Cycles of birth and death

A birthday, a funeral, and some reflections on life

Image by Sacre Bleu on Unsplash

This week I spent my birthday attending the funeral of a friend and colleague who had reached the end of a two-year journey with cancer.

It wasn’t how I planned to spend my birthday. I had planned lunch with a friend and an Ayurvedic massage. Both were cancelled last minute. After a momentary pang of ‘but birthdays are supposed to be fun’, I settled into acceptance and realised that a funeral felt like a surprisingly fitting way to mark the day.

For me, birthdays often tend to bring some grief amidst the joy and celebration. It can be hard to pin down or articulate the nature of this. Perhaps it’s the reminders of impermanence, mortality and the forwards march of time. Perhaps it’s the sense of reflection, life review, and analysis of my journey. The sense of not being where I thought I might be, of life not fulfilling the promises I’d been sold. The sense of lost dreams, lost youth, pangs of regret, and wonderings about paths untaken. Perhaps too it’s the reminder that everything that’s born must one day die. Every beginning has an ending. Every cycle must complete itself.

Birth and death are so inherently interconnected. The two bookends of our human journey. The two portals between the human world and whatever lies beyond. The places where the veil between this existence and the next is thinnest. Where we can see and feel the proximity of another realm.

I have long suspected that our soul journey is vaster than simply this human incarnation. This flesh and bone suit that we wear and travel around in as we learn, grow, and face whatever challenges we came here to encounter.

The path of yoga has helped me to recognise spirit as my underlying essence. That which remains when we peel back the layers of body, breath, mind and emotion. The thread of energy that connects us all as universal consciousness.

These teachings have led me to trust more and more in something greater. While yoga cannot save us from the pain, struggles, and finiteness of life, it has taught me a lot about letting go, finding ease, grace, acceptance, and trust.

My years living in Aotearoa, New Zealand have also deepened my appreciation of the spiritual. In Te Ao Māori¹, the spirit world is always with us, our ancestors walk amongst us, and it’s a common practice to acknowledge, greet and invite them in at the beginning of a meeting, gathering or ritual. This practice has slowly seeped into my psyche and I now regularly converse with the photos of my ancestors that sit on the shelf in my living room, asking for their support and guidance in times of need, asking for signs and direction when I’m feeling lost. I feel their presence more closely than ever. They show up in interesting and unexpected ways.

This birthday has brought plenty of space to reflect on this. I found myself walking through my week with birth and death on my shoulders. As I shopped for groceries, drove my car, opened my office door, walked down the street, felt the winter sun, and listened to the birdsong, I mused that there would be a last time for each of these activities. That, without the vehicle of our human body, we will never complete these mundanely magical tasks again. The gift of this is that it wakes me momentarily from my haze of habitude and taps me into gratitude and wonderment over the simplest of tasks. I walked through my week, reflecting on the ordinary things that my friend no longer gets to do, and pondering vast unanswerable questions - Does her essence still exist? Where is she now? Which is the better place? And who suffers more - the ones who die young, or the folk left behind in the mire of human struggles?

I’m not sure I have anything wise to say. Just a lot of musings and questions, some sadness, introspection, and a deep reverence for the mystery of our brief existence. I’m struck by the complex web of meaning and relationships we form in our lifetimes. And at the way this manifests and then seems to dissolve in an instant. At the ripples it leaves behind, that continue to reverberate in the world long after our departure. How the world is a uniquely different place for having each one of us in it.

Death feels a little closer and more intimate this week. There’s a deep recognition that my friend is not alone, that all of us will follow through that portal to whatever is on the other side. And with this, comes a greater appreciation for the tiny privileges of ordinary living. A greater desire to pull my loved ones closer, to remember to taste the sweetness the world has to offer, to value the miracle of my functioning body, while I still can. I wish I could hold this awareness close more often. To walk through the world more awake to my fate. To not take the mystery of it all so much for granted. This is the birthday gift my friend left at my door this week. For this, and for all the ways she touched my life, I am grateful.

I’d love you to share any thoughts or reflections you have in response to this, and how you make sense of the cycles of birth and death in your own life. It always makes my day to hear your comments and feedback. (If you’re reading this in an email, click through to the website to join the conversation).

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1. The Māori worldview