Warm River, Vast Ocean

"He who doesn't fear death dies only once." Giovanni Falcone

Maybe you’ve had an experience equally as frightening. Yesterday I was locking my bike at Wild Oats when I looked outside of the store and saw a young girl, mid 20’s, dragging her sister, late teens, away from the table. Initially, I couldn’t tell if they were messing around. But then, I realized the younger sister had passed out and the older sister, increasingly frantic, was unsure what to do. Several people including myself were on their cell phones screaming at the 911 operator to send help FAST! A crowd soon gathered round, each person reacting differently. One man was very helpful trying to get blankets. Another man ran from across the street and was hovering over the ailing girl trying to assess the situation. A women was crying and not sure what to do.

But everyone was thinking the same thing. “Was she dying? Were we sitting here watching the soul of this poor, young girl slip away?”

I had a similar experience recently with my Grandma who turns 90 next week. She got laryngitis and was struggling to recover. Clearly, the immune system is depleted in an elderly person. And I remember sitting there looking at my exhausted grandma thinking to myself, “Well this could be the very last time I see her.” It really looked like her soul was also slipping out the back door.

Death is weird. I don’t know how else to say it. To be in a moment where you are actually observing a potential “passing” is a vacant, ghostly, and morbidly fascinating thing. But most importantly, it’s scary. The sister of the girl who’d fainted was gripped with fright. As was my Grandma, understandably scared that her heart was struggling to beat and her breath was getting shorter by the minute as she lay there, surrounded by her 3 daughters, two of which had just arrived on emergency flights from the east coast.

Death is weird. You’d think by now, with all of our science and technology, that we would know what happens when to a soul when its body expires. You’d think by now we would have discovered some part of the brain that continues to function even after the heart stops...thus suggesting life after death. You’d think by now we’d know something, some hint, some clue, some proof.

Death is weird. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to face the emptiness with courage rather than with fear. If I was taking my last breath, I think I’d be horrified. But the yogis believe that with daily practice of transcending thought into the calm and empty space, one senses the peace beyond. With daily practice, it’s not so scary when one must dive in fully at the time of death, rather than dipping their pinky toe in a pleasant Savasana. The Bhagavad Gita states, “Who leaves the body remembering Me, he achieves the highest goal.” That is why Gandhi, when he was shot, had the peace of mind and wherewithal to utter “Rama, Rama” at the very moment before he passed.

It’s not really a fun topic, I realize that. But it’s an important one. Surely the ailing girl in front of Wild Oats and my grandma would agree. Both survived their moment hanging over "the edge."

My bearing witness to these close calls has sparked in my mind an enduring question: Must the edge be the harrowing trim at the tip of a skyscraper where one can only grasp the tips of their fingers before the imminent fall? Or can the edge be a sundrenched cliff from which one dives into a warm river winding its way to a vast ocean...

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