A meditation on mortality

     Hah!
   
     Old blogs never die, but just come back to haunt us later on, long after we thought they were gone.

     Accidentally coming across the last old entry, the one about death, it seems to be popping up all around again; the latest is the death of a brother-in-law.  But it brings up an old story, one long forgotten but strongly embedded in the past.

     Doug and I were driving around in Oak Hill back in 1972, for a reason that has since been forgotten.  At the old roadside park just north of the Y intersection there a bus was parked that had "Tarot Readings" written on the side of it.  We were into the tarot at that time, the times being what they were, so we stopped to see what was what. 

     The owner of the bus was indeed a tarot reader, one who made his living by moving around the country in this bus doing readings for whoever chose to come there.  He didn't charge money for his readings, but he did accept donations from whoever he did the readings for, and he said that his most popular customers were politicians, especially around convention times, and claimed that even John Kennedy had once had him do a reading for him.

     Well, this fellow was stopped at this roadside park because he needed to do some work on his bus, which was stranded there until he get the parts he needed.  So Doug and I went ahead and took him into town to the nearest parts store in South Austin, and he offered to do a reading for us in exchange afterward.

     I don't recall what Doug's reading was, only that mine was culminated by the Death card being covered by the Love card and involved living to be seventy years old.  But it several months later that Doug recalled for me that there was a warning about water.  This claim was  brought up again in the wake of one the more traumatic events of my late high school days. 

     Johnny Longhair (at least that's what we always called him), Lee Adams and I had gone to a concert at the Municipal Colosseum, high on speed from a bag of pills we'd bought.  Still flying high the next day, we decided it would be a good idea to go swimming at a pond off of Parker Lane, in what is now Mabel Davis Park but at the time was just one of the many bits of open land around a much less developed South Austin. 

     After swimming around for quite some time, it seemed time to go home, but Johnny was no where to be seen.   Since he'd last been seen swimming there with us, we began diving around to try to find him, fearful that he may have drowned.  Eventually it became that  something was seriously wrong, and we called the authorities, who sent out a scuba team to search the pond, where they soon his body.  His hair had become entangled in some underwater obstacle, right there in an area that I knew I had been diving in early during our frantic searches.   It was my first real lesson in how the mind can be tricked into not seeing what it really doesn't want to see.

    What I can never forget is going over to his family's house that night and having to tell his family the awful truth, a task that somehow seems to have fallen upon my shoulders.   His  funeral was the first our newly found adult lives, and it was not to be the last.

     It was in the following days, sitting around in a marijuana hazed shack behind a friend's house, that Doug began to remind me that this was what the tarot reading had been warning me against.   I don't know how true this was, but Johnny's death weighed on me for many years to come, and having been a person who'd loved to swim from an early age it never again quite appealed to me in the same way, and always left me wary. 

     This wariness was reinforced several years later when I was swimming in the river at Pedernales River State Park.  There is a section of the river that that narrows into a fast running channels cut into the limestone with  before dropping to deep and swirling eddies.  I got caught in one of these eddies, unable to to find which way was up and fast running out of breath trying to escape.  I remember very clearly thinking "so this is how it ends," and surprised at how the thought of suddenly dying was not quite as fearful as I'd always thought it might be, as well as at how my life was not flashing before me eyes as I'd always heard but instead focused into a very radiant moment of clarity.

     It will be no surprise to the reader the reader that I didn't die, though not quite as much as it was to me at the moment when I suddenly popped up into the open air again. 

     Time passed, as time has a way of doing, and many decades later I became a registered nurse working in an intensive care unit, where intimate brushes with death and dying became a regular part of my career.  Since then I've thought many times about this part of my professional life, which I've come to be quite good at and love as a service to my fellow human beings, an odd juxtaposition which in so many ways finds a reflection in that Death card covered by the Love card. 

     But this odd adventure with Doug from 1972 didn't end there, but rather some four decades later, while I was working that ICU.  I'd gone into a different unit to get some equipment when I heard a familiar voice speaking in Spanish to a housekeeper.  I peeked in the door, seeing much to our mutual surprise that it was Doug, who I knew had learned Spanish from many years living in Mexico with his mother. 

     Doug and I hadn't seen each other in over a decade, and there was much to talk over about how our paths had taken such different paths to have converged together again in his hospital room.  By that time he was homeless, living in a vacant lot off of Congress Avenue called Penn Hill, which he claimed had once been owned by his grandparents in the previous century.  Doug had fallen upon hard times, made harder by a penchant for drugs and alcohol that had begun to ravage his body as well as his life.  We visited many times while he was still in the hospital, and on that first day we saw each other there I was also able to bring up a mutual friend, James, with whom we'd shared many mutual adventures back in the seventies, many of them of an esoteric and magickal nature, often fueled by psychedelic excursions.  James had moved to Canada late in the twentieth century and lived there in Vancouver, only rarely able to come down to visit, so the timing of this coincidence made it clear that it was instead a sychronicity of considerable significance.

     Once Doug was well enough to get out of the hospital, I picked him up, and we joked about how oddly like going to fill his prescriptions afterward was like the old days when we'd go around scoring drugs.  It was cold out, and I even gave him a jacket to help out.  Over the next week I went to go visit him on Penn Hill, where he'd once again fallen into the role of an older and wiser teacher, gathering together other homeless souls who would harvest scrap electronics boards for whatever precious metals might be salvageable for a few dollars.  That was the last time I saw Doug alive.

     The last time I saw Doug he was back in the hospital, but this time he was in our intensive care unit and actively dying.  He wasn't my patient and, once again, I just happened by and recognized him there, this time covered in blood from ruptured esophageal varices and in the final throes of a very messy death from end stage alcoholism. 

     He died, but it wasn't until the next day when I got to work that I found out just how much he'd already died to his previous life.  He had not left any contact information, and no one knew how to contact any family members.  It took me a phone calls but finally I was able to reach his wife, who he had abandoned, along with his two children, years ago.   Her grief was mingled with a great deal of anger, some of which seemed to be mixed with old resentments over a failed affair we'd had years before during one of Doug's trips to Mexico with his mother.  But we eventually got the word out to other family members and friends as well, so Doug was at least able to not leave the world completely forgotten and abandoned. 

   

Near Death Experience

The past eight months have been a near death experience.

It's been a near death experience not just for me, but for my wife and her sister as well.  Some of us have been closer to death, my sister-in-law,Jane, now completely wrapped in the arms of ThanatosMay you rest in peace there, Jane; we miss you here.

But for my wife and I it's been merely a near death experience.  Jane started living with us immediately after her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, having no other immediate family to help her through this journey.  After several grueling trials of chemotherapy, which made her far sicker than she could tolerate, she started taking the hospice route. 

She stayed with us until the end, several weeks ago.  Since then, it's been an actual death experience, going on to blaze the trail which we all must travel, and which we all must travel alone.  I'm in no particular hurry to head on out that way myself, but somehow it's reassuring being reminded that my reservation for the is confirmed, as well as non-refundable.

Ha!  The waking versus the psychopompic, in between state twixt animal cognizance and cognitive eye opening.  I'm a gonna write here not because of being stuck in one or the other, but because the flux is interesting enough to start utilizing writing skills to trace just how the flow goes. 

Waking up

I once knew an anesthesiologist who was asked by a curious patient how he put people to sleep, and he explained how he gave them drugs.

"But how do you wake them up?"

"Well, I just stop giving them the drugs, and eventually they wake up..."

The question then becomes how does one wake up from the dreaming state?  Perhaps it's the analogy of just stop feeding the dream state, to find some method of exiting the world of possiblility and what ifs into the state of what is and how it is that it is. 

Somehow this sort of metaphor feels specious, rigid and inflexible yet in another way zen-like with a jewel like symmetry.  Ah well, I feel compelled here once again to consider everything, but to believe nothing, feet firmly planted into the world of maybe logic, caught up in some Heisenberg Principle of consciousness.

Sometimes the answer lies merely in the asking of the question....

Of Hyssop and its purging

On awakening from a dream, these words ensued: "Dream journal of a waking world." It seemed on further reflection that perhaps it should be "for an awakening world" or "a waking journal for a dream world" but it kept coming back to the original phrase, with clear connections to the multiple meanings of the word "wake" which connotates a death associated ceremony, but has rooots in the Indo-European "wog" or "weg", with definitions of "to be active," "to be active." "to become or stay alert" and "watching or guarding."

No more a journal hidden somewhere away, but a way to place it in plain sight, not hidden but just floating out there in the cloud reality of electromagnetism shared on the shifting sands of silicon chips. An active journal, a journal of growth, a journal for heightened vigilance over a world that is ever dying so that it can be reborn.

Okay, so it was at least partially inspired by a question yesterday from Lisa about blogging. Avoiding sharing about private matters in public is a skill that my professional closeness to death has honed to a fine point, so perhaps this is just a counterpoint to it based on the concept of interdependent coexistence, where nothing is truly apart from the world but rather merely a part of the world.

It was a strange dream, one of doing some sort of penance by looking out after a dying patient and difficult (read suffering)family members in the back of a hardware store, fortifying for it at a single room wood shack in the desert with a tea made with hyssop, though determining which of two plants was the hyssop was more difficult than thought.

How did this classical reference inspire this floral intrusion? Beats me! Who can fathom the mysteries of a world where one is constantly waking from a dream?

But this much can be determined by delving a bit deeper into the realm of the collective subconscious (or is it superconsious) mind. Hyssopus officinalis gets its name (azob, a holy herb) because it was used for the cleansing of sacred places. It is referred to in the Bible with the verse "Purge me with Hyssop, and I shall be clean."

(This was previously unknown, the only previous inference to 'hysop' (as some linguistic neuroprocessing circuits presented it) seeming to be to licorice for some unknown reason; the above information came from looking it up this morning.)

After this diving deeper for meaning, it seems a bit clearer why that bit of botanical trivia was so intrusive, a message from the dreaming world for a waking journal. And what was that allusion to a second herb all about anyway, especially since now looking at the pictures of Hyssop it was clearly one of those being contemplated by that bit player filling in for a self in that internal drama being played out last night?

Perhaps it was an opportunity posing as responsibility, or a responsibility posing as an opportunity, a response (a promise to engage one's self) to being before a port or harbor (the root of opportune) where meaning comes forth from seeking meaning. This finding of the purpose of life in seeking its purpose begins from some point of mystery, unveiling the self to stand naked before the world, shorn of preconceptions and open to opening.