Recently
I learned that my friend Hester had been suddenly diagnosed with Stage 4
cancer. She had been focused on daily
living, her long road stretching out to the horizon, attending to friends,
creativity, work, and related pleasures and struggles. Within days, her life abruptly made a hairpin
turn into a new path, narrow and poorly lit, and short. One week after I spoke to her, she died.
It
is at these times that the veil, which protects us from certain knowledge of
our impermanence, draws back and we glimpse the evanescence of all life. This happens rarely for most of us, and we
usually focus our attention on the events and circumstances of our lives as if
we will always be living, here on this Earth.
Younger people, especially, tend to feel personally immortal, even when
they know people who have died. At a
certain age, that veil becomes thinner, and somewhat frayed. We have family and friends who have
life-threatening illness, or who have died.
The numbers increase with our own age.
It becomes easier to imagine “that could be me.”
Still,
the veil is there, even if thinner, and those moments when we recognize the
brevity of life disappear back under the veil.
How
do we live life fully, completely, inhabiting each moment we are granted? In those moments when the veil is drawn
aside, can we still live in the present?
Is it possible to do so despite knowledge of what awaits us at the end? Or is the veil necessary, like blinders, to
keep us focused in the present? Is this a
universal phenomenon, or just a product of our own culture, which keeps illness
and death at a distance, and encourages everyone to hold on to the appearance
of youth?
Certainly
there are other cultures in which illness and death are regarded as part of
life in a different way from our own, in which people are cared for at home
among family of all ages. Also, there
are places where death comes more frequently to people at a younger age,
because of infectious diseases, hunger, and war. In these circumstances, there may be very
little left of the protective veil.
Though
the many religions and spiritual traditions of our world offer guidance,
ultimately we each find our own way to co-exist with these questions. Like many of us, I spend most of my time focused
on the details rather than the overview.
I attend to my family, do my exercises, see my patients, care for our
pets, plan and cook dinners, go out with my husband, my attention directed to
the events carefully listed, by color and category, on my phone calendar.
These
last two weeks, however, my veil has thinned, and I know that, as I go through
my day of details, my life, too, could change suddenly and irrevocably. This awareness brings so much discomfort that
I immediately turn away into mindfulness practice, name it “anxiety,” and
return my attention, not to my breath, but back to the specifics of daily life.
Still,
I find my mind meandering at odd times, wondering about meaning. What are humans here for? Why does each life seems so expansive, and
yet so brief? When people die, how can they suddenly not be
here? What am I here for?
I
sometimes see time stretching in a line from the past to the future, or not in
a line at all, with everything happening, in some way, simultaneously, and all
life connected into a vast web. In some
way, everyone who was ever here, is still here. In some
way, it is life itself that is the meaning.
