Part 4: Silent Meditation Retreat: Abandonment at Boarding School Revisited.

The little girl summarily dismissed with that perfunctory "Oh poor darling", I did sleep, like the dead. The bell next morning jarred me awake. I had to rush to my cushion for the first sit at 6:00 a.m.. Eyes barely closed, the tears began to fall. They continued through the walking meditation and back on the cushion throughout the next sit. I didn't imagine this had anything to do with the little girl. I still thought these were the tears of that general "sorrow".  My thoughts returned to my tile imagery of the first night and I found it shattering. How often had I heard life is impermanent, life is suffering; nodded and thought complacently, yes, of course. Makes total sense. And now here, crying on my cushion, I understood that until an intellectual concept is actively felt in the body, it is not truly understood. 

I skipped breakfast, went back to my room after the sit and exploded into sobs on my hard little bed, wracked with the sense that every moment, every breath: none of it will pass this way again. Good times too - irrevocably gone, moment by moment by moment. I had only ever experienced anything remotely like this when my mother died suddenly: it seemed that one moment, life stretched out before me, a wide sunny path; the next, it revealed itself to be a razor's edge, our hold on it perilous to say the least, great chasms dropping off to either side. There is a terrible clarity that comes with death: the things that don't matter fall away in sheets. But death is still a vast experience: this was microscopic. Breath by breath by breath. All changes. Nothing lasts. Nothing. 

Funny that I compared this to death early on in the writing of this reflection, unaware until much later, days after the fact, that it was death itself, MY specific death, that lay at the root of those tears. This was far closer to home than the axiom, "Life is suffering." My little girl, felt in the tight heart of the night before, was the one who was shattered. After spending an entire, excruciating year clawing her way into the light, now she is dismissed, and told she is "only a thought?" Oh no! This was a plunge back into darkest pit. This was that terrible night at boarding school all over again. What a place of nightmare for a child! Haunted country house of Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, a Gothic pile of turrets and cupolas and secrets, up on a lonely hill in the south of England. The little girl, eleven years old, lying in her bed with the thin mattress worn to the shape of countless other little bodies before hers, listening to the other nine little girls breathe in the cold room with the high ceilings and blue velvet curtains that were never drawn, and the moonlight playing over the sleeping figures, everyone asleep except me, my voice quaking, "Aren't we going to talk?" and somebody saying sleepily, "We're too tired." And the realization that this was it, this was my life now, Jane Eyre in her orphanage, no waking up from this one, I was awake and still the nightmare continued, no getting up and padding off to find my mother, she was on the other side of the world. My crying disturbed the others so much, one of them went to fetch Mother Glendon, our dormitory mistress, who in turn went to fetch my sister, five years older, who was somewhere on the other side of the building in her own senior quarters. And when she arrived at my bedside with her friend and a packet of Smarties, and I sat up and reached for my dressing gown, so happy to see her, so sure all would be better now, swinging my legs out of bed, searching for my slippers, it was so cold, we had come from the tropics, and this English school was so cold, and my sister saying, "What are you doing?" "Coming with you," I said. "You can't!" Oh! And that was almost worse than anything - to imagine you are saved and no, sorry, you still have to face the monsters under the bed all by yourself, you must live through this night alone. No reprieve. I think I died right there, clutching my Smarties, eating the little chocolates one at a time, the only good thing about that dreadful night, so starting a weight problem that would continue from then on. I survived of course, that worst night of my life until my mother died. Next morning I vowed I would never cry like that again, and I didn't until Mum died thirty years later, and then I couldn't stop.