Contemplating Death and Suicide

Clint with his son Leo

Recently my family has experienced an unbelievable tragedy. A few weeks ago, my partner Robert’s 30-year-old brother, Clint, committed suicide. If any of you have experienced the suicide of someone you love, you understand it has its own category of grief. It leaves you feeling helpless, left with this undeniable sense of failure, like a waste, as if it could have been prevented. Could I have done more? Could THEY have done more? It’s a cruel reminder that stories don’t always have that happy ending that as children we were led to believe.

Currently, I’m creating my project The Journey of the In-Between which is a painting series and book that explores death, significantly, my own. I have had a lot of experience with death in my life. Not only have I lost my father, six grandparents, and two people to suicide, for years I worked as a caregiver in hospice, and helped many people make their transition from this world. I witnessed many families suffer from the loss of their loved ones, and many others be at peace. When my own grandparents and father died, though I felt the sadness of the loss of them in my life, I also felt the beauty of their transition. I felt a greater connection to the unknown, which has always left me with a sense of beauty and wonder. Death to me can be so beautiful. This is the principal focus of The Journey of the In-Between; that death can be an experience that opens us to the greater consciousness we are.

When Clint died, it didn’t feel beautiful. It felt tragic and wrong. But I thought back to what I had learned in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a seminal text of Tibetan Buddhism. It speaks of the Bardos, which are the transitional phases of consciousness we experience after death. One stage of the Bardos describes how you can hear everyone that speaks of you after death. So I thought maybe Clint is seeing the impact his life left in a positive way with those who loved him in a manner he couldn’t see while he was alive. Maybe he will wake up from suffering and see the powerful clear consciousness that he is, that we all are, in complete perfection. Thinking this brought me solace, made me feel like it could be a happy ending for him after all. But then I had to stop myself.

Truth be told, most of us don’t wake up to our enlightened nature in this lifetime, or the next. According to the Tibetan Buddhist masters, we have a great opportunity in death to perceive our true nature and be free, but most of us get fooled by our own habitual patterns of consciousness and get sucked back into the cycle all over again. Most likely, Clint’s death was just deeply tragic, and any hopes of it being a happy ending is my own attempt to deflect my pain with happy thoughts that are a bandaid. In recognizing this, I turn to what I have learned in Buddhist Dzogchen teachings.

When speaking of a state of enlightenment, we want to believe that it means we have seen through some veil of ignorance and have woken up to an experience that is happiness and magic and rainbows. Life as bliss, Nirvana at its best! But that really isn’t the case. Tragedy still happens. Pain is still experienced. Life still has its ups and downs. The only difference between an “enlightened” person and someone who isn’t, is that this person is aware that all this pain and tragedy is just a movie, like lights flickering on a screen, and the acceptance of that. If you hit them with a hammer they will still yell in pain. But they see the pain as part of the play. So it is what it is, with no big story or meaning attached to it. It’s all inherently empty. When we perceive this, and we see that we ALL strive to attach deeper meaning to things, we can cultivate a sense of compassion for this shared game of life we are all playing.

Clint’s death is what it is. The pain all those who loved him feel is what it is. It too is part of the play, the dance of perfection which is the basis of all of creation. As I move forward creating The Journey of the In-Between, I am going to take this continual experience of grappling with the pain and tragedy of Clint’s death and remember that it is what it is. I’m going to remember that it doesn’t always HAVE to be beautiful. Though it may not be a happy ending, it's perfection nonetheless, even if I can’t see it myself.