Growing up on Hosmer Avenue in Cleveland back in the 50′s had nothing to do with Buddhism until much later when I became a Buddhist. That’s what happens with any religion I suppose. You start seeing things through a specific prism. I was young on Hosmer, seven through nine I think, and my brother was two years older. We used to laugh about the assortment of relatives who were always sitting around in the kitchen whining about aches, pains, conditions, and surgeries. They’d plant themselves at the kitchen table and kvetch about their arthritis, pleurisy, gall bladders, livers, gout, boils, bunions, backaches, constipation, acid indigestion, etc. I remember that my brother and I would stand behind them with furrowed brows pretending that we were empathizing. Any reaction to their miseries on our part were irrelevant anyways because they rarely noticed or acknowledged our existence. They had everything that they needed: coffee and ears to hear of their suffering. “The Cleveland Plain Dealer” was always on the table, and my Grandmother Matilda would have the obituary page propped up on the sugar bowl to see who had died. Emily Krajewski, beloved wife of Stanley. “Aren’t they the ones from over on Seger Street that were always drunk, fighting and calling the cops on one another?”.
“Yep. That’s them. Probably died of cirrhosis.”
If the deceased was someone of more than passing familiarity there were other considerations.
When’s the wake?”
“What funeral home?”
“Who’s going?”
Once these matters were cleared up it would be back to sickness, disease, and general misery.Of course my brother and I loved them all with the obligatory love of youth that requires loyalty or at least ongoing association, but we saw them as a pathetic bunch of old losers, shuffling along together on their last downhill slope to the boneyard.
Alas, the tragic transience of time. Now that I’m sixty-five I feel a sense of identity and spiritual kinship with all of those dearly departed that my brother and I so cravenly mocked back in the day. My body has decided that it’s time to begin the final process of returning to the essential elements of earth, wind, fire, and water from whence it came. The only question is how long the final landing approach will take. I imagine the spirits of my relatives sitting around some floating, shimmering table in the sky, drinking golden coffee and having their last laugh. So be it then. As Ajahn Chah put it, each of us is no more than “a temporary assemblage of matter”. That’s it. Nothing more. It starts with the Buddhist concept of “anatta” (no self) which says that the whole idea that we possess an independent reality called “me’ or “self ” is an illusion with no basis in reality. The more we attach to “self “, the more we suffer. When did you become you? When did you become something more than a very temporary assemblage of matter, rising and passing away back into the void in less than an instant? But it’s a stubborn illusion, and our troubles start as soon as we identify with this body. No me, then who is there to suffer? The pain is inevitable. The suffering is optional. Easy to say, hard to experience. Sometimes we experience it gradually, and sometimes we see it in flashes. That’s why we sit. That’s why we practice.

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