Gone to His Eternal Sleep

I just had my cat put down at the vet's. His name was Jaidee, and he was the sweetest cat anyone could ever have. I had him almost fifteen years before he developed intestinal cancer, much like my Tao-Tao did a few years ago, and we knew he wouldn't be around long after his diagnosis. Prednisolone kept him going for a couple of months, and I was hoping he could hang on till my wife returned from Thailand in three days so she could see him one last time and say a proper goodbye.

But Jaidee suddenly seemed to have trouble passing stool yesterday and began looking very uncomfortable, so I took him to the vet today virtually certain it would be a one-way trip for him. I was right.

Perhaps it's better that my wife wasn't here to deal with that. But now I'm home alone and very, very sad. For as much as I've loved the cats who have blessed my life and would dearly love, even now, to adopt another, it doesn't seem financially feasible at my age and under my circumstances. Not if I want to be here long enough and financially able to provide another cat with the lasting love and every kind of care it might need for the rest of its precious life.

I want to share my pain with others. But the truth is, no one cares or can care as much as I do. Even if they've had and lost cats, their cats weren't my cat, and they weren't me. And, when you come right down to it, I wouldn't even want anyone to feel as bad as I do right now. Or I would and I wouldn't.

I won't keep on about this. Jaidee has gone to his eternal sleep, and I may not be terribly far behind. Not from "unnatural" causes but from pathologically natural ones.

All I can say is that I don't believe in a heavenly afterlife, but if there is one, I'd want the cats I've loved over the past thirty-five years to be part of it, and especially my sweet Jaidee. There'll never be another like him.

A Melancholic Birthday

Another birthday came and went yesterday. In some ways, the year preceding it was a typical year for me. I won’t dwell on that. But some noteworthy things, at least to me, occurred.

My wife and I caught Covid on separate occasions after being fully vaccinated and boosted, and it was no worse than a standard cold for either of us, except that I had an unusual sore throat for a couple or so days.

I saw a local 15-year-old bowling prodigy named Saphyre compete in the U.S. Women’s Open in Rohnert Park last August and stun and thrill me by beating some of the best female bowlers on the planet, including my beloved New Hui Fen, on one of the oil patterns. Later, she took Jillian Martin, probably the most heralded female junior bowling phenom ever, to the wire in two Storm Youth Championship tournaments and convinced me that she’s a young sorceress with her amusingly nonchalant bowling style, deadly powerful release, and deceptively wizardlike lane play skills. Watching and rooting for her has been one of my biggest recent if not lifetime surprises and pleasures.

Speaking of bowling, I shot a 300 in league a few months ago, and a 290 and 278 more recently, but I’ve struggled to carry consistently and score well on the new lanes and oil, which is all the more frustrating when I see so many others in my league tearing them up. But I attribute some of this struggle to my unwillingness to put in the time and effort to get and do better. Isn’t that a central element in the story of my life? And can I change that? Will I change that? Not only in bowling but in every other important respect?

My mom seems to be doing well as she approaches 85, but I’m not sure how forthcoming she’s been about her health and well-being. One concern I have is that one of her step-daughters who lives nearby and has been so helpful to her may be moving away before long, and I will need to take up the slack that I may be ill-equipped to do.

My wife is still with me but I don’t know for how long as her parents back home get older and older and become more dependent on her overworked younger sister. When she finally does leave, my life may change drastically.

Finally, arguably the most important event of the year since my previous birthday and unquestionably one of the most important of my entire life occurred less than two weeks before my newest birthday. My best friend of over fifty years, Craig, was found dead in his car with a gunshot wound to the head miles away from his residence in Southern California. The police and medical examiner have ruled it a suicide, but I and everyone I know who knew him just can’t believe he killed himself. There were no signs whatsoever, even in retrospect, that pointed to suicidal ideation or tendencies, and there’s no apparent reason why he would have done such a thing and many reasons why he wouldn’t have done that to himself at this point in his life when he had so many things he enjoyed doing and so many achievable plans for his retirement. Yet, it looks like his family has accepted the ruling and that he will be cremated and buried soon.

I’ve been shy and reclusive all my life and have had no other friends for as long as I did Craig or shared as much with any other male friends over the decades as I did with Craig. I got drunk for the first time with him. I saw my first Bruce Lee movie and countless other movies thereafter with him. I went to my first Mahavishnu Orchestra concert and many concerts later on with him. We bowled together. Played basketball together. Spent countless hours in each other’s company or on the phone talking about this and that.

Even as our interests diverged over the past few years and we had far less contact than we used to, it was reassuring to know he was out there and was someone I could turn to if I ever needed him, and I hope and think he felt the same about me.

His sudden and mystifying departure has left a hole in my life. I will miss not only our phone conversations, occasional visits, Facebook messagings, and so much else, but I will miss the warm reassurance that the potential for sharing a reminiscence or other simple pleasures of our abiding friendship exists even when it resides in the background. For now it exists no longer.

Craig told me that after his parents died years ago, he became acquainted with a psychic who could communicate with his parents and enable him to communicate with them through her. I’m very skeptical of this but not completely convinced it wasn’t true; he told me some amazing things about what he learned from that communication that gave me pause. And so I wish that if my friend does consciously survive in a different or alternate realm in which he retains awareness of what’s going on here and an emotional connection with family and friends still inhabiting this plane of existence, he will find a way to reach out to that psychic so that she can reach out to me and tell me what really happened to him and why, and so that I’ll really know there’s life beyond death.

And now I look toward another year with plans and goals to fulfill, new friendships to forge and old ones to strengthen, new challenges to face, and all without the reassuring constant in my life that was Craig.

RIP, Old Friend

I learned last night that my best friend of over fifty years died of undisclosed causes sometime Saturday night or Sunday and his body was found in another county than where he lived. The details are very murky so far, but I’m hoping to learn more over time.

He had retired very recently and was looking forward to traveling the world to see new sights, meet new people, play poker, at which he was quite proficient, and live the good life he had worked so long and so hard to be able to enjoy and surely would have.

He and I had so many fun times together going all the way back to the late 60’s. We met in a junior bowling league, played basketball, got drunk for the first time, attended many great Bay Area concerts, saw scores of movies, especially of the martial arts variety, and hung out a lot. Over the years, our interests and activities increasingly diverged and we’d had very little contact recently, but we were still and would have always been there for each other if needed.

I don’t know yet what happened to him and am still getting over the shock of his sudden and very unexpected death, but I’ll miss him.

Rest In Peace, old friend.

Not Just Another Birthday Post

For years, I’ve published birthday blog posts where I’ve said I don’t know if I’ll be alive for my next birthday. Well, that’s never been truer than today.

This is not only because I’m a year older and closer to my end whenever that will be, but also because a deadly viral pandemic called Covid-19 is raging around the globe sickening people and claiming lives at exponential rates of increase, and older people are especially prone to die from it with respiratory failure and cardiac arrest.

I am now closer to 70 than I am to 60, placing me squarely and ominously in the “older people” camp, and I may even have one or more co-morbidities of an, as yet, undiagnosed nature that render me even more vulnerable to the virus’ death grip than does my age alone. I’ve never lived through such a time of overt existential threat, discounting, perhaps, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I’m far from certain that I’m going to come out the other side of this one.

So, this could be my last birthday blog post. Perhaps even my last blog post of any kind. Or maybe there will be many, many more if I not only come through this plague intact, but also renew my desire to write and publish after having passed through an extended dry spell of disillusionment with trying to write anything worth saying and sharing.

It’s not that I have something profound to say here today. I just want to indelibly mark this occasion rather than let it pass unrecognized. I want to express my deep gratitude for the life I’ve been fortunate to live. I say “fortunate” because I don’t begin to deserve the comforts I’ve enjoyed or the pleasures and joys I’ve experienced. I’ve wasted my life and burdened others unconscionably and let them down and worse over the decades.

But if I can make it through this pandemic with my modest passions and abilities intact, maybe I can accomplish something before the end finally comes. I wake up every morning grateful to be alive to greet another day, and I go to bed each night reciting the following prayer of my own composition:

“Lord, please forgive me and everyone else for all the unjustifiable harm we’ve caused ourselves and others and for all the times we could and should have helped ourselves or others but didn’t. And, Lord, please help all of us to do and be our very best from now on and to mindfully shine as bright beacons of wisdom, strength, equanimity, compassion, and lovingkindness lighting the path of goodness, truth, and beauty.”

If I have appreciably longer to live than I think I might, my greatest hope is that I can become a fuller and more radiant embodiment of my nightly prayer for everyone in my life.

Happy Birthday to me in the Time of Covid-19, and thanks to everyone living and long passed who’ve made it possible for me to sit here this evening writing this post in gratitude for my bountiful blessings, remorse for my failings, and deep desire to do better with the time and opportunities that remain.

Eternal King of the Suburban Jungle

My Tao-Tao died on October 15. But for some reason, I didn’t blog about it then. Maybe it just hurt so much that writing about it while it was still raw would have been like rubbing salt in a wound. And maybe I was thinking so many thoughts and feeling so many powerful emotions that I couldn’t separate out what I needed to say from what I didn’t, and so I didn’t say anything.

But now I’m feeling more at peace with something I was initially told would happen much, much sooner. I wrote on October 7, 2017 that Tao-Tao had been diagnosed with high-grade lymphoma of the liver and intestines two days before and that without prohibitively expensive treatment with a still bleak prognosis, he probably had only a few days to live, maybe up to a couple of weeks if I fed him a nutrient-dense prescription food and gave him prednisolone every day.

I declined the intensive radiotherapy and chemo and opted for only the special food and medication, and, to my surprise and then growing astonishment, Tao-Tao’s few days extended to a few weeks and then a few months and finally passed the year mark ten days ago.

His vets began calling him a “miracle cat,” and I cherished the miraculous prolongation of his precious life as he kept on going with an irrepressible brightness in his big, beautiful eyes. But one of his vets, a leading diagnostic specialist in the Sacramento area, told me that someday the prescription food and medication would stop working and that Tao-Tao’s decline would change from slow and steady to extremely fast and unstoppably fatal.

So every day I got up praying that this would not be THAT day I’d been warned about. And then one day it was.

On an early Monday morning, I got up to see that Tao-Tao was not in the kitchen waiting if not crying for his food that he normally proceeded to gobble as though he were starving to death, which, in a sense, he was from his impaired ability to adequately absorb and process even the most nutritious food on the market. Instead, I found him in a dark closet, the kind of secluded indoor place where cats might go to die when they can’t disappear outside. And when I picked up his emaciated body, brought him out into the light and saw his strangely dull eyes and then, with hopeless hope, carried him into the kitchen and set food down for him that he not only didn’t eat but seemed completely indifferent to, I knew without question that his time had come.

I told my wife, and she was clearly very sad about it. She and I don’t treat pets like pets so much as like vital parts of the family. We love our cats almost as though they were our human children that we never had. But she knew, as I knew, that this day was long overdue, and she did her best to resign herself to it as she prepared to go to work and said to me just before she left that I should do what I thought was best.

I certainly wasn’t going to let him suffer needlessly until he died in the house. So, I made an appointment at the vet for that afternoon. An hour or so before it was time to leave, my wife came home early. She said she’d been crying so much at work that her coworkers advised her to take off early and just go home. She took some pictures of Tao-Tao, including one in his carrier just before I left with him, and spent a few final moments stroking, hugging, and kissing him before it was time for me to leave. She couldn’t bring herself to accompany us, and I didn’t blame her one bit. My grief over seeing through what needed to be done was enough for both of us.

Tao-Tao’s vet that day was one I hadn’t seen before. She had only recently started working there. But I liked her immediately. She, like all the vets there, was not only female but also a graduate of the local vet school which happens to be widely acknowledged as the leading vet school in the world.

I liked the way she handled and examined Tao-Tao with well-practiced skill and genuine tenderness and affection for her patient. And I loved how she seemed very empathic to my distress and didn’t rush me to come to a decision about how to proceed until I had been informed of and able to weigh all my options regarding testing and palliative care.

I decided not to prolong Tao-Tao’s suffering just so I could spend a few more hours or days with him and authorized them to euthanize him then and there. When she asked if I wanted to be present during the procedure, I said I did. She explained how the procedure would be carried out and then took TaoTao out of the examination room to insert a catheter into one of his front legs to facilitate injection of the chemicals that would end his life.

While they were out of the room, I tried to steel myself for what was coming. She brought Tao-Tao back in wrapped in a blanket and gently put him on my lap while I held him.

He didn’t seem fearful or distressed as she gave him the first of, as I recall, four injections of different substances. The final one stopped his heart, which she confirmed a minute later with her stethoscope. She then said I could be alone with him if I wanted for as long as I wanted and left the room. I began sobbing as she left the room. But as I looked at Tao-Tao, he seemed so at peace in his eternal rest, like he had fallen into a deep and blessed sleep.

I stroked him, told him how much I loved him, kissed him, and then tenderly placed him, still wrapped in his blanket, on the examining table, gathered my cat carrier, and quietly left the room. The receptionist out front said, “I’m so sorry” as I fought back my tears, croaked “Thank you,” and headed for the car.

Later that evening I walked to the grocery store, and, while I was shopping, I heard Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” for the first time in over a decade playing over the store’s speakers.

It had been quite a year, indeed, for our two cats. Neither of them had ever been seriously ill and taken to the vet since we acquired Tao-Tao from an animal rescue society over ten years ago and Jaidee from the same organization about two years later.

And then, just a little over a year ago, Tao-Tao began losing weight and acting listless. I finally took him to the vet, and, after a series of tests and consultation with a renowned veterinary diagnostician, eventually received the terminal diagnosis, and soon afterwards, Jaidee became deathly ill with a virus that almost killed him but was saved by intensive and very costly treatment.

Tao-Tao was a beautiful Russian Blue mix with gorgeously large green eyes that almost never registered anything but an almost Buddha-like equanimity and gentleness, and he had the most compliant disposition of any cat I’d ever had or seen. He was like a warm, silky-haired toy you could handle almost any way you wanted and he wouldn’t complain. And dosing him every night for a year with prednisolone tablets was incredibly easy every time as I would just gently push open his mouth, drop in the tablet, and he’d obligingly chew it a little and swallow it and then eat his last of many servings of canned food for the day before I went to bed.

There will never be another Tao-Tao. Rest in eternal peace, my sweet and lovely Buddha-boy.

A Dearly Departed Rat

I just found a dead rat lying in my backyard. I don't know how long it had been there or what killed it. There are many cats in my neighborhood. Yet, the rat didn't show clear signs of trauma. But then I didn't look too closely. I've always been squeamish about handling animal corpses or scrutinizing their posthumous decomposition.

Yet, I've also felt a lifelong love for animals, even rats. Maybe I wouldn't love rats if my house were infested with them or their fleas were causing a plague epidemic. But I don't think it is, and there's no plague in my neck of the woods, even though rats undoubtedly roam my suburban neighborhood, drawn here by accessible food and shelter.

For many people, the only good rat may well be a dead rat. But the way I see it, rats are relatively intelligent, sentient beings who probably feel emotions not so unlike what we feel and who, like us, want to be happy or at least free from suffering, and to go on living. I understand that rats, at least the specially bred variety, can even make good pets. I regard them as my distant cousins and, in more "spiritual" terms, manifestations of the Divine.

So, when I see a dead rat lying in my backyard, I feel tender sadness for it and hope it didn't suffer much when it died and that if there's a heaven for rats, it is there, and, if there is no rat heaven, it resides in painless oblivion.

May all us humans be so fortunate when we die.

Why I Don't Mourn My Friend's Death

Over a year ago, I wrote the following in the wake of something I wrote even earlier:

Sitting at the bedside of a good friend who seems, for reasons I don't fully understand, to be virtually comatose and close to death from cerebral hypoxia associated with an advanced stage of Alzheimer's. What an awful, cruel disease Alzheimer's is!

Three nights ago, my friend’s decline ended unceremoniously in a senior care home bed. It was the first time either I or my wife had ever watched anyone die “up close and personal.” My friend lie in bed, unresponsive to his environment, unblinking eyes wide open, gasping in a strange, rhythmically spasmodic manner for breath. And then after what seemed like ten or more seconds’  interruption in breathing, he breathed in and out a couple more times, closed his eyes briefly and opened them again, and then stopped breathing altogether. A hospice nurse arrived a half hour later to officially pronounce him deceased on July 10, 2017 at 11 pm.

I wish I could say I was struck by the momentousness of a life passing before my eyes, but I’d be lying. I felt almost nothing except sadness for my friend’s wife who, after taking tender care of her virtually comatose husband for over a year with almost superhuman diligence, lost the considerable monetary benefits she would have qualified for had he been able to hold on for just twenty-two more days.

Maybe one reason why I felt so little is because it seemed to me that my friend actually died over a year ago. Certainly, the shell of a person who lie helpless in that bed virtually unconscious for all those months requiring total care from his wife and other caregivers was not the man who watched TV with me at my house several times a week two or three short years ago and intelligently discussed politics, international events, religion, philosophy, and the copious personal adventures of his rich and varied life.

If I were to have felt anything besides sadness for his wife, maybe it should have been elation over the fact that my friend was now “free at last...free at last, thank God almighty [he is] free at last!”

Yet perhaps that possibility was tempered by various considerations such as my uncertainty over whether a fully dead or non-conscious entity can be better off than a conscious one any more than a rock is “better off” than a starving child, and of whether, if my friend’s consciousness continued in some posthumous condition or place, he actually suffered less when lying virtually comatose on this mortal plane. Suppose he died and passed on to some excruciatingly hellish afterlife or wandered alone and fearful in some strange new dimension.

Or maybe my friend’s death and death in general mean little to me anymore because life has come to mean little to me. The older I get, the more I see life as a pointless, futile exercise. My friend seemed to think of it that way too. In fact, we seemed to think a lot alike about a lot of things. Maybe that’s why we were friends.

An Afterlife Under Any God?

A dear friend of mine is in hospice care with advanced Alzheimer's Disease. The decline has been shockingly rapid, and I don't fully understand why, although I think it's probably for the best for his family and friends that it's happening the way it is instead of being much more drawn out.

Anyway, I posted something to Facebook last night about my friend, and another friend of mine, Tom, who recently met the unfortunate victim of this terrible disease at my house, made a comment about his hopes for the afterlife, and I replied with my less sanguine thoughts about what any real afterlife would likely consist of.

Here is what he and I wrote:

Me: Sitting at the bedside of a good friend who seems, for reasons I don't fully understand, to be virtually comatose and close to death from cerebral hypoxia associated with an advanced stage of Alzheimer's. What an awful, cruel disease Alzheimer's is!

Tom: Terrible, terrible. While I have no faith in the Gods that write books, I do hope that there is some sort of "veil" we pass through after death where we get some sort of explanation what life, in general, and our life, in particular, was all about.

It's not that I think a life between just birth and death is meaningless. It is just that I think a reason and meaning for having been alive is due us. In Hamlet, the Bard talks about "defeated joy."

Me: Tom, if we die and that's the end of our personal existence and consciousness, it won't matter to us whether we find out why we were here or not. But if we go on to inhabit forever and ever some conscious afterlife, as much as I, like you, would love to believe that we would learn the answers to all our pressing questions and reap huge benefits from this, I'm more inclined to think that posthumously everlasting life could eternally make the trials and tribulations of this ephemeral lifetime seem like a joyous picnic by comparison.

In other words, if so much inequality, injustice, and suffering can dominate this life, what's to stop this from occurring on a far more iniquitous and torturous scale in any life to come? A supremely loving, just, and merciful God? What God is that? One of the "Gods that write books"? Any God that created and sustains THIS unholy vale of earthly tears?

What do you think about Tom's and my comments, and what do you think happens to us after we die, and why do you think it?

Sudden Death

I found out today that my wife's dentist "passed away" recently. That's how his receptionist phrased it in a manner that sounded distressed. I was very surprised by this. And saddened. He appeared to be no older than his late 30's or early 40's, and I got the impression that his death came about not by traumatic accident or protracted terminal illness but with unforeseen suddenness from "natural" causes.

Dr. Cheng seemed to be an excellent and dedicated dentist. He and his wife owned the practice and practiced together. They have or, rather, she has two kids. My heart goes out to her. She will now be my wife's dentist.

And I am left solemnly reflecting on the fact that if a guy that young can die out of the blue, a much older guy like me can too and that I need to get my act together while I still have the chance.

They Say It's My Birthday

My calendar says it's my birthday, and the Beatles tell me I'm "gonna have a good time," so I might as well oblige. After all, why not? I can't have too many more birthdays in my future, if any. It seems like every year, someone I knew in grade school or high school passes. One of my best friends from those days died years ago. I even wrote a blogpost about it.

But what kind of "good time" do I want to have? Do I want to spend the day sating myself with hedonistic pleasure by eating, drinking, and being "merry"? Well, I couldn't do that even if I wanted to. I have driving and chores to do, including getting a new passport photo taken for an upcoming trip to Thailand, and bowling league tonight. Besides, hedonism seems overrated to me. I'm more into happiness, which can be almost the antithesis of hedonistic indulgence.

Yes, I know there are philosophers and therapists who say happiness is overrated too, and that the more we pursue it, the faster it recedes from us. But my notion of happiness borrows from Aristotle's "Happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with perfect virtue."

In other words, happiness is doing like they sing in the old U.S. Army commercial: "Be all that you can be," or, at least, working diligently to do this. It's living a life of integrity in fulfillment of one's highest principles and in patient but steadfast pursuit of one's grandest goals. And, to my way of thinking, it's mindfully doing all of this with the love to which Augustine referred when he wrote, "Love and do what you will" and Mother Teresa spoke of when she said, "In this life, we cannot do great things; we can only do small things with great love."

Some people say love is overrated. I say it's not rated highly enough by enough people. Too many make excuses for not loving their fellow humans and animal and plant brethren. I don't make excuses. I just have trouble loving people. I always have. But here, early into my seventh decade of life, I want to love more and to find ways to do it. One way to do it, it seems to me, is to act in a loving way.

Psychologists tell us that if we can't feel the way we want to act, then we can act the way we want to feel and our emotions will tend to follow suit. I believe this. When I smile, I feel happier. When I carry myself with confidence, I feel more confident. When I walk and talk and comport myself in a more calmly deliberate manner, I feel more mindfully contemplative. So, I want to devote today to doing all of those things. To acting loving, confident, and contemplative, and to wearing a persistent smile on my face.

Hey, there are worse ways to spend one's birthday. So, Happy Birthday to me, yeah!

My Comment to Roger Ebert About Life and Death

Roger Ebert has an outstanding blog that uses the films he reviews as a taking off point for more extended reflections on the themes and issues raised by those films. In a recent entry about Clint Eastwood's new film "Hereafter," he makes the following comments about death:

"When I write that I expect to experience no more after death than I experienced before birth, I receive comments from people who pity me. They wonder how I can possibly live with such a bleak prospect. I find it more cheerful than most of the other possibilities that have been floated. I don't want to come back as an insect, haunt unquiet places as a ghost, or gaze down benevolently on my loved ones below as they, and all their generations to the end of time, die from mayhem or disease. I am also offered the possibility that I will be absorbed in God's love for all eternity, which is a better offer, but lacking in definition. If that means what it seems to mean, and if God is infinite (as he must be), then the role played by "me" can hardly be aware or conscious in any meaningful way. But I will become part of the universal, you say? I already am. You, too...We live, we die. That is not a tragedy. The tragedy would be never having been born."

I just replied with a comment that awaits Ebert's approval before it appears. Here is what I wrote:

Roger, I agree with you that there's nothing "bleak" about the prospect of dying and returning to the same state of non-consciousness that presumably characterized us before we existed. But I disagree with you that there would be anything "tragic" about never being born in the first place. For whom would it be tragic? If one never existed, there would be nothing to regret missing out on the experience it never existed to have.

In fact, I'd go further and agree with philosopher David Benetar's premise in "Better Never to Have Been" that if our lives are simply, as Alan Watts characterized the prevailing non-religious view, "a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium," and, as Benatar argues, fraught with more pain and suffering than pleasure and happiness, the REAL "tragedy" for most if not all of us is that we WERE born. We'd have been better off had we never been at all.

Last Moments

Body lying flat on a last bed,
Voices whispering a few last words,
Mind watching a final memory glide past;
When will that drama come for you?
--7th Dalai Lama

The Making of a Teacher

I am still an educator. But formerly it was education for degrees; now it is education for living.
--Eknath Easwaran

I'm reading a wonderful biography. The book is entitled The Making of a Teacher: Conversations With Eknath Easwaran. It was written by two of Easwaran's students, Tim and Carol Flinders, who lived with him at his ashram, The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. Easwaran was a marvelous writer despite the fact that English wasn't even his native language. He grew up in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala and spoke Malayalam as his mother tongue, learning English as a second language in school and mastering it along with Sanskrit through his own diligence. In fact, he excelled so well in English that he became the leader of his high school debate team, fell in love with English literature, and became a very successful university professor of English in India.

However, he felt a higher calling over time to take up a spiritual path grounded in meditation and was transformed through his discipline and experience into a spiritual sage who came to the USA in 1959 on a Fulbright scholarship and ended up teaching, at U.C. Berkeley, what may well have been the first accredited meditation course in a major university anywhere in the country if not the world. He also founded the Blue Mountain spiritual center and retreat and the Nilgiri Press.

In the late 1980's, Tim and Carol Flinders, who lived at the Blue Mountain Center with Easwaran in a community of his devoted students from all walks of life, spent several months interviewing him for a biography they planned to write about him. The Making of a Teacher was the remarkable result, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested either in Easwaran in particular or in simply reading about the life experience of an enlightened and much beloved spiritual teacher.

Below is a passage from the book that deeply moved me. I read it in the wake of a recent oil spill in San Francisco Bay that has befouled water and beaches and killed and imperiled birds and other wildlife all along the area. In reading it, I also thought of my beloved Smokey and wished I had stayed with him until the very end. The passage illustrates beautifully how Easwaran looked at life and death and taught about them in his mindfully loving way.

Halfway up the beach, six teenagers stood in a huddle, scuffing the sand with their bare feet. They were looking down at something, and as we approached we saw that it was an immature harbor seal that lay just above the water line. It was panting heavily, its eyes wide open. Easwaran stopped and looked down at it. The trembling pup turned its eyes toward him, too weak to retreat. Carefully, Easwaran knelt on the sand and began to stroke the unresisting, doglike head, running his gloved hand back and forth over its damp fur. The seal did not turn away.

The teenagers watched with cautious interest. One of them was tall and slender, with quick, serious eyes and a headful of blond hair that moved with the breeze. He stepped forward from the group, then dropped to his knees beside the seal. He looked into its eyes, then looked long and steadily at the man who was stroking it.

Easwaran didn't look up but continued to stroke the seal's small, pointed head. For some time, the pup lay still, its wide, dark eyes fixed on Easwaran. Finally, the eyes dimmed and turned lusterless.

Easwaran turned to the boy.

The boy asked, "Is it dead?" "His body is dead," said Easwaran, standing up and brushing the sand from his knees.

"You mean. . .?" The boy glanced at the group of friends standing nearby, then back at Easwaran, who smiled warmly at him. Encouraged, he stood up slowly and asked, "Did you see how that seal looked at you?"

"Perhaps he knew I was his friend," Easwaran answered.

The boy pushed the long hair out of his eyes and paused again. He appeared to be struggling to frame another question.

Easwaran waited, unhurried. His seriousness matched the boy's own--softened, though, by the transparent affection that young people always elicit in him. He returned the gaze of the young man who was asking him, wordlessly, what the death of the seal pup meant. "It means that this same thing will happen to all of us," Easwaran said quietly, anticipating him. "To me, to you, to your friends here." He looked at the faces of the others, who stood watching with patient incomprehension. Then he turned back to the young man beside him. "But it will not be the end. Not for any of us."

Not a muscle moved in the young man's face, but the look of struggle was gone. His gaze was eager now, and searching.

Easwaran clapped him on the shoulder, gave him another smile, and said good-bye. Then, waving to the others, he took Christine's hand and started up the beach. Had the boy been a few years older, I guessed, Easwaran would have let himself be drawn out a little more. Later he confirmed my guess, recalling his favorite Upanishad, the Katha, in which a teenage boy boldly demands answers about the meaning of death from a sage who is as fierce as he is wise. "Teenagers can show tremendous spiritual potential," Easwaran said. "They have the passion, the desire, the idealism, the reckless daring to stake everything they have on an almost impossible goal. But these young people need time, you know. My way is terribly demanding. Before they take on meditation and these other disciplines, they need every opportunity to explore all the innocent pleasures of life--and they need to begin to see through them too!" Still, he added, if the young man on the beach were to turn up at one of his Tuesday night talks, he wouldn't be surprised. "I would be more than happy to see him."

More than happy. Spiritual teachers in the Indian tradition keep ceaseless watch for that special light in the eye of the most gifted students--the glint of gold. When the teenage hero of the Katha has passed the tests placed before him by the teacher and proved himself worthy of spiritual instruction, the crusty sage breaks into an uncharacteristic smile: "Blessed are you, Nachiketa!" he exults. "May we find more spiritual seekers like you!" (133-135)

Consciousness After Death?

When a cat dies, does it have a soul or consciousness that continues to live? If so, is it a consciousness similar to what it had before it died--feline consciousness? Or after its soul or consciousness is no longer bound by a feline nervous system, does it become something else, something very different, something grander, richer, and vastly more expansive?

And the same questions hold for people. If we are conscious after our body dies and that consciousness is no longer connected to a functioning brain and body, is it a radically different and greater kind of consciousness than what we know in this life?

I've probably wondered this before, but never as vividly as I'm wondering it now. It seems to me that consciousness after death, unbounded by its biological and other limitations in this life, would have to be something far different than we experience in this life, something so different that it is virtually alien to our worldly experience. Yet most of us think of the afterlife as a continuation of consciousness largely as we know it. Maybe a little brighter and wiser, but essentially the same.

I don't know if Smokey's consciousness still lives in some realm of existence or what form it might take if it does. But I find myself hoping, in the grip of my sadness, that if he still lives, so will I after I die and that he and I will be together again.