Reading One Last Book to Dylan

OM MANI PADME HUM

By George Hartley, Dylan's father

[I have reposted this passage from my 2003 memorial site to Dylan. I am once again teaching The Snow Leopard and having conversations about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so I thought I should integrate this earlier reflection into this blog. His little brother Jesse's birthday is next week, so I have been thinking about them both and my days of reading to them from the Bardo Thodol. — George]

During the first week of November, 2003 Tibetan monks came to Athens, Ohio to create a sand painting mandala. I had heard of their visit, but being caught up in the details of life, including my frequent trips to Columbus to visit with Dylan and to take him to various medical appointments, I didn't pay much attention to the visiting monks.

While my previous connections with Buddhism have been primarily through Zen literature and practice (minimal really), I was nevertheless vaguely interested in Tibetan Buddhism. During the week after Dylan's initial diagnosis with cancer in July 2002 I had bought a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, having heard of it in one of my favorite books, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. I read enough at different times to become acquainted with the notion of the bardo, the condition of existence between death and rebirth. But frankly, the whole idea of Dylan's death frightened me too much to read very far into the Book of the Dead, or, as it is also known, The Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo.

So as I was sitting in a local coffee house just off campus on that Tuesday afternoon I saw two Tibetan monks, with shaven heads and saffron robes, walk into the coffee shop, order drinks, and sit talking in the window seats. I had a strong urge to jump up and ask them about the bardo and whether they could include Dylan in their thoughts as they continued the sand painting. But to do so would have meant admitting that Dylan might really be that close to death, so I just sat and watched as they left to get back to painting. I later followed them and got my first glimpse of the mandala in process.

My daughter, Katy, a student at Ohio University, told me that night that she had wanted to see the monks and especially their sand painting (Katy is a Fine Arts major). So on Thursday afternoon, almost by accident, I went back to the sand painting at 3:00. They were due to destroy the painting in their closing ceremony at 4:00, so Katy soon met me and we watched their closing ceremony.

I was interested to see the effect of the ceremony on all of us onlookers. People became relatively silent, looking on in awe or reverence or just politeness. I then saw a few people who appeared to be meditating during the monks' chanting, so I eventually began to meditate, even though I was feeling a bit self conscious doing so in a public group where I'm known under different circumstances as a professor there. But I meditated anyway.

I soon began having the most vivid visualizations I've ever experienced. Usually I see flat circles of swirling lights and cartoonish images if any. But now I was seeing in 3-D, feeling like I was spinning along with the visualizations of flesh-like magnifications, undulating mounds and folds that I can't really identify. In the midst of this euphoria, though, I suddenly heard a voice in my head tell me, "He's OK. Let him go."

I panicked. To say yes would mean accepting that after a year-and-a-half struggle Dylan and I would have to admit defeat, admit that our strength and determination might in the end prove not enough to save his life beyond the extra time he already had. So I said no, of course, and continued meditating and watching the final stages of the destruction of the Medicine Buddha mandala—such a fitting coincidence!— as the affirmation of life's ultimate impermanence.

Within half an hour of this auditory hallucination I got a call from Jenny, Dylan's mother, telling me to get to Worthington quickly (it's an hour and a half drive) because Dylan had just started having seizures again and seemed on the verge of dying at any moment. Hardly a week later Dylan died in the arms of his family—Jenny, Katy, Valerie, and me— at which time I gave in and started reading him just one more book, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.


[Afterword: I have also been thinking about this recently because just this week (January 2011) I watched the final episode of Joseph Campbell's Mythos II series, the episode entitled "The Experience of God." Here Campbell provides a brilliant reading of the Bardo Thodol as a series of conversations you have with the dead as they descend back down through the seven chakras and the accompanying illuminations and illusions that each chakra presents to the descending (reincarnating) soul. For further understanding, I highly recommend Francesca Fremantle's Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Shambhala 2001).]

[2nd Afterword one hour later: Having a conversation with Tori, my 5-year old daughter who never knew her brothers in the flesh. Her toy friend Skeletie the skeleton has been telling about how he spends his time in the underworld land of the dead. They have parties but miss having hearts and wieners and hair. They like thinking about how their skin rotted and became dirt, which fed new plants which grew fruit which fed birds which foxes ate and then pooped back into the earth for another cycle. She obviously doesn't need to read the Bardo Thodol to know all of this!]