Oh, sister, when I come to knock on your door

Don't turn away, you'll create sorrow.

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore

You may not see me tomorrow. ^[1]

I still remember the call from our good friend, Andrea telling me she was driving to our meditation center because Steve, her husband and my good friend, had passed away there. I drove over in a daze, the reality of her words not quite sinking in. Andrea had already arrived by the time I got to our center, and when I saw her we both broke down crying. The medics had already left at that point, but there was an officer from the Berkeley P.D. there who kindly walked Andrea through the bureaucratic procedures one need to go through in a situation like this. Andrea made arrangements for Steve’s body to be transported to a crematorium in Oakland. It took about thirty minutes for the hearse to show up, and we mostly sat in silence, with a sob every now and then, still in a state of shock. When they finally showed up, there was a fair amount of time spent discussing the logistics of getting Steve’s body down from the 2^nd floor of the building we were in (Steve was a large man). Andrea said she would like to go in and see Steve’s body before they took him away and asked if would come in with her (Steve had passed away in the men’s room).

I had never really seen a dead body. Now I had been to funerals before, with the body on display. But that was a sanitized image of death, with the funeral pallor doing its best to make the body ‘life like’. Steve’s body was nothing like that. It was stiff and rigid, with his mouth agape. He was flat on his back, with his hands turned up, and his skin taking on a blueish tint. I broke down when I saw the body of my once vibrant and gregarious friend laid out cold on the floor, an image that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

It vividly brought home to me the Buddhist teaching that life is precious and short and we should not waste any moment. I started taking a hard look at what I had been doing (or not doing) with my life, and how consistent my actions actually were with the person I considered myself to be. While the idea had been percolating with me for a while, Steve’s death was really the catalyst that propelled me onto the path of becoming a teacher.

^[1] Dylan, B. (1975). Oh, Sister. On Desire. Columbia Records.