Belated Eulogy

So high you cannot
Climb or get close to it;
Raindrops scatter in the flying wind.
The gate is barred with green moss.
Suddenly forgetting thought,
Without attainment,
Only then will you be sure
The gate has been open all along.
- Zen Master T’aego (1301-1382)



The greatest lesson of my life - not just because it has been the most profound, but because I find I have to constantly re-learn it - is that all things shall pass.

It all goes, becoming good and bad and indifferent flotsam and jetsam. All that rises must converge. Nothing gold can stay. Every cloud has a silver lining. Outta mind, outta sight.

My final year at high school wasn't pretty. I'm not getting into why, but there came a point where my baths were less about bubbles and more about razors and I wanted everything to stop. And because everyone (at that point in my life) thought I was terminally happy as opposed to just terminal, I kept it all in.
I went to school. I was dutiful. I was studious. And I had this constant fear that everything was caving in (even now, remembering, writing this, I feel that old familiar sensation in the top of my stomach, the one that makes me want to throw up and cry at the same time).

At school I had this teacher who had a habit of singing in homeroom. Got my daily dose of Van Morrison at 9.05am Monday to Friday. I'd get to school and shrink down into my corner seat, hoping for numbness, but he was having none of it. And on the very rare days when the others, getting into The Violent Femmes or discovering The Doors for the first time, groaned or sniggered to themselves, he would smile, look at me, say "Ready Katy?" and dive headfirst into song.
Every morning was a moondance. I loved it and I loved him for it.
It didn't get me through the day, it just got me through a part of it. And that was enough. Every morning it was enough.
And it passed.

And I'm okay. Generally. I'm a little too in touch with my anger at the moment. I let myself go or lost myself a really long time ago and sometimes I don't know if I can be bothered looking. I know I think too much and I think I know too much.
I don't act enough - and sometimes all I do is act. In my more lucid moments, I praise something I'm not sure I believe in for all those human angels who have believed in me.

I had always wanted to catch up with my old teacher and thank him - not give him the specifics - just a session with some old familiars, some beer and karaoke.

Two months ago, a couple came into the cellar door on a really quiet Saturday. They tasted the family produce and bought a bottle of wine. We talked about living overseas and where we came from and it turned out that the lady was a teacher at my old school. We reminisced about mutual acquaintances and I told them how this guy would start the day and asked them to say hi when they saw him.

They stopped talking, drinking, looking at me. They were really close friends of his. They didn't want to tell me. They cried.
He had died, a couple of years earlier, by his own hand. Marriage break-up. They said she left and he couldn't live without her.
I feel sick again.

The greatest lesson of my life - not just because it has been the most profound, but because I find I have to constantly re-learn it - is that all things shall pass.

I wish I could have told him that.
I don't know if it's due to guilt because I should have made the effort or vanity thinking it might have made a difference.
And I know that neither are real and both are pointless - but once upon a time I was hurting enough to want everything to end and he helped heal me. Whether he knew it or not.

So I do what any self-indulgent, pseudo-spiritualist with delusions of talent in my situation would do.

I cry.
I write.
I pray.
I listen to Van Morrison.
I have imaginary conversations.
I pretend I really knew him.


This, too, shall pass.