My Neighbor's Passing

I went to an alumni association seminar last night and didn’t get home until almost eleven o’clock. Driving up my street, I saw several police cars parked outside my next-door neighbors house. My neighbor Laura, a divorcee in her mid forties, has had a string of bad luck recently and the police have been frequent visitors to sort out difficulties with family members and an ex-boyfriend. Driving past the scene my first thought was “now what?”

This morning we received a call from my neighbor across the street. Laura died last night. There weren’t many details, but apparently she suffered a reaction to medication she was taking for a staff infection. I was shocked. I immediately felt guilty for having misjudged the situation last night. My thoughts went to her little boy, a classmate of my daughters. I thought about the suddenness of her death, the strange sense of vacancy that it created, and the sadness of the situation.

Death always creates an opportunity to reflect on this mortal coil. I have known many people who have died over the years, a young boy in my tae-kwon-do class when I was fourteen, my grandparents, and many family friends. In each case their death has changed they way I think about life, sometimes suddenly, other times more subtly. Mostly death feels like a tie to the past that has slipped away.

I don’t fear death. I think I did when I was younger, but at some point it occurred to me that death would not allow for reflection on the event. There was never going to be a time when I looked back at my own death and thought, “Boy that sucked.” When it happened there would be no sense of finality, there would simply be nothing more.

Nowadays, if I think about death at all, it is to question how I will die. I find it really interesting, even amusing. I can even remember the first time I thought about the event of my death. I was watching Apocalypse Now. During a skirmish with native tribesmen, the patrol boat is hailed with arrows and javelins. Chief Phillips (Albert Hall) is struck in the chest. He looks at the spike protruding from his torso and whispers “A spear” then crumples over and dies.

This enigmatic statement has stuck with me over the years. A spear. Mystery over. It is as if the ultimate question has suddenly been summed up. 42. A great deal of fun can be had along these lines: “a Mack truck”, “a Brussels sprout,” “a rake.” Images of Monty Python characters leap to mind “Uh oh, I think I’m having a cardiac arrest.” However none of this captures the frank, terrifying and inexplicable awe of Chief Phillips whispering “a spear.”

Another favorite movie scene in this vein is from American Beauty in which Jane and Ricky bond over his father's WWII paraphernalia, and then one of his camcorder movies of what he considers his most beautiful footage, that of a plastic grocery bag dancing in the wind. Ricky says “…And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and, this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.” Sometimes thinking about the way in which I die is like this for me, that there are all of these events in the world, and that there is a life behind all things, that life is somehow larger than my own death, and that I don't have any fear.

On a final note, I was recently reading The Gospel of Judas, a text known to the early church fathers and rediscovered in an early fourth-century Coptic manuscript. It tells a very different version of the final days of the life of Jesus and his disciples. Judas, far from the traitor, acts in obedience to the instructions given him directly from Jesus. Judas is the catalyst to release Christ's spirit from its physical constraints. We can no more blame a spear, or Judas for death.

Jenny and I were talking and she pointed out that this story is like the story of the death of the Buddha. Buddha ate his last meal, either of mushrooms or pork, which he had received as an offering from a blacksmith named Cunda. Falling violently ill, Buddha instructed his attendant Ānanda with a specific injunction that Cunda had nothing to do with his passing and should be held blameless. This last meal, said the Buddha would be a source of the greatest merit for Cunda as it provided the last meal for a Buddha and his entrance into Nirvana. The Buddha's final words were, "All composite things pass away. Strive for your own liberation with diligence. Hold fast to the truth as if to a lamp."