This week is that week
Death-versaries, the Bardo, and the precarious life of a fledgling
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
Friends, I promise there’ll be a solo Birds post soon, but, this week is that week, so it didn’t feel right. And what is ‘that week’, you might ask? It’s a Death-versary week; when the anniversary of the Death of a loved one comes around. Sometimes, the stars will even align so that you get multiple Death-versaries in one week—and this week is that week for me.
My mother died on June 14th, 1989 (I was 3) and one of my dearest friends died on June 17th, 2022 (I was 36).
I was curious in the lead up to this week as to how it might feel. I am blessed to have processed a lot of the grief I’ve felt around these, and other, losses. When my friend, Daniel, died last year I had been reading ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’ and, at a loss as to what to do with the rolling and, frankly, panic-inducing tsunami-like waves of devastation that were coming at me thick and fast, I decided to practice a ritual of reading to him, daily, for 49 days. In Tibetan Buddhism, the transition between Death and reincarnation can take up to 49 days, and this transition is spent in a liminal space known as ‘the Bardo’; which, translated, means “gap, interval, intermediate state, transitional process, or in between”.
I am not a practicing Buddhist, nor a practicing anything that I can clearly define, but, nonetheless, I have a deep respect for the tradition and I had a deep need for a space into which I could place some of the very powerful energy of heartbreak, and so, every day for 49 days I would light a candle or some incense, sit quietly, say his name aloud three times (“Daniel, Daniel, Daniel”), and then read to him from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.