One Woman’s Account of Her Time to Die
There are regrets—they’ve camped outside the door of my mind and are peacefully protesting my ignorance of them. They aren’t making too much noise: they seem to have some respect, at least, for the dying … good for them. Shall I let them in? Maybe I’ll end up regretting addressing my regrets—where does it end? Then again, perhaps that’s meant to be a private meeting, that one. Not fit for public consumption. Some things should remain sacred, after all.
Sacred. There’s a word that comes up often when you’re facing death. What is sacred? In a profane world, who is to be the judge of that? And “spiritual,” a word that’s practically lost all meaning. I had one friend who used to describe people she met as “really spiritual.” I never asked her what she meant—I knew she’d disappoint me. Spiritual and sacred have become two very important words to me. My guru once said, “Daily ritual is the art of making life sacred.” That’s beautiful, isn’t it? Those things we devote ourselves to daily; our spiritual practices; things that elevate our consciousness, awaken the soul. And by that I don’t mean rich chocolate cake and warm movies that make you cry. I mean real spirituality. Getting in contact with the spiritual nature, spiritual energy.
Discovering the self—self realization. That’s something else altogether. That’s the source of all things sacred. And those two things—the spiritual and the sacred—are all that are left to me. I wish I’d paid them more attention when I had a whole life to live, because at this stage, all I’ve really got to work with is who I am right now. I’m hoping it’s enough.
There’s a mad woman near where I live. (Actually, there are probably a whole lot of them now that I think of it, but I’ll try not to get sidetracked.) This one in particular, she’s Indian of course, because I live in India. But she covers her face with layers and layers of white face powder. The result isn’t that she looks whiter, but rather like a very strange shade of grayish-brown sludge. Almost a dead body pallor—quite bizarre. I see her every night from my roof, just around sunset. She wanders through the park next to my house on her way to the temple. She makes me smile, this woman. She also makes me think a lot of things. Like, at the end of it all, when we’re facing death—and I would say this applies whether we’re ready for it or not—it doesn’t matter how we see ourselves; or how we want to see ourselves. All that matters is what we are.
The problem is there’s no school or college or university that actually teaches us who we are, what we are. I mean, think about it … all that study, all those years, all those supposedly intelligent people leaving the hallowed halls of education in droves to make their mark on the world—none of them even know who they are. So what if they “achieve” something in this short and mostly bleak life? What does it mean at the end? In the same way that white face powder is not going to make that woman white, no amount of education or success in this world is going to give any information on who we really are. And we all have our own form of “white face powder”; we are all guilty of trying to gloss over the reality, to make it something it’s not, make ourselves something we’re not. For some it’s alcohol, for others drugs, for others it’s hard work, even. Success. That’s a difficult one to detect: that success can be considered a disqualification to understanding the self. The Trojan horse of spiritual realization.
So then: who am I? Of all the different memories of my life, all the different ages I’ve been, which is the “real” one? Which is the one that forms the root, the basis, the core of who I am? Maybe all of them. They all have one common factor, after all. Me. My presence. So sometimes I remember a three year old, sometimes I remember a twelve-year-old, sometimes a twenty-eight year old. But “I” am the common denominator in all of it. The real me is within those memories: the one within all of them who remembers always, everything. The soul.
