Opening the Heart
Whenever somebody dies, others are left with the loss and the grief.
Parami wonders what Buddhism and Buddhists can offer.
The first member of the Western Buddhist Order to die was Vangisa. That was in early 1981. At his funeral I was surprised to hear several Order members confessing that Vangisa's was the first funeral they had ever attended and that this was the first time they had ever seen a dead body or suffered a bereavement — My own experience was very different. Growing up in an Irish-Catholic working-class family, in a district of Glasgow populated mainly by families from the same background, I had attended funerals from a very early age.
Death was something which happened quite often in our community and was collectively witnessed by all the members of the community-as were births, marriages, and the other rituals which marked significant events in our lives. A death would be honoured by the neighbours visiting to say the Rosary (a cycle of prayers) and pray for the soul of the dead and for the lives of those who were left behind. The children would come along too. The first dead body I remember seeing and touching was that of our local parish priest when I was about three. My family, like the rest of the parish, went along to the church where his body was laid out in state and filed round the open coffin to pay our last respects. I was held up to look.
Between that time and the time of Vangisa’s death I must have attended over twenty funerals, including those of my parents, all the close members of my family, and a number of very good friends. On talking about this I realized that for many people in the modern West death is an unfamiliar and taboo subject, too morbid to be discussed. Of course death can be seen all the time at the cinema and on television, but the treatment there usually skims the surface, both overstating it (one person is killed every four minutes on television) and depriving it of any honest emotional weight.
In recent years many Order members, Mitras, and Friends have suffered bereavements. The Parinirvana Day festival — the anniversary of the Buddha’s own death, and a time when we think particularly of friends and relatives whom we have lost — has taken on more significance as death becomes a factor in more people’s lives. These days we talk about death and bereavement more often, discussing our need for adequate rituals to help with the grieving process, and learning how to support those who are coming to terms with the death of a loved one.
In 1986 I was deeply shocked to hear of the death of an old friend from AIDS. Although I had not seen him for many years, I often thought of him, and had assumed that I would see him again. He had been great fun and always in the absolute bloom of health. He had come down with pneumonia and died within a few days — before I had even heard that he was ill. This was the firstAIDS death involving someone I knew personally, and I started to read as much as I could about AIDS. After a while I decided I would like somehow to get involved, and became a volunteer at the Terence Higgins Trust, a charity which offers information, advice, and help on AIDS, ARC, and HIV.
Through volunteering there I came to know a great many people who were coming to terms with life-threatening illnesses. Often I was inspired by the courage and directness with which they faced up to this process, and indeed by the humour and lightness that many of them brought to the task. I was also often in pain. Sometimes it seemed too cruel; I wanted to run away, stop answering the telephone, stop looking into the eyes of young men who had just been diagnosed HIV positive and were still reeling from the shock. They had come to the Trust to find a safe place where they could talk and become less numb — and so start to feel the fear and anger. I knew, however, that if I ran I would really be running from my own pain, my own fears, my own sense of bewilderment and loss. And I knew that I could not keep running.
In 1988, Henry, a college friend, told me that he too had ‘full blown’ AIDS, as did his lover Derek. Over the next year, until Henry’s death in September 1989 and Derek’s that November, I spent a lot of time with them both, something for which I am very grateful. My friendship with Henry, which had been good, went even deeper and had a profound effect on my life. As he came to terms with his own death, he helped me come to terms with all the loss in my past, and in a small way to face the fact that I too will die — something which I had been managing to ignore, even with all those bereavements in my early life. I suppose I had not been able or ready to face impermanence then. I was too young and there were just too many deaths; there never seemed to be enough time to recover from one death before another occurred. The accumulated effect had been one of numbness, a freezing of the heart. Through years of meditating, opening my heart in the metta bhavana practice and in my visualization practice, the ice had started to groan and shudder. It was when I sat with Henry in his room in the London Hospital, and with him and Derek in their room at the Lighthouse day after day last summer and autumn, that the thaw really began.
Through people I met thanks to Henry and Derek I began to facilitate a meditation class at the London Lighthouse (a centre which runs support groups and classes for people facing the challenge of AIDS) and to conduct an occasional relaxation session with someone in the residential unit there. It is worth emphasizing that many of the people with whom I meditate are not dying — no more nor less than the rest of us. They have been diagnosed as ‘HIV antibody positive’ but are well, or they may have have Kaposi’s Sarcoma or some opportunistic infection; but they do have life, and they are very concerned with the quality of that life. The difference is that they are also aware of death and impermanence in a way that most of us are just not privileged to be; and this colours how they live their life. It also colours how I live mine. It helps me put into practice the teaching I have long own as a Buddhist: All conditioned things are impermanent. With Mindfulness strive.
In the last year I have also spent time sitting at the beds of people who were dying. Sometimes I would talk them through a relaxation or meditation exercise to try and help alleviate the pain, or to help them focus their minds and find some calm. That is very difficult to do when someone’s pain is severe, and I soon learned that I could not enter the room with an agenda of helping — in the sense of being able to make things better or having some magic formula to give. All I could really do was open my heart and listen, be as authentic as possible, and stay as in touch with myself as I could. If I was not, there would be a barrier between myself and the person I was with. If I could remain open and allow whatever happened to happen, our hearts would seem to touch, and a wonderful atmosphere of peace and acceptance could grow.
If I am ever asked how my Buddhism helps me in this situation I find it difficult to answer. It is very much a two-way process. My practice as a Buddhist and my understanding of the Dharma gives me a framework to work within, and helps me find ways to open my heart. But that is not the whole story. I have met many Buddhists who find death hard to look at and who become awkward and fearful when faced with bereavement, and I have met many non-Buddhists with open hearts and a wonderful capacity to be with someone when they really need them. I know that all I can offer is myself — but that ‘self’ has been formed by thirteen years of meditation practice and Dharma study. I also know that my contact with the dying, and my contact with those who are very much alive but consciously and courageously facing life-threatening illnesses, is part of the formation of my self, and has a profound and positive effect on my meditation practice and my understanding of the Dharma. I would not wish it otherwise.
Reprinted from Golden Drum 18.