a week later

What’s it like to encounter death?

I don’t know.

Is it “a shot across the bow” as my physician-brother put it? A warning to take good (better) care of the body, to enjoy each moment more fully? I’ve heard others talk about their heart attack as a life changer, an awakening.

Thus I’ve been waiting — for something. An insight perhaps, a fresh understanding of life’s deeper meaning? But nothing of the kind. I’m still living in a fog, remembering many details of what happened through the eyes of a bystander.

Woke up to silence this morning. Not a sound on our little street. None of the usual pub-crawlers, skate-borders, fighting cats, distant sirens. No sense of clock time, except that it wasn’t day yet. As I slid open the curtains, nothing else moved. I was alone. Even the dog stayed put. What is this, I wondered.

Nothing came to mind. It too was still.*

In Dry Salvages, T.S. Eliot writes —

Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

*I later opened “The Tibetan book of living and dying” (1993, HarperSanFrancisco) in which Sogyal Rinpoche writes about “a state of total awakening that is the heart-essence of all the buddhas and all spiritual paths, and the summit of an individual’s spiritual evolution.” This “is not a goal that lies at the end of a long and grueling journey,” he continues, but “the already self-perfected state of our primordial nature, which needs no ‘perfecting,’ for it has always been perfect from the very beginning, just like the sky” (p. 151).

photo credit