Memories and adventures of a Sri Lankan born vegan: The Passing of my Father

(I wrote most of this blog posting in June 2009 after my father died. It is now October 2011, over two years since he passed away. The feelings of hopelessness have now gone away and I have now come to accept the fact that he is now gone.However, whenever I see something that reminds me of my father, like his books, his glasses or his belt, I feel a renowned feeling of sadness about his passing.I used to dream about him a lot in the first few months after he died, he was very much alive in those dreams.Then I used to wake up and I would realize that it was only a dream and that he was really gone. I still see him in my dreams sometimes and it's as if he was still alive.)

I have not thought about death so much in my whole life until during the past month we lost our father. Up until now I had never experienced the consequences of death so closely since nobody in my immediate family had passed on before.

My father's passing has had a profound impact on me. It has made me realize how final death is. How my father can never come back to us in this lifetime and we can never turn the clock back or do things a different way. Even in our next births even if we do meet we will be different people and this present life is gone forever. Somehow I can't seem to accept the fact that my father can no longer see us from where he is at now and that he will have no memory of us in his next birth. No matter how much we think of him he will not know how much we miss him and wish that we could turn back the clock. In a way it's good that he is free from the burden of worrying about how we are doing. It's only us that are left behind that are left to cope with the loss of losing a loved one.

Now with the loss of my father, I have come to realize how fragile human life is , it's like a candle flame that maybe extinguished at any moment. I have been searching for articles on how to cope with the loss of a parent and how to cope with death. In my search I found that the Buddha had asked his disciples how often one needs to contemplate dying. They had given various answers, the correct answer being that one needs to think about death on every inhalation and expiration. Only if the in breath comes in do we live, that's how close to death we all are. That is such a remarkable fact that we never think about. It makes sense now why the Anapanasati meditation (concentration on in and out breath) is the most basic meditation used by Buddhists.

While we are alive we never think about death, the mention of death instills fear in us so we avoid thinking about it as much as we can. But since death is an inevitable fact of life we need to contemplate our own impending demise and those of our loved ones and friends.

I see my self going back over the last time I saw my father and even back to the last month of his life. I have this nagging feeling of sadness and guilt within me, for not seeing that he was not well and under a lot of stress. I keep thinking what if I had paid more attention to his health would he still be alive today? I feel like I didn't do enough to help him during his last year in life. He worked so tirelessly this past year and that was because he wanted to pay back some loans that he had taken out from banks in Sri Lanka. If I had known that his health was at such a low state I would have tried to help him more..But for sure none of us had any clue including my father himself. I feel looking back that he was under a lot of stress but I was too tied up in my own problems to tell him to slow down and take things easier.He had just come back to Sri Lanka to take care of some family property matters there . And once he was back in the States his plan was to take it easier job wise. He did complain that he was having some body ailments in the past month but none of us in the family took it to be anything serious and neither did he. We suggested to him that he should see the doctor about it but he didn't think it was important enough to see the doctor about. My father was very independent and therefore he always saw the doctor on his own.So it never occurred to us to take him to the doctor.

When I think back upon how hard he had been working and the fact that we didn't realize it I feel very sad. If I was in a better place myself mentally perhaps I would have seen it, but I was far more worried about my self that I had no time to think about how my father was. I think that is our bad karma that we lost him so soon he was not yet seventy. I see his own brothers and sisters who are a lot older who are still alive and that makes me sad too, I feel he died too young. I feel somehow that he sacrificed his own life because he was so unselfish. He put his family welfare first and never gave much thought to checking up on his own health. I also feel like he didn't want to face the fact that those ailments he was experiencing in the last month were anything serious,

My father was such a devoted family man and he put the needs and wants of his family first before his own. Now that I am an adult myself and when I reflect on the last year of his life I can truly see this to be true. I feel that he must be born into a better life on those merits alone.