Things went too fast for me and maybe too slow for her. She was feeling a lot of pain during thanksgiving and was brought to emergency the next day where she was diagnosed with cancer in the liver. Then the day after that, the specialist told her she had a month to live, which we didn't believe. How could a very healthy being suddenly learn she has cancer and then have a month to live? In my mind, dying of cancer was having a slow and sometimes painful death, definitely not in a month. The rest of the days I spent visiting her at the hospital every night, walking through that whole building all for cancer patients and getting a glimpse of life in a way I have never seen before.
There's the woman, bald headed and wearing only her flimsy white hospital gown who sits on her wheelchair every dusk, smoking her cigarette with a tilt in her head that seemed to defy everything else around her as if saying to the world, "you can put all the cancer cells in my body but you cannot deny me of my stick of cigarette." I admired her for that. As I walked through the hall, I see a woman, softly reading the news to someone on the bed whom I suspect was her dad. One time, they reeled out a man outside of his intensive care room for a couple of his relatives to see him. He was on air respirator and oblivious to things around him but even then, just looking at him, covered in white sheets, bald and eyes closed, I could feel his strong aura. He had the charm and feel of one of those powerful men in mafia clans or that of a great politician who has come to the end of his days. I could just imagine how he might have been in those days when cancer hadn't slowly taken over. Richmond Pavillion, that's the name of the hospital wing for cancer patients who needed intensive care. It was a place where one can't pass through without having one's perspectives in life changed.
I saw my aunt breathe her last breath. It was like watching a fish which has just been taken out of the water and was now struggling to breathe. The breathe slows down and sometimes stops and then just when you panic, it resumes again till finally it stops and as one hopes the breath would come back, it doesn't anymore. And as I stared at this non-breathing body of my aunt, I wondered where was the essence that made my aunt, my aunt, go? I remember a principle in science class, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed. Where was that "energy" that made this body move, and think and laugh and say "baloney me" whenever I tell a joke? As I reflected on the now unquestionable presence of a "spirit", I realized that other living beings must also have it, like a dog or bird. They probably have something which made then alive and which leaves their bodies when they die too.
My grief took me to looking for answers to my questions and I ended up reading a lot of books on spirituality these past months. One of them "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogyal Rinpoche gave me some comfort. I did not understand a lot of the things he wrote and I may never have the same belief as him but still it gave me comfort. It is a hard book to read when one is not in the right state of mind but if one has someone close to them who is dying or has died, it may be something that could provide comfort as it did to me.
And so here I am, finally coming back to write in my blog. And I suspect, I would write differently now that I feel like a different person and having a different perspective of things. I am still finding meaning in each moment and in everything I experience but I don't feel as lost now as I was a few months ago.
In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you love? How deeply did you learn to let go? ----The Buddha, India
