Nibbana

I just learned last night that a classmate of mine died recently. She was only a few months younger than I. In truth, even though I do remember having sparse interactions with her twenty years ago, I didn't really know her that well, and, strangely, that makes her death a bit more poignet for me.

Had I known her better, I could regret her passing properly, and perhaps have something a bit more meaningful to offer in the general forum where her friends, family and acquaintances  congregate. As it is, however, I am finding that death hits uncomfortably close to me - which it has done on rather few occasions within memory - and instead of feeling either sadness or nothing, I feel oddly transitional, and almost in denial about my own mortality.

In that sense, therefore, I have this (probably selfish) wish that I either had known this person better or not at all; the former so that I could properly first commiserate her death and then celebrate her life and have both acts convey respect and relevance; the latter so that, just as I do with the many other passing of individuals who are faceless to me, mournfully recognize the abstract concept of the shuffling off of yet another person from this world whilst remaining supremely aware of my own existence - and, for yet a short while longer - blissfully ignorant (or willfully in denial) of the certain alternative. Having slightly known this person, however, I can only, in reality, accomplish but shades of either stance whilst wishing to fully realize one or the other.

On the other hand, perhaps such imperfect ambivalence is but a part of the human experience, and it's out of an overblown sense of my own importance coupled with a denial of the absurd being that I occasionally am that leads me to feel that I need to fully express one stance - intimate regret  - or the other  - distanced acknowledgment. There is a grey line where Yin and Yang meet, and - for but a short while - we all live there, whether we do so consciously or not. Both a desire for the security that I get from certitude and my forgetfulness of how transitory this state of being truly is may be what's causing me to deny the legitimacy of my own feelings in this matter. In that case, I'll happily take my cue from wiser people than me, who have fallen in physical form, but risen anew in memory, and live as such, translated and transformed, until this day. That is the blessing that I wish is bestowed upon my fallen classmate, and is a desire that I have for myself one day.