What Happens if we Don't Turn Away?

I woke at 4 AM, and darkness took hold of me.

With dawn still hours away and my wife breathing softly next to me, it struck me that I had been with her for nearly six years. As a child, six years was a lifetime! Why was time slipping away so quickly now?

I wondered if perhaps I was no longer cataloguing memories in the same way as I did as a child. Then, each day included firsts -- a first touch of snow on the tongue, a first bash of my head into a cabinet -- whatever it was, it struck me with awe and wonder. Do memories no longer generate a narrative in the same way? Is that why time seems to disappear?

Then, from those mystical waters between waking and dreaming, a vague sense of dread arose as I peered into the dark. An unrecognized thought circled in murky water till it rose and took shape in whispered words. Could this be the early stage of Alzheimer's, when time no longer forms a story? This must be what my mother felt as her mind slipped with the rainwater down the sloped roof. Would that be my fate too? Are you already with me, death, stealing one memory at a time?

In the nighttime, the shadows come alive. Ghosts of people we loved and lost take shape as our own fears. Shadowy anxieties gather in our bedrooms, and they see right through us as we try to make them out in the dark.

It's tempting at such times to distract ourselves, go get a cup of tea, perhaps grab our phones to scan a newsfeed. But what happens if we don't turn away? This is Dogen's notion, ippo-gujin - translated as "studying one dharma to the very end" (here), or becoming one with "the total exertion of a single dharma" (here). This is the path of integration rather than escape; we meet each visitor as a sacred guest. 

I breathed. I did not put on my daylight armor. And the flutterings of my heart met advancing images from former lives. My mind's eye adjusted, and memories gathered in a procession of loosely associated griefs.

My mother and father now a few years gone were the first visitations. I let these incorporeal beings enter me, and sadness rose like tidewater. 

Then a stream of memories washed through me  -- memories of people I'd loved and lost. A dear high school friend. Two family constellations. So many of life's precious moments now evaporated. 

This is what I had feared  --  my own grief. Yet allowing tears to form was so fulfilling, so touchingly sweet.

I was not destroyed by these visitations. Welcoming whatever arises is often the greatest relief. Sometimes our fears just need to confess themselves.

Gradually, the rain slowed to a drizzle on the roof. The ghosts, finally recognized, dissolved into the air. I once again heard the sweet quiet breathing of my wife. And new tears formed in my eyes for she who was with me. As I drifted back to sleep, the early liquid song of a tiny bird poured into the hollow of my ear. "Just this," she sang again and again, accompanying me into a dream.

*Special thanks to Zach Horvitz for the pointer to Dogen's term.