Articles by Subject › Spirituality › A Dark Night: Love and Death

Everyone in that bright hospital room including myself knew there was no hope, yet we continued to pretend. Elegant, uncompromising Death was at hand and each one of us had a role to play in preparation for her arrival. I remember the blinding lights and bright colors, the alien sounds and his blood on white sheets. I close my eyes and still see the doctors working on his ashen body and hear the nurse ask with a serious tone in her voice, "Do you want us to stop resuscitating?" It is then when the sounds become silence and from that silence springs a voice that carries wisdom and power and speaks the word yes with authority, before my mind understands what has been said.

Over and over again I return to this eternal moment, for never has my role been more clear or lucid than on that night. I was the daughter watching her father die. I was the silent observer; a witness for Death. And as this scene unfolded before me, the Angel stood on my left hand side and together we gazed into the column of light at the center of a dying star.

Death, the Angel, was a tall, dark man in a white lab coat with a vacant smile. He appeared from nowhere, filling the room with empty space, his shadow moving and changing shape as his body remained completely still. In perfect calm, he turned his eyes on me and asked, "Who is the one that is dying?"

The ancient teachings of Toltecs say that the Angel of Death is always standing behind your left shoulder patiently waiting and whispering melodiously in your ear that your life is fleeting. Death seizes life from a child as easily as that of an adult. It has a function regardless of age, gender, social standing, wisdom, ignorance, poverty or fortune; all of that is irrelevant to its purpose. The ending of life happens to anyone, at any moment, and this knowledge is a precious gift in the shaman?s path; for a life lived in the awareness of Death is a life that is whole and completely free.

When you actually think about death and your relationship to it, you realize with certainty that we begin dying the moment we are born. We are a living anomaly, an impossibility. In us, both life and death are occurring at once. Don Eduardo Calderon, a Peruvian man of knowledge, speaks of the shaman as one who is already dead, and thus has no fear of death or life.

In writing this article on death on dying, I recognize what I have been searching for, what it is I seek. I endeavor to create a life of total freedom, a life that is fearless and ruled by the heart. My experiences, whether of sorrow or joy, have led me and will lead me to this. And I will return willingly over and over again to my father?s death in a bright hospital room.

I heard once in a song that love is watching someone die. On that long and dark night I found these words true.

 Star Water

The Tequihua Foundation