Tricycle | Awake in the World

Both my parents died at the end of 1998, each of them on a Monday, a little less than three months apart. Although they had been divorced for forty years, they flared out together like two long-tailed meteors burning a nasty parallel gash in the cold dome of the winter sky.

Even though I have been practicing Zen meditation for twenty-eight years and working as a front-line hospice volunteer for ten, nothing helps. Nothing. The back of my head has been ripped off and I’m immune to that unctuous snake oil salve of “no coming, no going; no birth, no death” that well-intentioned Zen friends dab on my raw scalp. Give me good old Rujing from twelfth-century China any day, who, when setting fire to Elder Yi’s funeral bier, cried out, “Ah, the swift flames in the wind flare up - all atoms in all worlds do not interchange.”