By Sundari
Dear James, Dear Sundari,
Unfortunately, my dear son died fairly instantly in a motorbike accident. He was just 18 years old and seemed to be on a good trajectory. Although he had been in a lot of trouble with the police for drug dealing and other offences, he had completed his school qualification and was enjoying a solid apprenticeship.
He pushed all the boundaries and since he couldn’t do his car license because of his history of drug dealing, he was still on his motorbike … which was actually illegal I found out later. Instead of a 125cc, he had bought himself a 750cc Suzuki.
The accident though was not his fault, and someone cut in front of his path.
Despite his desire for kicks and high-risk taking tendencies, he was very kind and was really loved by all, and was very popular.
My issue as a father who lived together with him and had supported him along the way, is how to cope and let go. On the one hand, yes, it is many billions of moments ago and his Self is long gone somewhere else presumably, I miss his physical presence of course. My routine is now completely different, and I no longer need to taxi him to work at 5 am, etc. Looking at photos brings back all the memories. Not sure how to play it. Focus on staying in the present and not reminiscing too much, but that seems somewhat cold and inhuman.
When it is so close, discarding the body/mind is proving challenging for me.
Do you have any advice?
Are all my projections of him and memories of him Maya and should I aim to let go fast and move on or wallow in sadness a while.
I drive past the accident spot every day and have left his room the same so far. My ego mind would of course like to have him still around … but dropping that is not easy.
Sundari: My heart goes out to you as there is no easy way to navigate the pain of your loss, especially of one of our children. Life really can be brutal; it can feel like we are no match for it at times like this. Self-knowledge does not give us immunity against feeling what we feel as a jiva, and we must honor that. But it does give us the knowledge and the tools to deal with powerful feelings so that they do not take over the mind if we apply the teachings to our life. Karma yoga is perfectly designed to do this. Loss is part of life and guaranteed sooner or later. Nothing lasts in mithya. Self-knowledge, truth with a capital T is a rock that withstands everything mithya throws at it. It is our only armor in the ever-changing dream of Maya. May it carry you through the abyss of grief and protect you.
As the witnessing Self, see how poignant, deep, and beautiful is the jiva’s pain as it stares into the unfathomable depths of life, loss, and death. Feel the strength and intimacy with the Self as you do so. What a traitorous felon human love can be, granting us gifts beyond measure and then brutally taking them away. I understand your pain as I too have experienced it. Keep in mind that from Awareness he came, by Awareness he was sustained, and to Awareness, the Subtle body returned to be held in the bosom of the one Eternal Existence. You will miss his body, his presence, his voice, and the energy of love shared with him, that is normal. Yet you will never be apart from him because he is you. He has not left you. It is not possible. He has not gone anywhere as there is nowhere he is not as the Self, as are you.
There is a purpose to everything we experience in life, particularly suffering, because it turns the mind inwards towards the Self, instead of outwards, towards the world. Isvara always gives us what we need to grow, there are no mistakes. Your son’s passing and your life with and without him are all part of the blueprint or bigger picture of this incarnation. Its sole purpose is to realize the Self.
Nobody is ever born or dies because the Self is non-dual and eternal. Only objects that are ‘born’ and that ‘live’ ever ‘die’. Your son’s incarnation as the person you knew and loved has come to an end, but the essence of who he is, Awareness, which is the same as your essence, is untouched by his coming or going. He finished his prarabdha karma, so it was time for that Subtle body to be withdrawn into the Causal body, from whence it came. But as the Self, he never came or left. I told another inquirer who lost a child a while back, and I say it to you too. Remember in your darkest moments that your son was never not the Self; it is not something he returned to.
Your sadhana now is to contemplate the loss of your son in light of Self-knowledge, which says there is no loss, ever. Loss only applies to mithya, the person. That said, grieving a loved one is a natural necessary, and human thing to do. It cannot be avoided, even when you know you are the Self. Grief is a deep form of praise because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.
Grieving is not about the dead one, it’s about you. Who is it that lives and dies? From the human perspective, beyond the five stages of grieving, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, there is a sixth. It is the possibility of discovering something meaningful in grief, though not in death itself. There is nothing meaningful to be found in death; it’s just the end of the body. The death of a loved one gives us a great opportunity to understand what love is and why it is what always remains when the loved object is taken from us.
My advice is to create an altar for devotional practice (if you don’t have one) where you offer all your feelings of loss and heartache in the karma yoga spirit to the Field, to Isvara, the Self, you. Do not censure yourself or place any limit on what you feel and how long you feel it; observe the feelings. Remind yourself that feelings are objects known to you. They are not you. Place a picture of Tristan on it as a symbol of the eternal and undying Love you are, and he was and still is.
People who have experienced bereavement often find that they’re in a better place psychologically after some time, if they have taken meaning from it, or when they’re upfront about how it’s changed them. One of the things we risk losing in our grief-adverse society is the personal growth bereavement can bring. We talk so much about post-traumatic stress yet what we do not talk enough about is that post-traumatic growth is just as possible and very beneficial. It is Ok to acknowledge that loss can have this spin-off and understand what it can do for you.
This brings us to another point: guilt. Because if as the bereaved we are gaining from loss, we will at some point feel guilty about it. Yet we should not because we’d never have chosen to lose the individual we cherished. Their death is something we can’t change, but what we can change is how we live in the now, and how we relate to life without them. We would give up in the blink of an eye the growth we’ve experienced if it would bring our loved one back; but the point is, that’s the one thing we absolutely can’t do. And we must remember, too, that the person who has gone would have wanted us to find meaning in our lives without them in it. It honours your love to grow from it, not shrivel in grief and pain. I am sure your son would want this.
The bottom line about grief is that there’s no wrong way to do it. Grieving is as individual as each of us; our grieving needs are different, in every case. It’s also incredibly lonely: the finite silence of the world you once shared can be deafening and threatening. All you can do on the bad days is survive. You are fortunate in that you have the scripture, and you have karma yoga. Use it as your shield to get through this time. Live one day at a time, thought by thought, consecrating all thoughts and feelings on the altar of karma yoga. You will get through this.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus famously said, “Death is nothing to us; when we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and Awareness end with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness”. End quote.
Epicurus did not have Self-knowledge; he was identified with the body and so believed that Awareness ends when the body ends. But if he had, he would have ended that statement with:
“The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, Awareness ends”.
It is in resisting the truth of how things really are which makes life so difficult and painful. It’s not that karma yoga means embracing unpleasant experiences stops them from being unpleasant. Indeed, accepting their intractable unpleasantness is arguably the whole challenge. But by doing so we relinquish results that stop all experiences from being a problem because we are no longer the problem. It becomes possible to be at peace with exactly how things are, including the ‘not-being-at-peace’ that arises when we experience extreme emotions like the grief of loss.
As the Zen saying goes… “Our suffering is believing there’s a way out.” There is no way out of duality other than with Self-knowledge and karma yoga. We hand over the experience and the result of action to the Field. We do not have to carry it. The Awareness you are has always been free of the experiencing entity, the person. And for the person, there’s freedom from the existential burden of doership, even if there’s no possibility of freedom from the actual experiences you are going through at the moment. Freedom is in the knowledge that your true essence is immortal, and no experience (object) has the slightest effect on you as the Self. The ability to discriminate Awareness from the objects that appear in you at all times is freedom. The death thought is just another object known to you. Use this knowledge as a grappling hook to get you out of the pit of despair and sadness.
People under the spell of duality, don’t understand karma yoga and assume that a life of meaning and dignity entails being in control, so of course, death is a fearful thing. But there’s more meaning and dignity in accepting our lack of control and not running from what can’t be outrun. There is no security in mithya. Karma yoga is the only life insurance that matters. As the body/mind, we will all die one day. In surrender to that, life is an adventure, even when the adventure brings us the loss of a loved one.
Feel free to write to us anytime. May Isvara grant you the grace to get through this time and to use it to grow and deepen in Self-knowledge, which stands alone unaffected by what the jiva experiences.
Much love
Sundari
