The Wake

The ferry’s wake glimmered as the boat retreated from the silhouetted city awash in dawn’s first light. Reluctantly turning away from the receding light, I walked to the bow of the ship and gazed towards where we were headed. The massive bank of darkening cloud and rain blurred the line between sky and sea as the city disappeared into oblivion. I was dreading this journey. Everything felt hard about it.

It was a journey I knew well, having taken it many, many times. To my family’s island home. Mother and father, sisters and brother all lived there, brought up their children there, and died there. For the past decade this trip had often been precipitated by a call to care for sickness, old age, and dying. This time was no different. Two lines of text.

Our beautiful Kresta Spring passed away at 3pm on Wednesday morning. Can you come?

After three years of the most epic struggle to live, my oldest friend’s daughter and the love of her life died at the age of fifty.

Ever since Losar, hearing Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche’s message, I had been pondering the meanings of being skillful in action. Not long after his message, a friend in an email had asked, “What does being skillful mean?” At the time, I did not answer her. I felt that sometimes her queries in the past were an attempt to satisfy a hunger for debate, and I was suspicious of this seemingly hollow pursuit. However my lack of willingness to respond had chafed. I was annoyed at myself and my inability to respond at the time. In my mind I had answered her question by thinking that what made an action skillful was motivation. But something in this response felt mechanical and tired.

But as life goes, when a question is asked one cannot fully answer, it will be asked again.

Now reluctantly travelling towards the gloomy island and towards Kresta’s grieving mother, the question of how to act skillfully took on another level of urgency. Carmen is not Buddhist, does not have a formal spiritual practice. Having spent a lifetime in her company, watching her as a mother, a caregiver of a dying partner, and someone who had taken on the care of foster children, I was always a little in awe of her spirit and energy. She had faced more than a lifetime’s share of adversity, meeting most of it with humour and love. The last two years of Kresta’s life had been extraordinarily hard. Carmen’s constant care as she watched her most beloved friend and daughter suffer excruciating pain, her willingness to be by her side through it all, was remarkable.

I had last spent a significant amount of time with Kresta when she and Carmen were caring for her stepfather, who was dying at home. After a week’s worth of the night watch, she leaned over and whispered into his ear: “Go, Poppa, go. I will take care of Carmen. You can go.” Now, two years later, Kresta is dead.

After the text message, it had taken two days to pack. And I was bringing my partner with me, who also required my care.

The small island has limited resources, so I had to pack the car full of supplies. I knew Carmen wouldn’t have food. The previous day there had been a wind storm that had knocked out power. And it was cold on the strait, adding to the weight of the journey.

Carmen would not speak to me on the phone during the last six months of the worst time of Kresta’s illness. She said it made her too sad to talk about it. So I was in the dark. Heading towards the question, What does it mean to be skillful in the unknown depths of another’s grief?

Standing on the bow of the ship I thought about the famous story of Kisa Gotami. This mother, wild with grief and clutching her dead child in her arms, begs the Buddha to bring her child back to life. The Buddha instructs her to bring him a white mustard seed from a household that has never known death and he will revive her child. Her frantic search ends with the realization that there is no family that has not known death. Returning to the Buddha, she lays down her dead child and becomes one of his foremost disciples.

Today, I think about the ease with which I heard this story in the past.

Now, on this cold ferry deck, it’s the utter desperation of this mother’s search that strikes at my heart. Holding the dead body of her beloved child. Pounding on a stranger’s door. Scouring the streets to find that one person who has not suffered the loss of death. That one who could give her a precious white mustard seed to bring back to the Buddha, and in the doing bring her most precious child back to life. Through her agony and her willingness to search, to truly look, she finally was able to let go of her child’s body and lay it down. And to fully accept the truth of impermanence.

I think of the skill and generosity of the Buddha. He knew exactly where to meet Kisa Gotami and how to point her towards seeing her own suffering in the light of the suffering of others.

This story was foremost in my mind as we finally made our way onto the small island and up the long curving driveway into the woods towards Carmen’s singular house, which perches on the island’s highest point of land. This now-empty dwelling once housed an enormous family. Photos of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, husbands, friends, and now Kresta line its cedar walls like the etchings in the prehistoric cave of Lascaux.

Carmen was already texting, Where are you???

She was, in her words, jonesing for a cigarette. Which I had anticipated and had stopped at the island store to buy. We were barely out of the car when she rained on us. Crying one minute and laughing the next. All my preplanned ideas of how to disembark, unpack, settle my partner, and feed Carmen were out the door. We walked to her porch with its view of the vale of rain on the distant mountains and simply sat with her through the rest of the long day. Tracing into the night the shadows of what had been Kresta’s last days.

We watched Carmen walk herself into a state of grace.

She had to tell us everything of the last six months to get there. The trips back and forth to emergency. Kresta’s incredible physical suffering. Her guaranteeing Kresta’s last wish to stay at home to finally die. Staying for the last watch over the life and death of her most beloved child.

In that long day on the porch and in the days that followed, I didn’t have time to reflect on what was skillful action. I couldn’t plan how to be in the face of this grief, and I didn’t know how to ease it. But what I came to understand was that being skillful doesn’t belong solely to the vigilant or solely to the mindfulness of motivation. Sometimes, it’s just being present.

I overheard Carmen on the phone with Kresta’s husband, telling him how good it was having us there. To be able to talk.

At the memorial a few days later, I could see how hard she was working. In the jostling living room full of people, I walked past her and said, “I feel sorry for you.” Laughing, she replied, “I feel sorry for me too.”

One after another, people wanted to share their own grief with her. As if grief belonged to them. And how much energy it took on Carmen’s part to comfort them.

During my time with Carmen I came to understand that to act skillfully is to drop the idea of skillful action as a set of preordained behaviours. I let go of thoughts of how to be useful, or help, or prevent suffering. In their stead, I tried to be just present. Present in the face of her testimony of great loss and great love. Trying as best as I could in the midst of it all to offer food for the hungry or water for the thirsty.

For three days before the memorial, we sat on her porch. The first day, she smoked cigarettes and drank tequila. The second day, she just drank tequila, and on the third she stopped, knowing what was going to be required of her on the day of the memorial. That whole time we looked out at the waters of the strait below. She cried and she laughed. It was as if we were celebrating some remarkable achievement. The absolute fullness of her care. The mastery of her craft. The alchemy of turning pain into love.

The eagles soared every day in the afternoon as if suspended in some great mystery. Rising effortlessly. Aloft in increasing spirals of flight above us for as far we could see. Once, there were seven of them floating above us in the clouded, muted sky. It was reassuring to see them in the knowledge of all that had happened. Tracing their elegance in flight, and their grace in leaving no mark behind.

I recollected Rinpoche’s teaching on the beauty of impermanence.

But did not say a thing.

And felt with Carmen all the sorrow.

And the relief of knowing this too will pass.