Afterlives

how do you hold space for the in-between?

I don’t know if I witnessed a death the other day. I can’t find any mention of it online. In retrospect, the scene has a surreal quality. A damp road, flashing lights.

Driving back onto the Bread Loaf campus during the last day of the environmental conference I direct, an ambulance pulled in front of my car. I followed it up the winding road, a road flecked by old homes, a roaring creek, big trees, and visible damage from Hurricane Irene. The ambulance stopped just before the Bread Loaf campus. 

A woman’s body lay motionless on the road a few yards in front of my car, two abandoned ATVs by the roadside. I watched her body for ten minutes from behind my steering wheel; I never saw her move. 

*

Astral images from Italian watercolorist Raffaele Mainella, who was instructed to ‘reawaken “the dormant memory in [the reader’s] soul that is asking only to rediscover its intensity.”

A few months ago, I read Pema Chodron’s How We Live is How We Die. Chodron writes about how to manage yourself during a tense, in-between moment:

In all the bardos of life and death, a key instruction is ‘Don’t struggle.’ Whatever is happening, stay there — right with what you’re feeling. Slow down and pay attention. Develop the capacity to stay in those uncomfortable, edgy places of uncertainty, vulnerability, and insecurity. Develop the capacity to flow with the continual change from bardo to bardo, from gap to gap.

The bardo is defined as “the intermediate or astral state of the soul after death and before rebirth.” It is the in-between. Stopped behind the ambulance the other day, I wondered - but wasn’t sure - if I was witnessing a body in this state, the in-betweenness of being. 

I thought about numbing myself with my phone but that felt wrong. Watching felt impolite and invasive. I found myself in one of those human moments where I wondered: how to be? 

Do you have experience in “intermediate states?” Or sitting with others in intermediate states?

Years ago I read a book by Frank Ostaseski, a Zen Hospice practitioner who worked with AIDS patients. He spent a great deal of time with people who were approaching the bardo, living on the borderline. He wrote: 

Dying is inevitable and intimate. I have seen ordinary people at the end of their lives develop profound insights and engage in a powerful process of transformation that helped them to emerge as someone larger, more expansive, and much more real than the small, separate selves they had previously taken themselves to be.

Dying is intimate. And though I don’t know this woman’s fate - I did notice that someone was sitting with her when the ambulance came, and two other people quickly kneeled next to her body. 

But the dissolution of small and separate selves in the presence of death feels real, too.

I think I’ll forever be working on how to sit with discomfort responsibly and gracefully. (This week’s repulsive political climate. Desire. Greed. Interpersonal awkwardness. Overcommitment. Environmental crisis. Witnessing sorrow. Missing people I love. etc. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve reached some sort of saturation point - social media feels nauseating, the tenor of the news feels toxic, and I find myself renegotiating my relationship with media. You? What can we opt out of, and what must we sit with?)

The day before seeing the injured woman on the road, I’d given a lecture on writing the sacred, anchoring the talk with Annie Dillard’s book Holy the Firm. In HTF, Dillard is attempting to reconcile her spiritual beliefs with the random violence of the world, something I feel myself doing often. Mine is less a spiritual accountability and more a questioning of our accountability to one another, to the self, to the land and species in our care. 

Milton Avery, Sketchers on a Rock

Dillard writes: “You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.” I’m excellent at wrecking my heart in my own secular form of prayer, my over-investments, my ruminations. When I think of Dillard’s evocation of singing, I think of pleasure, and these lines from “The Danger of Wisdom” by Jack Gilbert, sent to me by a friend a decade ago: 

We learn to live without passion.

To be reasonable. We go hungry

amid the giant granaries

this world is. 

It’s a balance, isn’t it? Pinging between witnessing the world’s cruelty, and our desire to enjoy our lives. These last weeks felt like such a deep political cringe, such a bellwether of what lies ahead, a warning about the dangers of our ambivalence. We know there is so much to fight for, save, guide, protect. Yet I sense we are tired of the relentless pace and pressure of constant crisis, the dawning and redawning of awareness.

When George Saunders wrote Lincoln in the Bardo - a story based on Lincoln grieving his dead son - he wrote of a moment of reckoning: “Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.”

In my own serious car accident a few years ago, I remember the blinding joy of hearing my oldest daughter sing again as I lay on the couch with ice packs on my chest. This week she was working on “Dreamer” by Laufey - and I had that same sense of crushing wonder, and cried in the kitchen as I was making dinner, just because it was beautiful. Seeing and appreciating my daughters is my primary way of calling myself back to the beauty of the present. 

Last week I turned in a draft of my book. I drove through a tornado.  I put nasturtium blossoms on toast. I made a roaring fire at my cottage and had a good long talk with a friend as the loons called from the nearby lake. 

x

M

PS - Someone sent me a Nora Roberts romance novel in the mail this week with no card. Anyone want to claim it?

PSS - I’ll be sending a new workbook on Writing the Sacred to my paid subscribers on August 1. Thanks for following and supporting my work.