Several months back, I was watching the HBO show White Lotus when one of the characters asked an old Buddhist monk happens to us after death. “When you are born,” the monk said, “You are like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down. You die. You land back in the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separated. No more suffering. One consciousness. Death is a happy return, like coming home.”
I found the monk’s words reassuring and unsettling at the same time. While I’m all on board with suffering going out the window and death being a happy return, my ego rebelled against the idea of my disappearing into some anonymous and eternally vast ocean of consciousness. Not being an expert on Buddhism, however, I’m sure I was missing something. But that monk’s words came back to haunt me last month, after my oldest friend Andy died in his sleep while vacationing in the Caribbean. When his wife called that morning to tell me the news, I wasn’t surprised because he’d had health problems for a long time, but it was still a shock.
When I went to the funeral home a week later, I saw my what remained of my friend of forty-three years in a wooden box on a table surrounded by a collage of pictures celebrating his life. Andy had been cremated in the islands and part of me was sad I couldn’t see him one last time, but part of me was also relieved. When people your own age die, especially someone you were close too, it can be too much to handle. Then, after I gave a eulogy and the priest said his words, we took the urn to the memorial garden at his family’s church and deposited Andy’s ashes into ground, all of us taking turns covering the hole with earth. After performing this last rite, I walked away from the mourners and looked up at the sky. It’d had been a very hot day, and the media had been blaring warnings about severe thunderstorms rolling in all morning. High above, dark clouds filled to bursting boiled above us but, directly above the church, they’d parted to create a circle of pure azure sky. As the sun’s power fell like a divine spotlight on the proceedings, I smiled. I hadn’t needed the umbrella I’d brought.
At the repast afterwards, I was nursing my second margarita when I saw Andy sitting at a table by himself, looking at the fuss being made over him with a bemused smile. As you can imagine I was a tad surprised. Then, when I blinked, my friend was gone, replaced by one of his relatives sitting alone with a beer. Seeing the departed isn’t unusual soon after death – one of the few hallucinatory experiences that won’t get you committed – so I didn’t think I was going insane. I’d even heard my departed dogs barking and walking around a for a few weeks after they’d passed. “That’s just Felix telling us he’s okay,” my wife told me after I’d leapt out of bed, thinking I’d left him outside before remembering he was gone. “Go back to bed.” Though it might’ve been a confluence of grief, booze, exhaustion and nerves, I wondered if my friend’s appearance was his way of telling me he was okay too.
Two weeks later in Lake Tahoe, however, my eyes snapped open at 4:00 am and I could feel my heart racing in my chest. Lying in bed terrified, I wondered if some medical malady had roused me from slumber – but I don’t have sleep apnea and, when I checked the EKG feature on my smart watch, it told me I was in sinus rhythm. Chalking it off to an unremembered nightmare, I tried going back to sleep but, because thoughts were frothing about my brain, I couldn’t. Then I realized what was going on. My friend had gone to bed and didn’t wake up and I was afraid the same thing would happen to me. After tossing and turning for a while, I gave up on sleep and went down to the hotel’s lobby to see if they’d managed to make coffee. Of course, there was none.
Walking outside, I went to the lake’s shore and stared at the vast expanse of placid water ringed by mountains as the sun began to rise. It was very beautiful, but I found myself wondering if that old monk had been right; that we’re just drops of water that will eventually fall back into an eternal sea. Was my friend still who he was? What would become of me? Spiritualties that say you must lose all sense of self in order to access the divine have always bothered me. The idea of losing all I am to become one with some kind of Cosmic Om just seems like a journey of the alone into The Alone. The negation of your being to return to Being is, when you think about it, violent. Not my idea of a “happy return.”
The next evening after dinner I decided to take my family on a drive. We’d already been all around Lake Tahoe, so I pointed my car in the opposite direction and, as we summited a mountain, felt my ears pop as we climbed past 7300 feet. Then, after we’d gone over the ridge, we were treated to quite sight. Below us the Carson Valley shimmered in the light of the setting sun as the Sierra Nevada’s glowed with purple mountain majesty. “You don’t see this in Jersey,” I said to my wife. Cradled in the valley below, the town of Minden seemed like a child’s toy and, awed by the beauty being lavished before me, I realized there was so much more of this world for me to see. From the heights, the view unfolded for a hundred miles, making it seem like the mighty mountain chain stretched into infinity. Then I remembered something a guy once wrote, “The finite cannot contain the infinite, but the infinite can easily contain the finite.” Maybe that’s what that old monk meant – that there’s plenty of room in existence for all of us as us. No negation, no violence or loss – just a happy return to the place where every tear is wiped away.
During the sermon at the funeral, the priest told us what Andy’s wife had said to him soon after her husband of thirty-two years died. “I’ll can just see Andy saying, ‘Oh Goody!’ when he entered heaven.” Looking at the vista below my feet as grief and joy surged within me, I knew infinity, far from being a solvent into which we dissolve, was the very thing that allowed us to be and that it’s peaceful beauty not only contained us but was the very thing that would make “all things new.” Oh, goody indeed. Perhaps that’s why Andy had a bemused smile on his face when I saw him, as if telling me:
“Steve, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”