Facing memory loss together: Buddhist lessons on aging’s final frontier

By Walter Hesford |FāVS News Columnist

My wife’s book club recently read Wallace Stegner’s 1971 novel, “Angle of Repose,” set in the 19th and 20th centuries. I decided to read it, too, since I had previously overlooked this classic work about the frontiers between East and West, the past and the future and married couples.

Though both members of the 19th century couple at the center of Stegner’s novel are from New York’s Hudson River Valley, the woman, a cultivated artist and writer, represents Eastern values and attitudes, while the husband, a manly mining engineer, represents the West, the wild frontier territory of opportunity, where he moves to do his work. His wife moves west to join him. 

The ever-changing Western frontier has long been associated with opportunity, with the future, and with manly, rugged individualism, while the East is seen as stuck in past traditions and as feminine, or effete. 

Probably in response to the view that real men needed to “go West” to prove themselves, Henry David Thoreau, a born and bred New Englander, declared that “the frontiers are neither east or west or north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.” To face a fact means to face reality and to risk one’s scalp, risk death, insists Thoreau in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.”

Buddhism’s view of death’s threshold

Death, if not the ultimate reality, is certainly a frontier. The November edition of The Lion’s Roar — a magazine devoted to Buddhism, meditation and mindful living — offers intriguing explorations of death’s frontier. While I am not a Buddhist, and am a failure at meditating and being mindful, I find these explorations useful in understanding the frontier I and the woman to whom I have been married for many years are on in our old age. 

That edition’s cover story, “Mindfulness of Death,” Lisa Ernst offers her investigations into the frontier between life and death. Toward the outset of her article, she reports that “One Zen master, when asked what happens after death, replied, ‘I don’t know; I’m not dead yet.’” This really speaks to me. The frontier between life and death is like the frontier between knowing and not-knowing. 

Ernst finds value and meaning in considering this frontier as a threshold where binary opposites like life and death become more spacious, less binary. She sees “that life and death are always together, not divided by time.” To contemplate this frontier, then, is to dissolve it.

Toward the end of her article, Ernst offers traditional Buddhist death meditations, such as “I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape old age.” This speaks to the frontier my wife and I are currently experiencing.

In conclusion, Ernst urges us to acknowledge “the way things are at the moment.” To realize that in the present we are dying “frees us from clinging.” Oh how I want to cling to what has been, what might be, even though, as poets tell us, to be fully present is to touch eternity.

The bardos we live through

In her article on the “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” Judy Lief acknowledges that this scripture is used primarily among Tibetan Buddhists to guide the dying and dead through the bardos — intermediate states — in the journey toward rebirth. She argues, however, that the book isn’t “Just About Dying,” that it can guide us through the bardos, the intermediates states, in which we find ourselves throughout our life.

It might be helpful to think of frontiers not as sites of conflict, of opposites, but rather as intermediate states of transition, which, according to Lief, can loosen us up as we realize that the grounds we have been standing on have shifted, leaving us uncertain, and thus open to consider what we may have wanted to avoid.

My wife and I are in a bardo of uncertainty right now. She knows she is suffering memory loss, and I am at a loss about how to best be with her during this transition. To be present for her with kindness, patience and perseverance might be the way to dwell on this frontier. 

What frontier are you on?

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.

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