Kenneth Madden

Laura passed away on the morning of the 2nd of January. There is a temptation to try and write some profound words about her but there is nothing I can say about Laura, she was just Laura- Life Lauraing. I remember shortly after I first met her a good many years ago now. We were walking across a court yard towards a friends apartment. She stopped me in the middle as the people we were with hurried inside to avoid getting wet. She smiled and said “Would you kiss me in the rain”. Of course I would have been a fool not to. There was to be no romance, just friendship. We laughed about it shorty after she moved in to share a house with a few other friends, three years ago now. I remember her laughing at me reminding her of our kiss all those years ago and how she was quite impressed with her line. I remember her musically. The sound of her playing Benny, her clarinet or the house full with the sound of her singing. One minute you’d be washing a pot and the next you’d be bouncing around the kitchen with Laura’s laughter keeping time to some terrible song on the radio.

At the ceremony Laura’s sister Sarah spoke beautifully about growing up together and how Laura was as a sister. There was some fantastic music, live music, which was very apt I think; she was quite the live wire. The priest used the metaphor of the butterfly, which was on Laura’s business card for her massage, to describe how Laura has changed into something even more beautiful and that the loss only seems like one to us as we cannot see this change. He also spoke about Bob Geldoff’s book “Is that it?” saying that no, it wasn’t and couldn’t be, that Laura has gone on to something better. I think the priest did an excellent job. I would however like to offer an alternative view.

Laura didn’t go anywhere because there is nowhere to go to. The body-mind organism that we thought of as Laura has ceased to function. It was transient and impermanent just as everything that manifests is transitory and impermanent. To the mind some things seem to endure or last longer then others. A person seems to live to a healthy old age or die very young. There is the sensation of movement in time which is supported by, for example, the memory or five people moving into a house three years ago or any other memory of an event that happened in the past. What isn’t seen is that there is one constant and in that one constant transience and impermanence arises. So this one constant allows change to be seen, gives rise to what we view as the ups and downs of ‘our’ lives. This is the constant in which the sensation of movement in time and space arises. This is the constant and this is Being. So many times I heard people say that Laura was so full of life and it was a shame that she died so young. From this perspective Laura was not full of life at all. Laura is Life. Laura never had a life to loose, she was life appearing as Laura or life Lauraing if you like. Death then is liberation from the experience of feeling like a separate individual in a world ‘out there’. It is a home coming in the sudden realization that you had never left home and all the story of you moving through life, moving in a linear direction through time and space, is exactly just that-a story. Laura, as well as you the reader of these words, is in actuality Being. Being is one, not two, one that appears as separate objects, separate people, separate countries etc etc.

So in relation to Geldoff’s book “Is that it?” or the idea that this can’t be it, this daily slog. Well funnily enough it is, it is exactly what is sought. What is happening is exactly what is sought but all the while you feel like a separate individual you search for wholeness, search to not be separate in all the places you think you’ll find it, although the searcher does not know what he or she searches for. So the miraculous beauty, the stunning immediacy of this is not seen, the newness in everything is not seen because you are looking for something and what is in fact sought is No thing. There is nothing to find and No-thing is what you are. No-thing or being is what you are, not the story of your life. So the loss of your life reveals amazingly that you are life, that you are all that is. So you linear movement of the story of your life from birth to death is a total and utter dream. The loss of you is liberation, the loss of you is the awakening to the dream and the resumption of joy without cause. This loss can happen at your physical death or before it and the invitation is constant.

There is nothing esoteric or abstract about these rambling, although I’m sure it certainly reads like that. It’s the death of a friend who was much loved, it’s the waves of sadness that hit you. It’s not some detached state where you sit back and observe life in passing by. It’s the full feeling of whatever arises untrammeled and full. It’s sadness without the need to push it or pull it or do something with it. It’s the seeing that there is only the sadness and it isn’t your sadness, no one for it to hit. It’s the recognition that sadness is it as much as happiness because they are simply a different side of the same coin and you can’t know one without the other. It’s the seeing that a friends death can’t be any other way and the seeing that they didn’t go anywhere, that they are the life that lit them up, the same life that pours through the senses. The same life that is aware of reading these words, the same life that wrote them.
All that searching is over now Laura, we miss you, x

Do not stand at my grave and weep
Mary Frye

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.

A dance of shadows.