During the week that Kamalashila was in hospital at the beginning of April, my brain seemed to be working overtime. It had to process all the new pieces of information, was running through the implications and was projecting outcomes and scenarios. In the mornings I would experience strong emotions. The afternoons were spent in hospital with KS and the evenings were frankly for zoning out, zooming with friends and finding some peace in the bathtub. Kamalashila was considering pulling what he called ‘a David Bowie’. This would mean not revealing that he had cancer and just continuing life until he died. I do not think he was hugely serious about this. But at the time he didn’t want anyone to know about the tumour and the seriousness of the situation until he had processed it himself a bit more. So this scenario didn’t happen. He decided to share wide and far.
I had my own scenarios running, as I wrote before. In retrospect it struck me how cartoonesque these were. They fall through time and again. It is the end of June now. KS is going for short walks, we laugh, we cry, we occasionally argue. I am not sure what I was envisaging for the end of June, but perhaps not all of that. Reality, what actually happens, is always so much more complicated and multilayered than what you imagine will happen. The cartoonish quality of my thoughts lacked depth and understanding, but nevertheless they were useful. It just seems as if running these scenarios, and allowing them play out with kindness, is some sort of preparing the grounds. This particularly happened in meditation and I would just sit and watch and wonder. Perhaps emotions can be experienced, received and held in relation to these possible stories about what may happen. But I don’t want my life with KS to be like a cartoon and my response to him lacking in depth and being unreal. Especially not now. This searching for reality, for what is authentic is at the heart of how I aspire to live my life. This period in my life is so intense, so full of learning, so dear and tender, so heartbreaking. So very real.
