who he is

Because I know myself very well, it is difficult to say who I am. -- Taiso Eka

"I am dessert," Rich says.

"That sounds profound," I say. "Or it may mean nothing. Not everything incomprehensible is profound. Or true."

He closes his eyes.

He has better things to do than listen to my gobbledygook. Trying to cough up phlegm, for one, but he doesn't have the strength, and I rub my fingers over his neck, feeling the bulge of the tumor growing, growing, remembering back five years when we first noticed this and thought, oh, just a misalignment of muscles, just nothing, nothing.

Rich came to know the name of what was inside of him. He tried to understand it with precise charts and measurements and CDs on file. But he never became his illness. As he never became what did not matter.

"Professor of Physics," I tell the funeral director when she asks for his work, his position. This is needed for the death certificate.

"He would gag," I then say. "Rich was not his title."

And he would be suspicious of any student that insisted on saying doctor, or professor, and not calling him by his name.

"We're colleagues," he would say. "I just know, maybe, a little more."

Truly, he knew himself very well.

Now, I don't know what he knows. He has entered what Zen masters call the "empty field," the incomprehensible place that can be touched in meditation where there is no object, no goal, yet liberates all desires, all "self-ness," all that is not.

Rich didn't do meditation. But as I watch the tumor swell and listen to his rasping breath and hold on to what still is, I know that he is far ahead of me in a place that is incomprehensible.

And true.

Candace