She was scuba diving at the time, a final test for certification in fact, and while in a deep Atlantic Ocean dive her oxygen tank stopped functioning properly.
I have a clear-as-day memory of my father running up the beach to tell the family friend who was watching my sister and I splash around in the water that my mother was being rushed to the emergency room of the local hospital, and as a child, it was my first real brush with death.
Since that time I've had quite a few more encounters with the radical truth of impermanence of all varieties, including death.
Most recently, it took the form of a walk last Sunday with my father-in-law who has early-onset Alzheimer's.
I'm actually fortunate to be able to say that I'd not yet had anyone close in my life with this terrible brain disease, but now, with my father-in-law, I see it very up close and personal.
And where he is now, I will say anecdotally as I still understand very little about the progression of the disease itself, is a stage where he is completely unable to hold any short-term memories.
It's like the light switch for short-term memory was just turned off.
So the good news is, my father-in-law is still able to recognize all of his family members, knows who he is, and is retaining most of his own personal history that has been long logged away in the neurological caverns of long-term memory.
It's strange though, to do something like a walk in nature with him, and all the while holding in my awareness that this event (at least on a conscious level) will be gone for him the near moment it is over.
I'm a big fan of writer and creator of the website Brain Pickings, Maria Popova, and she wrote this statement just last week:
Joy and sorrow are equally transient. Even transcendence is transient.
I thought of those words after spending the stolen time with my father-in-law.
Another piece too, which added to this theme of impermanence, was that my 3 year-old daughter was also walking with us that day, and she is now herself waking up to the reality of impermanence in life.
It seems almost everyday now, my daughter is inquiring about death, illness and the afterlife.
And I must admit, it can be painful at times to watch the (what feels like) bitter reality of that impermanence settle in to her 3 year-old understanding of the world.
It almost makes me sympathetic to the mythic story of the royal parents of the historical Buddha who tried to keep this truth of impermanence away from their son by forbidding him to go beyond the palace gates where he would inevitably encounter aging, illness and death.
For my daughter though, it is not only people for which she is contemplating mortality.
She will look at a pink rose her father planted for her in our garden, and ask me:
"Will this rose die too mommy?"
"Yes," I tell her, "the rose too."
Ugh.
The other day at the playground she was petting someone's dog, and while continuing to stroke the dog's soft fur, my daughter decided to tell the dog owner the story of her own dog who had died just last year.
She tells a lot of people that story these days.
I don't think I'm alone though, in my feeling of being a little bit like the blind leading the blind as my daughter begins to grapple with the certainty of impermanence in everyday life.
This sense of being somewhat ill-equipped for the task, leads me to seek out the hard-won efforts and wisdom of the palliative care movement, which has taught Western society a lot more about how to die well, how to be with the dying in a wholesome capacity, what it means to "live well" with pain and disease, and how to talk about death as a facet of impermanence that is natural and maybe even(though this is completely counterintuitive for me) nourishing.
Dr. BJ Miller, a palliative care physician, University Professor and former Executive Director of the Zen Hospice Project in California, has said in an On Being interview called "Reframing Our Relationship to That We Don't Control:"
We have these bookends of birth and death and in between feels like a guitar solo- in between, all sorts of crazy things can happen. But the song begins and the song ends, at least for this bodily life. And the fact that we share, that 100 percent of us across time and space, across cultures, that all of us share that version of fate is compelling to me.
This reality is "compelling" to me as well, which makes it all the more curious that this reality, this truth, has not led modern-day humankind (at least in the western world) to get better at the process of illness, death and dying.
In my professional life, I have been fortunate enough to know a young man who, like Dr. Miller, has a deep commitment to palliative care, but his work is with animals.
I've known this fellow for many years now, and his decision to volunteer with an animal shelter with the specific purpose of offering love and kindness--in the form of long hours of petting, taking a last long run, or offering a large piece of red meat as a last meal--to animals who are soon to die continues to move me. His level of compassion for animals who are at the end of life (dogs for the most part) is profoundly touching.
For me, I think one way I try to "get better" at willingly encountering impermanence in all its various forms it to actually recognize all its various forms- and they are not all full of sadness and sorrow either.
Take for example my 18 year-old niece. She just graduated from high school in June of this year, and is now traveling out of the country for the first time on her own to study for a year in Europe.
Now, if I was her own mother, I'm sure this life stage would be an absolute mish-mosh of grief-panic-stricken-wonderment.
But as her aunt, just slightly removed from the epicenter of parental insanity which I certainly feel in relation to my own two children, I can see (perhaps more clearly) the absolute beauty of this passage through impermanence with its own organic "bookends" and "guitar solo."
In celebration of my niece's "guitar solo," I sent her a copy of this poem by 19th century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
A Psalm of Life
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’er head!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
In my own spiritual life, I've written before, that I feel impermanence at times as a snake skin that I shed each time I wake up a little more to reality and my True Self.
[Though, I should also probably add, in some of those moments I have also had plenty of those experiences of grief and panic alongside the wonderment- more of that topic for another time...]
Dr. Miller also refers to this type of more unconventional death without dying in his 2015 Ted Talk "What Matters at the End of Life" when he said:
Parts of me died early on, and that's something we can all say one way or another. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left, like that snowball lasting for a perfect moment, all the while melting away. If we love such moments ferociously, then maybe we can learn to live well -- not in spite of death, but because of it. Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination.
I saw this morning on the news that today is the 72nd anniversary of the United States nuclear bombing of the Japanese city Nagasaki that killed approximately 70,000 people- 3 days after the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima that killed 140,000 people.
In light of this, as I consider all the ways human beings engage in this process of grappling with impermanence in day-to-day life, it occurs to me that, with the pleasant and the unpleasant experiences in life that will inevitably arise, present themselves and eventually fall away, comes a necessary respect for the delicate, maybe even fragile, balance that requires the utmost presence and loving awareness that we can muster.
Otherwise, we can automatically slip back into those human mine fields like greed, hatred and delusion which act as obstacles toward a mindful relationship with impermanence.
I pray today for some of that "imagination" in our world leaders.
May it be so.
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