Thread by @amandaknox

Every October, the dead knock politely on our doors. We answer in costume. We hand out candy. We flirt with ghosts and skeletons and zombies. Halloween is the one night Americans let death out of the attic.

/thread

And even then, we keep it on a leash, we mock it, we twist it into something cartoonish or over-the-top gory. What’s missing is a serious reflection on mortality, but I love Halloween all the same. It’s something at least.

The rest of the year, we hide death away in hospitals, in euphemisms, in the quest for wellness and longevity. We live, most of the time, like we’re immortal. You’re going to make it, we tell our dying relatives. You’ve got plenty of time, we tell ourselves.

This year, my family built a small shrine in our living room for the dead. Call it an ofrenda if you like. I don’t believe in souls, but the Mexicans got something very right with Dia de los Muertos.

I want my children to understand that the dead are folded into the soil of our lives, still nourishing us, and we should honor them with a festive attitude.

Rather than scatter marigolds, we decorated our altar with mushrooms, those fungal otherworldly entities that govern the border between life and death, recycling the decaying matter of the dead into nutrients for the living.

We lit candles for my Oma, who died Oct 3rd, the anniversary of the day I was first acquitted. We told stories about her and others we’ve lost.

Around the time I began planning this shrine, my husband and I attended meditation at our local Zen Center, and recited the Five Remembrances of Buddhism.

1. I am of the nature to grow old; there is no way to escape growing old.

2. I am of the nature to have ill health; there is no way to escape having ill health.

3. I am of the nature to die; there is no way to escape death.

4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change; there is no way to escape being separated from them.

5. My actions are my only true belongings; I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

I wanted to dig deeper into the Five Remembrances, and that led me to an essay by the Zen priest Koun Franz. He notes that the first three were the Buddha’s central wake-up calls.

Perfectly sheltered as a youth from illness, old age, and death, he was shocked to realize: That’s going to happen to me!

Franz writes of the Five Remembrances, “It’s Buddhism at its very, very best. It’s perfectly clear. It’s perfectly compassionate. It’s perfectly concise. And you can’t argue with it.”

As I donned my Halloween costume this year, as I helped my daughter with hers, I found myself reflecting on how these remembrances have played a role in my life.

When I was twenty, I learned an overwhelming amount about death all at once. My roommate Meredith was murdered, and overnight the world became a horror movie I couldn’t turn off. I was arrested, accused, imprisoned, vilified.

I was ripped away from everyone I loved, and the person I was—carefree, trusting, optimistic—was also gone. Death wasn’t an abstraction anymore. It was all around me.

It was not lost on me how easily Meredith’s fate could have befallen me had I been the one home alone that night.

I am of the nature to die; there is no way to escape death.

Prison, too, is a kind of death. The death of freedom and self-determination. Once there, I found myself surrounded by illness, mental and physical. The women I shared cells with were suffering from PTSD, depression, anxiety, and even schizophrenia.

Many didn’t have all their teeth. One cellmate was covered in scabs from obsessively clawing at her own skin. My own body broke out in hives, and my hair began falling out.

I am of the nature to have ill health; there is no way to escape having ill health.

I was one of the youngest inmates there. Quite a few women were in their sixties, and time had worn on them from lives of poverty and abuse.

After my conviction, when I was sentenced to 26 years, I saw my own future coiling in circles inside those concrete walls. I would pass through my fertile years in that place.

I am of the nature to grow old; there is no way to escape growing old.

It also became very clear to me after my conviction that I was no longer a lost student, waiting to get my life back. There was no life I “should have been living.”

When Meredith was murdered, my life changed overnight, and I lost the life I’d been dreaming of, the me I was hoping to become.

It took that undeserved guilty verdict for me to really accept that such a dramatic change, and loss, was simply a part of my life. It was life.

Everything I held dear could vanish tomorrow, or would change slowly over time to become unrecognizable.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change; there is no way to escape being separated from them.

The fifth remembrance—My actions are my only true belongings—is about karma, which is often misunderstood. It is more about cause and effect than some sense of cosmic comeuppance.

I was serving time for someone else’s crimes, and though my own sphere of agency was severely limited, I could still determine how to carry myself through each day.

I could do one humble thing each day to be proud of, even if it was just writing a letter to my mom. Trapped in a cell, it was easier to realize that my choices were the only things that truly belonged to me.

I struggled a lot in freedom with trying to realize that same truth, because it’s a lot easier in “freedom” to get attached to outcomes we have no control over.

Franz puts it this way:

"My life is being expressed 100% right now…There’s no backstory. There’s no other thing that you don’t see…What you choose to do in this moment matters. There will be consequences...

...And while you get to choose which actions you take, you don’t get to choose what those consequences will be. It’s like aiming a bow and arrow while you’re running: you know what you want to hit...

...Maybe you’ll get it. Maybe you won’t. You just do your best, but you have to accept the consequences for what happens because what other option is there?"

I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

The Five Remembrances are connected to what’s known as the Five Divine Messengers. When we see a sick person, an old person, or a corpse, we’re supposed to think: That is me.

Not, That will be me, but, That is me, right now. “That person is showing you the nature of your life,” Koun Franz says.

“You may not feel it acutely in this moment, but this is what it is to be human. Again, don’t look away. Realize what you’re seeing.”

The fifth Divine Messenger gives me chills. The “punished criminal.” This messenger was meant to remind you of karma, of responsibility for one’s actions.

But as Franz points out, that metaphor doesn’t land so cleanly in a world where punishment and guilt are often divorced. “Perhaps people had more faith in the criminal justice system 2,500 years ago,” he writes. Preach.

I know what it’s like to be that “punished criminal,” to have the world look at you and assume that your suffering is the natural consequence of your actions.

They saw me as evidence of something like divine justice. It’s a strange position, to embody for others a false moral lesson they expect from the universe. Franz offers some alternatives:

“Every time you can’t find your keys, it’s because you put your keys somewhere else. That too is karma—it doesn’t have to look like justice....

...It doesn’t have to be a balancing of the scales; that’s a simplistic and dangerous view. It’s simply that we do things, and something comes of those choices.”

I haven’t yet mentioned the first Divine Messenger, which is a surprising one: a newborn baby. When my own newborn daughter was first laid on my chest, screaming and fragile, I was overwhelmed with the sense of her perfection.

She’s perfect, I kept repeating. It’s a banal sentiment other parents share, I know. But that universality is intriguing. There’s this sense that this creature, untouched yet by chance and choice, could not be improved upon.

And yet, there’s the simultaneous realization that your child will grow up and change. One day, she won’t want to sit on your lap, or sing silly songs in the car.

As difficult as those early years of child-rearing are, I treasure all those moments I know are ticking away.

Could this be the last time she says “ridorpulus” or the last time she’s amazed to see a plastic skeleton posed by someone’s mailbox? (Trick or treating this year was a constant stream of “Mom look!”)

There is no greater reminder of impermanence and change than the ever-fluctuating wonder of a child, except perhaps death itself.

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