Welcome back! Due to scheduling changes in my life offline, Thursdays are looking like the day for me to get the Moment of Zen up from now on.
Today's moment was a tough one to write, so I would like to look at a pretty flower before delving back in. Here's a cereus blossom, a night blooming flower from a torch cactus.
Some more talk about blooming and withering after the fold.
Background
I've been spending a lot of time over the past couple of weeks thinking about death. The reason I was absent last week was because I was in New Hampshire, participating in a small family memorial for my uncle who passed away late last year from a rare blood disorder. We were spreading his ashes (probably illegally) in his favorite pond, one of the few places that offered tranquility to a man for whom stress came powerfully and naturally, and moments of quiet solitude was a need as great as food.
My thoughts on death wandered further afield when, on the news at the hotel, I learned of the death of Jack Kevorkian, a man whose life work was intimately connected with death, specifically with trying to offer options to allow terminally ill patients to legally end their suffering in a manner other than slowly dying of thirst.
Kevorkian was not the only person working on the end of life issues of the terminally ill, the trail he was walking had already been blazed by a group called the Hemlock Society (now Compassion and Choices). He had a rocky relationship with them that seemed due, primarily, to differences in style, Kevorkian was brash and public, the Hemlock Society more solemn and private. Some claim his motives were not as he presented them, and they might have been right. Regardless, I see him imperfect man, but one who has not only helped dozens of people to end their suffering, but who has also helped millions more to start thinking about what the end of their life means to them, and how they wish to approach it.
According to his friend and health advocate, Mayer Morganroth, Kevorkian died of complications from pneumonia and renal failure, as nurses piped music by his favorite composer, JS Bach, over the speakers by his hospital bed.
Story — My Grandmother's Death
I loved my grandmother very much. Though we lived in different states, my connection to her was arguably my closest connection to anyone in my family. We could share things that nobody else in the family would understand (including a passion for exploring old cemeteries together).
As the 1990's came around, it started to become clear that she was having great difficulty keeping track of her finances, and that she wasn't just "getting old", she was having problems above and beyond the normal course of aging. She had managed to keep the severity of the problems from us (and, perhaps, from herself) for many years by using her strong intelligence to muddle through serious cognitive impairment, inspired by her embarrassment and shame at not being able to do what used to be easy for her.
The doctors diagnosed her with an unspecified dementia, we never bothered to definitively narrow it down beyond that, because it would have been a costly question to answer, and given us nothing but a label. The prognosis for all such dementias is the same, and, at the time, there were no meaningful treatments for any of them.
Given how things progressed from that point, I assumed that she had Multi-Infarct Dementia, a series of tiny strokes in the brain that, in her case, seemed to center on the part of the brain that handled memory of skills, of how to do things. Eventually, all mental functions were affected, but her memory of skills went first and fastest, starting with complex tasks like balancing a checkbook, down through tasks so simple we take them for granted, like walking.
We watched in horror as we started to realize that she could remember a time when she could walk with confidence and share a conversation with her children and grandchildren, that she understood and valued the ability to walk and talk, but no longer could figure out how to make it happen. She was quite horrified by the situation too, one of the few thoughts she could clearly express, though it visibly took all her might to piece these two words together as coherent speech, was "Kill Me". Eventually, she could no longer even say that.
During the last years of her life, she was living with my mother, who worked full time during this period, and there was a home nurse that stayed with my grandmother during the day. One day in 1999, I got a call from my mother, saying she came home and found that the nurse had entered Grandma's room to find her dead in her bed. I commented that she probably had finally forgotten how to breathe. Our thoughts were a complex muddle of sorrow at her passing and relief that her nightmare was over.
What my mother said over the phone might well have been the truth. A little part of me suspects it wasn't, that either my mother, or the home nurse, decided it was long past time, and used a pillow or something else to help her forget how to breathe. If they did, I heartily thank them, it was long past time for her. I do know that my mother has asked me to help her end her life if she finds herself in a similar situation.
Dharma Chat — Buddhism and Suicide
Just a quick disclaimer, a reminder that the below is my understanding of the Buddhist views on suicide (assisted or otherwise), and in this case, this understanding is based largely on my my subjective and biased observation of the actions of devout Buddhists. This is not traditional Dharma being passed down from an enlightened teacher, it's my stab at a closer look at what lies before me. It's my own blind groping of the elephant, and, as such, certainly incomplete and probably wrong in some ways, take it for what it is.
Buddhism teaches that ending a life is something that shouldn't be done, and that includes ending your own or helping someone else ending their own. But...
Buddhism also has a long tradition of honoring devout monks who chose to end their own life. One especially dramatic example, this week also marked the anniversary of the death of Most Venerable Thích Quảng Đức, who died by dousing himself in gasoline and setting him self on fire while sitting in meditation in an intersection in downtown Saigon, surrounded by a ring of monks, some of whom had requested to be sitting where he ultimately sat. If you need more detail, I've already spoken of him here, and I highly recommend teacherken's recent diary on him here.
In many schools of Buddhism, elderly Buddhist devotees (typically venerable monks) will sometimes, knowing their time remaining is short, would put their affairs in order, say some goodbyes, offer parting advice, prepare themselves for a Long sitting meditation, and then gently stop their own heart during the meditation. (Leaving aside for now, as just a tangent with a link, the rare and archaic practice of Sokushinbutsu, where the monk would mummify and lacquer themselves over a five year period in preparation for their final days).
Buddhism also teaches us to be mindful of the body, including being mindful of the apparent life and death of the body. In many places, Buddhists are the ones who handle the rituals and preparation of the dead for the community. Buddhism teaches us not to fear death, nor to recoil from the dead, but instead to learn from the experiences surrounding death, the death of others as well as our body's relentless progression towards death.
I've never heard it expressed as baldly as I'm about to, but as far as I can tell, Buddhism's take on suicide is that it's wrong for someone whose life is still unfolding. However, if we find ourselves at the end of our lives, through age, through illness, through war, then it's not only acceptable, but skillful action, to live our death with purpose, to use our deaths to help end suffering, even if that fudges the precept against ending lives a little bit, even if outside help is needed.
Dharma Chat — Making Every Moment Count
But that moment is not this moment. this moment you're reading my text, and the next moment you're living your life, and many moments after that. Whether we're eighteen or eighty, our lives are indeed still unfolding. Unless something blatant and obvious comes up, we don't know which moment will be our last. Which brings us to another, closely related, Buddhist teaching.
It's important to live your life so that, if this moment is your last one, that's OK, and if it's not your last one, that's OK too.
I intend to live this moment trying to help end suffering, and that includes trying to make sure I have many opportunities in the future to help end suffering. That's my plan for the next moment too, though this one involves more typing, and the next one involves more getting ready for my physical therapy appointment.
How will you spend this moment? How will you spend the next? The kettle is on, and the floor is open to any other questions, concerns, comments; tears and screaming work too, I know I've been experiencing them while writing this diary.