THE LAST STRAW

I recently paid a cross country visit to my 87-year-old aunt and was not prepared to be greeted with a plate of spaghetti and a side of, “I’m going to die,” spit at me as though she’d just figured out it was Colonel Mustard in the library with a rope. Weary me was so taken aback by this revelation, I could only murmur, “Yes, well me too,” and scoop up some spaghetti. 

I had arrived expecting to hear her new daily complaint that old age sucks; she wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I expected to counter how it really didn’t look bad on her. She swims, walks a mile a day, does yoga, cooks, buys size eight designer clothes and even answers an email or two when she feels like taking on technology. Her memory is so vibrant, she recently recounted, in detail down to the color of the jacket she wore, an event that occurred when she was eight.

She could even be a poster child. Her husband, my uncle, is 90 and yesterday was their 67^th wedding anniversary. Instead of the typical hoopdeedoo they have come up with in the past, like an ocean crossing on the Queen Mary or a weekend fling in Manhattan, they just went out to dinner. But that’s because already this year they’ve twice driven the Atlantic seaboard, crisscrossed Florida, and are leaving tomorrow for a 400-mile drive to Boston for three days of planned events.

I would’ve bet the spaghetti that barring a freak accident, my aunt wasn’t going to die anytime soon. She has her mother’s hardiness genes. My grandmother breezed through her eighties buying her first shoulder bag to catch up with fashion, taking her first airplane ride alone to catch up with me in Maine, and showing off her facility with numbers: she could remember not only everybody’s telephone digits, but the price of every dress she ever bought, including the tax. Even after she broke her ankle, she charged down the sidewalk at her usual reckless gait, and if she passed an elderly woman in sensible shoes limping along, perhaps with a cane, she would sneer: “Look at that old lady.”

My grandmother was already 93 when she looked into the bathroom mirror and let fly those very words. Unfortunately, when they hit the mirror, they shattered her legendary aplomb by throwing in her face the realization that she was that old lady. This sent her into a tizzy which literally scared her to death.

Actually, what terrified her was not dying. She was so suddenly scared of all the things that could now come between her and death-- the indignity of a broken hip, the humiliation of senility, the horrors of a vegetative state—she promptly tried to commit suicide the next day. She tried a few times more, in pathetically hilarious ways, always swearing upon recovery she’d shoot herself before she’d let Willard Scott give her one of those Today Show salutes to 100-year-olds. She vaingloriously protested being alive for five years before she succeeded in avoiding those dreaded consequences of old age with the very subtle suicide of sitting stubbornly so still for so long none of them could happen. Edema did it with time in the lungs.

My grandmother’s old tricks showed up in my aunt’s new panic. She refused to eat, declined to speak, didn't leave the house or sleep—all tantrum stuff to be spiteful about not getting what she wanted. It would've been déjà vu all over again except that my aunt was terrified of dying. My cousin used to joke his mother kept moving around to out run death so it wouldn’t be able to find her, or the only explanation for the way she spent money was she was trying to buy her way out, a bribe to outwit it. All that sparkly stuff—the jewelry, cars, residences—were her substitute for religious icons held up to ward off evil spirits. But apparently all that grasping at straws, all those running and shopping tricks didn’t make death pass over and go away like a satisfied trick-or-treater. It was, as they say of the American Express card, everywhere she wanted to be.

My aunt bitterly repeated that all her friends were dead, all her family in the cemetery except for one cousin whose second husband had Alzheimer’s, and both of her children are suffering diseases of aging (worn-out heart valves and menopausal cancer). Proximity to those children had caused her to sacrifice the satisfactions of San Diego, and be resigned this winter to consign herself to Florida, which she had always sneered at as an antique shop of moldering oldies. “People here are just waiting to die,” she said, over and over while I was there. “Everybody’s old. It’s a dead end. I’m going to die.”

After three days stuck in her panic, I was desperately pushing all my dharma buttons to get out. Eventually, on a walk, I recalled a teaching by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche that “fear is created by thinking about the future—it does not exist in the present moment of experience. You should look at your own experience and see how fear is just a thought about a future event. When the event actually occurs, it is merely instantaneous, and there is no time for you to be frightened. You need to gain certainty from the perspective of your own experience that this is how it is.”

I was certainly gaining a view of how anticipation will get you, if you don’t watch out. Like her mother, my aunt was so blinded by her fear of eventuality, she couldn’t see any point going out to dinner or shopping for a dress for an award dinner in her honor. She put a pall on everything. I wanted to tell her the seminal old dharma story about the woman who, trying to escape a ravenous tiger, heads for the edge of a cliff, and seeing a small wild strawberry underfoot, stops to enjoy it before leaping. Instead, I memoed myself to remember the strawberry on my way out.

Of course that hungry tiger, death, is not life's only scary prospect. Who hasn’t seriously sweated the future’s small stuff: a date, an appointment, an interview, a destination? Who hasn’t hooked up their imagination to a thousand pre-event conversations, planning ahead what he said, then she said and I will say, to get it all nicely worked out to end happily ever after—meaning that getting what we want is what makes the ending happy, meaning that being in control is the definition of happy. Anything else means it all somehow went wrong.

The space between now and tomorrow is a traffic jam of wishes and expectations. We set out like traffic stanchions our should be’s and has to be’s and wannabes—our agenda of how life is supposed to be, how it’s’ supposed to go for us, and the minute our cones get sideswiped by life taking a short cut around them, it’s tantrum and tizzy time. Somebody do something!

To set up hope like that is to set up fear, because fear is merely hope turned inside out into the hope of not getting what we don’t want. We’re all scared life won’t be served exactly the way we order it and we end up with what we hoped we'd never get: fired or dumped or senile or buried. Then what? What if life doesn’t hold the mayo? That’s why Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso says when you stop hoping for anything, you will fear nothing.

Watching my aunt sweat the big blind date, I could see how impossible it is in America to be, as the scouts say, prepared. Death is really scary because we do everything imaginable to instill the hope it will just go away and leave us alone. Our whole culture runs on the gaseous fiction we are so in charge, we can get rid of stuff we don’t like and have it all our way. We can stop the sags of aging with the paralysis of poisonous botox, take drugs to never feel blue, inject steroids to keep on keeping on, dye away the hair’s gray, create plants with unlimited growing seasons —Astroturf among them, segregate the elderly out of sight, and set up trade-ins so we don’t keep an electronic or vehicle long enough to watch it wear out. We can keep bodies alive forever on machines as though death is some kind of medical mistake, with the government jumping in to stake a claim because every death is one less consumer propping up the GNP. Death is failure, it’s defeat, and, hey, winning is everything.

Watching my aunt struggle with this addiction to denial renewed my appreciation for Dharma practice that makes me say everyday: “My life is like a water bubble that could burst any moment, so today I must make it meaningful.” It’s really a gift to be trained to stare down fear and accept death as the normal consequence of life, a form of cosmic recycling in which we continually die to go on in a differing way: we lose our baby teeth, our virginity, our ignorance, our circumstances change and we move on. It’s a blessing to be taught to stop corroding what's happening right now with fleeting thoughts about what might happen later We're not there yet. We are, as the signs say, here. Eat the strawberry.

Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche has come up with a 21^st Century version of Chod, the practice of deliberately facing what scares the hell out of you --death-- so you can get over it. He recommends going on hellish amusement park rides like roller coasters and gravity-free space simulators. These manufacture fear you can play with. “These days, there are so many kinds of frightening entertainment,” he says, adding that people seem to like it so much, places like Disneyland are replacing all the soft, easy rides with really scary ones. “When you go to these frightening rides, you have to think profound thoughts to be able to handle the experience. For example, you have to think: “This is not real,” or otherwise identify very clearly the reasons why you are frightened. Sometimes you just have to look straight at the frightened mind’s essence, or else look at the fear and accept it without being afraid of being frightened.” I imagine it beats sitting in a chair for five years.

My aunt never did scary stuff like that. She’s spent 87 years doing only what kept her very comfortable, only what was agreeable, denying the existence of unpleasantness. She was so obsessed with having everything just the way she wanted it, and so spoiled by the money to have her way, she had no clue how to deal with something she didn’t choose. All she had was the American approach to death: planning ahead with life insurance, durable powers of attorney, trusts and a will, even for distribution of body parts. Our material system is all about the material stuff you can’t take with you, how you want to stuff others with it. It is not, as they say, about you. You're immaterial.

Seeing her helplessness made me very grateful for the Buddhist belief in advance preparation for death with mahamudra, phowa, bardo—all the stuff you get to take with you. I found such sudden solace in this method of planning for death as a trip you need to pack the right gear for, I actually wanted to practice.

I wanted to console my aunt too, but I didn’t know how to explain this Dharma to someone so mired in the philosophy of “who has the most toys wins”, I used to joke to my cousin that his mother would find a way to get traveler’s checks to take it with her. So I just sat quietly, sensing her hysteria was really grief, poignant funereal grieving. That part of her which had so long and so fiercely lived by that buy now stay later creed had died and been buried before I came. Her invulnerability was gone, her denial dead, knocked out in a head-on collision with an oncoming train of thought: Who has the most toys wins what? Surrounded by suddenly useless jewelry and cars and clothes—all the detritus of denial, she was staring in a mirror at emptiness. She was panicked and clueless. My guess is that experience did it in the end with reality.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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