Those Things Which Life Takes
Lack is not nothing
My grandma hadn’t been healthy for months. After a surgery, she had never really come back from the cloud of anesthetics. I was 400km away, going to work and living my life relatively routinely; as I must, right?
One week, I decided to do a three-day fast. My breath reeked, and my partner let me know it. But that's how you know it's working: cellular waste, the metabolites of a body eating itself and dissociating from what is not needed. It escapes from its own confines through the continual passage of breath.
Day 3, Friday evening, I got a call from my mum: better come home, it’s time to say goodbye while I still could. My empty stomach fell away. As a panic crept up to my light head, I had been dreading this day—not even since her surgeries but for the majority of my life. Grandparents die quickly. I knew that, and I always had this weird anxiety that one day this particular grandparent would leave me after an unforeseen phone call, just like this.
I didn't sleep that night. I had an acupuncture appointment scheduled for Saturday morning. When she walked into the treatment room door, my acupuncturist was alarmed at my state. She asked what had happened, why I looked so bad, hadn't I slept? Lying on her treatment table, I told her, and she rushed to the front desk for a candy, which she unwrapped and placed in my mouth as I cried a little. With a hand on my forehead, she told me I needed to eat more sugar at this time. I dried my tears quietly, trying not to shake while she placed the needles. She whispered reassurances and said she would help me open the channels of my grief. All I needed to do was to keep breathing through the pain. So I tried to elongate my tight chest while the needle points dissipated the heat of an upset body, and I thanked God for the gentle compassion she showed me that morning. I was sure this was exactly what a healer ought to know how to do.
After a four-hour train ride, with my hood up and headphones on, I got to the hospital: there she was, lying on the bed, mouth agape and breathing—in fact, she was hardly anything but a breath.
I spent three days visiting her. I sat by her. I sang her the songs she used to love. I read to her, bits of Middlemarch. I wondered endlessly, where was the locus of her consciousness in those days? Where could I address her? Was she away in other realms or hovering in the room above our heads? Wherever she was, I felt she was only just tethered—just barely—to her breathing body.
Each day, the nurse and I gave her a sponge bath. And as we washed her bruising skin, so near as it was to death, I realized that she was fasting, too. For months, she had hardly eaten and lost a lot of weight. And where did all the bouncy flesh go? It was literally just floating away—broken down into carbon and, inhale after exhale, released into the room around me, probably to be inhaled by me.
Sunday night, I left late. I said goodbye. And when I returned early the next morning, she had passed just before my arrival.
I made this note in my phone:
“This week I fasted, and then on the weekend, I lost my grandma, and yet I seldom have weeks filled with more clarity or gratitude; a strong awareness for the value of what I have.”
It had finally arrived, that half of my life without her—a moment I’d dreaded for years—and yet it wasn't so bad. In fact, I felt incredibly grounded as the immortal swell of love crashed in waves through the tiny portal of my mourning tears. In her absence, she was so potent, and I could not believe that life would have such strange gifts like this—delivered to me only by a stark and sudden lack.
“Lack is not nothing: rejoice, there is hope.” 1
She was gone. There would be no funeral for several months. But my mom was scheduled for surgery in two days, and I was to spend the next few weeks in my childhood bedroom caring for her while she recovered. Between moments of helping her around the house, I spent several hours a day meditating. I just didn’t know what else to do. I felt so alienated from the town that I was in. None of my usual habits lived in this old house, and I could find no satisfaction in the usual distractions. I just wanted to sit in the pulse of my swollen heart. So I turned the lights off, made a little spot where the ceiling of the slanted roof met the wall, and I sat there. My mom, though upset herself, thought I had gone mad.
But I felt great. Hysterically so. I had never been better. Truly, I had never felt clearer. The shortness of life impressed itself upon me.
“Life is long if you know how to use it.” “But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” 2
Those months that I had kept busy with routine were so fenced off from this strange bliss. What had I done? Gone out for dinner? Done some online shopping? It had been a while since I felt like this. I think a piece of me might have gone with her. Had it been my blindfold? It made me see that there is a type of poverty that the saints were pointing to, and it isn’t the kind that political minds disagree about. That the truest gift is what takes us, that this gift can only be received when we give ourselves to it. That the illusions of lack and having collapse into gratitude if we can just find the right angle.
And until we do, we will continue to dream up tragic utopias, structures of living that provide us with everything and tie our lives so tight that there is no room to be lacking. If there is any good reason to build the world brighter, it is for the great privilege of watching it also set. There is a place where we can let anything go.
Lack is not Nothing, Vol. 1 issue 1 - Rejoice There is Hope, Thomas Jockin.
On the Shortness of Life, Seneca.
Beautiful sharing, thank you.