You Already Know

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Some years ago, a friend who was one of the most beloved physician healers in Western Massachusetts died. He and his family were part of a wide circle of community and after he died they did a variety of moving spiritual rituals – they got a Tibetan Lama to come chant, they did 49 days of prayer practice, they did visualizations, they bathed his body, and shared many beautiful offerings.

After all this, his wife wanted to know what happened to him after his death. 

She went first to a wonderful Sufi master they had practiced with and asked, 

“Do you have any sense of what’s happened to him?” 

The master closed his eyes and said, 

“Yes, I’ve been tracking him. He’s now in Sufi heaven with the Saints. He was such a saintly soul.” 

Hearing this answer, she felt consoled.

Then she ran into the Tibetan Lama who had helped with her husband’s transition. She said, 

“I’ve been wondering how he’s doing.” 

The Tibetan Lama said, 

“Oh yes, don’t worry, I’ve been tracking him through the bardo. He’s now in a particular bardo, and he’s moving to another.” 

She nodded and thought, “Hmm, that’s a little different, but maybe so.”

The following week she visited a sagely Hindu guru with whom they had also practiced. Without being asked, the guru explained, 

“Oh, I’ve been meditating and connecting with your husband. He’s already in the womb of a woman in Washington, DC. He’s ready to take his next birth.” 

She listened confused by three teachers telling her three different things.

Not knowing who to believe, she came to ask me. 

I certainly was not going to give her another answer. Instead, I responded with a question, 

“Here’s a great Sufi master and a Hindu guru and a Tibetan Lama all telling you something different. Naturally, this brings confusion, you don’t know who to believe.” She smiled.

Then quietly I asked her,  

 

“Leaving aside what spiritual teachers have told you, what is it that you know yourself, truth that no one could tell you different because you know it so deeply? What are the things you actually know? You may not be able to know where your husband is, but what are the deepest knowings you have?”

She began to get still, and then answered, 

“One of the things I know that no one can tell me different is that everything changes. Everything that appears or arises eventually disappears. Everything that’s born dies. It’s all impermanence, it’s all in change.” 

I nodded, “Yes. What else do you know?”

She went on, 

“I’ve learned that the more I hold on to what changes, the more I struggle. And if I let it come and go as it does, life is easier.

I’ve also learned that I can’t stop pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss. They all keep coming no matter what I try to do. When I get lost in reaction, I suffer a lot. When I relax and come back to my practice of mindfulness and loving kindness, it all goes easier.

I also learned that in the end it’s love that matters and not anyone’s ideas about things. This has gotten even clearer with my husband‘s death.”

These words expressed her deep intuitive wisdom. 

I bowed and said that she already contained the core teachings that could guide her through birth and life, through changes and death.

Zen Master Soen Sa Nim would say: You already understand. You already know.

So I ask you who are reading: take a breath, let yourself get quiet. 

What do you know no matter what any of the lamas and mamas and swamis and gurus might say? 

What are the the deepest truths that you know about this human incarnation?

Now, through this lens of wisdom, take a moment to reflect. 

What is a compelling or difficult question for you in your life? 

What would the wisest and most compassionate part of yourself say in response? 

You can answer. You can know.

The beautiful thing about tuning into your deep understanding is that wisdom is both gracious and playful. As it says in the Tao Te Ching—

If you don’t remember the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. But when you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kind-hearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you. And even when death comes, you are at ease.

It is with the gracious ease of the Tao that you can begin to playfully navigate life from your own intuitive heart.

Jack Kornfield

On the Death of the Beloved

 

Style Arena

Though we need to weep your loss,

You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,

Where no storm or night or pain can reach you.

Your love was like the dawn

Brightening over our lives

Awakening beneath the dark

A further adventure of colour.

The sound of your voice

Found for us

A new music

That brightened everything.

Whatever you enfolded in your gaze

Quickened in the joy of its being;

You placed smiles like flowers

On the altar of the heart.

Your mind always sparkled

With wonder at things.

Though your days here were brief,

Your spirit was live, awake, complete.

We look towards each other no longer

From the old distance of our names;

Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,

As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,

We know our soul's gaze is upon your face,

Smiling back at us from within everything

To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,

Where we would grow lonely without you.

You would want us to find you in presence,

Beside us when beauty brightens,

When kindness glows

And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,

Darkest winter has turned to spring;

May this dark grief flower with hope

In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.

To serve the call of courage and love

Until we see your beautiful face again

In that land where there is no more separation,

Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,

And where we will never lose you again. 

John O’Donohue

On Losing Someone You Love

pixabay

 

Why the Stoics didn’t want you to suppress your pain and how to stop building an identity around your loss.

My grandmother passed away four years ago. She was a large part of my childhood, and in the years since she's been gone I have thought about her more than I ever did while she was alive. 

Grief does that. 

It returns the person to you in a different form, after you no longer have them in the form you were used to. 

If you have ever lost someone you love, you already know that no writing can touch what you carry. Words don’t go where grief goes. I write this knowing that, and knowing some of you are reading it while the loss is still raw, and others are reading it while carrying something older that never quite settled.

Nothing here will lift what you’re carrying. The Stoics never claimed their philosophy could. What they offered, and what I want to pass on as carefully as I can, is a way of thinking about grief that doesn’t shame you for feeling it and doesn’t trap you inside it.

The Stoics have a reputation for being cold about grief, and almost everything the standard picture says they meant is wrong.

The reputation comes from three places, and once you know where it comes from you can see how the misreading happened. Epictetus has a line about kissing your child as though they might die tomorrow, which sounds chilling out of context and has been quoted out of context for two thousand years. The word apatheia gets translated as having no feelings, when what the Stoics meant was something closer to not being controlled by reactive passions. And the practice of premeditatio malorum, the deliberate contemplation of loss, sounds morbid until you understand it as a way of refusing to take what you love for granted.

Put together, these three things produced a caricature of Stoicism as the philosophy of the stiff upper lip. Don’t grieve. Don’t feel. Get on with it.

This is the opposite of what they actually said.

In one of his letters to Lucilius, Seneca responds to the death of Lucilius’s friend Flaccus. 

The letter survives as Letter 63 in his collected correspondence, and it contains one of the most overlooked sentences in the Stoic tradition on the subject of grief.

Seneca’s position, restated in plain modern English:

Don’t weep too much, and don’t refrain from weeping.

That’s the Stoic position on grief. 

The tears are not the problem. 

Pretending the tears shouldn’t be there is one kind of problem. 

Building a life around the tears is another kind of problem. 

Between those two is where the Stoics actually lived.

Seneca elaborated and wrote that to feel no grief at the loss of a friend would mean we hadn’t really had a friend. The grief is the evidence that the love was real. Removing the grief would mean removing the love retrospectively, which is exactly the move the caricature accuses Stoicism of recommending and which the actual tradition consistently refused.

The philosophical work underneath this distinction was done over generations within the Stoic school. Later Stoic writers distinguished between the first involuntary movements of emotion and the judgments we add afterward. When you lose someone you love, the first wave of feeling, the gasp, the tears, the way the body buckles when the news arrives, was not treated as a fully chosen moral failure. It was the kind of thing that can happen before reason has had time to assent or refuse. 

No philosophy could or should try to legislate it out of existence.

The strictest early version of Stoicism had leaned toward treating emotional responses as judgments through and through, which means in principle they could be reasoned with. Later thinkers, including Posidonius, complicated that picture. Some responses arrive before reason gets there.

Grief, in its first wave, is one of them.

To tell someone in fresh loss not to feel what they’re feeling is to ask them to perform a kind of mental gymnastics that human bodies aren’t built for and that no Stoic worth reading ever actually recommended.

What the Stoics did want to talk about is what we do with the grief afterward. 

The first wave isn’t up for evaluation.

What comes after is.

There are two ways we tend to betray our grief, and both of them are betrayals of the love that produced it.

The first is suppression. 

Treating grief as weakness. Performing okayness in front of others, and increasingly in front of ourselves. Moving on quickly because the people around us seem to want us to. Filing the loss into the past tense and refusing to revisit it, because revisiting hurts.

The Stoics noticed this and called it what it is. 

If we can lose someone we loved and feel nothing, we are saying retroactively that we hadn’t really had them. The suppression looks like strength. It is actually a small denial, repeated daily, that the love was ever there.

The second betrayal is the opposite. 

Building an identity around the loss. 

Letting the grief organize the rest of life. Treating the grief as the thing we owe the person we lost, and slowly converting them into an emblem of our suffering rather than letting them remain who they actually were.

This one is harder to see clearly, because it feels like loyalty. 

• Doesn’t it seem disloyal to soften? 
• To allow joy back in? 
• To find ourselves laughing one day and realize we forgot for an hour that they were gone?

The person clinging to grief as devotion is usually avoiding something harder than mourning. 

Grief that stays a wound asks nothing of you except that you keep it. 

Grief that becomes a continuing influence asks you to act on what they gave you, in your own life, with no further confirmation from them about whether you’re doing it right. 

The grief stays intact because the alternative is to convert the loss from something done to you into something you now have to do something with. 

The wound is the easier position.

Seneca anticipated this and wrote a long consolation to a woman named Marcia, who had lost her son three years before and was still organizing her life around the loss as if it had happened that morning. He is not gentle by modern standards. He believes her grief has become its own thing, separate now from the love that produced it.

“Three years have already passed, and still your grief has lost none of its first poignancy, but renews and strengthens itself day by day, and has now dwelt so long with you that it has acquired a domicile in your mind, and actually thinks that it would be base to leave it. All vices sink into our whole being, if we do not crush them before they gain a footing; and in like manner these sad, pitiable, and discordant feelings end by feeding upon their own bitterness, until the unhappy mind takes a sort of morbid delight in grief. I should have liked, therefore, to have attempted to effect this cure in the earliest stages of the disorder, before its force was fully developed; it might have been checked by milder remedies, but now that it has been confirmed by time it cannot be beaten without a hard struggle.” 

— Seneca, Consolation to Marcia, 1.7.

The phrase to sit with is “acquired a domicile in your mind.” 

The grief has become a tenant. It has its own room. It has lived there long enough that Marcia has started believing it would be shameful to leave it, which is Seneca’s diagnosis. Earlier in the same letter, he puts the same idea more bluntly. He tells Marcia he intends to dry her eyes, which “already, to tell you the truth, are weeping more from habit than from sorrow.” That is the moment the grief and the love come apart. The tears keep arriving, but they are no longer arriving from the place the love lived. They are arriving from the routine the loss carved.

Seneca was hard on timing. He thought time usually does its work, and that three years was already long enough for the usual softening to have happened. In Marcia’s case it hadn’t, which is why he wrote.

I don’t want to pass that timing on. There is no correct date by which grief should have resolved into something gentler, and the people I’ve known who carry old grief well have not been on anyone’s schedule.

What I want to take from Seneca is the diagnostic underneath the timing, not the timing itself.

Grief can eventually stop expressing love and 

start feeding on itself.

Duration tells you nothing. A grief of two months can already be habit, and a grief of ten years can still be doing real work. What matters is what the grief is still for. 

Marcia’s son would not have wanted to be remembered as a wound. 

By keeping the grief intact, she was preserving him as a wound rather than letting him become what he could become inside her, a continuing influence on the way she lived.

The shift Seneca was pointing toward is rarely talked about clearly. 

It runs from grief that wounds to grief that becomes something else. 

A kind of warm remembering. 

A way of carrying someone forward that doesn’t require keeping yourself broken on their behalf.

There is only the slow, unforced movement that happens when grief is allowed to do its work without being either crushed or curated.

What does grief actually do, if you let it do its work?

Hierocles gave the Stoics one of their clearest images of human life as relational. 

The self at the center, then the rings of family, fellow citizens, and finally humanity.

The image was originally a way of thinking about duties and appropriate action, but it points at something deeper. We are not the isolated individuals we sometimes imagine ourselves to be. The configuration of our attention, our care, our daily concern, has always been bound up with the people in those inner rings.

If this is right, and the Stoics were not the only thinkers to suspect it was, then losing someone you loved can feel like losing part of yourself, because part of your life really was shaped around them.

The configuration of who you are had become organized partly through them, and now the organization continues in their absence, like a vine continuing to grow in the shape the trellis gave it after the trellis is gone.

This is why grief is the correct response. 

Something has actually been removed. 

The grief is your system registering the removal accurately.

But here’s what’s also true, and what the Stoics understood and what much modern grief discourse can flatten. The shaping the person did is still there. The way you notice certain things, the small gestures you picked up without realizing you were picking them up, the values you hold, the particular way you treat someone who needs the kind of care this person once gave you. Some of that is them, still alive in you. Not in the soft sense people sometimes mean when they say someone lives on in our hearts, but in the practical sense that lineage works this way. We carry forward what we received.

The Stoic consolation, if there is one, is this.

The grief is evidence the love was real. The love produced something in you that survives the loss. What survives is what they gave. What they gave is now yours to carry forward, into the way you live, into how you treat the people still here, into who you become from this point on.

This isn’t faster healing, and the loss stays exactly as large as it actually is.

It is a way of refusing two betrayals at once. 

The grief is permitted, because the love was real. 

The softening is permitted, because the love continues, in a different form, in you. 

Both can be true. Holding both is what the Stoics meant by grieving well.

There’s no schedule for this. There never was.

Some readers will be in the part of grief where Seneca's letter to Marcia is exactly the wrong thing to read, because the wound is too fresh and the only honest response is to feel it. If that's you, set this aside. The question Seneca was pressing on Marcia is not the question fresh grief needs.

For readers further along, or carrying an older grief that’s gone quiet but never quite settled, Seneca pointed Marcia toward a harder question. 

Is the grief still doing its work, or has it become something you’re keeping intact because softening would feel like betrayal?

Seneca’s answer to that question, for Marcia and for anyone since, was that 

the softening is itself a form of fidelity. 

To let the wound become warm remembering is not to lose them again. It is to finally let them be inside you the way they were trying to be the whole time. 

As evidence of what was given, rather than as evidence of what was taken.

What’s left, in the end, is small and specific. 

A turn of phrase you use that came from them and you didn’t know it came from them. 

The way you do something small in the kitchen because that’s how they did it. 

The way you reach for the person beside you when something good happens, because that’s what they taught you to do. 

The way you treat the next person who needs the kind of care they once gave you.

My grandmother was the kindest person I have ever known. People who only met her once remembered her. Nobody had a bad word about her, not because she was performing kindness, but because there was nothing else in her to perform. She was kind the way water is wet. It was simply what she was made of.

What she gave me, without ever sitting me down to teach it, was the conviction that being kind to people is the most important thing you can do with a life. I don’t always live up to it. I am more impatient and quicker to judge. But she is in me anyway. When I'm patient with someone who needs it, when I stay on the phone longer than I planned, when I give someone the benefit of the doubt, that is her, working through me, four years after she stopped being able to do it herself.

She is the reason I believe what this post has been arguing. That lineage is real. That love produces something durable inside the people who received it. That the dead go on shaping the living, in small daily ways, if the living let them. I am not done grieving her. I don’t think I ever will be entirely. But the grief has become, slowly, a way of carrying her forward rather than a wound I keep dressing.

That is what she would have wanted.

That is what I owe her.

in, Stoic Wisdom

Why We Fear Death More Than Death Itself

Colin Kinnear

 

The Mind, 

the Unknown, 

and the Illusion of Control

Most people are not afraid of death.

They are afraid of what they imagine death to be.

The pain.

The darkness.

The loss of control.

The idea of disappearing into something unknown and irreversible.

But if you look closely, none of these are death itself.

They are projections of the mind.

I once spoke with a nurse who had worked in palliative care for over a decade. She had been present for hundreds of deaths. When I asked her what surprised her most, she didn’t mention the physical process.

She said, quietly,

“People are far more afraid before it happens than during.”

That stayed with me.

Because it suggests something uncomfortable:

What we fear may not be death, but our relationship to it.

Psychology offers a clear explanation.

The human brain is not designed to understand non-existence. 

It is designed to predict, to simulate, to anticipate threats. 

The amygdala—our fear center—activates not only in the presence of danger, but in the imagination of it.

This is why thinking about a future event can trigger the same anxiety as experiencing it.

In other words,

we don’t need death to suffer.

The idea of it is enough.

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, argued that much of human behavior is driven by an unconscious fear of mortality. 

We build identities, pursue achievements, accumulate wealth—not only to live, but to feel that we will not disappear.

We try to outsmart impermanence.

But the more we avoid death, the more power it seems to have.

This avoidance shows up in subtle ways.

1. We distract ourselves constantly.
2. We fill our lives with noise.
3. We postpone difficult conversations.
4. We act as if there will always be more time.

And so death becomes something distant, abstract—until suddenly it isn’t.

Then the fear arrives all at once.

In Buddhism, this is described not as a failure, but as ignorance—not in a moral sense, but in a perceptual one.

We do not see clearly.

• We take what is temporary to be permanent.
• We take what is uncertain to be controllable.
• We take what is not “self” to be “mine.”

And from these misunderstandings, fear naturally arises.

The Buddha did not teach people how to avoid death.

He taught them how to see reality as it is.

“All conditioned things are impermanent.”

When this is deeply understood—not intellectually, but experientially—fear begins to change.

Because what we resist is no longer surprising.

Think about it this way.

You are not afraid that the sun will set tonight.

You are not afraid that seasons will change.

Why?

Because you accept them.

Death, in its essence, is not different.

It is the natural unfolding of a process that began the moment we were born.

What makes it terrifying is not its nature,

but our resistance to it.

There is also something else we rarely admit:

We are not only afraid of death.

We are afraid of unfinished life.

1. Unspoken words.
2. Unresolved relationships.
3. Dreams we delayed too long.

Regret amplifies fear.

Studies in existential psychology show that people who feel their lives lack meaning or authenticity report higher levels of death anxiety.

Not because death is different for them,

but because their relationship with life is.

And slowly, almost quietly,

the question begins to change.

Not, “How do I stop being afraid of death?”

But, “How do I live in a way that leaves less to fear?”

Because in the end,

it is not death itself that disturbs us most,

but the sense that something remains unfinished.

• Unlived moments. 

• Unspoken words. 

• A life only partially entered.

If fear of death is largely created by the mind,

then the real question is no longer:

“What will happen when I die?”

But:

“Why does my mind react this way at all?”

And even more importantly:

If fear is constructed,

what else are we carrying—unconsciously—

that might shape our final moments?

Let's go deeper into something most people never question:

What if the pain of dying is not just physical… but something we’ve been building our entire lives?

 Luna Rose

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my

 Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden

Do not stand at my grave and weep

 

Do not stand at my grave and weep

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sun on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Frye

Quando morre um ser querido...

Quando morre um ser querido, um parente, um amigo, é natural ter necessidade de se agarrar a recordações: objectos, cartas, fotografias...
Mas isso não é suficiente para preservar a sua presença, pois a sua presença não está nos objectos, mas no seu espírito, e enquanto se ficar às voltas com alguns objectos não se trata de espírito, mas de matéria.

Quanto a ir recolher-se sobre um túmulo, também isso é natural, mas o que está no túmulo é o corpo, não o espírito. O espírito tem necessidade de liberdade e faz esforços para se libertar do corpo e viajar na imensidão, que é a sua verdadeira pátria.

Aquele que sofre e chora sobre um túmulo, como se o ser que está no caixão devesse aí ficar eternamente, limita-o e perturba-o no seu desejo de libertação.

E não o reencontrará ao fazer isso.


Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

PROCESSO DE LUTO

 

"Não estou pedindo que você me dê um tratamento especial. 

Não estou doente, você também não precisa se afastar de mim, só quero que leve em consideração alguns aspectos do meu processo, porque estou vivendo através de uma das experiências mais difíceis da vida, a morte de um ente querido.

Primeiramente, peço que não tenham medo de pronunciar o nome dele, pois ele viveu e ainda vive em mim. Considere como estou feliz em saber que você se lembra dele também.  Eu gosto de notar que você mantém seus aniversários e datas comemorativas em mente.

Eu quero que você saiba que eu posso experimentar emoções diferentes no mesmo dia.  

De repente você vai me ver rir e vibrar de alegria ao lembrar dele e alguns minutos depois, chorar por sua ausência. Um dia estarei calmo e de bom humor, e talvez no dia seguinte nada faça sentido para mim.

Peço que me dê espaço para ser livre com minhas emoções, ainda estou aprendendo a lidar com elas.

Eu sei que você me ama e se preocupa comigo, mas por favor, não me force a me sentir alegre.  Se às vezes você me vê retraído, é porque minha mente e meu coração viajaram para outro espaço onde posso ver seus olhos, abraçá-lo, sentir seu aroma, ouvir sua voz e sua risada.

Considere que o que aconteceu comigo é difícil, não compare com outra situação que aconteceu com você.  Perder um ente querido não é igual a qualquer outra morte ou acontecimento, cada processo, como cada pessoa, é único.  

Por favor, não faça comparações.

Tenha em mente que, embora eu esteja trabalhando para transcender minha dor e processar minhas emoções, não sei quanto tempo isso vai durar para mim.  

Não se desespere, apenas me dê tempo, não sei quanto tempo ainda.

Estou ciente de que o mundo continua girando e não para diante da minha dor, mas por favor, não me conforte com frases como: 

"você tem que ser forte", 

"a vida continua" .  

Nem com explicações teológicas, não me diga: 

"Deus precisava de um anjo", 

"foi a vontade de Deus", 

"ele parou de sofrer".

É normal que neste momento eu não entenda e veja a vida de forma diferente.  

Além disso, provavelmente passarei por uma crise de fé e repensarei minhas crenças.  

Até me deixe pensar sobre isso sem me sentir culpado.

Sei que no meu ritmo e no meu tempo sairei fortalecido, renovado, resiliente e alcançarei uma nova compreensão espiritual.

Já aviso que meu corpo também me cobra esse golpe emocional.  

Posso ganhar ou perder peso, dormir muito ou não conseguir dormir. quero me isolar.  

Sentindo-se triste, ansioso, irritado.

E, finalmente, considere que tenho óculos novos para ver a vida.  

Este evento está sendo um divisor de águas para mim, não sou mais o mesmo.  Eu nunca serei.  

Estou diferente, estou me reconstruindo.

Não leve para o lado pessoal, apenas me escute, me diga coisas bonitas que neste momento você possa apreciar, me acompanhe às vezes em silêncio, tome um café comigo, me dê um longo abraço e tente me conhecer novamente."

A.D.

The Hungarian Cat Curse

Nesta história,

Do livro, Momma and the Meaning Of Life,

de Irvin D. Yalom,

Ernest Lash,

personagem do livro Mentiras no Divã do mesmo autor,

tenta tratar Merges

um violento gato falante de alemão, na sua nona e última vida.

Merges é um personagem bastante viajado, que numa vida anterior, fora amigo de Xanthippe, um gato que vivia em casa de Heidegger, e assombrava agora, sem dó nem piedade, Artemis, amante de Ernest.

Durante um sonho, após uma noite de sexo com Artemis, Ernest e Merges têm um diálogo fascinante...

Um diálogo que Yalom deseja que seja lido no seu funeral: 

"To Magda, 

my dear daughter, 

on her seventeenth birthday, 

in the hope that this message is neither too late nor too early.

It is time for you to know the answers to the important questions in your life. 

Where have we come from? 

Why have you been uprooted so many times? 

Who and where is your father? 

Why have I sent you away and not kept you with me? 

The family history, which I write here, is something you must know and must pass on to your daughters.

(...)

 I stayed unmarried and lived my small happy life with my cat, Cica. 

And then a monster, Mr. Kovacs, moved into the upstairs flat and with him his cat, Merges. Merges means "rageful" in Hungarian, and that beast was well named.

He was a vicious, hideous, black-and-white cat direct from Hell and terrorized my poor Cica. Over and over Cica returned home cut and bleeding. She lost an eye to infection, one of her ears was half torn off.

And Kovacs terrorized me. I barricaded my doors at night against him. And closed the shutters because he wandered around the outside of the house peering in through every crack.

Once, I put aside my pride and pleaded with him to keep Merges inside for only an hour a day so Cica could go out in safety. "Nothing wrong with Merges," he sneered. "My cat and I are alike, we both want the same thing—sweet Hungarian pussy." 

Yes, he would agree to keep Merges at home—for a price. And the price was me!

 Merges went berserk: all night long screeching, yowling, scratching at the wall of my house, and flinging himself against my windows.

As if Merges and Kovacs were not pestilence enough, Budapest at that time was infested by huge Danube river rats, which swarmed through my neighborhood...One day my landlord helped me set a trap-cage for the rats in the cellar, and that very night I heard ungodly squeals. Then, by the flickering candle, I saw the cage and, peering out from its bars, the largest, most horrible rat I had ever seen or, in mv worst dreams, imagined. I flew back up the stairs and decided to call for help when my landlord awoke. But an hour later, as dawn broke, I ventured back down and took another look. It was no rat. It was worse—it was Merges! As soon as he saw me, he hissed and spit and tried to claw me through the bars of the cage. God, what a monster! I knew just what to do, and it was with great pleasure that I threw an entire pitcher of water on him.

He kept on hissing and I picked up my skirts and pranced with joy three times around the cage. But then what? What should I do with Merges, who now was howling an ungodly song. Something within me made the decision without my knowing it. For the first time in my life, I would take a stand. 

For me! For women everywhere! I would fight back. I put an old blanket over the cage, lifted it by the handle, walked out of the house—the streets still empty, no one up yet— and marched to the train station. I bought a ticket for Esztergom, about an hour away, but then, deciding it was not far enough, I rode all the way to Szeged, about two hundred kilometers away. When I got off the train, I walked a few blocks, then stopped, took the cover off the cage, and prepared to release Merges.

As I looked at him, his eyes slashed at me— sharp, like a razor, and I shuddered. There was something about his wild look, so hateful, so relentless, that I knew then, with an eerie certainty, that Cica and I would never be free of him. Animals have been known to return home from across a continent. No matter how far I took Merges, he would return. He would track us from the ends of the earth. 

I picked up the cage and walked a few squares farther until I came to the Danube. I walked to the center of the bridge, waited until there was no one in sight, and threw the cage into the water. It floated for an instant, then began to sink As it sank lower in the water, Merges never stopped looking at me and hissing. Finally the Danube stilled him, and I waited until I saw no more bubbles, until he had reached his riverbed grave, until I was safe forever from the hellcat. Then I boarded a train for home.

For the first time in my life, I felt free.

But not for long. 

That night, an hour or two after I fell asleep, I heard Merges's yowling outside. It was, of course, a dream, but a dream so vivid, so tangible, that it was more real than my life awake. 

I heard Merges clawing and scraping a hole in the wall of my bedroom. Staring at the splintering wall, I saw his paw thrust into the room. More scraping, plaster falling all over my room. Then Merges burst into my bedroom. A big cat to start with, he had grown to now double, maybe triple his old size. Soaking wet, the dirty water of the Danube still dripping off him, he spoke to me.

The beast's word are frozen in my mind. 

"I am old, you murdering bitch," he hissed, " and I have already lived eight of my lives. I have a single lifeleft and I swear here and now to dedicate it to revenge. I will dwell in the dream dimension, and I will haunt you and your female descendants forever. You separated me forever from Cica, the bewitching Cica, the great passion of my life, and now I will make certain that you will forever be separated from any man who ever shows an interest in you. I'll visit them when they are with you"— here he hissed most terribly— "and drive them from you in such terror that they will never return— they will forget your very existence."

At first I felt exultant. 

Stupid cat! Cats are, after all, simple-minded, pinheaded animals. Merges had no real understanding of me. His brilliant revenge—that I would no longer be able to be with a man twice! Not revenge but a blessing, a blessing exceeded only by my being forbidden to be with a man even once. 

Never again to touch or even see a man—that would be paradise.

"What you feel toward men will be changed forever. Now you shall know desire. You shall be like a cat, and when your heat comes each month, your desire will be irresistible. But never fulfilled. You will please men, but never be pleased, and each man you please will leave you, never to return or even to remember you. You shall bear a child, and your child's child shall know what I and Kovacs feel. This shall be for all time."

Suddenly overcome, I began to tremble and beg for you, my unborn daughter. 

"Please punish me, Merges. I deserve it for what I did to you. I deserve a loveless life. But my children and my children's children, I beg you." 

And I bowed low before him and pressed my forehead to the ground.

"There is only one exit for your children. None for you."

"What is the exit?" I asked.

"Redress the wrong," said Merges, now licking—with a tongue larger than my hand—his monstrous paws and cleaning his hideous face.

"Redress the wrong? How? What should they do?" 

I moved toward him, pleading.

But Merges hissed and brandished his unsheathed claws. 

As I stepped back, he faded away. The last thing I saw of him were those terrible claws.

The rest you know. 

A year later, I conceived you. I never knew who your father was. Now you know why. And now you know why I could never keep you with me and why I sent you away to school. 

Knowing this, Magda, you must decide on what you will do when you graduate. 

You may, of course, always come to me in New York. 

Whatever you decide, I shall continue to send you money each month. 

In other ways, I cannot help you. I cannot help myself.

Your Mother, 

Klara"

"Merges's recipe for lifting the curse—Redress the wrong— did you ever find out what that meant?"

Ernest was awakened by Merges's howling. 

Again, he felt the room shake; again, the scratching and scraping at the wall of the house. Fear flickered, but he got quickly out of bed and—shaking his head vigorously and inhaling deeply—calmly opened the window wide, leaned out, called, 

"This way, this way, Merges. Save your claws. The window is open."

Sudden silence. Then Merges bounded in, ripping and shredding the thin linen curtains. Hissing, his head raised, his red eyes blazing, his glistening claws unsheathed, he circled Ernest.

"I've been expecting you, Merges. Won't you please sit down?" 

Ernest settled into a massive redwood burl chair next to the night table, beyond which all was darkness. The bed, Artemis, and the rest of the room had vanished.

Merges stopped hissing. He looked up at Ernest, spittle dripping from his fangs, his muscles tensed.

Ernest reached into his overnight bag. 

"Won't you have something to eat, Merges?" he said, opening some of the dinner containers he had carried upstairs.

Merges peered cautiously into the first container. "Five Mushroom Beef! 

I hate mushrooms. That's why she always makes them. That chanterelle ragout!" 

He uttered these last words in a high-pitched, mocking singsong, then repeated them, 

"Chanterelle ragout! Chanterelle ragout!"

"Here, here," Ernest said, in the soothing drone he used sometimes in a therapy session. 

"Let me pick out the beef pieces for you. Oh, my God, I am so sorry! I could have gotten the whole baked cod. Or the Peking Duck. Even the Hunan Meatballs. Perhaps the Pork Shue Mai. 

Or the Beggar's Chicken. Or the Ming's beef. Or the—"

"All right, all right" Merges snarled. 

He swiped at the chunks of beef and devoured them in a single gulp.

Ernest droned on: 

"Or I could have gotten the Seafood Delight, the salted shrimp, the whole roasted crab, the—"

"You could have, you could have, you could have, but you didn't, did you?

And even if you had, then so what? 

Is that what you think? That some stale scraps would redress the wrong? That I would settle for leftovers? That I am nothing but brute appetite?"

Merges and Ernest stared silently at one another for a moment. 

Then Merges nodded toward the container with the Rolling Chicken and Cilantro

in Lettuce Cups. 

"And what's in there?"

"It's called Rolling Chicken. Delicious. Here, let me pick out the chicken for you."

"No, leave it be," said Merges, batting the container out of Ernest's hand. 

"I like the green stuff. I come from a family of Bavarian grass eaters. Hard to find good grass that's not soaked in dog piss." 

Merges gobbled down the cilantro and chicken, then licked the lettuce cups clean. 

"Not bad. So you could've gotten roast crab?"

"I only wish I had, but as it was, I got too much meat. Turns out Artemis is a vegan."

"Vegan?"

"A vegetarian who eats no animal products at all—not even dairy products."

"So she's stupid as well as a murdering bitch. And I remind you again that you're stupid, too, if you think you'll redress the wrong by courting my stomach."

"No, Merges, I don't think that. But I fully understand why you'd be suspicious of me or anyone who approaches you in a friendly fashion. You haven't been treated well in your life."

"Lives —not life. I've had eight of them, and every one, without exception, has ended the same way—in unspeakable cruelty and murder. 

Look at the last one! Artemis murdered me! Threw me into a cage and nonchalantly tossed it into the river and watched me sink slowly until the filthy water of the Danube covered my nostrils. The last thing I saw in that life was her triumphant leer as my final breath bubbled out of me. 

And do you know what my crime was?"

Ernest shook his head.

"My crime was that I was being a cat."

"Merges, you're not any ordinary cat. You are an unusually intelligent cat. I hope I may speak frankly to you."

Merges, who was licking the sides of the empty Rolling Chicken container, growled assent.

"Two things I must say. 

First, of course, you realize it was not Artemis who drowned you. It was her grandmother, Klara, now long dead. Secondly—"She smells the same to me—Artemis is Klara in a later life. Didn't you

know that?"

Ernest was thrown off guard. Needing time to ponder that notion, he merely continued, 

Secondly, Klara did not hate cats. In fact, she loved a cat. She was no murderer: it was in her effort to save the life of Cica, her own dear cat, that she acted against you."

No answer. 

Ernest could hear Merges breathing. 

Am I, he wondered, being too confrontational, not showing enough empathy? 

"But," he said gently,

"perhaps this is all beside the point. I think we should stick to what you said a minute ago—that your only crime was being a cat."

"Right! I did what I did because I am a cat. Cats protect their turf, they attack other, threatening cats, and the best of the cats— those bursting with catness-let nothing, nothing, stand in their way when they whiff the sweet muskiness of a cat in heat. I was doing nothing more than fulfilling my catness."

Merges's comment gave Ernest pause. 

Wasn't Merges being true to Ernest's favorite of Nietzsche's maxims: 

"Become he who you are?" 

Wasn't Merges right? Wasn't he simply fulfilling his own feline potential?

"There was once a famous philosopher," Ernest began, "that is, a wise man

or a thinker—"

"I know what a philosopher is." 

The cat broke in, crossly. "In one of my first lives, I lived in Freiburg and made nighttime visits to Martin Heidegger's home."

"You knew Heidegger? said Ernest, amazed.

"No, no. Heidegger's cat, Xanthippe. She was something! Hot! Cica, hot as she was, was nothing compared to Xanthippe. It was many lives ago, but I remember well that army of heavyweight Teutonic bullies I had to battle to get to her. Tomcats came all the way from Marburg when Xanthippe entered heat. Ah, those were the days!"

"Well, let me finish my point, Merges." 

Ernest tried not to allow himself to be distracted. 

The famous philosopher I'm thinking of—he was German, too —often said that one must become who one is, must fulfill one's ordained destiny or potential. 

Isn't that exactly what you were doing? 

You were fulfilling your basic catness. Where is the crime in that?"

At Ernest's first words, Merges had opened his mouth to protest, but slowly closed it again when he realized that Ernest was agreeing with him. He began grooming himself with wide swipes of his tongue.

"There is, however," Ernest continued, "a problematic paradox here—a fundamental conflict of interest—in that Klara was doing exactly what you were doing: becoming herself. She was a nurturer and protector and cared for nothing in the world more than her cat. She wanted only to protect Cica and keep her safe. Thus, Klara's actions were all in the service of fulfilling her own basic loving nature."

"Hmmpf!" scoffed Merges. 

"Do you know that Klara refused to mate with my master, Kovacs, who was a very strong man? Just because Klara hated men, she assumed that Cica did, too. Hence, there is no paradox. Klara acted not for Cica but in the service of her illusion about what Cica wanted.

Believe me, when Cica was in heat, she was hot for me! Klara was unspeakably cruel to keep us apart."

"But Klara feared for her cat's life. Cica had suffered many grievous wounds."

"Wounds? Wounds? Mere scratches. Toms intimidate and subdue the lady.

Toms claw the hell out of other toms. That's how we woo. That is catdom.

We are being cats. Who is Klara, who are you, to judge and condemn catness?"

Ernest backed off. 

Nothing there, he decided. He tried another tack.

"Merges, a few minutes ago you said that Artemis and Klara were the same, and that was why you continued to haunt Klara."

"My nose does not He."

"When, in one of your early lives, you died, did you remain dead for a while before entering another life?"

"Only for an instant. Then I was reborn into another life. Don't ask me how.

There are some things even cats don't know."

"Well, even so, you're certain that you're in one life, then cease to be, and then enter another. Correct?"

"Yes, yes, get on with it!" 

Merges growled. Like all ninth-lifers, he had little patience with picayune semantic discussions.

"But, since for some years Artemis and her grandmother, Klara, were both alive at the same time and spoke to each other many times, how can Artemis and Klara be the same person in different lives. It's not possible. I don't mean to question your nose, but perhaps you were sensing the genetic connection between the two women."

Merges silendy considered Ernest's comment as he continued to groom himself, licking a massive paw and scrubbing his face with its dampness.

"I was just thinking, Merges, is it possible you didn't know that we humans have only one life?"

"How can you be so sure?"

"Well, that's what we believe. And isn't that the important thing?"

"Perhaps you have many lives and don't know it."

"You say you remember your other lives. We don't. If we have new lives and don't remember the old ones, then it still means that this life—this existing me, the consciousness that is here right now—is going to perish."

"The point! The point!" 

The beast growled. 

"Get on with it. God, how you talk and talk and talk."

"The point is that your revenge was wonderfully effective. It was good revenge. It ruined the rest of Klara's one and only life. She lived in great misery. And her crime was only to take one of your nine lives. Her sole life for one of your nine lives. Seems to me the debt has been paid many times over. Your revenge is complete. The slate is clean. The wrong redressed." 

Exultant at his persuasive formulation, Ernest leaned back in his chair.

"No," hissed Merges, glowering and thumping the floor with his powerful tail. 

"No, it is not complete! Not complete! The wrong has not been redressed! Revenge will go on and on! Besides, I like the way this life goes."

Ernest didn't allow himself to flinch. He rested a moment or two, caught his second wind, and began again from another perspective.

"You say you like the way your life goes now. Will you tell me about your life? What is your typical day like?"

Ernest's unruffled manner seemed to relax Merges who stopped glowering, sat back on his haunches, and responded calmly. 

"My day? Uneventful. I don't remember much of my life."

"What do you do all day?"

"I wait. I wait until I am called bv a dream."

"And between dreams?"

"I told you. I wait."

"That's it?"

"I wait."

"And that's your life, Merges? And are you satisfied?"

Merges nodded. 

"When you consider the alternative," he said, as he gracefully rolled over and set to work grooming his belly..

"The alternative? You mean not living?"

"The ninth life is the last."

"And you want this last life to go on and on forever."

"Wouldn't you? Wouldn't anyone?"

"Merges, I'm struck by an inconsistency in what you're say-ing."

"Cats are highly logical beings. Sometimes that is not appreciated because of our ability to make lightning quick decisions."

"Here's the inconsistency 

- You say you want your ninth life to go on and on, but in fact you're not living your ninth life. You're merely existing in some state of suspended animation."

"Not living my ninth life?"

"You said it yourself: you're waiting. 

I'll tell you what comes to my mind. 

A famous psychologist once said that some people so fear the debt of death that they refuse the loan of life."

"Meaning what? Talk plainly," said Merges who had stopped grooming his belly and now sat on his haunches.

"Meaning that you seem so fearful of death that you refrain from entering into life. It's as though you fear using up life. Remember what you taught me just a few minutes ago about essential catness? 

Tell me, Merges, where is the territory you defend? 

Where are the toms you battle? 

Where are the lustful, howling females you subdue? And why," 

Ernest asked, emphasizing each word, 

"do you allow your precious Merges spermseeds to rot unused?''

As Ernest spoke, Merges's head bowed low. 

Then, somewhat mournfully, he asked, 

"And you have only one life? How far are you into it?"

"About halfway through."

"How can you stand it?"

Suddenly Ernest felt a sharp pang of sadness. 

He reached for one of the napkins from the Chinese dinner and dabbed at his eyes.

"I'm sorry," said Merges, unexpectedly gendy, "to have caused pain."

"Not at all. I was prepared, as this turn in our conversation was inevitable,"

Ernest said. 

You ask how I can stand it? 

Well, first of all, by not thinking about it. 

And more, sometimes I even forget about it. And at my age that's not too hard."

"At your age? What does that mean?"

"We humans go through life in stages. 

As very young children, we think about death a great deal, some of us even obsess about it. 

It's not hard to discover death. We simply look around and see dead things: leaves and lilies and flies and beedes. Pets die. We eat dead animals. Sometimes we're privy to the death of a person. And before long, we realize that death will come to everyone—to our grandma, to our mother and father, even to ourselves. We brood about this in private. Our parents and teachers, thinking it's bad for children to think about death, keep silent about it or give us fairy tales about a heaven and angels, eternal reunion, immortal souls." 

Ernest stopped, hoping that Merges was following his words.

"And then?" Merges was following, all right.

"We comply. We push it out of our minds, or we openly defy death with great feats of daredevilry. 

And then just before we become adults, we brood a great deal about it again. 

Although some cannot bear it and refuse to go on living, most of us put aside our awareness of death and immerse ourselves in the tasks of adulthood—building a career and family, personal growth, acquiring possessions, exercising power, winning the race. 

That's where I am now in life. 

After that stage, we enter the later era of life, where awareness of death emerges again and now is distinctly menacing— in fact, imminent. At that point, we have the choice of thinking about it a great deal and making the most of the life we still have, or pretending in various ways that death is not coming at all."

"So, what about you, yourself? Do you pretend to yourself that death will not come?"

"No, I can't really do that. Since, in my work as a psychiatrist, I talk to many people who are terribly troubled, I have to face it all the time."

"Let me ask you again, then"—Merges's voice, now soft and weary, had lost all its menace—"how you stand it? How can you take pleasure from any part of life, any activity at all, with death looming ahead and only one life?"

"I'd turn that question upside down, Merges. 

Perhaps death makes life more vital, more precious. 

The fact of death bestows a special poignancy, a bittersweet quality, to life's activities. 

Yes, it may be true that living in the dream dimension confers immortality upon you, but your life seems to me to be soaked in ennui. 

When I asked you, a while back, to describe your life, you answered with the single phrase: 

'I wait.' Is that life? Is waiting living? 

You still have one life left, Merges. Why not live it to the fullest?"

"I cannot! I cannot!" Merges said, bowing his head deeper. 

"The thought of no longer existing, of not being among the living, of life going on without

me, is—is—simply too terrible."

"So the point of the curse is not perpetual revenge, is it? 

You use the curse to avoid coming to the end of your last life."

"It is simply too terrible to just end. To not be."

"I have learned in my work," said Ernest reaching over and patting Merges's great paw, "that those who most fear death are the ones who approach it with too much unlived life inside them. It's best to use all of life. Leave death nothing but the dregs, nothing but a burned-out castle."

"No, no," moaned Merges shaking his head, "it is simply too terrible."

"Why so terrible? Let's analyze precisely what's so fearful about death.

You've already experienced it more than once. You said that each time your life ended, there was a brief interval before the next life began."

"Yes, that's right."

"What do you remember of those brief moments."

"Absolutely nothing."

"But isn't that the point, Merges? Much of what you fear about death is how you imagine it might feel to be dead and yet to know that you can no longer be among the living. But when you're dead, you have no consciousness.

Death is the extinguishing of consciousness."

"Is that supposed to be reassuring?" Merges growled.

"You asked me how I can stand it? That's one of my answers. 

I've also always gotten comfort from the maxim of another philosopher, who lived a

long, long time ago: 

'Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not'."

"Is that any different from 'When you're dead, you're dead'?"

"A big difference. In death there is no 'you.' 'You' and 'dead' cannot coexist."

"Heavy, heavy stuff," Merges said, his voice barely audible, his head almost touching the floor.

"Let me tell you about another perspective that helps me, Merges,

something I learned from a Russian writer—"

"Those Russians—this isn't going to be cheery."

"Listen. Years, centuries, millennia, passed before I was born. Right?"

"No denying that." Merges nodded wearily.

"And millennia will pass after I'm dead. Right?"

Merges nodded again.

"Thus, I picture my life as a brilliant spark between two vast and identical pools of darkness: the darkness existing before my birth and the darkness following my death."

That seemed to strike home. Merges was listening hard, his ears pricked up.

"And doesn't it astound you, Merges, how much we dread the latter darkness and how indifferent we are to the first?"

Suddenly Merges stood and opened his mouth in an enormous yawn, his fangs gleaming faindy in the moonlight streaming through the window.

"Guess I've got to be shuffling along," he said, and trudged toward the window with a heavy, uncadike gait.

"Wait, Merges, there's more!"

"Enough for today. A lot to ponder, even for a cat. Next time, Ernest, the roast crab. And more of that green-grass chicken."

"Next time? What do you mean, Merges, next time? 

Haven't I redressed the wrong?"

"Maybe yes, maybe no. I told you, too much to think about all at once. I'm out of here!"

Ernest plopped back into his chair. 

He was pooped, his patience exhausted.

Never before had he had a more nerve-wracking and exhausting session.

And now to see it all go for naught! 

Watching Merges trudge off Ernest muttered to himself, 

"Go! Go!" And then added "Geh Gesunter Heit" — that Yiddish, mocking, phrase of his mother.

At the words, Merges stopped dead in his tracks and turned back. 

"I heard that."

Uh-oh, thought Ernest. But he held his head high and faced the oncoming Merges.

"Yes, I heard you. I heard you say, 'Geh Gesunter Heit.'' 

And I know what that means—didn't you know that I speak good German? You blessed me.

Even though you didn't imagine I would hear, you wished me to go in good health. And I am moved by your blessing. Very moved. I know what I've put you through. I know how much you want to liberate this woman—not only for her sake but also for yours. 

And yet even after your tremendous effort, and after your not knowing whether you were successful in redressing the wrong, even then you still had the grace and the lovingkindness to wish for my good health. That may be the most generous gift I have ever received. Good-bye, my friend."

"Good-bye, Merges," said Ernest, watching Merges stroll away, more perky now and with a graceful cat gait. 

Is it my imagination, he thought, or has Merges grown appreciably smaller?

"Perhaps we'll meet again," said Merges, without breaking stride. 

"I'm considering settling in California."

"You have my word, Merges," 

Ernest called after him. 

"You'll eat well here. Roast crab—and cilantro—every night."

Darkness again. 

The next thing Ernest saw was the roseate glow of dawn.

Now I know the meaning of a "hard day's night," he thought, as he sat up in bed, stretched, and contemplated the sleeping Artemis. 

He felt certain that Merges would depart from the dream dimension. 

But what about the rest of the cat curse? 

None of that had been discussed. 

For a few minutes. Ernest considered the prospect of being involved with a woman who might, every so often, be sexually ferocious and voracious. 

Quietly he slipped out of bed, dressed, and went downstairs.

Artemis hearing his footsteps, called out, 

"Ernest, no! Something's changed. I'm free. I know it. I feel it. 

Don't go, please. You don't need to go."

"Be right back with breakfast. Ten minutes," he called from the front door.