The point, to me, of the poem in my last post is in those two words at the end: “We wonder.” We wondered together. The young man was in a hospice. And, he was dying – of that, there was no doubt. And yet, even then, it is still a matter of not knowing exactly when, and there is always the question of what it will be like. He couldn’t sleep at night for fear of it.
I was merely a few years older than he was – I think I was thirty-nine – but, I knew these questions were mine, too. I was healthy, but I had begun to contemplate the inevitability of death. It wasn’t a matter of only one of us having the illness.
What will it be like? Sometimes I’m plain curious, almost excited, like Mary Oliver says in her poem When Death Comes:
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
Now, twenty-six years later, now that I’m old enough to die naturally, and after my cancer last year, I have been thinking more about this. ‘What will it be like?” The practice of dissolution of the elements is a wonderful one, and I have no doubt at all about its helpfulness – not only because it nurtures a joyous, wakeful life; but because it goes a tiny, tiny bit of the way in responding to the unanswerable.
However, the event will be unique. I sense its inscrutability regularly. “What’s it going to be like?” This question is a wake-up. I was healthy back then, but his question prodded at my sleep, rousing me from the slumber that is there in the trance of youth, in the trance of health, and in the trance of one’s life appearing not to be threatened.
“There are, practitioners, these three kinds of intoxication. What three? Intoxication with youth, intoxication with health, and intoxication with life.” – The Buddha, quoted in the Anguttara Nikaya.
But, here’s the more impelling point: When I realise that death is not readable, I feel the presence of my life in Nowness equally as mysterious – just as immeasurable. No clock-time can be brought to this moment. It’s just as unfindable as death. We are just as unable to ‘measure it out in coffee spoons.’ The breeze in the curtain, the sun-splashed wall, these are not findable, not objects thrown over there.*
This is the true wonder – the real doorway to the infinite. Death will be this moment.
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* My OED tells me that ‘object’ means “lit. thing thrown before or presented to (the mind or thought)”
(The story about my name is a long one, and I’ll come back to that, in a month or so.)