweet grief.

Aug 20, 2022

The famous buddha and banyan tree in Ayutthaya, Thailand; Jan 2022

What do you do with the limp hands of grief?

In the wake of losing my mother, I shakily grappled everything with weak fingers. When I’m ill, I lose strength to even curl my hand into a fist. My palms are open to the world. I wilt where I lay, waiting for the fever to recede or the cracks across my chest to suture shut.

The days and weeks following her loss, I meditated every day. I was determined not to lose my practice. I had only just found it. I wanted stillness. I craved peace.

It was Halloween weekend of 2020. Mom and I were living in the shabby but well-loved lake house her father bought in anticipation of grandchildren. Childhood summers filled the home with memories—sliding across the carpet in socks, sparring with pool noodles, dripping lake water and watermelon juice on bare feet.

I’d been staying there on my own for a little over a month when she came. It was COVID. I was writing and job hunting and hiking and reading. Days would pass without seeing anyone. I’d walk my dog, take a canoe out onto the water. Sit at my desk, stare out the window into green water.

The leaves had changed, there was still gold and burnt red speckled across the mountains. We’d lived together for nearly a month, by then.

She came in the middle of the night. Eyes wide, hair unruly, hands shaking. Her mouth was moving as quickly as her pounding heart. Stepfather. An affair. The bastard. Did I know? Did I know the ways he hurt her?

Yes. I knew. I consoled her, shocked but patient. I’d planned an intervention for her, scheduled for a few days later with her siblings and her mother and me. Affair or no, something was wrong and had been for too long. I was afraid.

The intervention wasn’t needed. She left, herself. I couldn’t remember the last time she spoke about the future. Of the family, only I knew. Only I saw her in all her states; her best, her worst, her desperate, her screaming, her weeping, her laughing, her wondering.

Living together was a month of great pain, intermingled with laughter and music. She didn’t know I could cook so well. Where did I learn that? Ukulele plunked out from her closed bedroom door. We took walks. One walk. She was in too much pain to move, most of the time. Her nerve damage had gone untreated for years, afraid of specialist bills and missing work.

She told me her earliest memory as we slowly crossed the moss-covered pavement. The forest was always taking back this road.

She was three or four, on a walk in the mountains with a preschool friend and her hippy mother. It was maybe 1970. The woman plucked a bit moss for the two girls to see for the first time. Bennett, in her small cupped hands, held the delicate, soft, green thing. She’d never seen something so beautiful. “Can I keep it?” She’d asked in her small voice. “Yes,” the woman replied.

“It was a precious gift,” mom told me.

My autumnal home with mom; Lake Santeetlah, NC; October 2020

I signed up for a weekend-long “Introduction to Zen” zoom retreat through the Zen Mountain Monastery in New York. I’d meditated on and off since I was fifteen. Never anything regular. But something was stirring inside me, and my inner restlessness needed to be met.

“I’ll be meditating,” I warned mom. “So keep the belting to a minimum?”

I’d just run to the gas station to buy her some more vape cartridges. Tobacco flavored. 4.0% nicotine. The next day we’d realize that cash was the last of her money. She would try to buy us two Frosties from Wendy’s drive-through. The card would decline the $2.71 purchase.

She was holding her ukulele, sitting in a rocking chair, glasses on the tip of her nose. “Got it,” she agreed.

I loved sitting. I loved the sangha. Even from the computer screen, I felt connected to these faces and voices and teachings. We drew lines in mindfulness. We chanted. We sat. We breathed.

When I was given the opportunity to speak privately with the head of the Mountains and Rivers Order, Shugen Roshi, I knew what I wanted to ask.

“What is the Buddhist perspective on death?”

I told him, briefly, about losing Quentin, my brother, to suicide.

I’d been reading Alan Watts and listening to Ram Dass in my solitude. I felt open to non-duality in a more embodied understanding than Christian binaries of heaven and hell, life and death, had ever afforded me.

“Did you see his body?” Shugen Roshi asked.

No. He’d been in Vermont. I was in Tennessee. No one asked if I wanted to see him. My experience of losing him moved from a living, breathing, spinning, drumming brother to a black plastic box with a USPS sticker printed in bold: “HUMAN REMAINS.”

Shugen Roshi explained the Buddhist practice of staying with the body. Ideally, not moving it for three days. Washing it gently. Sitting in its presence. He said other things about death and karma. The instructions for the body stayed with me.

After the closing chants and final sit with the group, mom peeked out from her bedroom. She hugged me, tears in her ocean-blue eyes. “I loved it, hearing you chant,” she said. “I’m so proud of you.”

Sitting was comfortable, the first few months after losing her. I was numb. It wasn’t painless, but it was somewhat comforting. I’d light a candle, stare loosely ahead at my altar with her picture sitting next to my mala and a red ink sketch of a monk. Usually, I wouldn’t find silence. Or stillness.

By April to sit zazen was agony. It stuttered out of my days. Her birthday passed. I moved through my own, without her, for the first time. It was a wrought month. My cushion gathered dust.

Since losing her, I’d done more workshops and gone to more dharma talks. I spent one Saturday listening to Pema Khandro, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and scholar. “In the Presence of Dying: Compassion and Great Change,” was the name of the talk. How could I resist?

The Tibetan Buddhist bardos, the liminal states of death and dying, were potent. The outer breath ceases and then, after three days, the inner breath ceases. As Roshi had said, that’s when you sit with and wash and watch the body.

I was able to see her, wash her gently, within her bardo of dying. Everyone resisted. My father, gravely warning that he didn’t want me even more deeply traumatized. My grandmother, saying that my mother wouldn’t want me to see her like that. My aunts and uncles, worrying over what seemed like a search for bizarre self-inflicted pain. I was unmoving.

In the two days it took me to get home, everyone had already gone to visit her. “I wouldn’t let you go in there alone, without having seen her, myself,” my grandmother said to me.

Everyone was gently, painfully grateful to witness her. No gaudy funeral home makeup, no shock or trauma of death. Just gentleness. Her, laying naked beneath a quilt in an Appalachian funeral home. In a culture so disconnected from the dead, it was a gift.

Bardo Thödol, the liminal state of becoming and transitioning between karmic embodiments, lasts 49 days. Seven weeks of seven days of prayer for the person who has passed. I didn’t know about it. In this window, the person’s soul is still omnipresent, conjured with a thought or a word. It’s then that monks pray daily for the lost person; the karmic influence you have over their next incarnation is strong during this time. You can help them amend for life’s mistakes, even in death.

I didn’t know. I hadn’t known to pray to her every day, to chant. I would have. Sitting on my meditation cushion, listening to Pema, I did some quick math. Three days after the outer breath ceased, 49 days of mourning. My face turned hot and red. It was my mother’s last day of Bardo Thödol. I spoke up, shakily, through tears. I asked if we could all, the hundred or more people on zoom, pray for my mother, Bennett.

Pema led us in the meditation and chanting. We visualized her, alit with buddha nature. Tears fell onto my crossed legs.

Brief respite from ecstatic dance in the jungle; August 2022

I haven’t had what I’d consider a “solid” meditation practice for over a year. To be present and mindful in stillness was to be present and mindful of the deep, crunching, gristly pain chaffing and splintering my insides. I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t sit in stillness, anymore. But I discovered yoga. I connected with asanas and the flow of my body and breath in deeper attunement than ever before. I appreciated the way I could move and pant and balance and sweat. I made use of my body with attention and care that I had never acknowledged.

Without pausing meditation, I wouldn’t have felt called to become a yoga teacher. I wouldn’t have come to Koh Phangan or been on the path I’m walking today.

This afternoon, I go to Dipabhāvan Meditation Center on a neighboring island for a vipassana retreat. The first time I heard of anyone doing vipassana, I silently widened my eyes. Silence. Meditation. Seven days? Ten days? No books? No pens? How?

I hold no expectations. It’ll be challenging. It’ll be nice. It’ll be whatever it is. Perhaps I’ll make it the full week, perhaps the stitches in my chest will unbind one by one and I’ll feel compelled to leave. Whatever happens, is meant to.

I am as ready and as unprepared as ever. There’s nothing to it but sitting. Nothing to fear. Nothing to feel anxiety over.

“It’s Buddhist summer camp,” a friend laughingly said. “Don’t take it too seriously.”

He gives good advice. Sneak in some nuts and dried fruit to snack on at night. Go ahead and bring your journal. You’ll be deprived of so much, have one indulgence. But don’t make up stories. Don’t conjure a fantasy if there’s an attractive meditator sitting across the hall. And don’t busy yourself thinking about how you’ll describe the experience later in a blog post. Hard, for a writer. He knows me well.

Death propels people into faith. My losses have moved me in different patterns than I would’ve anticipated. But for it, I’m grateful. I’m grateful for the beingness of it all. And though it still stings with heartache, I’m often grateful for the non-beingness, too. I’m excited now, to sit with that sting.

I’ll close with one of my favorite Rumi poems, and one of the maybe three pieces of poetry I have committed to memory:

I saw Grief drinking from a cup of sorrow
And called out, “It tastes sweet, does it not?”

“You have caught me!” Grief cried,
“And you have ruined my business.”

“How am I to sell sorrow
When you know it is a blessing?”