The Seriously Crooked Way Of The Middle, Before The Cracking Of The Skull

In the last year, I have participated in a disproportionately high number of funerals, burials, shiva sittings, memorials services, gravestone unveilings, baby showers, baby namings, christenings and landmark birthday celebrations.  It has been an overwhelmingly busy year and frighteningly indicative of life at the middle.  Here, I am unfortunately, not referring to the Buddhist Middle Way, but rather to the lifestyle lived by the middle aged middle class, in middle America. The specter of this monster has always frightened me to the core, if only because I am accustomed to dancing a gentle waltz between extremes. I do not favor straight lines, and it has always seemed to me that to mediate the middle road, one must navigate in relatively straight pathways. Yet at this point in my life, I find myself unmistakably in the middle of the middle. How did I get here? I see those around me dying, the other half being born. I find myself thinking about safety, about prudence, about providing for and optimizing livelihood for the next generation. It's a new and strange feeling. Birth and death rituals are important in every culture, as lives leave us and as we welcome new lives into our tribal circles. Our views about human existence expanding all the while, bearing witness to the nature of this complex journey. The middle is a crucial point at which there is still time to turn back and change our choices before proceeding further. My father suddenly died last year. He was diagnosed with late stage lung cancer and passed away within 2 months of his diagnosis. He lived a middle class life punctuated by dramatically radical decisions, that in summary, made his life less than ordinary. The closer we come to one another, the more clearly we are able to see the small and large actions that make a life extraordinary-- all of our lives. My father did not get to live into old age. This seemed to me a great loss, not only because I miss him terribly, but because the integrity of his being was so transcendent--something to be maintained and nurtured as we age. Something, that I hope he passed on to me. At this middle point of my life, I have come to the humble conclusion that everyone's life is in fact, quite extraordinary. Our small actions are large, the actions we perceive as large, sometimes in fact, turn out to be significantly small.

During a trip to the sacred river Ganges a couple of years ago, we stayed at an inn a short distance from the burning ghat. Day and night the fires that consumed extinguished human lives lit up the view from our balcony.  I felt an irresistible fascination with the burning of the bodies, the smoke rising to the skies, the unmistakable scent of burning human flesh. I could still recall that scent, which six years before had for weeks lingered in the air of our Brooklyn neighborhood after the attacks on the WTC towers.  My child was still a toddler then, and I feared for the damage to her developing lungs. Yet, I wanted to breathe in that scent, keep it near, as a reminder of what we are and of how easily it is all consumed into the ether. Deaths and births are always unforgettable events. The lists of names and photos of the victims of the 9/11 attacks posted all over the city, carved a permanent folder of emotions and memories that will forever live in the consciousness of every new yorker I have ever known. To most of us, these people were strangers, yet we were all touched and deeply affected by their lives cut short, by their humanity layed open before our eyes.

The powerful Hindu custom of Kapalakriya involves the eldest son hitting and cracking the burning skull of the deceased parent with a large bamboo stick, during the last stages of cremation.  After the cracking of the skull, the son turns and walks away, never looking back. The symbolic spiritual purpose of this ritual act is to help release the soul of the deceased parent from its entrapment in the physical body.  From an outsider's point of view, and therefore, a less religious and more psychosocial perspective, I think that it is something more. What if the secondary role for this practice is that of forcing the mourner to a definitive severance of all connection and attachment with the physical identity of the parent?  I believe that it is not just for the sake of the deceased that we crack the skull, but for the benefit of the mourner, as well. For if we can detach ourselves from clinging to the physical representation of a loved one, we can hold onto that which is more ephemeral, but much more long lasting-- our relationship to that life, and its significance on the evolution of our own. 

There is no need to look back, for the substance of a life is but what is survived in those who have been touched by it. It is survived in the here and now of who we are and what we do in the world. Death and birth both have the power to awe. The magical appearance and disappearance act they perform always strengthening tribal ties, sometimes only temporarily-- but more importantly, often immediate and reliable at the time when it is most needed.  At this point in my life career, I am starting to consider that perhaps the middle is something to be celebrated, rather than feared or loathed.  It does, after all, confirm that we have survived the beginning-- a delicate and fragile undertaking.