Yashobodhi's blog

Things are still quiet here. And too quiet for my liking. New patterns need to emerge at some point. I need to spend less time alone. I had the strangest realisation this morning. I am actually starting a new life. I must say the idea of it made me excited. Although Kamalashila is still in my life in many ways, the reality of it is he is not here anymore. What is ahead is that I continue to respond to life as well as I can. Making considered decisions at cross roads. Keeping in touch with integrity and truth. Looking after myself as best as I can. Knowing that in looking after myself, I am looking after the future. Looking after myself also means caring for the grief that shows itself in small and big ways. Embracing it. Loving it even. A few days ago I had another realisation. The best gift to myself right now is seeing solving problems as fun opportunities. Not as a load of stones around my neck. So this is how I am hoping to move forward. Alone. With the help of others, no doubt. But basically alone. I feel I may be growing up more. Getting more resilient and independent. I am more confident in my ability to respond to a crisis. Kamalashila is dead. And I am still here. It boggles the mind. Yet this is what is arising.

I have bought some Christmas lights. This is a first for me. But I think I need something to cheer me up. I put them on a big plant and have not had the patience to spread out the bulbs evenly over the whole surface. At the moment it is doing some sort of on and off rhythm that I find a bit stressful. A moment later I find the static setting and feel a bit relieved, yet also a bit bored. It is a bit too quiet here. I hear the sound of the bathroom fan. I had my first bath of the day a while ago. It is dark outside. Half past five in the afternoon. I see my Christmas lights reflected in the window. My hands feeling a bit dry. Toes pointed. Not sure why they are doing that. My feet rubbing together now somehow in togetherness. In communication. Now they stop. I stare at my right foot, at least I guess it must be there in that black sock. Dismay on my face. Fingers touching smooth keyboard. Then the toes point again, feet meeting. A bit like the Christmas lights earlier on. Seems I may be a bit nervous. It is hard to tell sometimes. People ask me how I am. I have not much of an idea. I think I am doing fairly well. I am not spending all my time in pyjamas, crying. I do cry. Sometimes at unexpected moments. A flash of a memory. Images of him suffering. When I miss him, I walk into his room. I look at the portrait. Look at the urns. I cry because of the missing. I cry because of how he died. I vividly remember his hands and his feet. The freckles on his shoulder. Sometimes I pat the empty side of the bed. As if I want to be sure he is not there. But also somehow giving him some affection. Expressing tenderness. Now I cry. And my chest feels full. Flickering energy in the pit of my stomach. He is gone. Yet he is not gone. Gone beyond perhaps. But not gone anywhere. I am still searching. I hope he is at peace.

I can see it has been a while since I wrote here. It has been more quiet after the memorial. Which has been enjoyable. It is just me here, in the flat, and some of Kamalashila’s ashes, next to his photo. The journey I am on is still very undefined. But along the way I need to do practical bits and pieces, continue with sorting out his stuff. Overall I am coping fairly well so far. The London sky is slate grey right now. Leafless branches swaying in the wind. My socks are slightly wet. I have mopped the floor. Apart from speaking to a friend over the phone and a fellow course participant coming over for a cup of tea, nothing much is happening here today. Though I did some cleaning in anticipation of the imminent visitor. And I made some sesame cookies.
Cleaning was an area Kamalashila and I would find it hard to see eye to eye on. He propagated that people should just take us how we are. Whereas I defended the notion of paying respect to our guests by inviting them into a clean house. In the pandemic and in the lockdown there was quite a slide of standards, coinciding with a decided lack of guests. However way we turned it, Kamalashila did not have the energy to do much around the house in the last year of his life. And for him, having little energy, it was important to choose what activity to spend his time on. I don’t have an answer here. There is a pondering though. He did acknowledge that it was quite pleasant to have clean surfaces around. Not having this bone of contention between us anymore, I feel strangely bereaved. There is freedom in not having anyone to look after and worry about. But yet it also gave me a direction and a purpose. It is just me now. And I am not sure where that is going. I have no idea what will be unfolding. What will I do? Probably just what I am already doing? Every morning after I wake up I make myself a big glass of tea. Then later on I will have breakfast and a glass of herbal tea. As the morning is approaching its end, I will make myself a coffee. Standing in the little kitchen that is now mine and preparing beverages, I wonder about the regularity of my life at the moment. Life with Kamalashila was never boring. There is a definite lack of unpredictability now. And I don’t think I like it that much. Though I don’t mind it either. It is all undecided. My heart skips a beat.

It is a grey morning here in London. And more grey to come. Today is the day of the filling of the urns with Kamalashila’s ashes. The urns, made by a talented potter friend, arrived here yesterday and are ready for action. Also, I have had two deliveries this morning and awaiting a third. This is for the careful packaging of the urns as they will travel into the world after they have been taken from the shrine on Sunday. We only thought about that yesterday: how are people going to take these urns home? There are four bigger ones for each of the directions and five smaller ones for mostly students. And then I have to think about stand-ins, as two out of the nine recipients won’t be able to make it to the ceremony. Tomorrow morning I will be buying flowers from the stall opposite of the Brixton station. But now I am waiting for another friend who is very kindly going to take on the task of distributing the ashes over the urns. Then tomorrow afternoon, on Saturday, the urns with ashes, flowers, some hangings and rupas, and other bits of pieces, will go to the North London Buddhist Centre for the set-up of the room and the shrine.
We had a meeting with the wonderful The Buddhist Centre Online tech team a few days ago. And before that I had another meeting with my co-organiser. We will have full house in the afternoon of the memorial. The shrine room holds about 85 people. The morning will have half of that amount of people. Should I do something about that? Send out an open invite? The practice part was the most important part of the memorial for KS and luckily we do have lots of people joining online. I am so weary. I cannot think. It usually helps to talk about these things I cannot decide on. So then I call on friends. Send messages to my external brain on WhatsApp.
In the midst of it all I miss Kamalashila. He is the one I want to spend time with after the memorial. My favourite person to be with. But instead I will have my share of his ashes. And the framed photo that will sit on the shrine on Sunday. And thousands of digital imprints. Series of photos of for instance one autumn leaf, a gap in a bamboo forest, an acorn on a tree. Taken from all kinds of angles and distances. Numerous voice memos. Notes. Tiny moments of attention, admiration and awareness. I cannot cling to these glimpses of the world seen through his eyes. It has been challenging to choose something from all that abundance to share on Sunday’s memorial. But choices have been made. All is ready. Almost. I need another bath. But first there is the event of the filling of the urns. I am going to be in another room whilst our friend is spooning ashes into urns. I am back on my yellow couch. It is all a bit much. I hear the whine from the central heating. And then a number of admonishing taps and clicks. As the water is streaming through the pipes, the ashes fall into place in the room that is no longer a vihara.

When I come back from a trip Kamalashila is home. I am surprised. How can you be here, I ask him. I thought you were dead. He just smiles. We go for a walk. His head only comes up to my shoulder now. I remark upon this loss of height. He shrugs. We meet a yoga teacher who seems to be a doctor. We meet a group of people who demonstrate how to cheat and change karma. We are home again, spend time, and talk about what has gone wrong with the treatment. He seems indignant. I say, hang on, you cannot be alive. I signed your death certificate. He looks at me and smiles, with big shiny eyes. This is when I wake up. I wonder. I think. I give myself a headache through trying to remember all the details of the dream.
I have been missing KS. A few times yesterday I walked into his room and it is so evident he is not there. Though his ashes are there still. It is painful. But it is good I am missing him now. I have been dwelling a lot on the difficult few weeks before his death. Mulling over what happened then. Perhaps that can be let go of now. I feel by now my body has mostly gone back to normal. Perhaps the built-up stress hormones have been cleared away. No more worry about him being in pain, deteriorating, needing medical help. No more fear about what would happen. Because it has happened. So now I feel I can miss him. And that feels bittersweet.

One more week till the memorial. I really do not have a lot of plans for afterwards, at least for what is left of this year. Except to continue with my tour guiding course and arrange a visit to the Netherlands. I haven’t been back since the holidays last year. We drove to Harwich on Boxing Day and embarked on the ferry to Hook-of-Holland. We took the ferry back on 2 January. Kamalashila was tired a lot around that time and we stayed an extra night in Harwich so he could rest up. He did the driving and at this time of his life he was not keen on driving without daylight. After we came back I tried to concentrate on my freelance work, starting new initiatives and reconnecting with my network in London, both with friends and professionally. Regarding my work, I had had a difficult few years, with the pandemic throwing a spanner in the works with my then newly-started freelance commissions and activities. Everything went online and then most of it went offline again when galleries starting to open post pandemic and people went back to meeting in groups. Whilst I had been living at a considerable distance from London with a sluggish broadband. So I was going full guns blazing in my new situation: back in London with its many potentials and opportunities for my work.

We know by now that what happened was completely the opposite. Kamalashila fell ill and my attention and care was needed in a different direction. As we are approaching the end of 2024, not my most favourite year, I am hoping to make a fresh start with my working life in the new year. I have a few work things to arrange, prepare and facilitate before then. I will have plenty of time to do the preparation for my course. This takes quite a bit of my bandwidth at the moment, apart from the memorial. At the moment I have ample time to turn towards my experience, to be witnessed by friends, to absorb beauty, and to follow my curiosity about all things Lambeth (the London borough where I live).

But of course I do not know how the creature called Grief is going to manifest and behave in these next months. There is still so much to arrange. So much admin. I keep an eye out for emails on Kamalashila’s phone and have to keep checking the payments going out of his account. Some of them are surprises, some of them by now familiar. Insurance for his devices, keeping his websites in the air, Soundcloud and Vimeo, charity payments, subscriptions. Some I cancel. Some need to continue for now, until they can be transferred to other accounts. It will take quite a while to sort it all out. I hope I will have plenty of time to do this. I hope I will have the headspace. I hope nothing unexpected and dramatic is going to happen that needs to be dealt with, faced, acted upon, that absorbs all of my attention. I hope. And we shall see. But I am confident I will get through it all. In one piece.

Dusk is falling again. I am not doing too badly. I walk through parks, visit galleries, have coffee with friends. For now all is leading to the memorial which will happen on 17 November. I am trying to take it a bit easy. Spread things out. I am still doing stints of passing things on. Yesterday somebody came to collect the two bottles of Eau de Toilette KS ordered in May. This was in a phase of nausea and he was hoping some nice scent would somehow help him through all of that. One sniff of each of the bottles was enough and they have been sitting on a shelf since. Until I posted them on TrashNothing. There was a lot of interest in these bottles. Today someone will come for a bag of clothes hangers. And another one for an oral irrigator. So much stuff to pass on. Most of Kamalashila’s books will get a home in the library of a newly required retreat centre. They will go into storage nearby tomorrow. They are now sitting in boxes in the hallway. It will be good to know they are safely on their way.

Two friends came a few days ago. The day after the ashes had arrived home. They asked to sit in KS’s room for a few minutes. I felt quite moved. It really stirred something up. There are these moments that draw out grief. Today I received a letter from the council about KS’s blue badge. They said it needed to be destroyed immediately. This is a badge that allows you to park anywhere for free. It is for disabled people. KS had applied for it earlier this year at the instigation of a friend. He received it and was absolutely delighted. It suited him to the ground to be able to park just near the Tate Modern, for instance. And he was so excited as well about the permission to drive into streets where you are normally are not allowed to go. What a joy that was for him. It is a pity he didn’t use it that much, because he stopped driving after he received his diagnosis. And of course he also had given his car away. After the revised diagnosis end July he started looking for cars again. Maybe he could still drive if he was going to get better. But of course this didn’t happen. And there I was, thinking about all of this as I was cutting the blue badge into many pieces. I cried because all his delight had permanently gone.

Kamalashila died a month ago. I can barely believe it when I write that. It seems too long and too short at the same time. Time is doing strange things. I am sitting at the kitchen table. Elbows leaning on its heavy wooden top. Kamalashila had found a wooden table top on the streets shortly after we moved here last year. A friend and I carried it upstairs as it was so heavy. It was rectangular at the time and was missing four corners where it legs had been removed, which were an integral part of the top. After some deliberation and discussion Kamalashila decided to make it into an oval, using his jig saw. After all, he argued, we are now living close to Oval. It is not perfect but it is pretty good.
Footsteps from the flat above now, reminding me of a Halloween party that was held there yesterday evening. Though the music stopped at a decent time and we had been notified of the party beforehand, I was already sitting in bed reading when the sound of the bass became a bit too much for me. I remembered Kamalashila’s noise-cancelling headphones, which he bought after he had been hospitalised for the first time in the Spring. I found them and tried to connect them to my own laptop. Music starting to play. And through the wall it had picked up his old phone signal in the living room and had spontaneously started an Oasis song called ‘Live Forever’. It was quite pleasant really. I only found out the title on looking it up just now. Strange signs or presence and absence at the same time happening a fair amount at this point. I look at the FindMy feature on my phone and it shows KS is right here, at home. Of course these are his devices that are still with me.
Also with me now are his ashes. I picked them up with a friend from the crematorium yesterday. I had brought the same backpack I used for carrying my father’s ashes now almost two years ago. His container was rectangular like a big cereal box. Kamalashila’s is round. Another instance of a rectangular turning into something round. Square pegs and round holes come to mind. We all walked back to the underground station, Tooting Broadway. I was carrying him on my back. I felt joy. Maybe that is weird. But it reminded me of us playfully trying to lift each other up and jump on each other’s backs. After a coffee in a cafe, with the ashes in the bag sitting next to my friend and I on the table, we went on the tube. The bag was now on my lap. That made me smile too. We walked to my flat and then the ashes came home. The tube went into the hearth. The Manjushri rupa in front of it. Home again, for a while, until the journey continues.

In the past days I have been feeling less inclined to write. I am often tired, headachy and slightly nauseous. I actually looked up the physical symptoms of grief, and it all seems to fit in. I have up days and down days with it all. Some days go by and I am doing fine and then later not so much. I spend quite a bit of time alone. Which suits me at the moment. But I try to meet a friend every day for a coffee or a visit to a gallery. In the past week I have been to the Turner Prize at the Tate Britain and to the Garden Museum, apart from the Van Gogh exhibition in the National Gallery. I have been to a tour about the river Effra. I have gone to my tour guide training course evening. I have met up with others to talk through the memorial service for Kamalashila. I have walked on the Southbank.
Apart from these meetings, I am slowly dismantling the Virtual Vihara. Which is actually awful. Because Kamalashila spent so much time putting it up. If feels painful to undo what he has done so effectively and so idiosyncratically. But it cannot stay like it is. I am thinking about Miss Havisham’s room in Great Expectations. Things need to shift and change and transform to heal the gap Kamalashila has left. But it needs to take an appropriate time. I don’t know what that is. I felt with some things I have perhaps moved slightly too fast. But I am trying to consciously make small changes in that room every day. I am weary. This is yet another shift involving lots of stuff that needs to find another destination, another purpose or home. We made a massive effort when we moved from the cottage in East Suffolk to this London flat. The amount of things that needed to be sorted and shifted and passed on was about a third or perhaps even half of all our belongings at the time. Now I am having to condense everything to a one-person household. It doesn’t have to happen in one day, or one week, or one month. But it does need to happen at some point. I do get help, of course. Which is lovely. But the decisions need to come from me. And these are often hard to make. And apart from stuff, there are so many other strands that are lying untouched. Like live wires. I have to tread carefully.

The room is crowded. It is a bit after nine in the morning and I am at a Van Gogh exhibition. I catch myself staring at titles. Unable to read explanatory texts. My glasses are steaming up because I have been rushing to get here in time. My nose is detecting smells: shampoo, perfume, some sweat. And I hope that isn’t me. I do glance at the paintings as I stand in a room full of excited and knowledgeable voices. I find myself next to The Public Garden, Arles. I hear people commenting on the trees. Another smell passes by. People love the trees. Someone is reminded of the trees in Massachusetts. Leaf peepers, my memory conjures up. Sweat is trickling down my spine.
I wipe my face with my hand. I notice a solitary figure on a bench in the painting. I rest with her. Then I spot a group of three people on a bench in the left corner. I feel crowded again. Well-modulated voices all around me, plus a burr and loud laughter. I enjoy picking out phrases. But of course as I start listening out for them, none jump out. “Yeah.” Voices rising and falling. I look at my screen. I listen. But so far I am not looking at the paintings much. I love the enthusiasm behind me. I stand still in front of Undergrowth. This I love. Background blending with trees. Big blobs of paint. A straight line contrasting with the curliness of mosses. Light tones among dark. More dark than light. Bright and promising green in the distance.
The woman who welcomed me liked my scarf. I told her about it perking me up. And that I hoped the exhibition would do this too. What to say when asked how I am? I said I had a recent bereavement. I move to the next painting instinctively, but have not looked at it yet. So I said I had a bereavement and had to shield myself from the compassionate look in her eyes. What to say to someone you know professionally when your husband died less than three weeks ago. I said: “I won’t say much about it, otherwise,” and here I point with both hands at my face. Mimicking tears streaming down. She nods kindly. I am facing the Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Rémy. Here I see an empty bench. Vincent, I relate. A tentative path, neatly marked rows of grass. Bright yellow on the facade of a building. The sun hitting the grass and the blossom on the trees. I shuffle along. I nearly walk into someone. She doesn’t notice. I am on the move again, noticing I am in room two already. How incredibly prolific he must have been while staying at that asylum of Saint-Rémy. Somebody says jolly good next to my right ear. I end up in another corner, next to a doorway and The Weeping Tree. Dark. Moody. Yet, beautiful, driven and dedicated. Now I get interested in looking. My body temperature has balanced out. Some space has opened up. A bit later my heart and spirit lift. And I meet The Sower.