Death: The End of Self-Improvement by Joan Tollifson

Author:Joan Tollifson [Tollifson, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: amazon
Published: 2020-03-31T16:41:18.405233+00:00

Dying to Everything

The closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become.

—Leonard Koren

My friend Valjean and I took Mom on an outing to the nearby Lincoln Park Zoo. Valjean is the friend my age who would be dead in a few years from a fast-moving lung cancer. We wheeled Mom around the zoo in the wheelchair. Mom was mostly interested in the little children that were there, much more than the animals. She stopped and talked to lots of little toddlers and had these wonderful interactions with them and with their parents. She kept saying, “This is such a treat. This is such a blessing. This is such a wonderful day. Thank you so much.”

It became so clear that, in interactions with people, the content isn’t really important. It’s what’s under the content. Mom can’t always hear the words anymore, but she feels the love. The content is like an excuse to be together, and what matters is the love. Like the words of that old Louis Armstrong song, “What A Wonderful World”—under all the small talk, what we’re really saying is, “I love you.” That’s the main thing my mother has always talked about, that everybody needs to love each other, that I should love myself, that love is the most important thing.

She’s very proud of me, so she loves to tell people that I’ve written books, and when they ask what the books are about, my mother says, “They are about being who you are.” And she says, “That’s really important, to be who you are.”

In one sense, of course, you can’t not be who you are, on every level, relative and absolute, personal and impersonal. But “How am I not being myself?” is an inquiry, an invitation to notice if there are ways that I am not being true to who or what I truly am, whether that might mean pretending to be straight when I’m really gay, or pretending to be sweet and loving when I’m really feeling enraged, or pretending I’m just a neurotic little person when I’m really this vast boundless no-thing-ness that includes everything, or pretending I’m a fully enlightened somebody who knows how the universe works when I’m really just another clueless bozo on the bus. The question can be heard on many levels. It’s an invitation to stop, look and listen.

I felt as if I were in this stripping process, being with death, being stripped of so many things I’ve been holding onto—my mother, my sense of entitlement, my ideas for how the world should be—and I was feeling more and more deeply that what’s real is only the absolute simplicity of everything just as it is. I felt like this whole spiritual journey had been a stripping process, one in which I kept uncovering new and subtler layers of grasping, clutching, holding back, seeking outside myself. And the deepest truth is not to find an answer, but to live with the answer-less-ness.

Any urge to sum everything up in some neat and tidy formulaic package just wasn’t there anymore.

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