Learning from someone else's fight

I saw the most interesting transition in mother's behavior over about 1 1/2 hours on her birthday last week. I arrived at the end of one dosage cycle for pain meds, and stayed through about 45 minutes into the next cycle. So, I got to see her "with pain" and without it. Or so I assume. It seemed more like with will and determination, and without them, but I am assured by the nursing staff that pain is there, but Alzheimer's causes the sufferer to be unable to identify it as such. Rather, it causes generalized agitation, anxiety and fear. Whatever was the cause, her behavior was like day and night. When I arrived she was in a bad mood. She ignored the things I brought to share with her for her birthday, refused even a single bite of cake, and spent all her time and effort trying to get out of the geri chair. She made a sweet plea to me to get me to take her away, but when I told her I couldn't take her, she turned hostile.

She would struggle to get out of the chair, pushing and pulling on the tray that keeps her in, trying to slide out, etc. After a few minutes she would give up, exasperated, and collapse back against the chair back. Then in a minute, she was at it again. This went on nonstop. At first I talked to her about her situation, the reasons for it, and how sorry I was that she was unable to do the things she used to be able to do, but eventually, I stopped. Suggesting that she would have to accept that she couldn't walk or talk well enough to be out of the chair and effective in communicating her needs seemed pointless, because she clearly wanted none of that. Her behavior indicated that she did not know or believe either of those abilities was impaired. And yet, they are.

Then she got her pain meds.

Over the next 30 minutes the physical struggling and efforts to talk slowed down and then stopped. She became a relaxed, calm, serene, and seemingly happy person. She accepted my offer for some birthday cake and responded with a beautiful smile at hearing happy birthday wishes.

I can take away many things from this experience. Pain meds reduce the desire to escape from your situation, whatever it is. Alzheimer's makes it harder to remember that you can't do things. But in an odd twist on logic (which I can handle now that I realize there are ways of seeing for which logic is not well suited), I also take away that failure to accept what is true is painful.

"I can't" -- The loss of control and who we are at heart

She started with an, "I have a problem" preface, after which she explained in a string of words that sounded like actual words but for the most part made no sense, except for these: "I can't do anything; I can't do anything right; I can't do anything at all." That was last Wednesday. It was also the first time since her move to assisted living, and now to skilled nursing care, that she admitted that there was something she couldn't do. Until Wednesday, the monumental struggle was always to explain to her why people were interfering in her life ("to help you" I always said), to which she always responded, " but I can do all that -- I do all that myself." You just can't argue with her logic, and the facts, well, her facts and mine just don't exist in the same universe.

And indeed, it was quite evident that she couldn't do anything. Her hands were shaking so badly that I had to feed her. By evening (after I had gone home) she had fallen 3 times and the next morning, she fell again. So, she had lost the ability to walk and to feed herself in, literally, a day. I'll make the long story short here: I got a referral to hospice and I am so glad I did. It's not clear whether she's got 2 hours, 2 weeks or 2 months to live, but it is clear that the disease has taken a serious turn for the worse. It is so good to have hospice nurses and assistants involved, who are focused on managing pain, anxiety and frustration, as the body passes through the phases it must when life comes to an end.

But that's not all she lost. Today when I visited, she was in the dining room in her "geri" chair, asleep. It took awhile for her to wake up, but when she did, she ate about half her lunch. But the whole time I was there, talking to her and feeding her, she was irritated, angry and hostile. She yelled at me for touching her arm ("Goddamn-it -- leave it alone"), and again when I asked her at one point if she wanted more of anything to eat ("NO! I don't want anything!" as she slammed both her hands on the table).

I always announce myself when I come to see her because, for awhile now, she has taken a few seconds to recognize me. She always does recognize me eventually, and she consistently acts towards me in a very loving way -- not at all like she acted today. So, though I had already said that it was me when I first sat down, and had talked about my brother and when we would both be by to see her next, I asked her if she knew who I was and as I expected, she answered angrily, "no."

Maybe it's just the disease. I've heard that it can exacerbate personality traits. And this was my mom toute crachée when I was a little girl, before she divorced my dad, whom she came to hate during their 9 years of marriage. Talk about a walk down memory lane, or perhaps I should call it, nightmare alley. This experience sheds a little more light on the questions I've been exploring regarding who we "really" are, and change. We can control our presentation to and interaction with others to some degree, but when control dissolves, who we are at center is revealed. Superficial change is not real change -- not good enough.

Fire in the Chiricahuas

One of the places I love most in the Sky Islands of Southeast Arizona is on fire. Horseshoe Canyon in the Chiricahuas is burning -- around 1200 acres so far -- and threatens what most call the "jewel" of the Chiricahuas, South Fork Cave Creek Canyon.
I was just there a few weeks ago with my friend, Kirsti.
We birded South Fork and drove Forest Road 42 from Cave Creek to the Onion Saddle, on into Rustler Park where it was cool and quiet and very, very shady.

In August a few years ago, we visited the same spots and were drenched with rain and chilled by cold and mist. And now there are temperatures in the upper 90's, predicted to hit 100 by Friday, and the place is on fire.

One more in a constant stream of reminders that it's all process.
I certainly need these reminders, because we don't typically see our lives as process.
We tend, instead, to freeze our experience into discreet events that we either like or don't like, or perhaps feel neutral towards. The photos I have posted here are the quintessential freezing of a process into an event. And, like our memories of the time we spend in a place, our events seem so real to us, so solid. That's how we speak of things: South Fork Cave Creek is (and we like to think, always will be) the jewel of the Chiricahuas, "the single most desirable hike in the Chiricahuas," writes Richard Taylor in the 2005 edition of A Birder's Guide to Southeast Arizona (p. 171). Until it is destroyed by fire, that is. Taylor also refers to other fires that have ravaged the Sky Islands in the past, as discreet events: the 1994 Rattlesnake Fire that burned 27,000 acres in this very area; the 1977 Carr Fire that blackened 9,000 acres at the tops of Miller and Carr Canyons.
But Dr. Bill McCormick quotes Leonard Taylor's, "Hiker's Guide to the Huachuca Mountains," in describing the Carr Canyon fire, acknowledging that it is a process:

In June of 1977, some careless people left a fire unattended; it quickly grew into a forest fire, and destroyed 9,000 acres of trees; most of Upper Carr and Miller Canyons. Heavy rains followed, causing severe erosion, and most of the top soil was washed down the mountain. Where once a shaded trail led through towering pines and flower-filled meadows, now a rocky path winds among charred stumps.

The mountain is recovering, however, and after the monsoons start the Carr Peak Trail is one of the most flowered trails in the range. Also, magnificent views abound, as they are no longer obstructed by trees.

Nevertheless, the description still reflects a distinctly human perspective, a dislike of what happened. The author describes "careless people," "severe erosion," and "charred stumps." The fire caused him and others pain and regret, and probably anger, at those who caused it.

On the other hand, I heard a fellow hiker in Miller Canyon comment just last month about a "lovely meadow" that she came to at the top of Miller Canyon. And from my cabin I could see a spot high up near the top of the canyon, that was filled with beautiful, bright, spring green, though relatively smallish, trees. Their color contrasted vividly with the darker greens of the surrounding mountainside habitat. And it occurred to me that perhaps her beautiful meadow and the spring-green young trees I saw both resulted from the Carr fire, now 33 years old.
Our firefighters are hard at work trying to stop the event they're calling the Horseshoe Fire. And those of us who love these mountains and their canyons, and wish to hold them as they are, however futile that wish may be, will worry all the way through to the rainy season about the fire's consequences, the homes it might burn, the many other things we value that it will destroy, the loss of life, the loss of beauty, the loss of habitat. But fire, or more generally what it embodies -- dramatic and drastic change, loss, even destruction, devastation, and death, followed by (surprise!) re-growth and renewal -- shows us a simple truth about our lives here. As does all the life that exists in Cave Creek and Miller Canyons, human life is a cyclical process encompassing everything that's part of the cycle, not just the parts that we like. Letting go of our wish that what we call the good will stay and what we term the bad will never come or quickly disappear, we're left with acceptance.
And after that, on we go to fight the fire because we're not dead yet and neither is South Fork Cave Creek. But with awareness and acceptance, we see the fire for what it is, and ourselves and our actions in a broader context.

The end of time

My friend Dana died this week. Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS). I wrote about her struggle with the decision whether to go on life support nearly two years ago, when, to my utter shock, as I thought I knew Dana well enough to know she would not want to live like that, she decided to have the tubes implanted. She had tubes for everything. I won't recall that Dana, I'm afraid, because I never went down to see her. We chatted on IM and Facebook. Because ALS paralyzes everything, she had some kind of visual pointer that allowed her to type. We watched the returns come in the night Obama was elected. We shared the awe and wonder of the scene in Chicago -- all remotely. Remote. That's what Dana became for me.

But that's not what she was, or what I'll remember. Last night as Dennis and I sat at one of our favorite bars in Austin, the Eastside Showroom, I ordered an Anejo tequila shot, and I raised it in memory of my friend Dana, the one who celebrated my 27th birthday with me on a beach in Mexico many years ago, passing a bottle of mescal around a big circle of friends until I was so out of it that when I stood up, my legs just collapsed under me and fell back into the sand! Not that it's a proud moment or anything, but rather, because Dana and I had a whole lot of fun together when we were young and a lot of our best times together were in Mexico. She spoke much better spanish than I did (until that year I spent in Central and South America -- I caught up with her then!), and could get us into, and out of, all kinds of situations I wouldn't have managed so well on my own.

Our friendship went on through her move to San Antonio after she graduated college, her first marriage which ended in divorce, her move to Los Angeles, Dennis' and my marriage and move to Los Gatos. One of my favorite memories is of Dennis' and my drive from Los Gatos to LA for thanksgiving with Dana when we both were in California. Jesus. It took us 14 hours to make what should have been about a 6 hour drive because the traffic on the highway was a complete parking lot for most of the way. I have never seen anything like it. We ended up at 2 in the morning crashing in some whore house hotel for a few hours before getting up and making our way to Dana's for a lovely dinner.

Then she moved to Houston, got married again, divorced, and married a third time, this time to Doug Plette, whom she knew was in fact the love of her life. He is the one who has been with her through her journey through ALS. She was diagnosed shortly after their wedding.

I can't even begin to fathom what those two and their families have been through these last four years. I got only brief glimpses of their lives as we visited a few times back and forth (they lived a bit north of Houston). But it has been the kind of challenge most of us hope we're up to, but privately believe we probably are not. Perhaps I'm projecting here. I believe I am not. But Dana surprised me to no end, with what she put up with and what she would not put up with. Maybe I will surprise myself.

About 6 weeks or so ago, I got a note from Dana. All it said was, "How are you?" I didn't respond. Truth was, I was in the middle of what was a very sad, very depressed period, and you just don't whine to someone with ALS who's enthusiastically living on life support. I had decided in January that this would be the year I came fully to terms with not only my mom's decline and eventual death, but my own, and that has meant going down a few levels into what's pretty aversive, accepting it, and eventually coming back up to greater heights than possible when you're simply turning away from the realities of life. And when she wrote, I just couldn't see how I could talk to Dana about death. I was wrong. I'm wrong a lot.

Today is Friday. In a few minutes I head out to the Assisted Living where my mom is staying, and I move her to the nursing home. It's been a very hard week. She had a bad fall last week, on one of our walks together, and it catalyzed a lot of things for me. It is time for her to move. She needs a lot more help than she's getting now. Death is on her shoulder. It was on Dana's shoulder. It is on my shoulder.

I can see out the front door the sunlight streaming across the front garden, lighting up the new spring growth with a brilliant green that must be seen to be believed. Life is good. Very good. Tears may stream down my face, but I have to say, I am so happy to be alive right now.

End of a year off; now to the hardest task

I dreamed I was traveling on a train with lots of friends. Everyone was happy and talking with each other and visiting around, from seat to seat. Scenery whizzed by, and gaiety reigned inside. We were one, big, happy group all together on a trip -- of some kind. Rather suddenly, however, the train reached its destination and in an instant, everyone was off the train except for me. I went back to my seat where I saw at least 6 bags of different shapes and sizes in a pile, all made of that army drab grayish green canvas, with buckles, straps, and outside pockets. The pile was a mess. I knew I had to consolidate the bags somehow, in order to carry them all, and I started trying to figure that out when my kitty wandered into view and I realized that I would never be able to get her to stay with me when we got off the train. Indeed, she had been wandering around the train the whole time we'd been on the journey, just like we all were doing. It was not a problem before, but now that I had to get off and keep all my stuff together, wherever we were, I knew I would not be able to manage her. She would be uncontrollable. She'd have to go inside one of the bags and I knew she would never stand for that. I realized that I could not get off the train with all my stuff.

When I woke up, this dream reminded me of the conversation between the Buddha and the first person to encounter him after his enlightenment, to whom it was clear that the Buddha was a remarkable being:

Who or what are you? -- Buddha answered, I am awake.
How did you wake up? -- Buddha simply dropped his bags.
What will you do now? -- Buddha picked up his bags and was on his way.

There's a lot there. Dropping bags sounds simple, but it's not easy. Nevertheless, I know what will happen if I don't. I visited my mother yesterday and learned something new from the endless repetition of her complaints: we take with us into whatever comes next what's in our hearts. We may "forget" many things, but we don't forget how we feel. And if we've carried fear, hurt, anger and resentment with us, that's what's left when everything else is gone. With all she has lost, with all the things that have dropped from her repertoire, you'd think, you'd hope, that anger and hurt would be among them. But they are not. I guess clinging occurs at some very deep level. Maybe it's simply a function of repetition. I don't want to get that good at it. I'm dropping the bags and getting off the train. Now.

To B (or not to PhD)

School.

What does that conjure up for you?

It shouldn't be an easy question. We spend many, many years in school, and very important things happen to us there. Some of my most enduring memories are of events and people from schools. Second grade teacher. A walk down the hallway that was a transfer to a different class. The six weeks my brother and I attended school in Kansas while we lived with my grandparents. Sixth grade "split" class (high sixth and low sixth all in the same room). My best friend, Cindy. I could go on. You have your own list of memories. Some good. Some bad.


But when we dream of school, it all gets very simple. Fear, anxiety, forgetfulness, failure. You've got to have had these dreams before -- you've totally forgotten to prepare for a test; you've forgotten to attend a class for the entire semester; you've arrived at school in PJ's.

I was looking for an image to illustrate this post, an image of a dream of school, and found an interesting one (see left) Adam posted with a discussion of these dreams and what they might mean to us once we're out of school. Ok. But I've been dreaming of school in a different way lately.

I had a dream near the end of May: I was a student at school in a building that seemed to remind me of every school I have attended and schools I have seen in other cities and countries. The classes were big and there was a big courtyard. There were a few people from the iSchool PhD program and a host of others whom I didn't know. It was formal education. The dream's emotional tenor was of anxiety, competition and a strange feeling of disconnection, even in the midst of a clearly social milieu. It was structured. Bells rang and classes started. I left my books out in the rain at one point. Two guys were fighting in the courtyard. It was like that -- unrelated scenes, vignettes and feelings just happened, all around me.

I headed towards a class that I wanted to attend, but not actually sign up for (i.e., audit), and sat down at the back of the class, but the professor refused to permit anyone to attend without registering. The refusal woke me from the dream.

I thought about the dream all the next day. And I keep coming back to it, again and again. Now that I am just 6 weeks from the end of the year I've taken off to mull things over, it's time to evaluate, and time to decide. Although I have always treasured learning, firmly believing that to live is to learn, somehow or another, the learning that we box up into chunks we call grades (K-16 plus graduate degrees), with classes and teachers who judge whether we learned what they thought we should, and degrees we are to acquire to enter different types of work we want to do, this learning does not appeal to me now.

Instead, the 11 months of my almost completed year off (to say nothing of the many other decades I've spent on this earth) make clear that learning goes on every minute of every day of our lives. The degree to which we seek it out, independently of formal education, characterizes us. We are adventurous, open to new ideas, explorers, curious, avid readers, eager to talk to people about what we have observed and thought about, or we are mired in routine, resistant to change, comfortable only with what we already know, averse to travel and uninterested in people who are different from us. It's a continuum of course. I'm somewhere on the end with those who like to learn, but I know that my interest in formal education is over. That presents a challenge, aside from the challenge that I'm actually in a PhD program at the moment. Formal education's packaged degree program provides a structure that learning in the wild doesn't. In the wild, there's no degree; no slate of courses; no forms to fill out; no templates for your progress reports; and no template for your terminal qualifying paper and dissertation. In fact, learning in the wild never ends. The journey is the destination. Sort of like life.

But more than this, learning in the wild makes no demand that you learn any particular thing at all (beyond what it takes to survive). You can learn that it's not worth it to sift through the granite gravel that got washed into the pebbled stream in your front yard by yesterday's wonderfully torrential rains, by actually trying to sift it and realizing that the effort outweighs the benefit, or you can sit on your deck and watch birds. You can construct detailed experiments and test hypotheses and write up your results and submit them to the public for comment, and learn even more about your results from those comments, or you can try a new recipe and see whether your childhood aversion to beets stems from their having been canned or whether beets just taste bad. You can delve into botany and learn about all the plants in the area where you live, or you can see what difference it makes to your garden to fertilize it every other week with fish emulsion and seaweed throughout the summer.

The question, "what is the point of this or that learning," gets you thinking about priorities, where to invest your time. But the question eventually collapses into "what is the point of this life," when one feels, as I do, that life and learning are one. "What do I want to learn in the next 20 years" becomes "what do I want to do with my life?" I still don't know what I want to do, but these 11 months have shown me that I don't have to know what I want to do to know that I am through with school.

I can see more clearly every day that teaching, research and service (education-style), or more simply, making a difference by sharing knowledge with others, in the hopes that either directly or indirectly, it will help them or their circumstances, is not the only way to make a difference. One can also make a difference by being a source of encouragement, a smile when its needed, or just an ear or shoulder to lean on. Indeed, one can make a difference by tending a garden. Someone no doubt tended the garden that Boris Vian stood in as a wind rushed through it. Many years later I can read his lovely observation that "[t]he wind cleared a path for itself through the leaves, and emerged from the trees filled with the scent of buds and flowers" (a rough translation from the french poem, L'Ecume des jours). The gardener probably never knew, but c'est la vie.

I have begun to see that the roles of teacher and student are, for me, part of being on autopilot. Being a teacher pervades my identity -- I have always taught, I think of myself as a teacher and I really enjoy it. Those sound like reasons to continue teaching. But I teach every minute of the day! In paying close attention to mental chatter this year, I find myself narrating my present moment experience, as though I am passing on what I know and observe to some invisible student, rapt student. I'm like on Twitter on steroids. What a revelation! Maybe the point for me isn't to pass things along right now. I am not expert at what I want to learn, so how could I teach it? And I don't want to spend any more time passing along the things I know already. It seems like the wrong choice right now. I'm not sure why. It just does. It will be a good exercise to stop teaching, both in my head, and in the real world.

I sense more clearly every day that the path I'm on will lead to recognition and acceptance that everything ceases. I visited my mom today and felt, once again, desperate sadness at how it is when you can't think straight, don't remember much of anything, can't make your hands carry out your wishes, can't see that well, and can't say what's on your mind, what's left of it. I still have a long, long way to go on the journey to come to terms with the loss that a disease like dementia inflicts. But if it weren't dementia, it would be something else. That is life in all its dimensions. Growth, expansion, exploration, creativity, and then contraction, decline, loss and eventually, death. Not regrettable. Just the way it is. Life and death are one and the same thing. Annie Dillard's splendid, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek explores this phenomenal contradiction -- how can our world be so beautiful, and so filled with violent death? But no! It's no mystery. They are one and the same. Every week I get a little closer to accepting this, to not wishing it were other than how it is. I haven't managed to surrender entirely, yet. I guess I fear that I would scream out loud, or die of the pain if I actually totally accepted what is happening to her and what will happen to me and everyone I know and love, eventually. Who in their right mind would accept this if they didn't have to? Ah, but we do have to.

Two months after the "no doing school half-way" dream described above, I had another school dream, this one quite different .....

It started out being about other things (I was in a store, trying to find things that I wasn't able to find), but then I ran into a professor who asked me point blank whether I was going to continue in the PhD program. I hesitated and the professor quickly added, "We have other students that we would like to accept into the program to take your place." I answered that I had an appointment scheduled with a member of my committee. The professor responded: "Before you go, I want you to know that no matter what you decide, I love you." The professor embraced me very sincerely, very warmly and very affectionately. It was a very pure embrace, devoid of role, of selfishness and of ego. I just felt loved and accepted. The roles we had assumed as guide and student, and which had, to some degree, interfered with our relationship as friends and colleagues, dissolved. We were simply friends again, warm, loving, supportive friends.

I see the professor in these dreams as a projection of that part of myself that fears failure, rejection and loss. In the first dream, I feel that I must do what others want me to do, though I react out of conflict, emotionally, with resistance to their expectations. In the second dream, I accept unconditionally whatever I choose to do. I rest in unconditional love. Wow. I must say, it was a fabulous feeling. You know how strongly you can feel a feeling in a dream, well, the truth is, you can feel that feeling awake too. We all have our fears. We have our aims, our resistances, our anger and determination -- all driven by our egos. But we also have, at the center of our being, total, complete and unconditional acceptance and love. I can relate from that, rather than from the ego on the surface.

I have learned so much from school that it's impossible to value it all. It's priceless, in other words. But I simply could not have learned any of what I've learned this year from a book or in a class. There is no degree in this kind of thing. There is no graduation. And it won't get me a job. The knowledge just grows and deepens and expands, affecting in the end everything I know, do and say. What more could I want?

Memory cold as ice

"Erickson was born the first summer Dennis brought me to Santa Fe, so I know he was there when she was born. He was about a year old or so."
"No, my kids are both older than him."
"But I was only invited to her birth to take care of the kids, your first, and Erickson, so I know he was born before her."

"Do you remember where MaryAnne did her readings? Was it on the second floor landing, or the third?"
"It was the second. Our wedding party was on the third."
"oh, yeah. That's right."

"After that boat ride when Gary ran into the dock, I never got in the boat with him again."
"When was that?"
"Oh, it must have been around 1969. I know he's more careful now, but I just never get in with him."
"It's 2009. It's been 40 years. You know, I never actually heard anything about that wreck. I thought I knew everything about them during that time."
Thinks to himself, "I lived with them during that time. I'm not so sure that wreck you remember actually happened at all. Maybe it did, but why didn't I know about it?"

I've always thought of memory as a utility, a tool that I need to do my work, to be creative, to carry on an intelligent conversation. Comes in real handy when you need to read 20 books on a subject and synthesize their authors' points of view on a related subject. Fairly important if you need to draft a legal opinion. In fact, all integrative, analytic and synthetic thinking depends on a good memory. Learning from our mistakes requires memory too.

In August and early September I took some trips* that brought some of memory's other functions forward from the places where it works, often unexamined and even unappreciated. Memory is a utility, yes, but it's also the basis of who we think we are. We become our past, or rather, we develop an ego identified with our actions and feelings from the past. My friends could say about themselves, "I was a smart-ass in high school," or, "I opened a head shop in the late 60's." Their past is part of who they are today. *The photo above is of the sky over Ocate, New Mexico, a place where Dennis and many of his New Mexico friends hung out a long time ago.

But I also saw, over and over again, how shot through with holes our memories are, and even how absolutely wrong they can be. We make up things that didn't happen when we remember them "wrong." And we forget so much of what happened, inventing a past that never existed. In this fractured process, we invent a "me" that doesn't exist, except in our minds.

And there may come a point for some of us when we remember little of our own past. Not where we grew up, not where we lived when we were 30. Not who our relatives are, our friends, not even the name of the nice guy who lives in the room next door, with whom we take three meals a day, and who helps us with every aspect of those meals because we "remind him of his wife." Who are we then, when we have no memory as utility, no memory as who we are, when accuracy and details are no longer the issue, but simply whether we remember anything at all. Who are we then?

Why do we remember some details vividly but wrongly? Why do we forget some things that others who were there with us remember clearly? Why do our memories fail as we age? Good questions, but curiosity about those matters isn't enough anymore to take me away from the day-to-day of simply experiencing life and being in the present with everything that comes up, especially when what's coming up is how fundamental our memories are to who we think we are and how memory's functions are all connected by that thread of our remembered conception of ourselves, our thoughts and feelings that constitute our egos. We have a good memory; then we have a not so good memory; then we have no memory at all. We remember ourselves as helpless and afraid; we remember ourselves as wild and crazy; we remember ourselves as compassionate and loving; we remember ourselves not at all. We recall how we were in the 70's (maybe, if our memories can be trusted); we recall how we were in the 90's (again, maybe); sometime in the future, we won't remember any of this at all. If we identify with our memories, whether as utility or more fundamentally, as who we are or even who we think we should be, who are we when we don't remember anything?

A memory-less emptiness resides just one step away from annihilation, non-existence, or so it seems to me as I watch my mother's expression as she listens to music from the 40's. If it's clear that "I am this or that" ends with death, whether the death of memory, that is, mind itself, or the death of the body, when both mind and physical form die, there is reason to think long and hard about whether Buddha might have been right when he said it was a mistake to identify with ego, with what our minds construct out of our past experiences, our versions of "I am this or that." But it's one thing to recognize the natural consequences of identifying with something that dies. It's quite another to know that what dies is not really me, that "I am" is something distinct from "I am this or that."

So, when I saw and accepted that I remembered an event wrong, I was in that moment free to give up identity with "me," the whole constructed set of events, actions, thoughts and feelings. Knowing that my memory was wrong even once, and likely wrong a lot of the time, I could accept that I didn't really know what happened when. If I don't know the past and I am my past, I don't know me. But that realization only sets me on the doorstep of not knowing anything, Buddha's not knowing. Buddha accepts much more than the mere fact that the "I" of constructed memories does not exist: the "I am" that transcends the ego's limited view of "I am this" accepts as well, every moment, without judgment and without identifying with it or the events that take place in it. It may be too big a leap for me at the moment, but at least I can see the way one maybe gets there. I can imagine it.