During the last few weeks, I’ve been contemplating my position in the bardo. In Buddhist tradition the term originally referred to the period between one life and the next, but according to Francesca Freemantle, author of Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead, there are at least six bardos out there: life (or birth), dream, meditation, dying, dharmata (reality), and existence (or becoming). Maybe I’m being narrow-minded, but I am not particularly interested in the esoteric characteristics of Tibetan Buddhism and Freemantle’s bardos. However, I am intrigued by the most general and useful sense of the term, which relates to any transitional experience, for the world of change is where we live—and die. My fascination with the bardo relates to several converging factors, including writing about aging and dying, as part of an incipient book project on human senescence (including my own); reading George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, a challenging but moving novel about the shadow-lands between death and rebirth, circa 1862; and a recent cancer scare, which just last week was alleviated by a negative biopsy result. (That wonderful phone call from my doctor: the tone of his voice gave me the welcome news, even before he’d gotten to the punchline: all clear for now, but let’s check things again in six months.) My doctor had recommended a biopsy in mid-August, but I’d had to wait almost two months for a preliminary MRI, another week for the actual procedure, and then eight more days for the pathologist’s report. Plenty of time to generate anxiety, but I figured that I’d handled the interval of doubt well, given the odds: about 25% for a positive cancer diagnosis, and then 60% of that for an “intermediate to severe” form of the disease. Do the math and that’s “only” a 15% probability of some kind of metastatic shit-storm, but 15% is one hell of a lot greater than 0%, the chance of a hole-in-one, or winning big in the next Powerball draw. And a recent dream suggested that some deeply hidden angst about what Siddhartha Mukherjee calls the “emperor of all maladies” had evaded my ineffectual defenses of compartmentalization (stuff any distress into a mental container, like a kind of psychic jack-in-the box) and fatalism (cue Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera”). In my dream, metastatic cancer expanded across my chest like a liver-colored amoeba, spreading outward from a huge mole-like growth toward a series of numbered points etched into my skin, those points seemingly representing the winner-take-all end game—and the winner was not me. A dream-bardo between life and rebirth awaited, never mind that I am mostly negative about the possibility of any sort of afterlife and subsequent rebirth. But then came the pathologist’s report and that liberating phone call. I’m very grateful, of course, to have avoided the frightening presence of cancer in my body—at least until my next check-up. At the same time, I understand that I’ve had it very easy, unlike the many people I know (or knew) who have struggled with cancer in one form or another. Still, I’m also thankful for what my tangential brush with cancer has given me: a newly awakened awareness of my position in the bardo of this life, that “rare and precious” transition between birth and death. Small parts of us begin dying as soon as we are born (cell lines flame out, aerobic metabolic processes work their free-radical dark magic, mutations accumulate, developmental genes switch on or off), but for many years our biotic curve is generally positive—until it turns negative, as our bodies and minds begin to wane. At seventy-one I’m near to the end of my trajectory, cancer or no cancer. I know that I should treasure each day more often than I do, and my negative biopsy has been a forceful reminder that I’ve become too habituated to my day-to-day existence. The world (this life!) is lit with infinitely more luminosity than I am accustomed to seeing, even if it also can be a sad and brutal place. Loved ones, books, the blaze of light in an autumnal maple, a cup of hot and bitter black tea in the morning, a new or familiar piece of beautiful music, the purring of a happy cat, the quotidian act of getting out of bed in the morning and shaving, washing the dishes, whatever: all carry such heft and presence, and each one should receive my full attention. These things and an infinity of other experiences populate what I’ve started thing of as the bardo of my existence—that long and intricate life-to-death transition that I’ve been immersed in since September of 1951. A few days ago, I set out on a long canal-side run to celebrate my negative cancer diagnosis. It was a crystalline fall morning—the sun bright, the air still and mild, Canada geese and common mergansers on the mirrored water, scattered maples and sumac glowing. I was ecstatic in the movement, even if my balky right knee and sleep-deprived body began complaining after I’d been out for an hour. And as I ran, I recalled the voice-over narrative from the final scene in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, which I’d memorized back in 2001:
Where was it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? Walked with? The brother? The friend? Darkness and light, strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made: all things shining. All things shining—the hope is, wherever we might go, whatever we might do. I thought about this as I ran out of Albion and past Eagle Harbor, west into the light of a beautiful autumnal day, my aging body working as best it could, and for a little while sunk deeply and fully and thankfully in the bardo of this world.
2 Comments
11/6/2022 07:01:36 am
Moving and eloquent! And a relief--a gift of the negative biopsy. The way you write about the gift of this luminous life we are so fortunate to inhabit truly resonates. Thank you, Chris.
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12/26/2023 03:34:00 am
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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