Life & Death: The non-boundried Bardo

I had a chance this week to look death in the face. My cell phone voice mail carried a message from work, saying my in-home client would not live through the night. I turned my car from the direction I was heading, to the direction of her home, to visit one last time. As I knocked on the door, a new team of high level care-giving nurses (strangers to me) answered the familiar door. The nurses were kind and gentle. You could tell they knew how to dance in, around and through the stage play of death and dying.

I identified myself to them as one of the care-givers for the woman inside their current care. They quietly let me in with a knowing and inviting smile. I took off my coat, put it on the same chair I always did and entered the very different atmosphere that filled the living space with a non-familiar vibration of death. I entered the bedroom and gazed upon the body that was now almost empty of persona. There was a softness all around that seemed to balance the heavy grey toned palate of her skin. Ninety seven years of life, was now coming to a quiet end. My greeting to her seemed to float across an invisible wavelength, as if the tones approached her ears, bounced off, and traveled through the air, like water soaking into a sponge.

This was a body cloaked in a veil that was invisibly draped between us. Nothing seemed "real". No borders or edges defining this place, no metronome tick, tick, ticking to define this time and space. I leaned in close and said my hello and goodbye with an assured level of happiness and joy from both sides of the uncommon veil between us.
I whispered her favorite prayer we would say together each night at bedtime. This time the sound and words carried an acknowledged sense of a timelessness I cannot describe.

When I got home, it was all I could do to sit in the experience that none of what we see moment to moment is real. Nothing. Not even the passing of time. Not even the events that seem like beginnings and endings...nothing. Some how, this moment of unreal ending…helped me let go of everything and anything if even for just one moment in the non-time of time.

I sat and looked out my livingroom window – soaking in everything and nothing at the same time. It was still. It was calm. It was life and death holding up what seemed like mirrored hands against one another – creating a still point of existence and nonexistence only a breathe width apart. The Tibetan Book of the Dead talks of the “space in between” life and death as the Bardo. Perhaps for one moment in my life, I caught a sense of that in-between the worlds invisible vibration. Each day living and dying with this client was a gift – even up to the moment we so limitedly call the “last” moment. Today her gift to me was the gift of noticing that which cannot be measured, timed or captured, but only sensed when we each remember to do nothing but “allow”. Just allow.