People Tell Their Stories:
Death and Dying

Death gives advance warning of its arrival; can we ever really be ready? Like a sudden highway sign on a long drive this message put me on notice, I wore the words like a second skin, I sniffed the air like a cat. Our companion since birth, death’s form is our steady shadow lagging slightly behind or looming large ahead. Eventually, we will merge; dying to life we are born into death.

On that wintry day as a vaporous first light crept across the city our train pulled into the Varanasi station. Benares, the stomping ground of Yama. Sacred Kashi where the widows come. My initial glimpse of the Ganges brings back shivers; in an atmosphere laden with frost we paid our obeisance to the deified waters dipping our fingers shyly into the river. My purpose in this place now felt blessed, I had come to see for myself the raw and unadorned truth of the matter. To see someone who had been loved by someone carried upon a shoulder lying rigidly wrapped in bright cloth to the burning ghats, the cremation pyres. Rama Nama Satya Hai! God’s name is truth – this chant propels the carried and the carrier to the ageless fires. De-shrouded of secrecy in plain sight with the spirit and soul already freed, the flesh is roasted with a minimum of fuss, the stiffness succumbs to the heat, the clay returns to the earth. Not easy to take in large doses – the specialness surrounding the corpse who was so dear is gone – this is an elemental process that strips away our gooey sweet ideas.

Death disguised as cancer was just beginning to infiltrate my world, stealing friends and the wives of friends and finally my mother. My mind was furiously caught in a web of theories, philosophies and traditions regarding the treatment of death. Feeling attached through love and enslaved by grief, logic insisted that I follow the trail and find a truth to set me free or at least one that sets me straight.

This quest for truth took us from Varanasi to Calcutta, from Sarnath to Pushkar, into the Punjab, the magnificent Golden Temple in Amritsar and finally up to the misty pine forest of Dharamshala where we were very blessed to have met the Dalai Lama.

Infused with the empyrean energy of such places and beings, I returned to New York City to be joined at the hip with my mother for the next two summers. Our spiritual practices became entwined, great fortune found us sitting at the feet of several mighty spiritual teachers. My mother, Suzanne, was pulled towards Buddhism, I towards Vedanta, this mattered little as our spiritual yearnings were compatible. Long ago unfortunate circumstances had obscured our chances for closeness but now the bulk of that misery had been rubbed away. Blossoming as a result of our emotional tilling and reseeding was a mutual respect for and interest in each others dharma, our paths as seen from a higher visage. We spent two summers gathering chi as it were.

When autumn arrived I would leave once more for India spending the following two winters in the south studying the Upanishads, listening to gurus, pundits, and swamis. I feel exceptionally fortunate for that time was well spent, bathing my mind with noble content, emerging from the smoke of my enigmatic notions, gathering quiet within. I kept connected with my mother via email and helplessly read of the dark and bleak winters she was experiencing vastly contrasting with our bright summers. Her life seemed to have no respite from a growing sense of confinement that sought to puncture her spirit. (From a reflective point of view perhaps this is what ultimately punctured her lung.)

In the spring of 2002, I relocated to Florida. Thus ending our cult of two, never again would Suzanne and I have the luxury of traversing time and space together as we did in those jewel-toned summers.

It was on a grass mat beneath the fir tree in June 2004 that I read an article written by a Vedic astrologer, a woman not much older than me and someone whose work I was familiar with. She revealed how cosmic forces were crushing her world, a few weeks back her mother died and now it had been discovered that she herself had a rare form of bone cancer. The article seemed very important to me – a disclosure of the impermanence and uncertainty of things. I hobbled around this information feeling quite winded from it. I took this story as evidence that death was in the vicinity, lurking nearby. My inner radar system appeared to be siphoning out of “all that is” what I would need as guidance for what lay ahead. The universe seemed to respond to my paying attention by giving me clues. Events conspired to reflect back wisdom I would need to draw upon, my subconscious and conscious mind were together pulling in stories, images and feelings of illness, suffering and death. The outcome of these stories was always the same, sad and unresolved, termination and finality. No one seemed to get better, disintegration was the inevitable, and I wondered how to keep my head above this encroaching sense of loss. How was I to breathe with equanimity while waiting suspiciously for my foes - suffocation and dread – to make their way to my door?

Another unlikely source of insight appeared while watching the long drawn out funeral of Ronald Reagan. The procession morphed into a slow motion denouement, each step of the march, each goodbye resembling a petal being released from a bloom, the center being; the President in his coffin, the receptacle of the pollen, the concentrated bindu of sweetness growing harder and stiffer, becoming unrecognizable. The most exquisitely painful moment elipsing as Nancy Reagan fought with rationality and decorum abandoning herself into her vortex of extreme sorrow. The outer world disappeared for her as she flung reason aside and groped, clung, begged her diminutive self around the coffin. Don’t really be gone, don’t really be gone. This episode was exceptionally powerful for me to witness. I distinctly recollect the feeling - I was watching demi gods reenacting pearly truths inside a television. Words from pages becoming flesh and tears. The protruding brutality of impermanence and attachment at their pinnacle - All things must pass, all things must pass away the Buddha said.

My mothers indomitable spirit got her through a rough and troubled stretch, a very grim period when housing, work, health insurance, and age were evolving into gargantuan intrusions with each demanding her attention. Suzanne’s roommates, full blown narcissists lorded over her; they consistently trimmed while at other times hacked away at her peace of mind and security. Behaving like characters from A Clockwork Orange, the couple schemed and concocted many a devious ploy to move Suzanne out. Once the female of the pair remarked that Suzanne was like a buoy - she just never drowned but bounced atop the churning waves.

She was a haircutter for forty years. Was it the long hours standing filling her body with pain. At a very youthful 65, the foundation in her life seemed to be cracking. In a valiant show of spunk my mother sought a new vision and I felt an admixture of heartache and reverence for her brave front. The heartsickness arose because I wanted my mother to be free of trouble - able now to put down the tools of her trade and be cradled in her hammock. Gazing at O’Keefe’s in the clouds, counting laps as she swam in her lithe bronzed figure at the community pool, years of mainlining NYC with its pseudo glamour and obstreperous pull, finally, finally behind her.

Unenlightened defines a culture that repays a lifelong effort of contribution with a raw deal. Supporting the economy, paying her way, Suzanne was an over-tipper not by trying to make friends or be a big-shot but because she valued a spiritual contract that esteemed the worthiness in others.

Decades-long loyal clients respected the span of Suzanne’s expertise; they would go without a cut rather than have someone else touch their hair. Several times a year it was her healing that they sought, her special listening ear, uncanny counsel, her off beat groundedness and evergreen curiosity about them. Plans were in the making for her to shift to an elegant Japanese salon which emphasized traditional values and Buddhist principles but something hard to see made the changeover misty, the move never eventuated.

Long before she met Buddha she was aware of Buddha-nature. Perhaps while growing up in Lower Hutt (New Zealand) playing in the vegetable garden as the earth ran through her fingers, she found satori. Having manners never hindered my mothers far out ideas, I think it enhanced them, one could accept her way-out-ness because she treated everyone and everything with such care - with the eye of an artist she made ordinary situations into a discovery – a perch from which to find the beauty hiding. Her Zen poise was flawless.

An indefinable something was wrong. My chest felt tight, my mind was ceaselessly anxious, a lump in my throat caused my breathing to change, and my eyes burned until tears fell. An ache I would know intimately was conceived. Time racing away made the space since I last saw Suzanne grow awkward and mistaken, and in the summer of 2004 I hurriedly made a trip to NYC. The mood in the apartment was strained, my mother had been shifted out of the big front room and squeezed into a tiny area which she had made as lovely and cozy as only she could. I felt very ill sleeping in the big room that used to be hers, filled with light and space instead of her things and her self.

She looked really well, shiny bright eyes and skin, lean and energetic, but with that, there was some sort of fatigue, she was slipping away underneath her sparkling demeanor. No one else might have noticed it – but I did - my inkling told me so. We raced about – Jackson Heights for Indian food, wafting up and down the street waving to the shop keepers we knew from our summers together. We caressed the piles of sari bits in the box at each shop door. We used to buy two or three at a time unable to resist their beauty, have them hemmed to give as gifts and wear ourselves, long drinks of heavenly colour slithering off our shoulders or curled around our necks. But this time we resisted and bought none, it seems to me now we were ghosts on that happy day haunting old times together.

I accompanied my mother to orientation night at the hip learning center where Suzanne was to begin classes in the autumn of ’04. When the program ended we landed in the balmy night and she insisted upon calling a Buddhist character she knew, a friend, he peddled a pedi – cab around the city several evenings a week. My mother loved the new, the avant garde, the far out people with big hearts who told stories with quirky twists about heartache. In a moment of summer in the city magic we were to alight upon the speedy wheels of an evanescent revolution, the sultry air and juicy lights making zig zag flashes as we zipped down 5th avenue, across town to Times Square where reality flirted with dizzy splash, oh, the brilliance of it all. I remember feeling my hair flying, the moment extraordinarily still, an eternal moment in time type still, turning to look at my mother I thought how well, how bright and beautiful she looks, we smiled then laughed with each other, noting our spontaneous joy.

Once in the union square subway station we walked with our arms linked in harmonious tandem solidly facing the thick of it; rush hour. As we were swept along in the river of humanity towards the number 6 train, she mentioned an important paper that I should be aware of and where she kept it. I burst into a spray of icy hot tears and said ok, remaining in the flow as we kept swimming in the school of others onto the platform.

I knew, she knew, no one knew and then it was – January 26, 2005, diagnosis - stage four.

I recall the sum total of thirteen weeks from diagnosis to cremation. Six weeks at the hospital, seven in hospice - how fast, shocking and unspeakably sad - a crash course in cancer, a crash course in death - also, a crash course in responsibility. In fact, the entire feeling was of being in a slow moving yet certain crash - the fatal impact still tolling on me.

There was no hope from the onset of this thirteen week journey - at least not hope in the traditional sense of surviving the crash. No uttering about remission or the possibility of… It’s funny how final it was right at the beginning. Naturally, I have regrets - a sick in my gut feeling, a startling middle of the night sweaty feeling. Is there something I didn’t do - anything I could have done.

The horror of it - I didn’t fight hard enough for her life, but the funny final feeling was a deep one: a resignation to life and truth and death. No escape, no buying time. No negotiating except through the minefields which lay in our hearts and minds.

I don’t truly know how my mother felt. All her practice, training, belief and trust had to become her walking stick, her seeing eye cane, must leave the realm of theory and hope – and become the vehicle, her confidante that would not fail her. Her astonishing composure reflected her inward mastery, the ripened fruit of awareness, paying attention and openness.

She didn’t ask many questions. She didn’t leave any instructions. I believe once it dawned within my mother that there was no going back, she renounced her life. She let go of all her possessions, all her belongings - even her associations. That is not to say she relaxed into this new realization but as she let go of the outer material creation she held onto her dignity and practice.

I don’t know how she did it - so quietly and completely and swiftly - like a sage. For certain the pain she met physically and emotionally appeared instrumental in escorting her from this life, appeared to abscond with her hope - reassuring her she could no longer stay here.

Those seven weeks in hospice were a veritable pilgrimage. We could go just so far together and then must split apart and each carry on. We ritualized the journey. Many gifts had to be given to please the gods for a triumphant outcome. The gift of loving life had to be relinquished to enter the kingdom of death - the land of light. The gift of attachments, of control, of choice - all had to go. She had to unwrap her soul from the tissue of life. I don’t know how or when she did this. From what happened, I can only deduce and surmise my mother was walking the path of surrender, and that her determination to not fall apart and fate were in lockstep.

We sang. And the voice of song filled space where other emotions may have rivaled for a foothold vetoing any chance for joy. Song is transportive - getting you down memory lane, it can take you away. It includes you because song is a link in the rhythm of living. The right song at the right time keeps you company and understands you - it is a chaperone through halls of sorrow. When you are at a loss for words you don’t have to say anything, you don’t have to think. You sing.

Our mother’s wish to often not see and speak with people was no measure of her feelings for them. This aversion was entirely precipitated by the emotional swell that would visit when returning to the fullness of life. So many times, I ruefully told near and dear ones - not today, no visitors. She had to protect her vows of renunciation. As her sentinel I wanted to protect her.

I know I would reiterate over and again - please forgive me for saying not today, she can’t talk. Please forgive me if I am babbling – please, please know how much your call, your prayer, your good wishes mean. Please keep calling, praying, and wishing. All those messages became a luminous reservoir of love - where each call was registered, acknowledged, digested and contributed to the pool of solace giving immeasurable sustenance to us. The caller was identified and she would take some moments to reflect upon who they were in her life – so many who were clients. Who would do their hair?

The cards were tied up with ribbon and kept in the drawer next to her bed. The flowers were trimmed, arranged, and then rearranged, eventually strung into malas to garland the pictures of gods and goddesses in her corner of the room.

There really is no satisfactory way to say goodbye. My mother spent her life bringing forward the natural beauty she saw in others - magical things always happened when I was with her. It was because she could perceive such exquisite inner beauty that this magic revealed itself. She could always make me feel beautiful - I would believe her. This ability drew people in - it never left her.

While on the 10th floor of hospice, our future together was diminishing and strands of time were being woven into an heirloom - a keepsake. Time held for us the treasure of being alive together; we lived while death lay in wait. When we could have felt absolutely invisible, new friends appeared. People you would never ordinarily meet - supremely learned, wise in the last rite of passage - the midwives of death. Trained and versed, erudite in recognizing the formidable terror involved in this primeval process, they knew that tender, genuine, confident guidance was invaluable.

In the culmination of your life’s relationships sits this most profound place of isolation and vulnerability where you long to trust someone with your life. Even faith has form and reliability but trust is a freefall. Will basic goodness find me worthy and lovable - that’s the scream of the mind in our private darkness. The glorious staff empathized, comforted, soothed and listened. In humane and compassionate terms, they unraveled our despair and laid the groundwork for coping and coexisting with the stress and the mystery.

Eventually we could no longer tool around in the wheelchair pretending to go places - and every song had been sung. We were somewhere else now. We were as close as you can get to the fire - the inner flame. Her spirit was seeking the ocean of bliss and began the upward spiral to the portal of her crown. We said our goodbyes on Friday evening before the morphine drip was implemented.

That shall remain a singular and indescribable experience. As throughout this pilgrimage, the sacrosanct sobriety of spiritual practice was the glue that kept us and the bridge that carried us - together. Thus we entered our vigil. Our mother appeared adrift in a drug-imbued cancer-ravaged vessel. We tidied her room. We spoke to her constantly. We monitored her body as the circulation withdrew from her limbs.

We chanted mantras. We turned off the oxygen and waved incense over her form. We sat feeling her heartbeat, watching her laboured breath. We listened as it changed patterns - her body was hot, then clammy, then cool. Tuesday morning we were torn between anguish and acceptance. We were counseled that not one breath is wasted. How beautifully those words fell into my heart. Each breath was now a sacrifice, her last gift to us, moments as rare as unblemished gems, moments of rarified unity - a shared and bonding silence together.

As much as humanly possible a sharing of the spaciousness she was nearly in and the solidity of where we were remaining. I wish I could have been more deeply quiet. These are the moments to revisit, to keep for eternity - they were glimpses into the nature of heaven. This is when our hearts may encounter resonance; love can time travel permeating our collective karmas with the sweetness of absolution. This was a chance to become familiar with profound stillness - where we may always find one another. It was within these moments we were to find peace.

We closed the door to her room and bathed her head to toe with sandalwood soap. We rubbed jasmine lotion into her skin and anointed her with rose water. We carefully redressed her. We cooed softly and lovingly to her. A piece of golden silk cloth embossed with dragons and cherry blossoms was behind her head. The Buddhist last rites - the heart sutra had been said.

We opened the door and our mother’s guardians both visible and not were now gathered round her. The solitary and focused wooing of her spirit to return home was fully apparent to us. The haunting lullaby of Charles’s Native American Indian flute purified the atmosphere and signaled the beckoning - the final letting go.

From a faraway place our mother willed herself present to make her passage before our eyes. She tried to say something - it was inaudible, but she was moving consciously, miraculously. What happened next I can only liken to an eclipse of the moon. Amid tears and prayers and encouragement from us as we stood right over her, a shadow crept up her neck slowly upwards across her face - her eyes which had been locked into a glazed half-open stare blinked in slow motion. Released from their tortured position - two blinks, slow and soft, her eyelids looked so refreshed and relaxed. Just like the eyes of a doe.

A mist floated up past her eyes and out the top of her head - a mist of light. And she let go of one soft breath and then one more - her last. Good bye Mom. Good bye Suzanne. My memory of your resplendent essence.

In the hours following the bombshell from the doctor my mind was silent. I made important calls, I listened to things people said, received directives that pelted past my filters landing squarely in my consciousness. Proverbial verbal bulls-eyes. They arrived as single missives – each lone voice imbued with a kind of inscrutable authority – and as time has shown me I took this advice into both mind and emotion as liturgical commands. Think not and go. Be there and stay. Show her your tears, you will miss her. Your life will change forever; your history will come before you. All this came to pass; I went, I remained, I witnessed, and I wept. After her breath took leave, after her resemblance was turned to dust, I had a week to erase, disassemble and wash away all traces of her having been.

Next I must return to a life abruptly left behind. Return to some job, carry on, and move forward. Such meaningless slang, these ideas seemed deader than my mother. The someone in me decided this was impossible. After all, I had been told that my life would never be the same and too, I had received more … more of something I never had - I did not want to go back, could not go back. I did not know how lacking in this more of something I had been. I don’t know how to explain it other than I felt valued, valued and valuable after caring for my mother, seeing her last exhale and saying good bye. Yes, living in the past is useless but mindfully reliving events, paddling up streams of consciousness to mine the memory for discoveries is healing. Holding my sorrow blossom I behold beauty. I wish she, who would understand, wasn’t gone.

I returned to Tucson, fumbled around in loneliness, acutely noticing mothers and daughters. The weather was excellent with early summer’s increasing heat, the predictable blue skies and cloudless quiet. Day after day as dawn seeped in I sat on the edge of the bed, the slatted, wooden, window shades open a tad – enough to allow morning sun to enter. The white wall opposite me looking like a movie screen with shadows from the blinds in various depths of gray resembling steps, long narrow stairs progressing up the wall. My gaze was vague, unfocused and very still; I saw flickering speckles of powdery shimmers haunting the dry morning air, the scene pulling me in and in more until I fully expected to dissolve. My breathing deepened and slowed as I awaited the eventuation. Most certainly my form would disband like a dry leaf from the tree. As filtering motes of flaky cells dervished before me, I too would upward spire to my mothers place. A simpler thought I have never had, a more refined excursion never did I seek; I was sure I could become as subtle as a sparkle in the light – so be it.

I waited for her return right after she passed, such an unusual person would no doubt come back to huddle with me and relive the plot that rubbed her out. I expressed the anticipated outcome to my brother and a friend in the twilight gloom of hospice one dusk. I said – oh yes, I expect her to rejoin us in two weeks – I know she will want to talk about this, examine it frame by frame. They looked at me in disbelief which deterred me none.

I later reasoned that if Suzanne could not come to me I would no doubt follow her and flashed on a vision I had in hospice that Friday evening in the half lit dread after our good byes. I was leaning over her as she lay stiff with fear and heavy with drugs, her eyes were shut tight, and she was waiting. Projected in my minds eye was this image – my mother in monk robes the colour of brick appearing robust and happy, two Tibetans, a monk and a nun were with her, she turned to give me a hearty wave, her blessing – a long look of assurance. I sensed that she was prepared now to enter the bardos. The landscape around them was lunar, barren, and difficult. The following four days reflected that landscape which makes me cling to the hope that during this hell she was not all there, that the greater part of her had already transitioned with ease.

As well as conjuring myself into particle matter during those filtered morning hours, I imagined my mother sitting upon a slender branch in an olive tree, this animated picture was carefree and enjoyable – weightless, excused from a solemn grave. While sitting on a grass mat to watch my breath I could almost make her out in the wheat coloured cluster of dry grasses near the olive tree. She wouldn’t come closer, but sat in lotus pose like Quan yin, regal, delicate, soft and removed. Some of my mothers ashes were offered to the Ganga in Rishikesh, and when we came home I suffered from undiagnosed giardia, lost a lot of weight and saw her shining skull in my own thinly drawn face.

I saw her often in the shower I didn’t want to take. Parts of us so similar physically – our knuckles, kneecaps, and posture after a long day, our New Zealand bones that love the sun. A certain look about the eyes, not the eyes but in the eyes. I wonder if it is memories we see, ancestral tendrils following a line of thought, the spirit of a grandmother or uncle. It took some time to figure out the pall that came over me in the shower. Every day for weeks I had given my mother a birdie bath, hunching back and forth from the sink with a soapy cloth trying to keep the flannel warm so to transfer a lovely feeling. It was awkward. One time in the hospice shower was more awkward – too cold, the terror she may fall down on the tile, me fully clothed and soggy, the door ajar and two orderlies laughing and Suzanne precariously balanced on a plastic stool. But, for a split second, for even a couple of moments, her upturned face was delighting in the splashing cascade – the earthy contact so natural, immediate and normal. I am so sorry it was a blip and bungle, a fright of hustle and bumps, I am eternally sorry I could not quench her desire to wash it all away.

It was not until she passed away and the swift decision to disperse her things confronted me that I fully realized I did not have children. Funny that. It uniformly influenced my actions – it taught me about time in short order and the predisposed nature of persuasion that stuff has over us. I decided to give everything useful a new home, condense memorabilia and mentally document everything for later perusal. Propelling this intensive dissemination was forceful outward pressure and lots of inner reasoning. I now know I will die, I now know I have no children to want from me, or to pass onto the trappings of their history. There is an urgency to run ahead of the plan, get out in front and prepare for my own passing. Minimize, sign the paperwork, become a modern me, scattering my personal effects usefully, beautifully and unabashedly while alive.

So this mourning business awakens me from a hopeless ambition of infinite dawns in endless time, I am on the scent, desirous of ridding this mind of old thinking as I confront aging with spanking clear awareness. These are inclinations toward lightness of being, animal joy that naturally stretches when stiff, that quietly settles in at sunset. The sage under a tree is an intoxicating visual for me evoking the liberation of contentment, potent good will, an organic experience in its peak. Gate Gate Para Gate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha! Liberated from fear, I reach the other shore.

Danielle winter is long time devotee of Vedanta and enthuser/adviser of people wishing to eat in harmony with nature. She is a New Zealander living most of her life in NYC, some of her life in India and presently going with the flow in Tucson, Arizona. She may be reached at nellywinter@hotmail.com

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