What if I died today?

Perhaps it’s cos I challenged myself recently to hire a car for my niece’s wedding, drive it across London, and brave the English countryside, all on the wrong, I mean left, side of the road — a stick shift, no less. Just to see if I could still do it. I haven’t hired a car here before, and I’ve had 30 years to get used to the seamless efficiency of an automatic, including its lovely lack of stalling.

The car rental place seemed a bit of a dive on the North Circular in Park Royal, but Anish was friendly and, after we’d sorted out some needlessly complicated paperwork on account of my having multiple phone numbers, addresses, banks, and passports, off I drove in my shiny little Corsa.

The first busy, multiple-laned, trafficky bit was a little hairy, at least for the people around me, judging by the honking. At one point I did have a small stalling situation in the middle of the road.

I had the time to “avoid highways” and enjoy some beautiful scenery on a summer day’s in England, which is now a Hot Sunny Country. Good choice overall, except it was the roundabouts that really flummoxed me on this trip, especially the ginormous ones. A couple of them took me several attempts, getting off at every unwanted exit and circling back before I managed to get into the right lane at the right time. I was enjoying this adventure, to be fair, but also being forced to reconsider my long-held belief that I am a good, even rather suave, driver. I might have to concede that this self-image has more to do with cruising along empty highways in a giant automatic to the accompaniment of rock music.

Anyways, back to my first sentence … perhaps it’s because I set myself this slightly unnerving little car challenge that I last night found myself in a vivid dream, once again in a manual car, this time backed up to the edge of a cliff. Attempting to go forward, I found myself in reverse instead; but now my right hand could no longer reach the gears and my foot did not reach the brake. I was thinking, “This can’t be happening!”, but, the next thing I knew, the car was toppling backwards over the cliff.

So this is it

I knew I had no time to be scared, no time to feel sad, no time for worldly concerns, no time even to think about my soon-to-be smashed up body. There was only time to start talking to Buddha, and I found myself saying: “I love you, Geshe-la. I love you, I love you. Please look after me and take me to the Pure Land.” Followed by: “Please also look after everyone back there, including those who might be sad (or mad) that I died in this stupid way.”

And I remember thinking: So this is it. When the time comes, it really is this fast.

You have to let go immediately and go for refuge.

I felt peaceful enough, considering. But I woke up before I hit rock bottom. (So I’m here to tell the tale.)

This was a really good test run –  far more significant than my first attempt at hiring a car – because it showed me viscerally what really matters when I face my inevitable death and next life. All those adventures, all those activities, all those people, all those places … bye bye. All those appearances will dissolve rapidly into the deepest level of my awareness, the clear light of death, the one-way portal to my next life. Memories wiped clean. My meditations today have been focused and undistracted – and I feel as if I am practicing from the perspective of already being in my next life.

The roundabouts of life

That day I hired the car, my decision to “avoid highways” meant I could stop off unexpectedly in the new (to me) town of Windsor to see Queen Victoria and serendipitously find myself right next to Crowthorne Train Station where my parents fell in love (hence, me). Later, on my way home, I saw a sign to “Cold Ash”, which used to go by “Colditz”, inspiring a brave detour to the prison these same parents sent me to when I aged out of the American school in Ankara. I didn’t exactly love my girls’ boarding school at the time – tried running away with my suitcase on day 2, and did actually leave as soon as I could for a boys’ boarding school – but, really unexpectedly, they reached out to me last year to do a two-page spread about my life in Buddhism. The school was surprisingly similar to how I remembered it, only smaller of course; and a young man taking his smoke break offered to show me around inside, telling everyone quite unnecessarily: “She was here back in the seventies!!!” But I had none of the heebie-jeebies I might have expected — just a surprising sort of affection. Which shows how you can never tread in the same river twice.

Geographically speaking, my life has been spread out all over the place. About 15 years of it took place in England, give or take, in childhood patches and early adulthood; another 17 years or so, starting at birth, were spent on all the other continents (bar Antarctica); and the last 30 years took place in the States. It’s why I like London, I think – it feels like living in a microcosm of the world, and I’m beginning to understand the significance of Venerable Geshe-la’s comment: “When Dharma flourishes in London, it will flourish around the world.” In any event, this drive had become an unexpected trip down memory lane + some generational history, all mixed up with fresh new appearances of England, culminating in a splendidly big English family wedding. This oddly familiar country has somehow been part of my story all along, however far and wide I’ve roamed.

My life has covered a fair bit of ground –  it’s been “rather interesting” my 91-year-old dad said the other day. And so has his and so has yours, I’m betting. So many places, people, adventures, views, roles, houses, beginnings, and endings. So many roundabouts taken, exits beckoning, roads doubled back on, and unexpected places arrived at.

But still …

None of this changes where this road is ultimately heading.

When should we say our goodbyes?!

Even if we’re not hurtling backwards off a cliff when we die and there’s more time for goodbyes, when the actual moment comes there can be no looking back. No regrets. No clinging to the life we’re about to lose forever. We have to go for it.

While I was in the car that wedding weekend, things felt fairly solid and real, like life does. But this life that we’re currently invested in will soon turn out to be no more solid than last night’s dream. So perhaps the sanest thing we can do with it is to get used to turning to our objects of refuge until that becomes so familiar and instinctive that we remember them when we need them most.

This life may end today, but while we are still alive today, we can use this incredibly precious day to practice Dharma. Because when everything else is disappearing — our body, our possessions, our reputation, the people and places of this life, our plans, and even our responsibilities — Dharma is the one thing that will actually help us. It will help us when we’re hurtling over the proverbial cliff, it will help us in our next life, and it will help us in every life we’re still taking after that.

The main reason both my nieces’ weddings this Summer were so splendid was the atmosphere of genuine love. My oldest niece Maisie married her husband three weeks earlier in an elaborate ceremony in St Albans Cathedral, to other-worldly music and hymns that really meant something. At this second, simpler wedding, my youngest niece and her husband did something particularly thoughtful – at the wedding breakfast we each found an envelope at our seat, containing a handwritten letter explaining what we meant to the bride and groom.

A simple thing, but it made the love being celebrated that day suddenly feel even bigger than the love between two people.

And it also made me wonder: why wait till the end to say these things? It’s usually when someone is about to die – or, as we more often than not miss that deadline, after they have died – that we finally put into words how much they mean to us. But why wait? Why not do what Molly and Cameron did and tell them now?!

Love is one of the great meanings of human life. Death awareness doesn’t diminish that love; if anything, it gives us more reason to express it while we still have the chance.

Talking of which …

Lately I’ve been practicing with these three lines from Great Liberation of the Father (or Mother), a self-generation Tantric sadhana that doesn’t get mentioned all that often but is one of my favorites:

I request you please to grant me your blessings
So that I may cut the clinging of self-grasping within my mental continuum,
Train in love, compassion, and bodhichitta,
And swiftly accomplish the Mahamudra that is the Union of No More Learning.

This for me sums up all of Buddha’s teachings and what I’d like to accomplish in this dwindling life. From practicing like this, the rest will follow — including all the practical things I do to try to help other people.

You might think that death awareness would take away our passion for life, make us passive, detached, or entirely inward-looking. And there are times when it’s important for a Dharma practitioner to gather inwards to keep that existential perspective – whether that’s in regular meditation sessions, dropping in to our inner peace throughout the day, attending courses and festivals, and/or perhaps disappearing into a long retreat one of these days. But the fact is that most of us will be spending most of our life out in the world – making ends meet, keeping things going, trying our best to help others, and so on. And we can do all of this without losing our death awareness, living lightly while seizing each day. Taking life seriously without taking all of its appearances so seriously.

For example, mostly I love my life and find inspiration in loads of things, so I don’t have a death wish. I don’t feel that putting my Dharma practice first means giving up on my responsibilities – in fact it’s what has allowed me to do whatever meaningful or helpful things I have managed to do.

When time runs out

We may wear several hats and have an impressive number of plates spinning in any given week, but we’ll have to drop all of these when the time comes. We are not in a position to take responsibility for keeping them spinning forever – all we can do is contribute what we can while we’re here, and hope and trust that that’s enough for others to keep it spinning once we’re gone. Perhaps that’s another freedom that comes from remembering death, or even just impermanence – doing everything we can while we can, without imagining that everything depends upon us, much less that it will continue the way we set it up once we’ve left. 😅

(When my good friend Gen Lekma and I were chatting the other day about how quickly we’d be replaced, she pointed out: “Yeah, and in the very next ordination ceremony, even my name will be given away.”)

Finally, death reminds me that we can only help other people endlessly once we are enlightened. Becoming Buddha Heruka, at one with my Spiritual Guide, has to be my main goal. As it says in that same prayer:

This body of mine and your body, O Father,
This speech of mine and your speech, O Father,
This mind of mine and your mind, O Father,
Through your blessings may they become inseparably one.

Thanks for reading.