This period has for me been one of feeling off the hook, since Yashobodhi has been writing a new blog journal that is not only excellent in literary quality but which often refers to me, and I assume you are all reading her here.
For me, there honestly hasn’t been much to say. Which is to say, I’m afraid, that not much has been going on. Each day has been a bit like the last… a bit too much like the last, indeed. So I’ve had to make a change, and carve out a bit more solitude. I need to catch up with myself a bit.
My day to day experience is dramatically improved and stabilised compared to how it was when I was diagnosed in April. I’m currently functioning fairly normally. But underlying that, the gradual decline that’s been going on is becoming obvious. My walking and balance is less good, and I lose weight most days. I am sleeping more in the daytime, and have less energy – I am surprised how many activities feel like an effort. Maybe there is more I could do to address this decline – more yoga, more on the exercise bike, more walks outside – but the cancer is what is making the substantial difference. Though those things could extend my lifespan a little, the general trend is, I fear, going to be to less and less of less and less.
Not that I actually do fear it. To me it is all something of an adventure even though you couldn’t call it exciting. it is OK for me to die, since I’m not the one losing anything. I appreciate that it is far harder for those around who love me and who will experience the loss of whatever that is.
I am realising that everyday experiences can hold a lot of significance. For some time, I have noticed that when I come out of a daytime nap, it takes a long time to wake, and I often become highly sensitive and reactive. It’s maybe similar first thing in the morning, when most people give one another some space to wake up, but when you wake at 3pm, you wake alone, because everyone else has been awake since morning. I dread the kinds of miscommunication that can arise when I’m not tuned in as well as usual. I dread being misunderstood in general, and the older one gets the more that happens to people. I try to let it go because it’s no one’s fault and I used to do it as well. I can remember having a kind of awe of the elderly, an awe that was part fear, part ignorance, part a loss of autonomy because of the fear and ignorance. It stymies communication and can even cause people to dread contact. I remember the long silences at dinner when Sangharakshita ate with us. Maybe this is what surrounds the aged candidates for the current US election, wherein despite the unbelievable lunacy of the contest, no one in either camp feels they can say anything about either candidate’s suitability for office, even when the whole world is likely to suffer for their respect.
The weakening of my faculties may mean that I’m becoming less suitable for the office of living Kamalashila’s life. I realise that staying awake is one of several phases in that: waking, sleeping, dreaming and dying, plus meditation and rebirth, are the main phases of awareness listed in the Bardo Thodol or Book of the Dead. Prior to waking at 3pm, while asleep, the seeds deeply planted in the mind are stirred and may surface from the deep past, and maybe that happens more vividly as we approach death. Then on awakening from that sleep and dream, and entering the bardo of ordinary waking life, it may have been a long journey from those depths into the usual daily trivia. Perhaps there’s an unwelcome harshness, a sense of being blinded by the light of ordinariness. And then, an unforgivable grumpiness, perhaps!
In life we all interpret again and again our surroundings and sense inputs as ‘me’ and establish a normality that is, in a dull way, comforting. If we do not do this, there is less to hold the illusion together, our interpretations can then shift and change, and the former feeling of stability may be disconcertingly upset. As one whose life is at its end, I notice how I can no longer normalise my experience the way I used to, and then there is, right there, a shift, a small sinkhole that appears below the pavement that supports me. I also notice how I am drawn into human stories, gawping at videos and tales in books, relating with huge empathy to everyone in every story. I can go right there, immediately. And that is the easy path of rebirth. The sinkhole was the moment of death. The whole thing was like a dream.