Insights by Nityaprem after his stepfather’s death
During the last few years there has been much death in my family. All three of my remaining uncles died within a short time of each other, leaving a set of grieving aunts. I, as a long-time sannyasin and now a mature 52-year-old, provided support but privately thought the sannyas motto of “Celebrate everything, even death,” was the thing to keep foremost in mind. I was being positive.
Then this year it was Swami Anand Yatri’s turn to leave the body. This time, I felt the impact of it firsthand, and my emotions were much stirred because Yatri and I were very good friends; I had met him on the Ranch when I was just 13 years old, and he became my mother’s beloved around that time. It was the start of a lifelong friendship. He later married my mother and so became my stepfather as well.
The sannyas attitude to death was of course formed by Osho. There was a well-known quote, “There is no death in the first place, death is an illusion” (from Beyond Enlightenment, Chapter 3) which is typical of Osho’s view that death is not the end. That and an assiduous reading of near-death experiences convinced me that life continues, and that we might meet again on the other side, or in another life.
However, theory often does not survive an encounter with the real world, and the mind frequently does not truly know what beliefs lurk in its depths. The mind is like an iceberg, much of it is submerged below the level of consciousness. So knowing what your reaction is going to be to something new, like the passing of a loved one, is not easy. You experience it, and then get to reflect on it afterwards.
Much has been written about the stages of grief, but I honestly don’t hold much stock in those psychological ideas… I’ve just observed that the things that have been suppressed will manifest themselves in the process. For me, there was shock, numbness, and then a wonderful surprise. It took a good seven – a nice mystical number – of months to work itself out.
Yatri had Alzheimer’s, and my mother and I had been caring for him for a few years, living together in our communal home in the Netherlands. But the last few weeks of Yatri’s life were an exceptionally difficult time for me. When I would come down the stairs at around six in the morning to make coffee, on the ground floor of the house all would be dark and quiet, except for Yatri’s breathing. He slept in the side room off the living room, sedated with morphine, and from his breathing you could tell whether he was comfortable. A panting or gasps would mean he was uncomfortable, a light sighing would mean he was ok. The last week he just slept twenty-four hours a day. Until one morning I came downstairs and my mother said to me, “He is gone,” and we sat together for half an hour each holding a hand of the cooling body.
In a way the next week had something unreal about it. Yatri’s body on a refrigerated metal plate in the side room surrounded by flowers, the farewell ceremony where I spoke, accompanying the body to the crematorium. It was a very sannyasin kind of ceremony, with flowers to be put in a flowerband around the coffin, plenty of snacks after the speakers were done, and rose petals to be strewn over the coffin in farewell as it was being carried outside. A little celebratory, despite the Western European tendency to find death very serious.
Then coming home — and finding the house just ordinary and empty, except that Yatri wasn’t there. My brain at first kept expecting to see him, in his chair by the window or in his wheelchair at the dinner table, and I would be surprised to find him gone. This was a feeling that only slowly passed, it took several weeks, and in the time afterwards I found myself becoming unusually emotional from time to time. It is one of those things, when a familiar person disappears from your life and surroundings it has a natural shock effect, and after that you keep waiting for them to reappear, for the situation to return to ‘normal’.
If you pressed me, I might say that the next months had a numbness, a certain depression. In a way there was also relief, because it was his time to leave the body. He had had Alzheimer’s in an advanced stage and could no longer stand upright under his own power. The burden of his care on my mother had been considerable. So the feelings were mixed, especially as there had been a series of difficult moments between him and me in the previous years, because the Alzheimer’s had almost made him a different person. But at a certain point I had a dream of unusual clarity, where I saw Yatri come walking towards me as he had been in his early seventies. He was slightly red in the face, as if he had been exerting himself, but he was smiling. I thought on waking, well, perhaps he is observing us from somewhere Beyond.
Eventually there was a turning point, the numbness went, and to my surprise the Yatri who started appearing most in my thoughts was the one with whom I had shared so many happy memories, not the old man with Alzheimer’s but the good friend of many years. I found a gift there, a new sense of emotional depth, a greater maturity. I think grief approached with insight and compassion ripens you, like a storm of tears which afterwards leaves you released and clarified.
I believe that in the end what remains is sharing the stories of our loved ones. For me Yatri was like a second father as well as a friend, and I will always be grateful to him for the shared pleasure of science fiction books, for the times we played Dungeons and Dragons together when I was young, for the Christmases we enjoyed together with a fire in the wood stove, presents under the tree, and the times when he would make his speciality, smoked haddock fish pie.
How to cope with grief is for me about patience, compassion, the willingness to shower love and forgiveness on anything the other might have done wrong in life, as well as celebrating the funny and good sides of people… Yatri had been a pilot in the RAF when young, and he tended to treat his favoured Saab car a bit like a fighter plane, zooming around the hills in Dorset and Dartmoor. These little anecdotes, the small stories about people now gone, tend to live on in the memory with fondness.
In the end, I was very glad I had found the right moment near the end to tell him that whatever had passed between us during the previous few years of his care, I loved him dearly. I remember he looked me straight in the eyes after I said that, with a very clear gaze of something resembling pleased surprise. It was a moment of reconciliation.
Sannyasins are naturally good at seeing the positive in life, and if you find it in you to forgive and make your heart big, to remember your love, then the good in your relations with those who have gone beyond death’s door will naturally surface, and then you can celebrate and share the good stories of their lives. Yahoo Osho!
[A questioner asks Osho about grieving for her father.]
No, it is never too much, it is never too much. And it is such a beautiful experience. It is so cleansing and purifying… nothing like it. It has its own beauty, it has its own joy, if you allow me to say so. If you really grieve and go deeply into it, you will come out completely new and fresh and young, as if all the dust disappears with it; the past disappears with it. But it will go. So this time, if it comes here, allow it – and enjoy it.
I’m not saying only allow it, because one can allow it very reluctantly. One can allow it very distantly. One can remain aloof and allow it, but then it will remain somewhere – a lingering shadow will continue – and that is bad; that is very dangerous. It can become a continuous hangover and that can destroy your present.
So the account has to be closed. And when it is a question of father or mother, it is a very deep account. In fact, if you can close your account with your father, you will for the first time become mature, because the disappearance of the father is the disappearance of a certain security, a certain centre. With the father, the past has disappeared. You are no more a child – you have become grown up.
Osho, Dance Your Way To God, Ch 17
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- Yatri – 20 February 2024
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