Judy's Boat
by Shanti Loustaunou and Lynn Hays

This was our time to care for Judy. Our dear friend found a lump in her breast the day after her birthday in 1994. Surgery, chemo and radiation followed. She was devasted when it metastasized to her liver two years later. One morning, shoulders slumping, she announced she had just called the mortuary about her cremation and began to cry.

"Oh, Judy, you don't need to do this alone. Forget the cardbaord coffin; we'll build you a beautiful pine box ourselves, swoop you up in our arms and carry you there."

Inspired by the book, Caring for Your Own Dead *, we phoned the state funeral board and the local island crematorium to research how we could do a home funeral ourselves. As Judy became weaker, we created a dakini net of support around her. On Whidbey Island, an island near Seattle, where we have a Sangha of forty people and other friends, Judy had always been independent and fiercely active in nature, loving the mountains and sea. But now she needed help. The whole community became involved in creating a mandala of care. The mandala had inner and outer circles, caring for every aspect of her life. A small group of round-the-clock caregivers formed the core, trained and guided by home health nurses. Friends and family took care of her finances and a wellness fund was established in her name by teachers from her school. There were guardians at the gate, prayer circles, Dharma teachers and sangha, cooks and chauffeurs. Denial, anger, hope, fear, pain, exhaustion, surrender: we struggled through it all. Supporting whatever choices she made, we held her like a baby in the darkness. We did what we couldit was hard and easya paradox of dualities, very hard to be close to suffering and very beautiful to be so close to love. Judy was a school teacher in life and gave us her finest teaching in dying. Lila, her twenty-eight year old daughter, showed us acceptance with grace. Impermanence was the elephant in the room.

After Judy took refuge, Dharma became the centerpoint of her mandala, helping her and us to hold her illness and inevitable death in a spiritual context. We began to navigate the unknown territory of liberation beyond the body.

We turned to Tsultrim often, especially during times of crisis when we thought we might lose Judy sooner than expected and we felt unprepared. She talked to us of the expansiveness and natural radiance of the mind as one's true nature. She encouraged us from afar to make Judy's house into a temple and to have her call on the wisdom beings of the universe. We gave Judy a precious gao filled by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, a great treasure and source of strength for her as were the mantras she would spin with her mala.

During a trip in July to the west coast, Tsultrim made time to visit Judy. In a phenomenal coincidence, she met Lama Wangdor and asked him to join her at Judy's bedside. He talked quietly about how to see her suffering as the taking on of suffering of all sentient beings. One's death is not easy to accept. Even the lamas have fear. He taught her mantras for Amitabha and the Medicine Buddha and gave her rare and extraordinary Tibetan medicine from the Dalai Lama. "I looked into her mind, and I saw that I knew her," he said.

The Dharma teachings continued to emerge in miraculous ways with the Kusali Devi flying from Tara Mandala to Judy's side, bringing Ugra Tara, Ajima, and sacred healing ash. "I saw her in my dreams," the Devi said. "She must be a powerful person to have called the Devi from so far."

Three weeks later, Judy sensed a change and called her daughter home earlier than expected. She and Lila had time to lie on the bed together in her last few good days, cry, laugh and hold each other.

Then she lapsed. On the last morning, her breath changed. The great dissolution of the elements had begun. We called Tsultrim. "You are expanding into the light. Relax and let go. It's OK to let go." As Tsultrim spoke, her breathing quieted, became softer and imperceptible. We started the Xitro practice. With Lila's hand on her heart, Judy's last breath expanded inward and then outward into an infinity of breathlessness, like a brushstroke that never ends. In the hours after her last breath, her eyes opened and began to shine with a light that could have only been birthed by an inner luminosity. She became the mirror, reflecting the clarity of mind, revealing the nature of mind. We stood at the foot of her bed gazing with her into the vastness.

Being able to look at her, to sing or talk, practise or sit silently, was a gift that reached far out into the community. We were seeing death in a net of beauty, inevitability, integration. Old losses came up and were healed; the love surrounding Judy soothed our souls. For our children it was quite powerful. Many were grateful for such a close experience of death. Fears began to melt. Profound energy was coming from Judy, it was like a meditation.

When she was lying there, for the next several days covered with flowers, lit by candles, veiled by incense, she was a presence we still spoke to, saying good night and good morning. As time passed she became less in her body, until she seemed as vast as the sky.

Now we fulfilled our promise to Judy, painting and building the beautiful pine coffin we called Judy's boat. The night before her cremation a presence of infinite compassion filled the room, so intense it woke everyone sleeping with Judy's body. We understood then what Vajrasattva purification felt like. In the morning, the energy in the room had shifted, and what remained was an empty shell.

By the time we had lifted her small body into the boat and literally filled it to the brim with paper cranes from her students, garlands of flowers made by her sisters, photos, personal momentos, dharma objects, feathers, shells, tobacco, prayer flags, more flowers, her beautiful serene veiled face seemed completely at peace. Many hands lifted her into her boat, many hands pounded wooden pegs sealing the lid, many hands carried her "boat" to the van, hung with prayer flags, that drove her to the beach for a final Xitro before going on to the crematori-Om-Ah-Hum.

Prearrangements with the funeral director allowed us into the oven room. Lila pushed the buttons to close the oven door and activate the fires. To us Chöd practitioners, this really seemed like the final feast offering of the body. While she was burning, we went to a nearby beach. We visualized the funeral pyre as the mandala of Vajrasattva, the fire purifying her negative karma and obscurations and dissolving her body into light. Luminous dakini clouds, rainbow tigles, a flight of eagles, the Aurora Borealis were seen. We returned to open the oven and see the white charred bones of our friend, mala beads at the base of her skull.

We practiced the Xitro for forty-nine days after death and some of Judy's ashes traveled to Tara Mandala where we made them into tsa tsas mixed with clay from the land. Tsultrim and Lama Wangdor blessed and dedicated them during the consecration of the cemetery. We placed the tsa tsas under a chörten of rock; the wind blew the smoke of the fire offering over the tsa tsas, spreading merit over the land.

Judy Hodges sailed into a sea of luminosity on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, Washington, August 28th 1997. May this experience be for the benefit of all sentient beings.

AH

* Caring for Your Own Dead, by Lisa Carlson, 1987, Upper Access Publishers, Hinesburg, VT (Revised edition: Caring for Your Own Dead: The Final Act of Love, by Lisa Carlson, Upper Access Publishers, Hinesburg, Vermont.) This exceptional book lists funeral laws and local requirements for each state. It includes all needed information on body disposition, obtaining and filing the death certificate and body transit permit. In Washington state, remains must be either buried, cremated, embalmed or refrigerated within twenty-four hours. The refrigeration clause allows one to keep the body at home. In Colorado, a statute permits religious groups to take care of their own dead without interference.

We highly recommend that anyone considering a home funeral for an anticipated death establish a relationship well in advance with local authorities, funeral directors and crematorium. The above information does not apply in the event of unnatural death. We should work to change this.

Back to Article Titles page