Inside Yoga 90 (25/11/13)
Facing our own mortality can be one of the biggest challenges life can throw at us – and this can be especially true when we find ourselves suffering from an incurable illness with death fast approaching as our only a certainty.
Having been a fan since my teenage years, when I heard the news that Lou Reed (the singer and one time member of the Velvet Underground) had died on October 27, aged 71, I felt the sadness any fan would have felt. Lou Reed had a liver transplant this year as he been suffering from liver disease, but following complications his health deteriorated.
His partner, Laurie Anderson in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, has talked about her time with Lou and about his last moments. What is interesting is that as meditators – Lou was a Tai Chi practitioner, and the pair were students of Mingyur Rinpoche (a Tibetan Buddhist teacher) – they approached Lou’s death with meditative awareness.
Laurie explains: “Lou was sick for the last couple of years, first from treatments of interferon, a vile but sometimes effective series of injections that treats hepatitis C and comes with lots of nasty side effects. Then he developed liver cancer, topped off with advancing diabetes.
“He kept doing tai chi every day for two hours, plus photography, books, recordings, his radio show with Hal Willner and many other projects. He loved his friends, and called, texted, emailed when he couldn’t be with them. We tried to understand and apply things our teacher Mingyur Rinpoche said – especially hard ones like, ‘You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.’
She continued: “Last spring, at the last minute, he received a liver transplant, which seemed to work perfectly, and he almost instantly regained his health and energy. Then that, too, began to fail, and there was no way out. But when the doctor said, ‘That’s it. We have no more options,’ the only part of that Lou heard was ‘options’– he didn’t give up until the last half-hour of his life, when he suddenly accepted it – all at once and completely. We were at home – I’d gotten him out of the hospital a few days before – and even though he was extremely weak, he insisted on going out into the bright morning light.
“As meditators, we had prepared for this – how to move the energy up from the belly and into the heart and out through the head. I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn’t afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.
“At the moment, I have only the greatest happiness and I am so proud of the way he lived and died, of his incredible power and grace.
“I’m sure he will come to me in my dreams and will seem to be alive again. And I am suddenly standing here by myself stunned and grateful. How strange, exciting and miraculous that we can change each other so much, love each other so much through our words and music and our real lives.”
To read the Rolling Stone interview go to http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/laurie-andersons-farewell-to-lou-reed-a-rolling-stone-exclusive-20131106
If you have any comments and questions relating to this article, leave a comment boxes below.
