We think we know

My wife almost stepped out in front of a speeding car this week.

 
We think we know what will happen, that from day to day we will continue, that those around us will too, that life as we know it will carry on. But we don't know. Accidents, divorces, finding out something that entirely changes your way of thinking of someone you thought you knew--any of these can seem to explode the world we know.

Telling me about this near miss, Kathy said, "The whole day would have looked entirely different." Yes, for so many people. For the driver of the car, for his family, for me, for Mitchell, for her sisters, niece, nephews, my parents, all of their children and their children's children, concentric circles of relationships with people we have never met and will never know. Our lives would have changed forever because of one moment of negligence on the part of a driver, one second of inattention on Kathy's.

We try to make everything that happens fit into a predetermined frame of reference. I think perhaps this is what people are doing when they say that a tragic event is "God's will". There has to be, so the logic goes, a frame of reference in which all of this can be encompassed. What is beyond bearing is bearable if there is a box big enough to hold it in, and that box can be God. (Though if God wills some of what is going on in this world, I frankly want nothing to do with the guy). Life is more like "The Matrix" than we care to admit. Not that literal kind of explanation for what goes on behind the scenes, but something much more mundane. Life is an uncertain and constantly shifting kaleidoscope. Our impression of a solid reality must be vigorously maintained; this requires a great deal of energy, and if we let our concentration on this task waver for even a moment, it can feel like we are insane, that the whole world is falling apart.

One night I was sitting alone in our house and felt what I assumed was someone coming up the back stairs. The house vibrates just a little when someone comes up those stairs, so that's what I thought I was feeling. Then the vibration became a little more intense, and I thought, "Huh, that's a bit much for anyone I know". Then, as it became yet more vigorous, rather than move on to other possibilities, rather than admitting the possibility that it was an earthquake (which it was), I thought, "Man, that must be some enormous guy coming up those steps". It's not that I was in denial or afraid (I rather like earthquakes). It's just that I had a reality I was not going to let go of easily, no matter what the evidence.

Language is part of the problem. It delineates, measures, defines, limits. We think we agree on what it is being said, but even that is an illusion. What you envision when I say "Buddha" is not what I envision, nor what the next ten people you meet would. We project on to that being whatever we need for him to be. Even with a word less fraught, say the word "apple", there is no agreement. There is a story of a young boy in an elementary school class who, when asked what color apples were replied, "white". At which (so the story goes) his teacher scoffed (though one would hope she would be more skillful than to actually do this). But the little boy insisted. When asked to explain, he asked the teacher to cut the apple open. An apple is, after all, far more white than it is anything else, but that is not what most of us see when we speak of one.

So, every word I put down here has a panoply of meanings, some of which are easy to agree upon ("upon" is not very controversial), others of which might cause us no end of problems (what if I were to bring up "faith", for instance?). And each step away from impression to idea to concept to picture to description obscures rather than clarifies what it is we mean.

As a species, we also have a tendency to recognize only what is present. Our ability to project with any accuracy into the future is extremely limited. This is not just denial (though that certainly is part of it); it is a practical way of dealing with the world. We see what is in front of us, for the most part, and that is plenty for us to deal with. Take global climate change, for instance. We know that humans are largely responsible for this phenomenon, at least the preventable part, and we know further that limiting our use of fossil fuels will go some way toward ameliorating the problem. We are also aware that the urgency of the situation is, as one scientist put it, much as if a meteor was hurtling toward the earth on a collision course. Yet in the day-to-day of our lives, we need to drive to the store. We want electricity when we flip the switch. We want the grocery shelves to be stocked with goods that can only get there with the expenditure of enormous amounts of fossil fuel to process and deliver it, to keep it cold or hot or warm. We want to visit our distant families, no matter the cost in airplane fuel. This is not a criticism of us, but a recognition of our limited ability to do something different today that will have an effect in decades or centuries. We are mammals in survival mode and, to our reptilian brains, tomorrow only matters if we survive today. Thinking into the future, as an integral part of our reality, is not a skill with which we are well-supplied.

Believe it or not, this is all good news.

Noting the intricacies of the web of what truly makes up our lives is the end of suffering. Suffering is trying to close the curtain that shields us from that reality. Not that we can afford to check out of the real world; we do have to shop and drive and cross the street, make love and die and grieve and persist. But there is a substantial difference between living in the world and believing that this is all there is. You have only to begin with yourself. What of you is you? What piece of you makes you who you are? How much could be cut away and have the remainder still contain your essential "youness"? Could a brain, kept alive and thinking in a jar, ever be you? The heart alone? Your finger? Your foot? And even if you could identify what makes you uniquely you, what would happen in the following moment, when that had changed, no matter how minutely? Then who would you be?

What if Kathy had stepped in front of that car?

One of the reasons that films like "The Matrix" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Abre Los Ojos" hold such appeal for us is that we know somewhere deep in our souls that this is the truth of things, that no matter how substantial we believe our day-to-day lives to be, we still from time to time feel as if we are living a fraud, that the other shoe will drop anytime now.

The Buddha holds the other shoe (though many spiritual traditions speak to these truths). And the great news is that all we have to do is stop trying so damn hard to do the impossible.

Delight in the Difficult

While walking home from the grocery store today I dropped a gallon of milk. The plastic split and all of the milk spilled on the sidewalk and into the street. I was grumpy about this as I walked back to the store until, fully formed and without my volition came into my head, "Don't cry over spilt milk," which made me laugh.

This is a minor unpleasantness, of course. It is just milk. I have enough money to buy more. It's a hassle and a waste, but it's no big deal. But we all have experienced much more bitter disappointments, failures, and disasters. The challenge of delighting (a subject I began last week) is much greater with the difficult things we must face than those that are wonderful or neutral. This is where the grist for the mill of mindfulness resides.

It is easy to say that one should merely accept all things as being as they are. While this is true as far as it goes, the problem is that some things really do feel very odious. Pain is by definition unpleasant. The death of a loved one feels as if it will rip us apart. Loss of our dreams, hopes, aspirations or good fortune digs a deep pit of despair. To say we should accept these things with equanimity seems more than just a bit facile, the breezy recommendation of one who has never experienced them. (I wrote a post a few months ago about The Happy Bird, who asked that everyone "sing a little happy song when every little thing goes wrong". The point of this story is that everyone wants to strangle the little shit).

A good friend of ours has a young friend (only 20 years old) who was in a terrible car accident a few weeks ago and may not have much of a recovery. When my friend went to a coworker and said, "This just isn't good", her friend immediately said, "Oh, we don't know it's not a good thing!" Well...yes, we do.

Acceptance is not denial. Acceptance is the idea that everything is as it is. There is no judgment of good or bad in acceptance. Everything must be as it is because if it could be otherwise, it would be. Wishing it were different cannot make it so. Wishing it were different, inveighing against how bad things are, how those who don't deserve such suffering should not have to go through such things, and how those who are evil sometimes get much more of the good than they should, does not tip the scale one way or the other.

What such thinking does is increase the suffering in the world. The Buddha spoke of two darts; the first dart is the original injury, which he acknowledged is not a pleasant experience. But the second dart is this insistence that the first dart should never have injured us, that it's not fair that we should be hurt by a dart when so many go unhurt, our demand for justice. We read all the time about families who carry bitterness and a desire for revenge for years after a loved one has been hurt. I see them as bristling with darts, weighed down by the poison of them. And only the first of those darts was put there by someone else.

How much more wonderful would it be if we could find it in our hearts to accept what is, not to believe that all things are "as they are meant to be" or "part of God's plan", but merely that they are as they are. We can delight in the difficult because it gives us the opportunity to practice what we know of the Dharma, to look to the Buddha and ask how this can be the road to enlightenment. There is an answer in who he was, in what his teachings are, if we open our hearts to them.

Delight

I think I missed the point of my own post last week. I knew what I wanted to say when I started, but then lost sight of it. It goes something like this:

What we need to work toward is taking delight in the everyday. This is the very nature of nirvana. When we think of the mundane as a drag, as things to be gotten through so the Real Living can begin, we miss out on the treasure hidden within every moment.

There is a story of a man who went all over the world seeking riches, yet when he came home, broken and old, he was told by a deity to dig beneath his house, where he found a box full of the greatest treasure he could imagine. At which (so the story goes) he promptly died. A little heavy-handed, perhaps, this tale, but you get what it's saying. When we ignore the treasure in our midst we live our lives in the grasp of greed, the constant seeking for something other than what we have. The treasure of meditative awareness is contained in every minute detail of our lives; it is always and forever available to us.

Nothing could be more mundane than the breath, yet this is what many of us choose as the focus of our meditation. It is prosaic and boring, ever-present and mostly unvarying (at least we hope so!) Yet think of where we would be without it (well, we wouldn't be without it, of course). Another story: a young Zen monk sitting by the shore of a river with his master was complaining that the breath was boring, that he couldn't imagine spending the rest of his life contemplating something so unbearably common. Without a word, the master grasped the young man and thrust his head under water (in these stories, Zen masters are always incredibly strong), holding him there just long enough to make his point, then asking, "Now, my brother, what do you think of the breath?" Which also reminds me of the comic in which a young monk is sitting next to an old monk and the latter is saying, "What do you mean, 'what next?' This is it."

Which is not to say we should set out to glorify the breath. It truly is simply a part of being, with us from birth to death, constant as a metronome and about as interesting. What we need to do, though, it take this as our cue to elevate everything we experience to the level of valued teacher. Every meal we eat, every heartbeat, every step we take, each tick of a clock, every horn honking in the street; sitting, standing, lying down, toileting, bathing, brushing our teeth, walking down stairs, taking out the garbage—all are grist for the meditative mill, if we allow them to be. I have seen this shift occur in me in the middle of doing something I consider boring or merely necessary—when I wake up to the meditative possibilities, it transforms the event into something holy. Pretty neat trick to play when picking up trash or washing the dishes. Suddenly my every motion becomes a dance, where every step is known, not just taken.

Instead, what we most often do is dismiss these as the bridge between meaningful activities, missing the value of the breath, the treasure under our floor, right under our noses. While we wait for the gift to be delivered, we fail to unwrap the hundreds we already have. But how does one do this? In any moment, we can stop. Unless the house is literally on fire, we can stop, just for the moment it takes to bring awareness into what we are doing. It changes everything.

This is, I think, what I was trying to say about meditation in my last post. When I think of myself as too busy (or too tired, bored, or important; what have you) to sit in meditation, I am exhibiting this very dismissal of the gifts in front of me. It's not that meditation is a brief foray into the spiritual; rather, it is a training ground for all of life, a reminder that the normal, the everyday, is where enlightenment lies. The most significant moment in my meditation is the moment I decide I will sit, for in that moment I have come to a recognition of the value of the practice and have shaken off the imperious voice of my mind telling me I have more important things to do.

This does not mean that all of  life must be mundane in order to find awareness; on the contrary, few things could be more meditative than those that are exciting or daring. The concept of "flow" teaches us that some of the most clearly concentrated moments of our lives are when we are thoroughly engaged with an activity, and nothing demands this of us quite so clearly as the extremes. You had damn well better be thoroughly concentrated when rock climbing or hang-gliding, or you might not survive the experience! But to seek these adrenaline rushes as the be-all of our lives is also to miss the point. All of life has the mundane in it, and all of the mundane has the Buddha in it. It really is no more complicated than that. We would like it to be more complex, because that would make us Important, but, truly, one may find ultimate peace and harmony while dusting the furniture. It's up to us.

Making a list and checking it twice

I got back last Saturday from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I went there to visit my son and his wife over Christmas (she is in graduate school at the U of M). Yes, it was cold, though not nearly as cold as it is there today. And it snowed a bit, but not nearly as much as the Midwest got the past few days. Glad to be back in gray, wet, and (relatively) warm Seattle.

It was fun there, though, and not just for family reasons. I lived in Chicago for seven years and, though the

cold and slush and ice and snow could get old, I didn't stay long enough to become entirely jaded about the whole thing. Growing up in California, weather just wasn't much of a challenge (although I could do without temperatures over 100). Living in a climate that can kill you if underdressed is fascinating to a California boy, at least for a while.

And Ann Arbor is a nice, little college town. I have never really lived in one of those—Evanston (near Chicago) and Seattle, the towns where I went to school, have a great deal going on that is not about their universities. My perception of Ann Arbor is that it more or less revolves around the University of Michigan. It makes for a different feel, but very pleasant. An abundance of book stores, coffee shops, and restaurants. Quite lovely, actually. Of course, we were there when most of the students weren't, so we hardly got a feel for what it is like when all those 42,000 people are around. A truly nice place, though.

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I have been reflecting quite a bit recently on what makes me real. I know that sounds odd, but we all struggle with this fundamental idea, that we are a solid reality living within this body, controlled by this mind, stumbling around doing stuff until we collapse into sleep and then wake to do it over again. The question that arises is, when in all of that Doing are we Being?

I am a list maker. My wife likes to say, "Check! Check! Check!" when she sees me marking things off, I suspect because I take such great pleasure in doing so. Of course, there are many reasons I do this. It is practical, for one thing, for me to know what it is I need to get done. And being organized about it is not a bad thing. But there is an inkling in the process that a part of me doesn't quite believe I exist if I am not Doing Things in the world.

Heather Martin, whom I consider to be my primary teacher (I have no idea what she thinks), likes to quote in her dharma talks from a book of tombstone inscriptions. One of her favorites is, "Got Everything Done. Died Anyway". This could easily be my epitaph if I died today. There is in my obsession with lists and getting things done a sneaking idea that if I keep busy death cannot catch up to me, that as long as I am acting in and on the world that my absence would be inimical to survival of the world.

Now, of course, on a conscious level I am not nearly this egotistical. Nor this obsessed. But when I stop to think about how important all this is to me, I realize that there is an element of the fantastical in my thinking. Even when it does not have to do with death, there is the foolish idea that I could actually someday get enough done that I will have some free time to do what I really want to do. And of course this never happens.

If we live our lives as if at some point in the near future we will finally be able to truly live, that we will at last be able to just sit and study French or write our novel or master our camera or read "War and Peace", we will reach the end having done none of these. It is an act of will to get out from under the internal and external pressure to be a Human Doing instead of a Human Being, to be a walking list of things to do. One reliable indicator for me is the frequency with which I meditate. Now, I'm not necessarily advocating meditation, and for God's sake don't go putting it on your to-do list ("Must learn to meditate!") But for me it is a fairly certain barometer of a loss of perspective. It is somewhat akin to cooking but never eating—I am carrying out the deed but missing the point of the exercise, living a life but not being in it. When I think I am too busy to meditate it's a pretty sure sign that I have climbed back onto the exercise wheel in my cage, the one that goes round and round and winds up nowhere.

I have been given more responsibility at work, so I have a whole new source of anxiety about getting things done. If I am not careful, this could take over my life. I will be working more hours, taking on more projects, supervising people, serving on committees (argh!). I hope that having this forum to write out what is going on will keep my honest about my obsessiveness and the degree to which I am able to keep living a life that is not consumed with getting the next thing done. You will be the first to know.

Evil and it's Opposite

I just finished a wonderful book, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. This is not the place for a book review (the book is excellent, though), but there is one aspect of it that has captivated and held my attention, namely the main character's assertion that there is a flaw in the theory of evolution because it cannot account for altruism in the human (and in some cases non-human) species.

I find this odd. It seems to me clear that we are a cooperative species because we would have died out long ago if we were not, simple as that. I know that many acts of kindness or heroism have nothing to do with the survival of one's offspring, but I don't think evolution needs to be quite so literal. Birds, for instance, evolved wings because it made it more possible for them to survive, but they swoop and soar sometimes simply for the pleasure of it. There is no evolutionary adaptation there; it is more or less a side effect of a desirable trait. Just so, the extremes of altruism may not have anything directly to do with evolution, but the trait itself is highly adaptive. Or, so it seems to me.

Of more interest to me is the nature and persistence of evil. Here we truly do have a human characteristic that would seem to fly in the face of evolutionary theory. While it's true that the mass extermination of others (for instance) would seem to lead to the perpetuation of one's own offspring, such extreme acts go far beyond the level necessary for evolution to take place. Indeed, such extremes (history suggests) will eventually rebound upon the perpetrator and make the survival of his or her offspring less likely.

Caligula

I am thinking of the big evildoers here: Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, Caligula, Torquemada, King Leopold. What could possibly have motivated these men (and it's worth noting that they are all men) to the heights of murder, rape, and torture? To simply call them evil and leave it at that seems disingenuous. These were men like any others; they were not substantially different in form from any of us.

This addresses what I believe Hannah Arendt was getting at when she coined the term "the banality of evil". It is both a disservice to humanity and an untoward exaltation of the evil one to think of Evil as something exceptional or outlandish. This way of thinking can lead to an attitude that can serve to sanitize or even romanticize evil acts. Just think about how we sometimes speak of a man like Rasputin, as someone extraordinary and mystical instead of just one more normal man gone bad.

Closer to home is the thorny situations where neither good nor bad is entirely clear. Take, for instance, the aversion most of us have for lying. We nonetheless engage in this vice on a fairly regular basis—and a good thing, too! Part of the social contract is those lies that make life possible ("Does this dress make me look fat?") On a deeper level, there is the thought experiment dreamed up (I believe) by Kant: a man who believed that lying was always wrong was sheltering his brother from a man who wanted to kill him. The potential killer came to the man's door and asked if his brother was there. What does the man say? It seems clear to me that one must always consider the greater good. To be a moral absolutist is to be a moral idiot.

I ran across two linked philosophical thought experiments the other day that also challenge the way we think about such choices. Here they are:

An out-of-control trolley is careening toward a large crowd of people and will undoubtedly kill dozens of them if it continues on its way. However, you have access to a track switch. If you throw the switch, the trolley will divert to a different track where only a few people stand; they will surely be killed in the collision. You only have time to throw the switch but not enough time to warn anyone. What do you do?

Usually people recognize in this scenario that the greater good takes precedence and, even though your action will lead directly to the death of some people, it will also save many others. But what about this?:

The same scenario as above, but this time there is no switch.You are on an overpass above where the trolley will pass. The only way to stop the trolley from killing all those people is to push the fat man standing next to you onto the tracks below, which will stop the trolley. (And, no, you are not adequately hefty to serve the purpose). You don't have time to warn anyone, including him, and you have the necessary strength to do the deed. Do you do it?

For most of us, this is a much more difficult scenario. Interestingly enough, in the latter scenario, you are responsible for the death of only one person versus "several" in the first one. Yet because you must actually put your hands on someone and directly cause his death, this is much more difficult for most of us to imagine doing. (Another twist on the scenario is that the fat man is responsible for the trolley being out of control—he rigged the controls and you know it. Is it easier to contemplate throwing him in the path of the trolley now? Why?)

I don't pretend to have facile answers to any of these questions, but I find them interesting. I think the only way we can survive is through a bit of moral relativism. Yet when we take this relativism to an extreme it can lead to horrendous injustice and indifference.

Which brings us back to altruism. It is essential that we feel compassion and openheartedness toward all of those beings in our world in order for us to survive. With all that is going on around us, this can be extraordinarily difficult. How can I hold in my heart every last refugee and starving person, every whale and polar bear, and still lead a life joyful enough to be worth living? The Buddha would say that our hearts have an infinite capacity to consider and address the problems of the world, but it doesn't always feel that way, does it?

I wish you all wonderful holidays. I will write here again after the New Year. Watch out for those trolleys.

Observations II

As I did last year, I come to you, hat in hand, with observations gleaned from the world and the scary place inside my head that wonders about such things, things that in the past 12 months have made me go, "Huh!" Enjoy! (Or not, as you choose).

*I am utterly confused by people taking airlines up on the offer to board early if they are not using the

overhead bins. As far as I can tell, the passenger's thinking is this: "Yes, please, I would like to sit in a tight, confined space the size and shape of a coffin for an extra 15 minutes for no reason whatsoever". Good thinking, folks.

* Why does every credit card scanner have to have different rules? Sometime I swipe the card, sometimes the clerk does. Sometimes I sign on the screen, sometimes I sign a piece of paper; yesterday I signed on a tablet with my finger (!). Sometimes I must sign for over 25 dollars, sometimes over 50, sometimes no matter what. Can't they all just agree on one system?

* Who exactly buys all those records Bjork sells?

* How do public radio pledge drives work? I know that as soon as I hear the pitch I switch to another station or put on a CD or something. The way I figure, there are three kinds of people who listen to public radio: those (like me) who already support it, who are annoyed that they have to hear the sales talk anyway; those who have no intention of supporting it and are annoyed by the intrusion; and those who are wavering. Does this third group really tip over into the support category because they are hectored and badgered? Do they sit there and listen to the importuning until they enter one of the two other categories? That's a fairly sad statement on the human condition, if you ask me.

* My phone has a program that syncs my iTunes with the phone's mp3 player. In order to do this, it reaches out through the Wi-Fi and opens iTunes on my computer. I think this is way cool and a little creepy.

* Traffic lights are primarily a technological expression of our sense of fairness. If you don't think so, just

watch and see how quickly we ignore them if they are unfair (too long, in an absurd place, etc).

* Has anyone else noticed how common it is these days for cars (and trucks and buses) to have one headlight out? It seems to happen all the time. Weird. (I assume this is not a Wallflowers homage).

* Didn't there used to be a courtesy understanding about how early in the morning it was OK to start doing noisy stuff? My brother's neighbor mows his lawn as early as 6:45 on Saturdays or has loud conversations in his driveway at about the same time of day. I have noticed construction going on as early as 6:00 on weekdays in residential areas. We shouldn't need laws to tell us that's just too damn early to be doing these things. I mean, jeez....

* I like to think that I can get inside of people's heads enough to understand even the strangest behavior and the motivation behind it, but I admit to being entirely flurmuzzled by people who let their dogs poop just anywhere and don't clean it up. I can't even imagine being that person. I'm not saying I disapprove (though I do), just that being them would be about as weird as being a Sontaran. Unfathomable.

* I have had three or four encounters with people in parking lots, on ferries, and places like that where cars are parked close together, who get all bent out of shape when my car door touches theirs. I am talking about the lightest touch, just enough for me to get out of my car. C'mon folks, get a grip. These are cars, they encounter one another. I am being careful, I promise, but the surface of your car is not a sacred space.

* Rather than taking umbrage all the time, I'd really like to give it now and then (I know, I know, I do, don't I?). Speaking of which, why do we always go back and forth? I would like the option to go forth and back sometimes (which really makes more sense, anyway, since I must go forth in order to come back). I would prefer, now and then (then and now?) to go fro and to. And is something any less clean because it is span and spic? Just wondering.

* I have an earring that is the symbol for "Om". If I wear it upside down is it the symbol for "Wo"?

* Why are all drinking fountains everywhere adjusted so only the merest trickle escapes? Is this a prostate issue? If drinking fountains have prostates, we are all in much more trouble than we ever knew (and I am certainly going to stop using them!).

* Why do shoe manufacturers ship shoes out laced in such strange ways? And who comes up with these bizarre lacing patterns, anyway? Are there professional lacers? Are they tatty dressers? (OK, I admit it, that's an obscure joke).

* Pedestrians: please don't push the crosswalk button if you intend to jaywalk. Here I sit waiting for the light to change, and you are already a half mile on your way.

* Why can businesses sign you up instantly for their stupid email "alerts" but it can take up to 10 business days to unsubscribe?

* Why can't we just eliminate the numbers 0 & 1 and the letters O and I from all serial numbers, confirmation codes, coupon verifications and such, so there's no possibility of confusing them? There would still be plenty of number and letter combinations left. We could think of it as a digital homage.

* What exactly am I supposed to say when you knock on a locked bathroom door? Isn't that fact that it's locked information enough?

* Isn't it odd that the word "cervical" refers to two such divergent anatomical structures? I can't imagine two body parts with less in common (well, yes, I can, but let's not go there).

OK, that's it for another year. Admittedly not particularly profound, but a little peek inside my mind. Sorry if you are frightened by the glimpse. We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming....

My input was not sought

Last Sunday I went to the memorial service for my good friend Debbi. I have written several times here about her and her progression toward death.

Toward the end of the day, after all the songs had been sung and poems recited, the memories relived and rehashed, I was standing at a large, beautiful collage of photos, all of Debbi at various stages of her life, lovingly put together by her husband, Sam. The whole trajectory of her life, from beginning to end, laid out in such an orderly way. I turned to my daughter-in-law and said, "death is chaos".

Death is Chaos.

It's the best I can do. I wish I could be of more comfort, but as far as I can tell, this is the truth of it. Because death (or, more accurately, grief) is felt in the heart and not the head, I cannot think my way through this thing. Intellectually, death makes a lot of sense. We all know it's coming, and thank goodness for that. Life would have little meaning if there weren't a period at the end of this particular sentence (living a semicolonic life would be misery, I think). In Debbi's case, it was particularly clear that death was a desirable ending to her last chapter. She had been suffering, in one way or another, for over a decade, and the last year or so she was almost entirely immobile. If you knew her, you know that was a form of hell for her. So—good on her for dying, we all say.

But....

But grief is experienced by the heart, and the heart knows no such thing. The heart still expects to be able to pick up the thread of a conversation, finish that letter, make the visit not made. The heart knows only infinity; it doesn't consider the possibility of endings. It's not that the heart shies away from them, mind you, just that it never occurs to it. To the heart, death is as if one had awakened with legs where arms used to be and vice versa. No matter how much everyone told you that this was a normal state of being and to be expected, still, it would come as something of a shock. One might even be rather skeptical of the reassurance. It would feel like chaos. Such is the heart's incredulity.

I suspect this was, at least in part, what T.S. Eliot was speaking of when he wrote:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
(From "The Four Quartets")

And it turns out, at least in my experience of it, that once activated, grief is indiscriminate. It becomes greif for every damn thing, every relationship I neglected, every opportunity that passed me by, every experience that never came my way. In the final analysis, we struggle to make sense of the finality of things not only because it makes us sad but because our hearts cannot fathom the utter completeness of loss. There is no going back there, to that person, to those moments.

John Updike:

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.
("Pefection Wasted")

But I think the poem that most captures how the heart speaking to the mind feels is "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lillies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains;—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Good-bye, dear Deb. I love you and am glad you are at peace.

But my heart does not approve.