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Oban, Scotland.
April 2010.
The striking landscape of Scottish West Highlands laced with pockets of water, raced past us as the Bus sped up the narrow roads that snaked across the lush green country side.
I flashed a glance at my fellow traveller. She was anchored in her quietness.
The way she seemed most times since I met her the previous day.
Partly it might have been her personality. Partly it maybe, like she said last night, “my English could be better”. I disagreed with her in my head about the language part.
She articulated in much better English than she gave herself credit for.
It didn’t help I didn’t speak German.
She focussed on the mobile landscape, as it appeared and disappeared across the window of the fast moving bus. It seemed like she was photographing the scenery in her mind’s eye, frame by frame, to be reminisced later.
The ride to the Ferry dock on Craignure was about an hour from Tobemory which was on Isle of Mull. We had just hiked there and left reluctantly hurrying to catch the last Bus.
The trail wrapped around the lush green hill to reach the Lighthouse. We sat on the grassy mound on top of the hill for hours, mostly silent, watching the boats go by in the Ocean below.
They were those coveted moments of deep peace.
The bus was moving faithfully towards its destination. We would be on time.
Occasionally, maybe remembering, she would turn to acknowledge me by radiating, by now her trademark, open agenda-free, smile that seemed to take roots in her big deep intelligent eyes. There was a certain Peace she seemed to have settled into by now.
I started to become aware that was I was only partly aware of my immediate surroundings.
My awareness seemed to oscillate between thoughts i was lost in and the beautiful landscape I was so lovingly enveloped by .
The land or the energy of the land, seemed to womb me in a safety and embrace that relaxed my body into a deep sigh.
But….it also started giving my body Permission and Safety.
This brought forth my dormant Pain to be processed. Like letting go of carcasses of some unfinished business.
In the recent time, like many many people, I was getting immersed in waves of the unprocessed pain that I was releasing and the loneliness coming from disconnection from the Old.
Pain, are memories, of undesirable experience that we resisted experiencing.
I had my fair share.
All of that were being brought forth to be experienced, so I could release it and be free of it.
Meanwhile through this process my mind was terrified losing its reference points…its beliefs and concepts. All decimated mercilessly by this thing called Change.
All my reference points which also served as my measurement of some sort of sanity in this world, had been either dismantled or destroyed.
I felt like I was Dying. Again.
I have died many times in my life. Maybe too many times.
But all that now seems like dress-rehearsal compared to what I was putting myself through now.
A while ago I knew this was happening.
As I changed, so did my relationships, what I did for a living and how I did it.
Hence my lifestyle and my entire life.
Everything, my world, that was strung together around my old self started falling apart rather quickly.
Anything or anybody that could keep up with me remained.
Which is, very few to none.
Someone who I used to admire, summarizing it for herself, rather uncharitably, said to me “You are quick to destroy relationships around you, aren’t you?”.
I saw it differently.
I preferred the line from Fiona Apple’s song.
I’m good at being uncomfortable so I cant help changing all the time.
So I knew I was dying. With it, everything and everybody, unwilling to negotiate with my change in position.
What did not know was how prolonged this process would be.
What I didn’t know was how meticulous and intense this sweep of breadth and width of my being would be.
It didn’t take a Psychic to to tell me I was completely lost.
This Loss of…..beliefs, concepts and its various combinations. Those one seemed to identify with to come up with this device called Self-Identity.
Feeling lost, looked at from another perspective, was Freedom.
Not identified with, hence not bound by, any firm beliefs of Who To Be and Where To Be.
In the bus, the landscape was passing by faster, more of blur as I was getting wrapped up in the tornado of my thoughts and emotions.
In my head, I started making trips, transporting old fears from the past into the future.
An yet-to-be-formed Future was now being polluted with possibilities created from a bygone past.
I was in my head constantly, I noticed. I somehow allowed its dance to dance, doing nothing with it.
It was very painful to be in my body as I experienced it all. Yet that’s where I needed to be.
I was everywhere but not Here and Now .
But I also decided not to assault myself with thoughts of why I wasn’t “Here and Now” taking in all the landscape as my fellow traveler was so effortlessly doing.
Also the experience I came to have was not what she came to have, even though we were in the same boat. I was getting what I came to get.
It was then that her question brought me back from my bowls of my thoughts, to the bus, back to the moment in time.
I don’t know what it was.
If it was when she did finally talk it got my rapt my attention? Or the strangeness of the question?
Who knows why but I heard her question word by word in slow motion.
“How would you want your funeral?” She asked.
I was thrown off balance.
She still had “that smile” going.
I scrutinized her face for humor or to unearth where she was coming from.
Did she just ask me about my death?
“Why would you ask that out of the blue?” I quizzed her.
She shrugged her shoulders.
I weighed in to pursue the “why” deeper or answer her question.
She had said earlier “you ask…why…. a lot, don’t you?”.
So I decided to dig inside me to answer her question.
Somehow biological dying seemed a piece of cake. But death of my Mind and all that it identified with, felt excruciating.
I have many times wondered how dying would be like. I was not afraid of it.
But Living seemed harder sometimes. Not just existing but really Living.
Death was a release, in the Indian culture I was born into. Like talking of old clothes body, and stepping into new clothes, they would say. A significant part of us, was Eternal.
But talk of Death was zealously avoided in my adopted American culture.
A significant mass seem to get by with this pretense that Death somehow didn’t exist.
But when it was close, a stubborn denial and a shock that it was actually going to happen, set in. Maybe even this hope that it somehow could be avoided.
My thoughts returned to her question.
Perhaps I was caught off balance by the directness of the question and it coming out of the blue.
I paused before replying.
“I don’t care about what happens here after I die.”
“In lot of ways its easy for the person who is dead. They are gone.
“It seems harder for the people they leave behind. People left to grieve the loss of the one they loved. To deal with the situation that their loved one is not here anymore”
“How would I want a funeral?
I think I would leave it to the people who I leave behind. They can mourn or celebrate”.
“Its not up to me to dictate how they should feel when I’m gone when they are the ones left to deal”
She nodded.
“how about you? How would you want your funeral?” I volleyed the question back at her.
( to be continued )
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