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126 VVVVVVVVVVV Buddhist Reflections on Life and Death A Personal Memoir ALAN POPE Death Becomes an Issue When I was eight years old, my mother came home one day with fresh donuts. When I greeted her in the kitchen, my excitement over her offering yielded to the seriousness of her tone and the dampened nature of her energy. She told me that a neighborhood boy whom I knew had hanged himself following an illness. His mother found him in the closet with the belt from his robe tied around his neck. Stunned, I took one of the glazed donuts from the box held out before me, retreated into my mother’s upholstered rocking chair in the den, and sat in stone silence. Staring into space, I was bombarded by a swirling mix of emotions for which I had no experience and no name. Biting into the donut, I tasted nothing. I experienced on that day the magical transformation of a world that was safe and playful into one filled with ominous threat. The unfathomable image of my sometime playmate hanging by his neck in his closet defied all understanding. How could he have done that? How could he have been so unhappy? What was it like to have found him? Life now posed possibilities I hadn’t known existed, possibilities whose proximity to people I knew made them frighteningly real. My innocence was robbed that day, and the comfortable sequence of events that moved through time in my ordinary allAmerican neighborhood suffered a disruption of which I could make no lasting sense. So I did all I could, and I forgot about it. I went about my life, my childhood, as though nothing had happened. But something had happened : a seed had been planted, one that would blossom into a fascination with death. In high school, despite valuing mathematics and science above all else, I took a world literature class. It was fabulous. But as much as I loved reading writers such as Dante, Erasmus, and Molière, it was Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich that impacted me most deeply.1 This slim volume, which inspired Martin Heidegger’s massive existential treatise, Being and Time, revealed to me the inextricable link between how we live our lives and how we die.2 I felt called to live my life with meaning and purpose, in such a way that I could die in peace, with a clean conscience. Putting that into practice, however, would prove difficult. In Tolstoy’s novel, the protagonist unexpectedly finds himself, in midlife, on his deathbed. In the course of dying, Ivan Ilyich initially denies not only the fact of his dying, but also the reality of how he has lived. Although the reader learns that Ilyich had abandoned his own moral virtue for the sake of professional ambition, and that he had married for status rather than love, on his deathbed Ilyich clings to the dogmatic assertion that he has lived his life as he ought to have—“pleasantly and properly.” Nevertheless, such self-assurances are consistently interrupted by a sharp pain in his abdomen that abruptly brings him out of his head. Being grounded in here-and-now physical reality leads him to question the selfimage he has developed and the choices he has made. Hearing the call of his own conscience, he realizes how miserable his adult life has been. Against all manner of psychological resistance, he eventually cannot deny the inevitable truth—that he has lived his life all wrong. This wrongness, as portrayed by Tolstoy, is in having lived a life of social conformity, a life of “shoulds” rather than “wants.” I was petrified by this possibility for myself! What if at the time of my dying I were to realize I had lived my life all wrong? How horrible! This concern amplified a brewing period of rebellion in my own life, and I came away from the story determined not to surrender my free will by blindly following the dictates of social convention. However, in so steadfastly adopting this stance, I resisted the conformity that is necessary for our healthy engagement with social life. The work of an adolescent includes adopting social personas from whose cloth our own unique person will be cut, and in attempting to avoid this process, I became bound in a web of confusion. I also failed at that time in my life to appreciate the final scene of Tolstoy...

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