Life, Death and Exploding Vaginas

26 Weeks

"When you realize how perfect life is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky..."

-   Gautama Buddha

My best friend died when I was two months pregnant.
 

I hadn't spoken to him in a while, not since he left for rehab. I knew he'd be back at the end of May. We share the same birth week, and I was looking forward to showing him my baby belly over a cupcake and a game of chess. 

Unknown to me, he flew back earlier than expected. His sister's husband was found dead in a jail cell. There was an article in the paper about it. My friend returned home to comfort his family. Not even 48 hours after arriving in Vancouver he fell asleep on a Saturday night and suffered a heart attack. He never woke up. He was a musical maestro, gifted artist, poet, and a practicing Buddhist. He was my best friend.

On the day of his funeral, the church pulsed with a swell of familiar faces. My friend's extended First Nations family, co-workers, and even the odd Buddhist monk showed up to pay their respects. The ceremony lasted over 3 hours, which we were told is short for a First Nation's funeral. It felt like an eternity to me.

Despite being utterly exhausting, sitting silently in a room for so long was also extremely cathartic. Sitting still with nowhere to hide from my pain or my friend or his absence blew to smithereens whatever icy shackles previously contained my grief. I came undone. I dissolved. I cried until my throat hurt. At the same time, in the space of my friend's not yet too distant memory, I settled on some interesting insights that I'd like to share, made all the more poignant by the invisible life blooming inside my belly.

First off, death sucks. No matter how spiritual, evolved or positive you want to be about it, death fucking sucks. The fact that the person you love is no longer around to sit with in the sunshine or snort coffee out his/her nose as you both laugh uncontrollably about something that isn't even funny, it's the shits no matter how you slice it. At the same time, life wouldn't mean much without death. Would it? If everything and everyone stuck around forever we'd inevitably take it for granted, even more so than we do already. Death has a way of snapping the life back into you. If you let it. Since my friend died the little things that used to bug me don't bug me so much. I squeeze my husband a little tighter. I forgive the people who hurt me a little more quickly. I guess in this way death can be a gift as well as a curse. As much as it fucking sucks.

Second, it really does take a village to raise a family. At the funeral my friend's sister, brothers, mother, and close aunts and uncles sat together in the front row. Periodically one of them would stand up, bereft, walk or run out of the room and/ or simply collapse in tears. They were never left alone. There was always someone close by, a warm body to hold tightly or someone waiting in the wings with a glass of water. One of the speakers later told us that 'delegating' like this is a traditional model of care. In death or tragedy the village gathers and each individual is assigned a specific task, or person, to take care of until the worst of the tragedy is over. I can only hope to conceive such a conscious sense of community for my baby. The tight circle of love my friend's extended family created was truly inspiring. If this was the kind of community he grew up with, no wonder he was such an exceptional human being.

Finally, I realized death is not the end. I'm sure of it now more than ever. My brother and I often debate the old life after death question. He's an amazing physicist who operates particle beams to create radioactive medical isotopes. He talks about impossible-to-understand things like black holes in coffee cups. He thinks there is a scientific explanation to everything, which I disagree with entirely. I mean, if a black hole in a coffee cup isn't magic, than what the hell is? Anyway, even if we were to take scientific 'law' into account, the first rules of physics are that:

1. You can't make something out of nothing, and 
2. You can't 'destroy' energy, you can only transform it.

Death is therefore not destruction, it's a transformation. In the same way birth is not creation, it's a transformation.

I have no idea what exactly this means, only that my friend is now everywhere. Even though I can't call him on the phone, he is with me as I write this, sitting in the park where we played chess, listening to music on my iPod, laughing at the assholes in Canucks shirts, calming me down when I'm upset, feeling the flutters of life inside me. He's around even more than before. And I know that when I face down my demons and shake under the overwhelming weight of my fears, he'll be there. When my vagina explodes with new life and I explode with joy, he'll be there too. I can see him now, laughing at the sky as our cruel and elegant cycle of life continues. 

I hope we all keep laughing with him.