Death is a Sacrament Teisho

　　by Subhana Barzaghi, Roshi

　　Subhana Barzaghi Sensei”s talk, dedicated to the memory of Father Bede Griffiths, was given at Spring Sesshin 1993, Gorrick”s Run Zendo.

　　Immediately we start to speak about death in our culture, it conjures up all kinds of images of something morbid or depressing or tragic or painful, Our Western culture is particularly good at hiding death and making it something alien. We immediately cover up a corpse and lock it behind closed doors, cover it over with a sterile sheet, in some ways denying death”s relevance to life. There is such a great fear of extinction that we treat death as something taboo. We live with this anxiety about death, as if it is a denial of our rights to continual and perpetual self-determination.

　　My first early experience around death was certainly not a pleasant one. I was working as a nurse at the Lorna Hodgkinson Sunshine Home in Sydney. I normally looked after children Ñ a ward of twenty-eight unruly mentally retarded boys Ñ but on one occasion I was transferred to the geriatric ward and I was rostered to a mentally retarded patient there who was dying. I think I was rostered because nobody else wanted to take care of him. When I went in there he could barely speak and state his needs. The smell was repulsive: everything came out in the bed; there was excretion everywhere. I did not know how to relate to this situation at all: I was twenty-one. As the days went on he became worse and he died. I felt that this was a very tragic and repulsive way to die because I had no way of meeting this person”s needs or even communicating with him. I felt totally inadequate. I went straight to the matron”s office and said, ”If you don”t transfer me back to the children”s ward, you”re going to have one less nurse on Monday morning.” In those days, I don”t think we were prepared for death or how to deal with it Ñ I certainly wasn”t prepared, in any way.

　　Many years later I had another experience, completely different from that. When I was a midwife for seven years, delivering babies at home, on one occasion I was assisting some dear friends. The labour was not progressing well and was showing obvious signs that the woman and the labour needed attention. So we transferred her to the hospital. During the pushing stage one could tell that there was something not quite right. The pushing stage was very, very difficult for her, unlike other situations that I had been in, so we picked up on something on an energetic level. When they tried to find the baby”s heartbeat on the monitor, there was no heartbeat. That is not uncommon at that stage of labour: when the baby is so far down in the birth canal, one cannot always pick up the heartbeat. Nevertheless the doctor also somehow felt that he must get this baby out. When the baby was born, it was dead.

　　The father, who had done a lot of work on himself, was a very interesting person, very spontaneous. He just let out an almighty scream that went right through the hospital. The nurse burst into tears and ran out of the room. The doctor cleaned up and didn”t know what to say. So there we were. I was with this couple and this dead baby. What we decided to do was just walk right out of the hospital. We took the baby with us. Nobody was going to stop us Ñ they didn”t know how to respond anyway. We got into their van and drove off someplace in the middle of the night and we all sat there in the van and passed round the dead baby and started singing to the baby and speaking to the baby. Of course there was a huge amount of tears and enormous grief, but I was also amazed, in looking at this baby”s face, at how exquisitely peaceful it was. So I had the most extreme emotions of incredible peace and at the …

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