Death is a strange thing. We know our whole lives about the fact of death, but when it enters our personal experience of life, it hits us like a brick wall. Until experienced at close quarters, we have no idea just what it feels like to be confronted with it.
As children we still have a natural curiosity about in death. I remember how my daughter took great interest in dead beetles or a dead new born bird that had fallen out of its nest lying on the pavement. She asked questions like “Where is it now?” and “What does “dead” mean?” and found the whole matter, not alarming, but rather interesting.
We lose this natural capacity to be curious about death as we grow older and learn that it is one of the taboo themes, slowly but surely, encroaching our lives. It is hushed, not openly spoken about, until at some stage, it seems not to belong to life at all - except for in insurance policies and news items. Death thus slowly becomes something to be fearful about. Other than that, it becomes a quiet thing in our lives, a stranger – until such time as we are personally confronted with it in one way or another.
My own relationship with death prior to the recent passing of my father was really quite good. Part of my tantric initiation was facing my fears around dying...and growing up in South Africa with burglar guards and security firms, violence on street corners and sometimes a rather brutal law enforcement, it was substantial. Facing these fears, I found a willingness to embrace death as something natural, even beautiful, as my understanding of the natural cycle of our life-force energy, not only in nature, but particularly also as human beings, grew. As my understanding of the naturalness of and what awaits us after death grew, so my fear naturally subsided.
But nothing of this prepared me for the impact it would have on me when my father died. It felt like nothing I had experienced before, it felt totally new and very deep and quite shocking.
The feeling of unchangeable loss was just as much a physical as well as emotional. In Tantra we embrace all feelings, all emotions, all experiences with totality, and we learn to own them completely as our own. Allowing the depth of the experience to increase, we are catapulted into the moment of “what is” completely. As we go from moment to moment in this way, we are truly in life, in living, in experiencing, in being, in being alive with the energy of life. Sometimes this is playful, sometimes joyful, sometimes it feels great. Other times, depending on what it is we are embracing, it almost feels static and overbearing, as if we are shutting down. But, in reality, it never is. In such a moment there are many nuances. Sadness is not just sad. It is so many things. It includes anger, regret and pain but also joy – if only we are willing to see it.
Death is such a thing. It feels sad to those looking on, but in reality it is just as wonderful a celebration as birth itself – only at the opposite end of life as human beings. It is a releasing of human life energy to become fully what we are, what we are meant to be, what we have strived to be and if we are willing, we can experience something of this as we look oh with sadness.
I chose a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet to read at the family funeral as well as at the large civic memorial service that the city of Durban gave my dad. Being a public figure, we had to, as a family, endure both services within two days of each other, and we wanted both to be a celebration of his life and so they were. This passage from Gibran had great meaning to me. Apart from becoming a fan of his writings as a pseudo-hippy in the late sixties (The Prophet, for all who do not know it, this is a must read on any spiritual path), there is something else that drew me to this passage when I was contemplating what to read at the funeral and memorial service.
My dad was a paraplegic from age three after contracting polio. I knew him from babyhood to have four legs. Two wearing trousers, and two made of wood, their tops covered in dark red, or black or green velvet, and he propelled himself forwards in quite a bumpy fashion. To me it was natural. That was how he was. I don’t recall exactly when it dawned on me that he was different, I assume it did at some stage, he however always remained just my dad and no different from any other dad who was just like something else. He drove a car, we went on holiday every year to his sister’s farm in the then Transvaal and he would drive the eight or nine hours solid to get there. He took us to the beach or to the drive-in, I sat on his lap listening to the wonderful stories he told, he dried my hair with a towel – he did all the things that other fathers generally did with their children. Even when he stopped walking with splints on his legs and crutches under his arms, and took to a wheelchair some time in his sixties, he was simply still just dad.
This changed dramatically for me seeing him in his ICU bed which he occupied for four weeks before passing away. He lay in bed without his splints, without his wheelchair nearby, his torso weakened by the operation he had had, he was helpless, unable to move. His strong shoulders and arms used so much to allow him movement, could no longer hold him, and every move he made, had to be done for him. I enjoyed the closeness this allowed me, as for the first time I was able to touch him as much as I liked. I stroked his head, massaged his feet and hands, and I put my hands under the blankets and stroked his chest and tummy and even his little legs. It was really only during this time that the reality of his physical handicap really impacted on me. And this is why this passage from The Prophet so easily came to mind as something I would want to read at the funeral and memorial.
In the first few days after his passing, I would sit on my veranda listening to the thrashing waves of the Indian Ocean, the comforting sea breeze and the night sounds of the crickets and frogs in my garden, and I would wonder where he is, where his energy had gone, what his consciousness was like. What I “saw” after four weeks of this helplessness, was that he was now dancing, freed from the physicality that he had overcome all of his life to be simply the man he was, fathering three children, becoming a highly respected member of the community, both in business as well as, together with my mom, his life-long humanitarian work, which has left an indelible mark on the city of Durban.
I never really thought about how hard it must have been for him at times, of how much more difficult life for him had been. The pain of realising this was huge and a sense of guilt arose in me, guilt for not understanding this earlier. To me he was always so strong and so capable, that I never saw him as a paraplegic until just before his death. The guilt was short lived. He would not have wanted it otherwise. He never asked for special attention. He led businesses, board meetings, gave talks and took on top roles in commerce and society with ease. Only the on-lookers would hold a breath when they saw him for the first time standing or walking with his crutches. His life was an inspiration to others who are physically challenged; an inspiration to be who they are in spite of the challenges they face. An inspiration to follow their dreams and fulfil their aspirations. Much in the same way as he was, as my dad, a major inspiration in my life.
Some few weeks before he became ill, he watched the interview with me about my work on the Let’s Chat With Mel show on M-net Series and loved it! He thought I was doing wonderful, very necessary work and encouraged me, saying “...you have to write a book”. Two days before he died, he repeated this: “You have to write a book about your work and you have to do it now. Don’t delay, don’t put it off. You must do it right away.” He said this with such determination, that it made a mark on me. I have taken this, his last wish for me, earnestly and I have started! I have a wonderful researcher assisting me and I intend to take time, to make the time, to get this well on its way before the end of the year.
But I digress. I was writing about my evenings on the veranda trying to come to terms with my dad’s death and contemplating where he now was. At some stage a thought came to me: “He is now free of his physical body, he is probably dancing now, dancing somewhere out there”! And thus Gibran’s The Prophet came to mind.
The book is a lovely little story about Almustafa, an old wise man who had lived the final years of his life, a lonely twelve years, in the city of Orphalese waiting for “his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.” On the eve of his final journey, the people of Osphalese finally began gathering to hear what he had to say, and so he returns from the shore to meet them and answer their questions, thinking “Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering? And shall it be said that my eve was in truth my dawn?”
And as the story unravels, the people of Orphalese ask him questions about life. His answers are valid to all of us today and are an inspiration for all aspects of life – about men and women, children, friendship, marriage, love, money, work, pleasure, beauty, prayer, religion ...and much more until the final question came:
“Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.
And he said:
You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The night owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”
Namaste
Leandra
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