The night nurse said I should come right away.
At 2 a.m., I arrived by Sam’s bedside. The nurse on call said he had “taken a turn for the worse.” He stopped breathing; his heart gave out. There was nothing more they could do. Lying there, he looked so peaceful, quiet. I sat beside him—the two of us together in the stillness.
When someone you love dies, you’re swept away without a handhold on the crest of grief. You find yourself being pulled further out from shore and down, down, down. Your world shatters. Your heart aches, empty with unbearable heaviness.
In our culture, too often grief and loss are viewed as a disorder, something to overcome, move on from, get over, chin up, man up, rather than something we tend. I have grieved many losses. From these losses, I’ve learned that grief is far from simple. It’s a suite of complex emotions that run wild and unpredictable, unruly and untidy. There’s a spiral quality to grief, revealing ever deeper layers of sorrow. Grief calls for intentionality, and from a Buddhist perspective, it invites us into the practice of shamatha and vipassana, that is, stopping and looking deeply.
When we stop and look deeply into the true nature of grief, we see that it continually transforms like a wave or cloud. We remember that it was the meaningful connection we had with our beloved that formed the basis of what is now our sorrow and grief—we are saddened because we lost someone important. We’re invited to intentionally allow ourselves to be transformed by sorrow, perhaps broken open to the deeper realization that even the bitterest grief is not unchanging. This too is a continual process of transformation.
Can grief be a doorway to deeper love and understanding? As I encounter others engaged in their own grief, I’m invited into a community of empathy and compassion. In tending grief, I’ve found that the initial shock, denial, anger, and resistance transform over time into moments when I can take a full breath and feel not only broken-heartedness but the broken-openness of an undefended heart.
I loved my oldest brother, Sam, in ways I could only fully understand after he died. A constant in my life, he knew all my shadows and secrets, the disgraces and bitter pills of living I consumed. I could hide nothing from Sam, and I didn’t want to. We laughed together, cried together, danced together, and complained about sucky things together.
Sam taught me about the enduring and boundless capacity of love and how to allow myself to find love in unexpected places, especially in a meal. In those days I was a militant vegetarian, meaning I felt superior in my diet. Every time I came over to Sam’s Upper West Side apartment, he did all the cooking, and he loved every moment. The kitchen was his forest refuge, the place that brought him joy, and it showed in the sumptuous meals he prepared. He perfected his signature dishes: curry chicken, ox tail, and crispy-fried Jamaican escovitch fish. Although I could smell the curry and tamarind the moment I got off the elevator, I would have none of it in my righteousness.
Then, one Thanksgiving, Sam spent hours making a Jamaican feast of curry chicken, pork loin, collards soaked in ham hocks, corn bread loaded with butter, and more. I’d just read a teaching by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh on how food can be an expression of love, so I realized suddenly that this wasn’t just a meal. This dinner was Sam’s way of loving. I turned to Sam and said, “I’ll have everything.” He looked at me, shocked, and then slowly joy spread across his face. I ate it all and with every mouthful savored his love. He was the happiest I’d ever seen him.
Sam was the person who’d brought me to the path of practice in the Plum Village tradition. The year was 1995, and I was sitting in Sam’s apartment when he opened The New York Times. There was an image of Thich Nhat Hanh, who was offering a talk just down the street at the Riverside Church. Sam knew nothing about Buddhism or Thich Nhat Hanh, but he knew a lot about me. At the time I was deeply ensconced in my big and demanding job as a lawyer-lobbyist. I was type A, hard as nails, hyper-critical, quick tempered, full of tension and stress. Knowing all this, Sam casually said, “Just go on down there and listen to that guy.” Because Sam was always right, I did.
Four hours later, I walked out of the church, shaking my head: “That’s not for me,” I said to myself. Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as he’s affectionately known, had talked about finding peace and compassion within and sharing that with others. He described breathing as an act of conscious awareness, of love. A part of me thought, if I believed Thay’s words, what would that mean for the legal career I had oh so carefully crafted, the sacrifice, the backbreaking effort I’d put in to make myself into something respectable? Another part of me knew that Thay was offering a path.
Thay said that one of our greatest fears is that when we die, we become nothing. Many hold the belief that our existence begins when we’re born and ends when we die; we’re born from nothing and we become nothing when we pass away. Buddhism offers a different viewpoint; there’s no after, no before, no coming, no going, no same, no different.
Our nature is that of no birth and no death, and when we understand our true nature, we transcend the fear of nonbeing, the fear of nonexistence. In other words, our true nature is continual transformation. There’s manifestation, and there’s cessation of manifestation—bringing forth another manifestation. In Buddhism the nature of no birth and no death is nirvana. I used to believe that nirvana was a place for the truly enlightened. However, nirvana means extinction, especially the extinction of dualistic ideas, such as birth and death, self and other—ideas that cause us to suffer.
“We are afraid of death because ignorance gives us an illusory idea about what death is,” Thay wrote in his book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Parallax Press). “We worry about our own future but fail to worry about the future of the other because we think that our happiness has nothing to do with the happiness of the other. In order to extinguish these ideas, we have to practice. Nirvana is a fan that helps us extinguish the fire of all our ideas, including the ideas of permanence and self. That fan is our practice of looking deeply every day.”
Thay used the metaphor of water and wave to help us understand death. As a wave crests to its fullest height and crashes, it doesn’t die, because its very nature is water. Wave and water inter-are, and with this awareness there’s no fear of the wave dying.
As Thay famously said, “A cloud never dies.” It transforms; its nature is continual transformation. At times, depending on the conditions, clouds become rain; at other times, they manifest as sleet or snow. I’m reminded of this each night before I go to sleep. Above my bed is one of Thay’s calligraphies that says, “Smile to the cloud in your tea.”
The realization of continual transformation offers me solace, a blessing. Sam is gone from this physical plane, the historical dimension of his selfhood, and yet he’s with me every day in the ultimate dimension where there’s no birth, no death, no after, no before. His life and legacy inform my life and my work as a dharma teacher. His life lives on, not only through me but through the countless people we’ve both touched.
I’m not saying that Sam’s death didn’t rearrange my world view—it did. I am saying that I hold the reality of his physical death and the understanding that his life and our relationship led me to something deeper than his death and my feelings of loss and despair. His death led me to accept and appreciate the beauty of this very moment, which is filled with both potential and pain, beauty and destruction.
Death and life are interconnected. Every cell of our body is continually in the process of dying and being born. The true nature of reality is beyond conventional ideas of birth and death. But this is not a denial of physical birth or death, the historical dimension of our lives. Instead, this is the realization that there’s no permanent, unchanging self that is born and dies. There is an ultimate dimension of self.
With mindfulness and concentration, we understand the insight of interbeing, our interconnectedness. Our blood, land, and spiritual ancestors continue in us and through us. Sam planted seeds of transformation that have manifested in me. He showed me that deeper than my ambition for a legal career is a vocation and volition, the ground of service and compassionate action.
In 2022, when Thay transitioned from his physical body, I was on an extended retreat at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Roshi Joan Halifax, the abbot, shared the news of his passing. In tears, I ran outside and fell to the ground holding Wendy Johnson. We all three students of Thay.
In the days and weeks following his death, I felt Thay in the clouds, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains surrounding the Zen center, in the fragrant sage growing on the roadside. Thay was everywhere. “When I die,” he’d said, “don’t put me in a box. I am not there.”
I practice shamata and vipassana, which infuse grief with tenderness and understanding, and I don’t grieve alone. I call on trusted friends to support me. Sam’s presence is continually manifesting in my daily life. Cooking in the kitchen and eating a meal are manifestations of Sam. Grief is not the final home. Like a cloud or a wave, grief is an opening, an invitation to continual transformation—touching pain, touching sorrow, touching joy, touching life itself.
