zenjones

One of our members has only a few days to live. She’s had cancer for a while; hasn’t attended our group in a long time. In fact, she’d pretty much stopped attending by the time I started with this group 5 years ago.

What I know about her: she is a poet, she practices. The couple times she attended our group since I began, her comments were insightful, and mostly over my head. I have heard that she has been fully aware and experiencing her own decline, and talking about it with her loved ones.

I mostly think about her daughters, who are about the age I was when my mother died. That event was the most painful and saddest in my life. Even now, 22 years later, I feel my heart grow large in my chest and tears back up behind my eyes at the mere thought of her.

But her death also resulted in some of the most profound learning in my life. I was—and had been for a long time—a cynical hard-partying person. I ran with a self-destructive crowd, many of whom are dead or lost to drug addictions. Soon after the death of my mother, my own behavior became exponentially more risky, more thoughtless, and more out-of-control. More drugs, crime, dangerous sexual behavior, manipulating people, lying to myself, being with violent people, car accidents. When I told my friends that I couldn’t seem to stop my life from spiraling down, they couldn’t figure out what I was talking about.

Luckily, a new friend convinced me to see a therapist and I began to experience my life. I recognized the pain and trauma that brought me to my original cynicism, I experienced the sorrow—and the joy—of mourning, of crying, of letting go of the tight hold I had over my emotions. And I discovered myself—a person who’d always been there, just walled behind defenses. I realized I loved school, and went back for a degree. I found wonderful work with funny, interesting people. I found my husband, one of the greatest gifts of my life. And I came to zen practice.

So I am sad for those young women, her daughters. And maybe they already know themselves, maybe they don’t need the kind of transformation I did. Maybe they will mourn and move on. But I know that from death and pain can come life and joy, and so I am not too sad.