Grief, Part 2

In Buddhism, my mom carefully explained, it's tradition for the children of the recently deceased loved one to pray every day for 49 straight days. Buddhists believe that the spirit enters an intermediate period following death, and if the children pray regularly, the departed may be able to take a favorable rebirth -- hopefully Nirvana. This is what my mom told me.

When we got home from my grandma's funeral a year ago, my mom set up a makeshift rememberance ceremony table in our living room so that she could dutifully pray every night. The table, draped with a red cloth, held a picture of Grandma, sticks of incense, and bowls of fruit.

"And what if Grandma doesn't reach Nirvana?" I asked my mom.

My mom, struggling with her plural/singular verb agreements as always, she said, "Then she will continues reincarnating. But who know."

"Well, what happens if you don't pray well enough?"

"Then she might turns into a frogs or a worms or somethings."

Although my mom is a practicing Buddhist, I am not. I've always been a fan of the general philosophy behind Buddhism, but all of the contradictory rituals and tradition that it entails has always been my stopping point. Still, all that lamenting about funerals and death got me thinking about the afterlife, so I decided to saturate myself with stacks of Buddhist reading material. I figured that at the very least, all of my research would allow me to offer words of comfort to my mom in a Buddhist context.

The more I read up on Buddhism, however, the more I realized that no one in my family really knew what the hell they were doing. All of my grandma's children -- my aunts and uncles -- weren't performing the rituals exactly by the book. Even worse, it seemed like no one cared.

"Isn't the rememberance table supposed to be facing west?" I pointed out to my mom.

"It is."

"No it's not, mom, it's facing north."

"Well, it likes it this ways."

It annoyed me to no end that my mom seemed to have this skewed, "convenient" version of Buddhism in her head. Wasn't the goal to get Grandma to Nirvana? If so, then why weren't everyone doing things correctly?

Disheartened, I met up with my friend Pastor Bill the following week for lunch to discuss some of the confusion I was having with a supposed afterlife. Pastor Bill had been helping me sort out a lot of questions I had about religion. Although he quietly hoped that I would eventually accept Christianity, I never saw myself as anything more than a diligent atheist. Regardless, I still wanted to know where my grandma was, after death. Just in case, you know, an afterlife existed.

So I asked Pastor Bill if he thought my grandma was in Heaven. I don't quite remember what his reply was, but all that mattered to me is that he didn't give me an easy "yes."

I then realized that I would never get the type of comfort I was looking for. I would never know for sure if my grandma was in chillin' with God in Heaven, or if she was burning the way she did at the crematory, only for an eternity in Hell. I would never know if she was enjoying Nirvana with Buddha, or getting her guts squashed all over the place by a shoe in her reincarnation as a lowly cockroach.

All of these thoughts were frustrating to think about, to say the least. Heaven... Nirvana... Why can't people just let my grandma sleep? Forever. In nothingness.

Several months passed, and my thoughts and concerns of the afterlife slowly eroded because of the hectic school year. I came home from school one weekend and saw my mom praying in front of the rememberance table. She had moved the table to another location in the house. This time, the table was facing south.

At this point, we were long past the required 49 days that she had to pray in order to get Grandma to Nirvana. We were probably over 100 days past the requirement. Sheesh, I thought. Mom is really going above and beyond the call of duty. Not only is she getting an A on her homework, but she's doing the extra credit, too.

And then it occurred to me that my mom wasn't doing all that praying for Grandma's sake. She was doing it for her OWN sake. She just wanted alone time with her mother every day, just so she could think about and get close to her.

I took a seat behind my mom and closed my eyes to think about Grandma too. I thought about how she should have never gotten sick when I was so young. I thought about how convinced I was that I would have been her favorite grandchild if she had had the opportunity to watch me, my sister, and my cousins grow up. I thought about her beauty, her strength, her intelligence, her guts, her kindness, and ESPECIALLY her incredible selflessness.

Her selfnessness is legendary in my eyes. This is the woman, who literally worked herself to death juggling three jobs to support seven children, who readily gave money to the poor -- when everyone nowadays has trouble coughing up spare change for Hurricane Katrina relief. This is the woman who, without a second thought, funded my dad's college education when his own parents refused, just because he was dating my mom at the time.

It was remarkable how much better I felt thinking about Grandma's life, as opposed to speculating about her afterlife. My grandma was an amazing person, and just thinking about the lives that she touched and the things that she did really gets me excited.

There probably isn't a Heaven, but I say living and loving life the way my grandma did beats out harps and streets of gold any day.