Reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
1
My students shift uneasily in their seats.
It’s another language, they say.
The cessation of suffering is the cessation of grasping.
It’s a nice idea, a girl says, but it’s against human nature.
Against our culture, not our nature, a boy says,
his wire rimmed glasses making him look more Trotsky than Tibet.
But, the girl says, opening and closing her hands,
My feelings are my feelings.
Doesn’t our Western culture shape your feelings?
They’re my feelings, the girl repeats. No one can take them away.
2
Thanksgiving morning I walk my dog
and curse the cold.
What was once red leaves, blue sky and pond
is now, all, the color of lead.
In our minds change always equals loss and suffering.
Only the ducks stand out.
Fat and solid they glide
like glass ducks on a pewter tray.
The only thing we have is now
and the memories:
Do the ducks remember the day
they were eating bread
and my dog dived in on top of them?
I do.
the way the splash felt on my arms,
the way my tee-shirt smelled
when I got home.
And the fears:
my dog will drown
my sweetheart will move
or wake up one day and see that I am old
and we didn’t have children.
Let go of these fears.
Learning to live is learning to let go.
Stay with
the cold day,
the numb ears,
the wet dog.
It’s attractive
the now
the ducks
still in the water.
No memory
no hope
my dog diving in.
And I can do it too
for a minute
a whole day
dive in
give up the heartache of grasping.
Why suffer beforehand?
Up until the very moment it happens
I will be happy.
But on other days
the now is sucked away
and I see loss
coming on
like winter
and I
a sitting duck.
3
My parents keep everything
though I tell them not one cell
of their bodies was with them
when they were born.
Impermanence is the law of the universe
so why won’t they clean out their garage?
It once held three cars
but now is full of my grandparents’
furniture, abandoned books and pots.
One corner is set up like my grandmother’s
living room with rakes and shovels
among the lamps.
These are transient things I tell them.
When we let go of the impermanent the permanent will be revealed.
How can we get to it
under all this junk?
I beg my father to go through
piles of bank statements from the fifties
so I can throw them out and make room.
He finally comes out one hot night,
sets up a metal folding chair
and slowly on his skinny lap
turns over each cancelled check:
Southwestern Bell Telephone $2.18.
Dallas Power and Light $1.26.
When he finishes, he motions with one long finger
for me to put them all back in his grandfather’s satchel.
Why are you keeping these things?
I scream.
Let them go.
We have their spirits
and their weirdness.
Why do we need their things?
Like this hideous candy dish, I say holding it up like a weapon,
Why do we need Ma-Ma’s candy dish?
Do you remember, my father says slowly,
how everything in Ma-Ma’s house was sticky?
When you got a glass down from the cabinet
it was sticky?
Yes. The lemon drops were always stuck together
in the dish.
Her purse was full of packets of sugar and candy.
Even in the nursing home she stuffed her purse
with little tubs of jelly.
And she made taffy in her kitchen at the farm
and we’d help her pull it hot and translucent.
Standing in the crowded garage
I see just what my father is getting at.
How else could Ma-Ma be revealed to me
except through the sticky, half wrapped sour balls
she thrust in my hand
on the long bus trip home from downtown.
The permanent needs a ride
into our world.
How else could it come to us?
Coming as it does
from so far away.
Note: the quotations in italics are from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.
• • •
Death as a Second Language
What’s the word?
my mother asks.
I hate died.
I want a better word.
I hate euphemisms more I tell her.
My grandmother used to say
my grandfather had gone away
as if he’d left again for World War I.
She laughs. I know.
A woman today said,
I heard you lost your husband
and I said. Well he’s not exactly lost.
We’d lost our dog once and put up signs
in a panic. Every pile of dirty snow
looked like him and we pictured him
shivering under a truck.
But there was no panic
with my father in the bed serene.
If he shivered we pulled up the sheet
and said, We’re here. You’re here.
My father used to see about
everybody as he put it.
People turned to him
as a bank that wouldn’t fail.
He was used up I say
utilized completely to the last cell.
Let’s try it.
My father used up his earthly life.
Though his body was failing
every word he said was perfect.
Everything else was gone I tell my uncle
and he was pure spirit.
Hemmed in by skin too hard,
my father shed his body.
I like it. My father shed
his earthly body.
Moved onto higher ground
my friend, a gospel fan, suggests.
No. That strands him in a different place
when he’s all around like sunlight.
On the subway I see two old women
Greek or Italian
holding in their knobby hands
a list of English words in extra large print.
One points to cradle
and the other folds her arms
and rocks
a baby that is not there.
I look down their list for a word
that means there and not there
gone and still here
extinguished and brighter.
Once a native speaker
I cross the aisle
to be near them, to hold the rail behind them
a beginner now in the language of death.
• • •
At the Baylor Hospital
My sister and I are past forty
and mask the gray in our hair with highlights,
but we giggle in matching pajamas
and settle down to sleep on the floor
of the room where our father is dying.
When the doctor comes in the morning
it’s still dark, but we rise quickly
to stand up straight at his bedside.
The doctor smiles at my father.
Good planning, he says, having daughters.
• • •
Beth Thompson is a high school English teacher, writer and storyteller. Her work has appeared in Calyx and The New York Times. She is inspired by her childhood in Texas and by her students and family.