The Inevitable

On January 17th 2020 I laid in my death bed, talking to a stranger about my life. Ten minutes later I died and a monk held my funeral…

旅立ち - The Departure

I attended a workshop on Friday called ‘The Departure’. It was held by Rev. Jotetsu Nemoto a Zen Buddhist monk from Gifu prefecture here in Japan. The workshop forces you to confront your own mortality. It consisted of five steps: meditation, creating a vision board, the process of dying, your last word with a stranger and lastly your death.

The Life of Ash - Uncut

We were told to bring scissors, glue and favorite photos and magazines with us to the workshop. Magazines… who in this day and age buys these anymore? Anyway, our professor luckily had some magazines with him and I grabbed the one related to music. We were supposed to cut out anything that grabbed our attention and build a vision board that represented our live in some way. To be honest, I didn’t exactly knew what the vision board was about, but I just filled it up with a few snippets out of the magazine, two photos with my friends and a lot of drawings.

This is, unmistakably, my vision board. We only had an hour to complete this, so it doesn’t have everything I would have wanted to put on there, nevertheless everything important made it on there. First and most importantly, my friends are all on my board. I gotta say those pics are sexy as fuck. I guess I don’t really need to explain why they made it onto the board.

So next up we have in the upper center, right to the feather ‘Rise Against’ written. Rise Against was the first rock band I’ve ever listened to and also the first band I went to a live concert to. Ever since that faithful day I started to listen to more hardcore, punk and post music and even some metal here and there. It was somewhat of a musical evolution for me. I did and am still listening to their music on a regular basis. I even as much as dedicated one of my my Life Goals to covering all their songs at some point in the next few years. The text right to ‘Rise Against’ says ‘This ink it travels through the page, up my hand into my veins’ and is from one of my favorite songs called ‘The Black Market’.

The musical theme goes on on the bottom left of the vision board. Somewhat hard to read it says ‘Never There’ which is a song from Sum41. I listened a lot to that song in the last few days and it really grew on me. To the right there is a snippet of the music magazine I took. There is a singer standing on a stage with a huge crowd in front of him. While I don’t dream on standing in front of such a big crowd, I definitely want to play live at some point in my musical career. Let’s see how big a crowd I can gather together.

To the left of the middle picture it says ‘LP’, which stands for Linkin Park and three of their songs below it: ‘Invisible’, ‘In The End’ and ‘Nobody Can Save Me’. The two albums I listened to the most in the last few days were from Linkin Park (One More Light) and Mike Shinoda as an individual artist (Post Traumatic), so I thought they definitely earned their place on my contemporary vision board.

The last musical themed drawing is in the bottom center. That part is really hard to read, but it says ‘Dying inside these walls’. It is from the song ‘My Curse’ from Killswitch Engage. What can I say, I just love the way he screams that at the end of the song. It just sounds so amazing.

The feather to the top of the vision board and the Buddhism artwork to the right are drawn by myself, but not during the workshop. I made those during university when sitting in different classes. The right one says ‘bukkyou’ in kanji at the top, which means Buddhism, then the five elements in Japanese Buddhism: wind, earth, water, fire and void. At the bottom it says ‘Buddhism’ again. I really like how this one turned out, looks pretty cool to me.

The Most Important Things

The next part of the workshop started by us writing down the three most important things to us in four categories, so in total the 12 most important things in our life. The first category was people. We had to write down three people that are the dearest to us. It was hard picking these three, but I guess they stand representative for all the other important people.

Then we had to write down the three most important things/objects that we owned. This one was surprisingly hard to do as I didn’t consider most of the things I owned very dear to me. Of course I have some stuff I really like and would not throw away, however, saying that I consider them dear to me is a bit of a stretch. The only thing I could come up with was my ‘memory box’ with all kinds of cards, letters and other written things from my friends. From time to time I still go through the box and read through the letters and get emotional from all the things written in them and all the memories that are connected to them. Apart from that box, I just wrote two other random things down.

The third category was non-tangible things, which included hobbies and other activities you like to do. Apart from the now obvious listening to music and spending time with friends I just wrote down cycling. What can I say, I just love cycling. I pretty much instantly wrote down these three without much thought going into it.

The last category was dreams. Now this one was really hard for me. I have a lot of things I want to do in my life, however, I wouldn’t necessary describe any of them as dreams of mine. After some thinking and the fact that Rev. Nemoto just continued with the workshop after some time, I quickly wrote down three of the things on my Life Goal list.

Death

After writing down our most important things in life, Rev. Nemoto told us a story. It was the story of our own life. At least how it could proceed to happen:

In recent times I feel a bit down and I don’t exactly know why. I am strolling around through my life without my mood getting any better. After some time, with nothing changing my friends advise me on going to the doctor and getting checked up on my health. Maybe the doctor can find the reason why I am feeling so bad. Reluctantly I agree to this and go to the doctor the next day. The doctor does some tests and then sends me on my way. Some time passes and the test results come back. They found something suspicious on my CT scan and they want to do a biopsy. I agree to the procedure. The test results from the biopsy come back. They found out I have cancer. The doctor immediately advises me to have a surgery. I also asked my friends and they share the same opinion and so I decide to have the surgery. I get very fearful and panicky and I am constantly obsessed with this illness. I read everything about it, just to figure out how to cure this disease. When I realized I might not survive the cancer, I was filled with this deep emptiness.

‘With a sense of resolve, look at the 12 things you wrote down and discard three of them.’

After the surgery I go to consult the doctor. He tells me that the tumor was maligned and that I will have to have chemotherapy. As I have no option I just agree to this. My friends and family try to encourage me and tell me that I will certainly get better. But I feel like they don’t understand me. I feel angry at them for giving me such false encouragement and for not trying to understand how I really feel. The chemotherapy really takes a toll on my health. Little by little it becomes more difficult for me to do daily activities. I find that I stumble easily, that I can barely get out of bed anymore and that I don’t have any appetite. My friends advise me to get hospitalized and start a more intense treatment. I agree to their proposal and get hospitalized. Lying in bed I stare at the ceiling and a sense of anger wells up in my heart. I wonder why I had this kind of fate. Did I do something bad in my past? I don’t understand this and it makes me angry. At the same time I feel anxiety that I may never be able to get out of the hospital again.

‘Out of the remaining nine precious things, choose three and discard them.’

My friends start to come frequently to visit me in the hospital. They bring gifts and flowers to try to cheer me up, but nothing they do can cheer me up. Everything just seems so empty to me. One time I go to wash my face and I look in the mirror. I see this person with his hair and eyelashes fallen out. I look so strange and ill that I can barely recognize this person as myself. From that day on I refuse to let anybody come to the hospital to visit me. As I stare at the ceiling an overwhelming sadness overcomes me and I cannot stop the tears from flowing. I know that I will never get out of this hospital again and I feel so sad and so empty. It is as if my heart is being crushed.

‘From the remaining six items, please choose three and discard them.’

Recently I spend more time sleeping than being awake. It feels to bothersome to move my body and I have no desire to get up out of bed anymore. My only connection to the outer world is the view from the window. Everything in the outer world seems so futile and so empty. I feel that my body is losing its life force and that it is becoming like a lump of earth. One time I tried to say something and I realized that I couldn’t speak anymore. I lost the ability to speak. I want to say something to my friends that are looking after me, but I am unable to say anything. Tears are coming out of my eyes and I cannot stop crying. A few days after that my body completely stops responding to me. The only part of my body that I can still control are my eyes. It feels like my soul, my heart is become like a piece of ice. The people looking after me are also unable to control their tears. Seeing their sadness, I can also not control my tears anymore.

‘Out of the remaining three precious things, choose two and discard them.’

‘Are you okay? Wake up?’ The doctor is apparently hitting my body to resuscitate me. But I am unable to open my eyelids. I want to tell the people there that I am still alive, but I have no way of doing so. I can hear the sound of the EKG that is measuring my heart beat. It seems that my heart beats are becoming few and far between. Am I really about to die? I cannot accept that. In my hazy conscientiousness I remember that time I practiced dying in the Tabidachi workshop. I feel I must try to remember all the people that were kind to me, that scolded me for my own good and that were good to me. I try to remember their names as much as possible. I try to remember as much as I can about the people that were precious to me. I even remember some people I haven’t thought about in a long time. People that have become distant. I tried to remember as many of them as possible, while I still can. And I express feelings of gratitude to each one of them. As my conscientiousness fades, my body feels like it is dissolving, falling apart into pieces. It’s as if my body is turning into dust and becoming transparent. I feel as if I’m melting into a very bright light. I’ve become one with the wind.

Now a miracle occurred. I become conscience again and I am able to speak briefly. The nurse is in my room and notices. She comes to my side and holds my hand in the final moments of my life.

Last Words and my Conclusion 

Did you ever wonder about what your last words would be? I can say with certainty that I didn’t. The workshop continued with our last moments. We had to pair up, one of us laid down and the other put a white cloth on the lying person’s face, while also holding their hand. I could say anything to them that I wanted. I didn’t really know what to say. Were these my last moments, I would have wasted them by not being able to get out even a single coherent thought. Props to my partner for asking the right questions in that moment. ‘Do you regret anything?’, ‘What would you want to tell your friends right now?’, What is your fondest memory?’, ‘What would you have liked to do in your life?’. That last question hit me like a motherfucking truck. I thought about it for a second and then I simply answered ‘Nothing’. There are things I’d liked to have done, but nothing where I’d say I regret not being able to accomplish it.

I am still thinking about that question and it makes me kind of sad. I am currently 23 years old, yet, I seem to have no clue what to do with my life. I have no plans for my future. What would I like to do? I simply don’t know and it makes me mad at myself. This is also my biggest take away from the workshop. This may not be the result Rev. Nemoto imagined I’d come to after his workshop, but, at least for now, this is my take away. I still have a month left here in Japan and after this coming week I’ll be done with university and work. I will be able to focus solely on myself and do whatever I want. It may sound stupid and pretentious, but I will try to find myself. Find what makes me happy in life and, just in general, learn more about myself. I never really bothered to do that and I want to change that now. Let’s see how this goes…

Thank your for reading and see you next week :)
Ash