passing

A friend of ours, a devoted Buddhist, passed away a couple months ago, just a few days after his 65th birthday. Moments after he rolled out his car onto the road at the end of a workday, he lost consciousness and the car glided to a slow stop with the help of some bystanders. He passed with a calm, peaceful smile on his face, they said.

Nothing is more certain than the fact that we are all going to die one day. Yet rarely do we think about such gloomy endings, which is a good thing–imagine what a chaotic world it would be if everyone worried about their coming demise everyday. The (illusionary) permanency of the world is achieved because people are set out to live as if they were not going to die tomorrow, until one day when it comes without them knowing.  

And when that day comes, not to us but to someone else we know, we are shocked and saddened by the precariousness of life and the loss of a precious relationship. Then after some mourning, we pick ourselves up and resume our "not for me today" living as if nothing had happened.

Immediate demise we don't expect, gradual aging we do experience. Our hair turns gray, joints get stiff, memory fades–our body cells die and regenerate with increasing chances of mutations and defects every day... Most of us do not "rage against the dying of the light," but "go gentle into that good night"–that peaceful sounding ending is yet another good thing for the world and the people, I suppose.

We like to say when losing our loved ones that we'll remember them forever, but the cruel truth is that we forget, sooner or later, our emotional attachment to them, the same way our pain and sorrow is taken away from our memories as time goes by.  

And even if I met them in heaven before I forgot them, what would I say to them? Telling my parents that I have walked through the path of life as they did and feeling more like a peer to them... "Catching up" with my best friends with things I wanted to share but didn't have chances to... Then what? With earthly relationships and common experiences existing no more, how (spiritual) lives move on in eternity remains a mystery to me.

Perhaps the worst emotional damage we experience after learning of a loved one's passing is the void we feel inside, like a part of our life that's been taken away, forever lost with the departure of their life from earth. But maybe we are misdirected, because "what we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us," to quote from Helen Keller. Our loved ones do stay with/in us forever, after all.

And instead of "living like you are going to die tomorrow," that supposedly positive-living encouraging, but contrived, false-alarm sounding motto I dislike, I wish you all a good night's sleep, and waking up treating "tomorrow as the first day of the rest of your life!"

Happy Lunar New Year