Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.” ~ Alice Walker

When I look back over my life, it is not the teachings that matter. It is the clear recognition of loss in my own personal life. How can it be otherwise? After our daughter was diagnosed with cancer, I remember something well. She was scheduled to have a biopsy at a children’s hospital in Memphis. After we saw the pediatric surgeon, she climbed on a bouncing metal horse on the grassy lawn there. I knew her normal life was coming to an abrupt end. My heart turned sharply, cutting razor wire around itself, as if that might protect me from the all-out blinding pain that lay ahead for our family.

In the years to come, I would be regarded as a Typhoid Mary—that woman whose child had died during the summer of 1978. I brought that up today sitting around with my fellow Tai Chi students after class. “Tai Chi is big for me,” I said, “because my life is small.” It probably can’t be otherwise. And yet because of loss, the teachings point me back to myself. To regard the razor wire and know why I put it there so long ago. My tears have rusted it though, softening me around the edges.

How can I write about what matters when it was so long ago and now so far away? The intimate smell of a child and her blanket, the saliva glistening around her sweet thumb. 

What teachings can offer comfort when a child is dying? Yes, death comes to every household, but not usually so early on. The buddha could not rock that child when she screamed with fear. A grown up teaching could not make her smile. Course material for the intellect doesn’t work on children.

I offer you this. While human life is limited, it is also infinitely untouchable. The wreckage is beyond repair. The light points to a far off heaven where little children do not die. But we cannot hope to reach it and make everything all better. I would suggest to you that just sitting quietly with your own wreckage makes more sense than listening to someone posit theories about awakening.

When I visit the cemetery where she and her father lie buried, I just have a deep sense of unreality. Where did all of that life go? What will it be like when I see them again? And don’t tell me I won’t cry for joy.

Vicki Woodyard