Waking Up To Life When Death is Near
by Jalyn Knobloch
Voices from the Space2Meditate Community
The practice of sitting in meditation is providing me tender support during a particularly difficult time in my family. My younger cousin, who has been living bravely with cancer for the past year and a half, has come to a crossroads in her treatment, where options seem to have run out and the cancer, which metastasized from her colon to her lungs, is growing. This scenario, the nightmare we feared from afar, is here. When that happens and fear arrives at our doorstep, what do we do? Well, this practice is showing me the way.
It is helping me wake up to a life that makes no sense, where I cannot find my footing, and everything seems entirely strange, except for my breath, which is constant and familiar, and my physical body which exists in each moment.
It is helping me wake up to a new grief settling on my heart. It is a profoundly deep feeling that no amount of shopping, eating, drinking, dating, scrolling or pleasure can cure. It is a grief born of love, and the only thing I can do is see and listen to it with compassion.
It is helping me wake up to the fact that my cousin is still here. As much as there is this tendency to mad dash into the sorrow of the future, she is still alive. I can pick up the phone and call (I have!) to talk about dumb shit (we do!) and hear her laugh (it’s a bright, beautiful sound!).
It is helping me wake up to a part of myself that wants to show up for her, my family and myself in the face of uncertainty, a part that does not want to run away from what scares me, like I have in the past.
It is helping me wake up to a reality shared by many. That our family is not the first to face an illness that is terminal, where all the advances science has made over the years come up painfully short.
It is helping me wake up to the love of others. All I have to do is notice that love and go towards its warmth. It will be there.
It is helping me wake up to the fact that my cousin’s path is mine too. We are all on the road to a life that ends. I am no different than her, and we are walking in the same direction together.
All of these realizations do not mean that I don’t wish for a time when my cousin could do handstands in her tie-dye leggings at the tops of mountain peaks, her fierce and fun zest for life on full display. I wish our conversations didn’t have to go towards the $250 wheelchair her and her husband found on Amazon that can be ordered immediately without waiting for the arduous insurance process to kick in.
And yet that wheelchair, along with her portable oxygen tank, will allow her to visit the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, CA and use the tickets we bought for her Mother’s 70th birthday this past August. I want Erin to go on this outing with her family, have beauty surround her in every direction and feel peace infuse every fiber of her being. I want whatever fear she feels to be melted by the sun and for the fresh air she cannot fully breath to wrap itself around her in a full-body embrace, the likes of which only the outdoors can give.
I want us all to have beauty visit us, especially during the darkest days. The practice of sitting in meditation brings me the stillness needed to welcome beauty into my heart, even now, especially now and to create extra space for the loss that comes with being human. Loss of any kind needs room to sit. It needs room to be held lovingly.
