Inside the Chönyid Bardo: Winner of the 2015 AWP Intro Journals Project in Nonfiction, selected by Sue William Silverman

It took us four days to discover that our service provider had switched our phone number without telling us. In those four days, we became accustomed to the absence of a ringing phone. I was too busy getting ready for a trip to Cassadaga, a Spiritualist camp in central Florida, to notice how quiet it had become. The only calls we received during those four days were from telemarketers. This should have signaled something was amiss, because our landline is on the Do-Not-Call registry. Then on the fourth day, Matt, my boyfriend, called a friend, who asked him why we’d changed our number and why we hadn’t bothered to tell him.

It is easy to lay blame somewhere in a situation like this, and I rested it solely on the planet Mercury. It was in the middle of a retrograde pattern, where the orbit appears to move backward through the night sky. According to astrologers, when Mercury’s orbit goes retrograde, communications break down, computers are hacked or crash with increasing frequency, contracts are broken, reliable people suddenly become unreliable, and the results can be chaotic. This mistake could be blamed on a new customer service agent who mistakenly hit the wrong button and canceled our phone service, but better to say it was a contortion of a planet millions of miles away—better to say it was the winged god playing a capricious game.

Panicked, the agent realized his mistake and switched us back on, but under a different telephone number. He might have been worried about his new job and told no one that the only string in the tin can that connected us to the rest of the world had been severed.

The first call I made when we got our new phone number (from a different, apologetic agent) was to a close friend, Michael, who’d been in for outpatient surgery.

“How did you know I was trying to reach you?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” I answered. “I just wanted to know how the surgery went.”

“Robbie died last night.”

Robbie, Michael’s best friend, my friend, Matt’s friend, Eagle Scout, husband. Dead. In the four days without our familiar phone number, we missed our last chance to talk with Rob, who’d been battling liver cancer for the last year.

Years earlier, during a period of major depression, I’d broken a newly blossoming clematis vine in the garden I was planting in Michael’s yard. When the vine snapped in my hands, I cried harder than I’d ever cried before. I thought I had killed the whole plant. I sobbed so hard I felt something snap inside with a loud crack, like a tree giving in to the lumberjack’s saw and falling, hard. I could feel a strange new pain, like poison smog escaping my body. It baffled me and made me wonder if I was being touched by something divine.

Robbie was certified in massage therapy and had mentioned that emotions are stored in the memory of our muscles, so I asked him, “What does this mean?”

“It’s nothing God handed you,” he said. “It’s just part of you getting your shit together.”

O ye Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, abiding in the Ten Directions, endowed with great compassion, endowed with foreknowledge, endowed with the divine eye, endowed with love, affording protection to sentient beings, consent through the power of your great compassion to come hither…. (Invocation to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, appendix to The Tibetan Book of the Dead)

I’m not a Buddhist. I’m probably not anything, but I call myself a pantheist. I decided a long time ago that I would believe in everything because I would hate to miss Heaven due to a technicality. While I am not Buddhist, when someone close to me dies I reach for my Tibetan Book of the Dead, in case my loved one might be lost and alone inside the chönyid bardo.

The chönyid bardo is...