Salt * Wet * Fish

An email from Tricycle’s Daily Dharma reminded us how we could be viewing life, death and sickness.

This comes from Ajahn Brahm’s story about a nun dying of a sickness (I think its cancer) asked Ajahn Brahm to visit her in hospital. When he went there, the nurses refused to let him in and they said that the nun said explicitly that she not be disturbed. The nurse promptly showed him the notice the nun pasted on to the door. “You see the sign?” But Ajahn Brahm pointed out to her that it says “Anyone, EXCEPT Ajahn Brahm”! When asked why, the nun says that people who visits her makes her feel sad and they talk of nothing but her conditions and how she will be. But when Ajahn Brahm visits her, he tells her jokes and she feels better after that!

I feel that we are conditioned by society to “empathize” with sickness and grasp on to life. As such, many people sometimes find it difficult to accept that our closed ones are in sickness or are dying from sickness. We may also feel that the only response in such case is sadness, that non-sadness is a show that we are unconcerned and worst still “insensitive”. Even some people may feel that depression, pain and sadness is divine, in a self-flagellating way.

Yet very often, the dying person may need more peace and happiness than people crying around them and reminding them how painful they must be in or should be in (if they are not). Ajahn Brahm reminded us that we should offer the dying person the peace and quiet to go, because many times people who are dying do go because they worry about their loved ones when they depart. The best that the loved ones can do is to offer peace and a rest of mind to the person that everything will be well-taken care of when a person departs. That he/she should not worry about it and can go when the time finally comes.

Sometimes when a person is suffering and is in pain, he/she may want to release her/himself from such ordeals. However, if we keep crying “Don’t go, don’t go!”, this may cause the person not to be able to leave in peace and hold on to this life longer, prolonging the pain and sufferings.

Its not something we can change overnight nor ourselves overnight. Even if we try it, we may feel odd about it, as if we are really insensitive or did a terrible wrong. But that is our internalized values trying to fight change. However, once we recognise that life, sickness and death is no more different than the changes of the seasons, the changes of the mornings and nights, the rise and fall of waves in the ocean, our perspective may change and we may then learn and know how to deal with such issues in a better, perhaps correct, manner.

Tricycle’s Daily Dharma

May 18, 2006

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Hospital Etiquette

When you visit someone in the hospital, talk to the person and leave the doctors and nurses to talk to the sickness.

–Ajahn Brahm in Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?
from More Daily Wisdom, edited by Josh Bartok, Wisdom Publications
(http://www.wisdompubs.org)

http://www.tricycle.com/issues/1_381/dailydharma/2515-1.html

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