Chapter 15: When I’m Gone
The call came in the middle of the night. The other end was silent a long time before saying four words: he is no more. In Chinese, ta bu zai le: he is not here any more.
When Chinese speak of death, they often don’t say “died”; they say “is no more,” bu zai le. “Has gone,” as if the person had set out on a road toward somewhere far; “has gone away,” as if to some place; “is gone,” as if all at once there were an emptiness. Each way of speaking looks for a shape the living can bear. “Is no more” is the most honest: it doesn’t say where he has gone; it only says that here, where he used to be, he is not any more.
People speak of their own death in many ways too. When I’m dead. After I die. If one day I’m gone. Some smile as they say it, some frown, some stop halfway and go no further.
When people think of “I won’t be here,” each heart takes its own shape.
Someone wakes at night; the room is very dark; the person beside him is fast asleep. Suddenly he thinks: one day I won’t be here. This bed will be here, this window will be here, I won’t. In that moment something inside drops away, like stepping down and finding no stair. He lies there, eyes open, and it is a long time before he sleeps again.
Someone has a check-up and gets a sheet of paper with a line on it the doctor says needs further tests. For those few days everything looks different to him: the tree below, the people in the street, his child’s face. For the first time he thinks very concretely: if I’m gone, what will they do?
Someone is very afraid of being forgotten. Afraid that after he is gone, in ten or twenty years no one will mention him again, as if he had never come. So he wants to leave something: a book, a house, a name, some photographs, someone who remembers him.
Someone, thinking of death, thinks: then what does my whole life amount to? Decades of being busy, a few things saved up, and in the end you let go with both hands and take nothing with you; wasn’t the whole trip for nothing?
And someone never will think about it. If others mention it, he changes the subject: why talk about that, it’s bad luck. He has locked it in a drawer, and so long as the drawer isn’t opened, it is as if it weren’t there.
In these shapes there is a deep assumption: death is something the “I” will go through.
When that day comes, there will be a me who walks into a blackness, who goes through its own vanishing, who stays on and on in that nothing. Or there will be a me who, on that day, looks back on this life and finds it was all in vain.
So people fear. Not only pain, not only leaving loved ones, but that blackness, that “trip for nothing.”
Is there an “I” who goes through “I won’t be here”?
Can a person experience his own not-being? To experience, one must be; whatever is experienced already is. A person can never meet his own “no more”: in his place, being goes on being until the very last moment; after that last moment, this time no longer meets anything from this place. There is no “me after death” sitting in a blackness, going through its own not-being. The words “is no more” have never been said by the one who is no more; they are always said by those still here.
There is also a symmetry. Before a person was born, for all those years, he “was not” either. No one grieves over the thousands of years before his birth, nor feels them as a long darkness in which he was shut up waiting to be born. Not-being before birth, he never met either. Why is the “not-being” after birth so much more frightening? Because people look across from the side of “being”: what came before birth is behind, already past; what comes after death is ahead, as if one still had to walk into it. But the stretch ahead is like the stretch behind: not a dark road to walk into, and neither is anyone’s experience.
That blackness is the living, while alive, using the experience of being alive to color not-being: think “nothing at all,” and a blackness floats up in the mind; but that blackness is thought up by the living; it is being. A person can think of his own not-being, but cannot treat not-being as a darkness he himself will go on to experience.
This is not to say death is not frightening. Fear arises here, and it has its reasons: it makes people careful crossing the road, take their medicine on time, say what they have to say a little sooner. Only that picture of “walking into a blackness” can be seen for how it was painted.
Then, at the very end, is this time of being really over?
Yes. This sentence must not be softened.
Anyone who has sat by a bed and seen someone off will remember the moment. The breathing grows slower and slower: one breath, a long pause, another. Everyone in the room holds their breath, watching that rise and fall. The last breath goes out, and no other comes in. The room is still the same room, cars still pass below, footsteps still go along the corridor, and the person on the bed is no more.
Being is that rise and fall, with no unmoving being behind it holding it up; when this rise and fall stops, this time of being has truly ended. This person, with this body, this voice, the shape of this time, has finished being. At this moment, to quietly invite an unmoving thing back and say “really he is still somewhere, being on in another place” is to cover a hard fact with a soft word.
This is hard, but it is not said looking back from after death either; no one has been after death. What can be certain is only this side: this rise and fall has stopped, and this person no longer answers anyone in the shape he had. Whether after stopping there is some other continuing, the word “being” can’t settle that there is, nor can failing to find that unmoving ground settle that there isn’t. What can be held to is something else: this time in which this person lived in his own shape has ended; however one understands what comes after, an after that no one has seen cannot be used to wipe out the real loss of this moment.
At a funeral, people say many things: that he has gone to a better place; that he has become a star in the sky; that he hasn’t really left, he lives on in our hearts; that life is a cycle, back to where it came from. Those who say them mean well. The funeral over, you go home, and his slippers are still by the door, toes pointing out, as he took them off the last time he went out; his cup is still on the table, a ring of tea stain at the bottom not washed off. You go into the kitchen and, without thinking, take out one pair of chopsticks too many.
At that moment no cycle, no star, can reach you. The extra pair of chopsticks in your hand says something else: this person will never again be in this shape.
All those comforting words want to carry this one ending into something bigger and dissolve it there: into a star, a cycle, a better place. But every time of being is one of a kind, and so its ending is a real ending. If it could be taken back by something bigger, it was never one of a kind, and its death would count for nothing. To use those words to wipe out the loss before one’s eyes, saying he has really lost nothing, looks like comfort but in fact makes light of that person: as if his time of being were only a small piece lent out for a while by something big, taken back when used, nothing lost. Whether one believes there is something after death is each person’s own affair; but whatever one believes, the days this person lived in this shape have ended, and this loss is real.
Those still here know something is missing.
Under the fear of death there is also a picking. What people own is the living one: the one with strength, who can speak, who can recognize people. In the last days, when someone has wasted out of shape, can’t get his breath, can’t call his children by name, those beside him often say: he’s not himself any more. As if the real him had gone on ahead long ago, leaving on the bed only an empty shell, enduring in his place. But in those last days, the one who can’t get his breath is wholly him too; the hand clutching the corner of the quilt is him; the moment the last breath goes out is wholly him too, not a bit less. Not a broken version of him, waiting for the original to come and claim it back. From the first cry at birth to the last breath, each moment as it came was wholly him; the last moment, too, was only another whole moment. That is why the ending after that moment is a real ending: there is no him hidden behind, slipping out of this time to go on being somewhere else.
Then what of that “trip for nothing”?
Something a person said last year was shown, whole and complete, in last year’s time; the moment it was said, it was already a whole time. This is called “having been.”
Applied to a whole life, the weight of it shows. Those decades of his, every day was being lived: the things he carried, the words he said, the afternoons he laughed, the nights he hurt. Now he is no more, and in the days ahead there really is none of his time. But each day before, as it was, already was; it did not wait for a good ending later, nor for something left behind after death, before it finally counted. Death is the ending of this life, not its cancellation.
A trip for nothing? Whether it was for nothing is a sum worked out later. The years he lived did not wait for that sum to be settled before they were, day by day.
But the one afraid of being forgotten will still ask: then what about what I leave behind? What about my being in others’ hearts?
Having been does not depend on leaving anything; what is left has its own comings and goings.
After someone is gone, what first touches people is often what is “still here.” His cup is still here; the pot of orchids he grew is still here, and no one knows how to water it, and two leaves have yellowed; his writing on the calendar is still here: “Wednesday, collect prescription.” That Wednesday is long past. And some “still here”s are in the living: a pet phrase of his slipping out in conversation; cooking with less salt without thinking, because his blood pressure was high; passing the noodle shop he often went to, and the steps slowing a little.
These are traces. A trace is a thing of now, being in the shape of now. Traces change. His clothes hang in the wardrobe, and opening the door there is still his smell; a month later, a bit fainter; half a year later, you have to bury your face in them to smell it; later, none at all.
People often mix up having been and traces: watching the smell fade day by day, they panic, as if a little more of him were being taken away. What fades is the trace. The smell fades because the days on this side are still going forward, and going, they wear the trace smooth bit by bit. What wears the trace smooth is not the fault of forgetting; it is living itself.
Remembering someone is a trace too. Today you remember how he turned round in the kitchen, tomorrow how he frowned when angry; a few years on, some details can’t be pinned down, and some things not noticed before come clearer instead. Memory changes; this is no betrayal of him; it was always alive, the being of now, in the shape of now, close beside someone who has been.
Not-being has its own way of being too. The empty seat; a lighter square on the wall, left when a picture that hung there for many years was taken down; that pet phrase of his in oneself. None of these is his still being here; these are the being of his not-being: his not-being, in those still here, shows itself as an emptiness, as the extra pair of chopsticks taken out, as the “remembering” that comes a few seconds after waking each morning.
In ta bu zai le, “he is no more,” there is still the word zai. This zai does not say he is still somewhere else; what it is is the moment of saying this sentence: the speaker is, in this room with one person missing, in this pain, saying his not-being. Not-being is, in those who are still here.
This layer does not make the pain a bit lighter. That pair of chopsticks will still make someone stand in the kitchen a long time. It changes only one thing: the pain is not something that comes only after falling out of being, as if, the moment he left, the living had been thrown outside being, into a place where nothing counts. There is no such place. Hurting, missing him, that while standing in the kitchen, are as real as when he was here, being in this place, lacking nothing.
The one afraid of being forgotten might think back to childhood: on the bench downstairs, wasn’t there always an old man sitting, waiting for a child to come home from school? Later the child grew up and doesn’t really remember what he looked like, only that someone always sat there. Those afternoons of his: because they weren’t remembered, did they not happen? No. They truly were; whether they are remembered is a matter on the side of those who come after. Being does not wait to be recognized, and having been does not wait to be remembered. The greater part of this world has been without anyone remembering; those beings that left no name behind have been not a bit less.
Leaves, stars, a shower of rain all come and go, yet they never say “I won’t be here.”
An autumn leaf falls to the ground, shower after shower of rain falls, it slowly rots and becomes part of the soil. Someone may say: see, it didn’t really die, it became soil, and the soil grew new leaves. This mixes two things together. The soil is soil, the new leaves are new leaves; they are other beings, each its own; the leaf that unfurled in spring, turned over in the summer wind, had a hole bitten in it by an insect, is no more. The perishing is real. But the spring and summer it was are real too, and full.
A star seen at night may have gone out long ago, its light still on the way, falling into the eye only tonight. That star’s being is over; the light it gave off in the years it was is still traveling.
A mayfly flies up out of the water in the morning and falls by evening. Once it has flown up, it has only this day. It doesn’t grieve that the day is too short, nor think of leaving anything behind; it flies over the water all day, mates, lays its eggs, falls onto the water, is eaten by a fish or drifts off downstream. That day is full.
A shower of rain falls all afternoon and stops. Some of the water on the ground soaks into the soil, some runs into the river, some is dried back into the sky by the sun. That shower is no more; that afternoon, it rained.
These comings and goings all move by themselves. No one makes the leaf fall, no one makes the star go out, and there is no “I” standing by to see them off. Being has always come and gone: every time of being is this time; this time will one day finish being in its own shape. The candle will burn down, the rain will stop, the mother waiting at the stairwell for her child to come home will one day stop too. This is not being breaking down; being was never something that doesn’t end; it is just this rising, moment by moment, this falling, moment by moment. A rising without falling would only be something frozen; a being that only rose and never fell would be that unmoving being that can’t be found.
Becoming and perishing are not two things, one good, one bad, sadly tied together; they are two halves of one breath. New leaves must grow where old leaves fell; new people must grow up in the days the old make room for; the next sentence can only be spoken once the last has stopped. This makes no loss any easier to bear; it only lets people see: losing and the new arriving are one breath.
Now turn it round, to face yourself.
One day the one who is no more will be you, and me. Everyone knows this, but knowing and meeting it are two things. The moment you meet it, something inside drops away, like stepping down and finding no stair.
Then it gets light; you get up, brush your teeth, go out. That evening you may watch someone at home chopping vegetables in the kitchen, watch for a long time. The sound of chopping, one stroke, another, heard for many years, and never heard like this. You may phone someone you haven’t been in touch with for many years; you fell out over some small thing back then, and neither spoke first. The call connects, the other end is taken aback for a long moment, and says: oh, it’s you.
It doesn’t make a person serene. He still fears, some nights fears so much he can’t sleep, still loses his temper over little things. But a cup of tea set before him, he first looks at it a while, watching the leaves sink one by one. The tea hasn’t changed; only he knows: cups like this are numbered.
Knowing it will end, people often only then see the weight. But the weight is not given by “it will end.” The weight of a time of being lies in this time itself and doesn’t wait for death to approve it; however long one lived, today’s one word of care would still be only this one word. That it will end only keeps people from overlooking it.
Some think: what if it didn’t have to end?
In recent years this thought has grown more and more common. Some say that before long people will live to several hundred; further on, bodies could be replaced, brains stored, and people could live on and on. As if the thing feared for thousands of years were finally about to be beaten.
Living long is a real change. But it can’t avoid what was said before.
Someone lives five hundred years, and in the three hundredth year opens that photo album: of the child on the first page—skin, bones, thoughts, fears, loves—not one thing is left; and those he loved then have long since gone, one by one. He can still point at the photo and say “this is me,” on the strength of there having been no break in between; but in these three hundred years, stretch after stretch of him has finished being, stretch after stretch. What doesn’t end is only this one time carrying on all the way; and carrying on is always changing, always ending, always rising.
To imagine something that never changes and never ends is to think once again of that unmoving being that can’t be found.
So even if one really could live on and on, it would still be rising moment by moment, falling moment by moment; even forever would be time after time. Forever adds not a bit more being to any day. The one who has lived ten thousand years, the one word of care he says to someone today, is still only this one word.
Where one goes after death, no one knows, and there is no need to pretend to know. What can be seen is: this stretch that has been is real; the people touched, the things touched, are real; these don’t need anyone’s remembering to count. And one more thing, a little strange to say, is also real: not-being is something every time of being meets. I will, you will, those around us will, that stone will, that star will too. It can comfort no one; it only lets a person know, at the loneliest moment, that on this road no one has been singled out and abandoned here alone.
Being here, not there; being this one, not that one; the body gets hungry and grows old; what is wanted comes to nothing; one can’t get into another, only stay close; and being, one day, not being.
Zai is not zai. Every time of being carries its own “not”: not there, not that one, no getting in, one day not being. No “not” has pushed it outside being.