Tripping Over the Threshold

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

I’ve always been a little bit glib about death. The idea of impermanence has come easily to me. Too easily. But lately, my curriculum has all been about encountering the physical reality of death. Looking at it up close. Taking it seriously.

Accordingly, three infant robins fell out of their nest onto our balcony. Their mama had built her nest on top of the part of the air conditioner that extends outside of the house. This was before it got really hot. We saw her flying up to attend to her babies, but we never really saw the birds. Then one day the temperature shot up. Unthinking, we turned on the AC and they fell out of their vibrating shelter, two to the floor of the balcony, one to a wrought iron Italian deco chair where they struggled to survive. Mama watched over them, but in the morning one was dead, one was missing and one was trying hard to stay alive. I picked up the one who had died and carried her in a paper shopping bag down to the pond where I left her in a garden of purple flowers and told her ahavah rabbah ahavtanu…you are loved with an unending love.

Photo by Donna Koch on Unsplash

A few days before that, a Friday, I submitted to a covid shot. I made an appointment at my trusty local CVS. But when I got there, they told me they were flat out of the juice and I’d have to go to a different CVS location. Something seemed a little off. Eventually, the politically loaded syringe, the favorite weapon of anti-science conspiracy theorists, was jabbed into the muscle of my left upper arm and I checked that errand off my to-do list. That night I was visited by demons wielding sandpaper. I encountered a non-sleep sleep, thinking all night that I was going to fall out of bed like the robins, so restless was my rest. All my covers ended up on the floor. My brain was a popcorn maker, a pinball machine, not preoccupied with any particular subject, just racing and leaping around, crashing against the walls of my skull. I woke up exhausted and rattled.

On Saturday, I slept all day. I would wake up, use the bathroom or get a glass of water, and grope my way back to the chaise in the living room to go back to sleep. Sleep was all I wanted in life. Want isn’t even the right word. I was beyond wanting. I ate a little but only out of habit. My usual more than healthy appetite was gone. I was not sick to my stomach and I had no respiratory symptoms. I simply didn’t care about food or anything else. Anything that wasn’t my pillow seemed irrelevant if not foreign. It was dizzying and nightmarish. There was nothing to hold on to. No up or down. No mental or emotional content to the experience. You couldn’t even call it an experience. It was more like an predicate state without a subject. Blurriness, scratchiness, indolence. This must be what the Buddhists mean by aimlessness, I thought. I wasn’t loving it.

Then at around eight in the evening after eating a half an apple for dinner, I was suddenly very hungry. The sensation was so distinct and unexpected. I became aware of my desire to put something into my mouth which, convention suggests, would end up in my stomach. I made a sandwich of leftover asparagus omelet on a baguette. It was so good, I could have cried. Mostly it was good to register desire and know how to fulfill it. Such a feature of animal reality. The side effect of the vaccination had turned the tables on me. Instead of walking around in a cloud of desire - I want to eat, I want to be noticed, I want to be appreciated - There was nothing. There was nothing to want. It felt like death and I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. Now that I’ve grown closer to my own end of life, I’m somewhat less enthusiastic about moving on and I’m glad for this. I’m glad for embodiment and for the recognition of the preciousness of life. I’m glad for desire and purple flowers and asparagus omelets and I am not reluctant to say, I’d like some more, please.