A Glorious Departure

Songs from the Mother Tree

We are coming and going always, being born and dying; and certainly not all of our departures are glorious. We have heard from the great wisdom traditions about the profound benefits of 'a good death,' and the need to prepare for such a death. The Dalai Lama speaks of this; he seems to regard a good death as one we are able to embrace without a lot of fear and regret.

I live with a sense that there are many ways to die a good death. Preparing for it feels like basic sanity, and there are no guarantees. My experiences with death and dying have been heartbreaking revelations about what a shocking and disorienting experience dying is for those of us in human bodies. Whether we are witnessing the passage, or the one who is dying.

When Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was dying of cancer he told his beloved students, “When I die, if I suffer, that is all right you know, no confusion in it; this is just suffering Buddha.” And there is help, visible and invisible; stories come down through our ancestral fields testifying to this. Grace comes to us at these times from strange and unlikely places. From the nonhuman world there are streams of wisdom about death and dying pouring in our direction, if we can listen, if we are able to see. I've heard Vanessa Andreotti speak about how she feels our educational systems are dying, the ivory tower is falling; we are witnessing a necessary death. She walks with a beautiful wondering about how we could support this dying process so that our institutions can fall apart like a mother tree in the forest, whose body becomes food and refuge for many other beings after she dies.

At a time when so much is disappearing: species, languages, institutions, landscapes, and our imagined futures, this feels like a question worthy of our time. Worthy, but also weighty, something that may feel like too much to ponder in the midst of collapse, chaos, war and genocide. Perhaps following this thread in the context of these very troubled times feels almost impossible, overwhelming. So I will start with a small story of my own.

My mother died of cancer twenty five years ago at the age of eighty. She struggled long and hard to get well; she did not want to die. In the last seven or eight months before she died, she began to practice meditation and contemplation in a whole new way. Every afternoon she lay down on the sofa, looking out on the small lake below. She would put on her headphones, cover herself with a blanket, and listen to guided meditations, teachings and contemplations from her teachers. Sometimes it looked like she was sleeping, or floating. I had a sense of something precious being infused into her being, far deeper than the knowing of her conscious mind. An energy would wrap itself around her during those long afternoons. I felt it penetrating my heart--a deep, sweet sense of peace. Her bitterness, her aversion, her self pity began to slowly disappear, like mist in the sunlight.

She was also being held in constant prayer by the members of her local Buddhist community. At one point the energy of those prayers that were holding her became quite palpable; I could feel them when I entered her room, and so could others. Sometimes I heard them with some inner ear, like the gentle buzzing of a crowd of golden bees.

Your body died.

Its snow turned to water,

its blossom turned to fragrance,

its flame turned to light,

its kiss turned to love,

its movements turned to presence,

and its life returned to the Living One. (1)

On the last night that she was conscious, I carried her from her bath into her bed. She felt like a small bird in my arms. I could already feel her body dissolving, her spirit preparing to leave, going back to where it came from. She lay quietly in her bed, with three of us by her side: her best friend, my brother and myself.

“I'm not afraid,” she said, and it was a true statement, full of innocence and humility.

“Why not?” I asked her. I was touched and astounded by her lack of fear.

She looked at us for a moment and then said, “I have no idea.”

For some reason, this struck a deep chord of hilarity in us; we laughed together for five joyous minutes, and then my mother fell asleep. This was the last conversation I had with her; that night she entered a coma which lasted for three days. Around ten in the morning on the fourth day, my mother took her last breath. She slipped away gracefully, without any sign of struggle.

About twenty minutes after she died, someone knocked at the door. A friend of hers was standing there.

“I've come to pay my respects to your mother's body and to her spirit,” she said.

“But how do you know that she died?” we asked. “It just happened, we haven't told anyone.”

“Well,” said her friend, “she said goodbye to me on her way. She was so happy, so full of love. She poured some of that radiance into my heart.” She went into the bedroom to sit with my mother's body for a few minutes, leaving the three of us standing there, astonished.

About five minutes after that, the phone rang. It was another friend, who lived across the country. “I'm so sorry about your mother,” she said, “and I want you to know she is well, very well, she said goodbye to me as she was leaving, and told me how much she loved me.”

Then there was another knock on the door, and then another phone call. It went on for hours, people arriving at the door, and calling from all over the world, to tell us that she had said goodbye to them and touched them with her love and gratitude on her way out of the body. Some of them spoke about how they felt she was flying, jubilant, joyous. Those farewells all happened at the same time, right after my mother took her last breath.

How to speak of the impact of this? Of realizing that when my mother died, her consciousness became profoundly nonlocal and also deeply liberated and loving. This was how she was able to make direct contact with so many different people in different places at the same time. And each one felt that she was speaking directly to them. Some of them told us that she even spoke their name. It was amazing at the time, a deep and unexpected revelation. I did not have an easy relationship with my mother, so I received this as a stream of radical grace from her, something improbable, miraculous, that she left as a parting gift. Along with the awareness that the agonizing heartbreak she had lived with for so long had fallen away.

What I had no notion of at the time of her death was how this gift would keep on unfolding, like a shade flower blossoming almost imperceptibly inside my heart. We are immersed in a global mainstream culture that is massively averse to death, grief and loss. Within the desolation of this context, a good death is an immense blessing for those who witness it, who participate in it. It is an alchemical event, and the benevolence of its impact is not limited by time or space. I've remembered that morning thousands of times over the past twenty five years, and in remembering it, my whole orientation to death and dying has been slowly, gently, fundamentally altered.

Until recently, most of us have not had access to resources that would help us to trust, to soften into the liminal wilderness we encounter as we die. Of course we don't prepare for our death. We don't want to think about dying. Death is the enemy. How would we be able to imagine a good death?

When someone is unprepared for death, fighting, raging, in denial, it can be very difficult for those who are tending and supporting them. This way of leaving can create wounds and traumas in the people left behind, and in our collective relationship with death. Which can make it even harder for us to fully participate, with our heart and bodies and souls, in this profound transition. We don't know how to pray together, to sing, to create ritual and ceremonies of blessing. We have lost the art of communal grieving, and most of us live profoundly disconnected from our ancestors.

And, in the middle of all this denial, terror and dissociation, the sprouts of a new culture around our ancestors, death, dying and grieving are finally emerging. Maybe they are growing from the body of a great mother tree who has fallen in the subtle realm and is feeding this emergence. There may come a time when family and friends can sit with the body after someone dies in the hospital, and say a long and sweet goodbye, without having the body immediately whisked away. And a time when more and more people die at home, where their loved ones can sit with the body for days afterwards, singing and praying and making offerings to the soul in transition.

I feel the story of my mother's death being woven into the conflagration of what is dying and being reborn right now, sprouting like a mushroom from the primordial generosity of the mother tree. As I allow myself to receive this gift from her, all of the ways we harmed each other, judged each other, and missed each other dissolve, as snow turns to water, as blossom becomes fragrance, as a kiss becomes love.

What she lived and could not live are being realigned inside my heart, becoming food and living nourishment for me.

“I didn't, I couldn't, see you while you were alive Mum, but now I do, and it is good.”

And there is an answer, as if she is singing softly to me, from the other side.

(1) Elias Amidon, 'At the Cremation of a Young Woman.'

Photo credit: Joshua Albritton on Unsplash

Painting, ‘For Rumi’ by Joyce Huntington