Couple of weeks ago, I volunteered to be a steward at Birken Monastery. It's going to be in May for a month. This year I was hoping to attend a retreat anyway. When I saw the posting on the web site, I thought it would be way a better than a retreat because I get to be of service not only to myself but to those in the monastery. I have been in monasteries before and attended retreats. So I am used to being away from my home and my husband. But no sooner I signed up, I started having feelings of apprehension, almost bordering on fear.
I used this for my investigation. What am I being fearful of considering that I have done this sort of thing before. I felt I was feeling fear of leaving things behind - home, husband, cat and all the familiar things. The fear in another way was having to be somewhere new - a new place, new people, and a new way of operating. Something unfamiliar.
Then a thought came to me. Don`t I have to leave what I like and love anyway someday. At lease this time round I can come back but there is that day when I have to go for good, which is my death.
Dying in some way is not dissimilar. You have to leave behind what is familiar - your family, loved ones, belongings, basically the whole world as we know it to exist and above all your body. What a scary thing. I mean consider it. I am feeling a sense of apprehension just leaving behind a home, a husband and my cat for only a month and I have the choice of coming back to it. But I am taking myself with me...even when I have the most precious travelling with me, I still feel apprehension. What could possibly be my fear levels when I am dying or realise that I am going to die.
I also realise that I feel my apprehension because of what might change during my time away. Will things be the same....will my husband be distant when I come back....will things go back to where they were before I left. I feel that dying could give rise to similar fears. I mean you know for sure, things are going to change and in your absence everything is going to change for those you knew. Imagine the fear and the sense of sadness one might experience.
I had my uncle die of cancer earlier last year. I remember my mother saying that he was sad that he might die and that he way crying. In many ways I figure, that he might have experienced the same sadness and even fear of what I described before. Might be more that what I am experiencing right now.
Isn`t it funny...that we all know that we are going to die but it never makes us feel frightened! It doesn`t make us fearful that we have so much to leave behind. And that so much is going to change in our death for us as well for others. Yet we live not considering this at all. Or is it that we are fearful what might happen, should we consider this. I guess that`s a reasonable fear to have. But should that fear prevent us from getting to know what is an inevitability.
In life, we have trained ourselves to move away from what we don`t like, enjoy, make us happy and instead to seek what we like, brings us joy, makes us happy. As a result of it, we sometimes don`t want to face what is right in front of us, believing that if we ignore, turn away that perhaps the very thing that we want to avoid will disappear, go away and go into oblivion. But unlike all things we face in our life, we also treat death in the same way. Well some don`t even want acknowledge the existence of it. So once again we live life, hoping that in our avoidance that some how that too will go away or the fear of it will disappear. We even tell ourselves that there is no choice but to face and that we will do so when the time comes.
But that again is a big fat lie. I am saying this after years of observation of myself and others.
I have seen mothers, who have lived without recognizing that their children will grow up and change, go way cry out of sadness and fear. But those mothers just like all realise that there children will grow and change. And they all feel they are going to be different but when the times comes they find that it`s harder than they first thought. Same with husbands and wives. While they acknowledge the loneliness they would feel in the absence of another, they do no realise how much that causes hurt, fear.
What I am saying it, stating something it much easier than having to face the actualities. We are all born with same emotions though we display them so differently. So a persons sense of loss is not that dissimilar to anthers though we might handle them differently. A persons fear is not dissimilar to that of another though again we will handle it differently. But yet we go through life thinking that we are so uniquely different from one another, mostly due to our individual looks. But that in itself fails to give us the opportunity to learn from one another. That one persons pain, can also be our pain, anthers sense of fear can also be our fears, a sense of loss can also be our sense of loss, hurt is also our hurt.
So we continue down our life towards death in the same way. We fail to learn from those who have died before us. We only see these things as events in our lives. The grandparents loss, not realising that they were parents to our and not recognising that loss, sadness. In that we fail to realise the sadness that we might encounter one day when our parents die. In the same way we don`t see or can`t recognise how a person feels at the moment of death. I haven`t personally encountered a dying moment of any person. But I would like to experience this in many people. Because some day I will face that myself.
Having the smallest glimpse into it, I hope, would shed some clarity. But in the event I don`t get the chance, at least I have learnt from the stories of others - like my uncles. In identifying myself with each of them, and their pain, I have come closer to death as a living being. I recognize the pain, fear, sadness that could possibly arise from it. But having recognised them, I feel more at ease with death than I have been ever before. I used to be mortified of death when I was little. It was a scary thing because people go away. When I grew up, I could at least talk about it and think about it. With the passing away of my 4 grandparents, 3 uncles, I became closer to it. But I never saw it within myself.
It was only a few years ago that I started doing that. Then last year one of my uncles died. I was not there to see him die. But I saw him three months before he did and heard stories afterwards.
There seem to be a great letting go at the moment of death. It is that fear and sadness of letting go, not being to know what is going to happen, or have control over things that happening (be it sickness) or those things that you are going to leave behind. It arises because we have not lived a life of letting go. All of our lives we live to increase, gather and build. We have degrees, jobs, children, houses, money and we never let go of any one of these things out of our own choice. At a moment we have to we do it, because we think there is no choice.
A life lived that way can only have ending. The same dilemmas we have faced in life. So we die, because that is our only choice. But I realise that it does not have to be. We don`t have to die because we have no choice. It would be sad to do that. We should die because we choose to. Then when it happens, no matter when, we have chosen to die. as a result we could adjust our lives to some amount of letting go. Just like we would prepare months in advance for a wedding, a baby being born, for an exam, we can prepare ourselves to die. When we do that well, we have the choice to have a death. With the choice we can chose an easy one or a difficult one.
So, coming back to my start, I realise this time away as my death. Leaving something behind that I cannot have and having to experience something I don`t know. Coming to a peaceful state with that makes things easier. Just as I hope that it would be in my death as well.
