My wife and I were at a shop a couple hours from where we live and I bought a few different sizes of Tibetan Prayer Flags. I had done some research before finally buying them, and had learned that they are traditionally hand sewn in cotton and are hung, not always but generally outside. They appear always in patterns of five colors for the elements as shown below:
Peace/Heaven (blue), success/air (white), long life/fire (red), prosperity/water (green), knowledge/earth (yellow)
Every time before, I had hesitated to buy these damn flags but now I had finally ran out of excuses; they (the excuses) never filled my hands anyway. So I purchased these flags and brought them home to hang in a few different locations around the property. I figured they would be good conversation points but when I began to do more research on them, my ignorance was truly revealed when I read that the flags are usually hung outside because when the wind blows through them, the prayers of Peace, success, long life, prosperity, and knowledge are meant to blow with the fleeting wind, taking with them the prayers of good will for anyone who happens upon them. The flags are a beautiful gesture of life extending beyond our own.
So the flags - but more importantly their symbolism - was never for me. Not in that way, at least.
Tibetan Prayer Flags are supposed to be gifted, not purchased. You are supposed to receive them. So there I was, egg on my face, if there ever was a face to save.
In my house I have a hand-carved miniature Tai Temple. In Thai it is called a San Phra Phum, San meaning shrine and Phra Phum meaning Spirit, God, or Angel. It was presented to my wife and me as a wedding gift from my friend Don. Don told me how it was made from hand-carved teakwood by an old Thai woman he met with his wife visiting her home town of Pamok Angthong.
He told me about the animistic tradition of Thai spirit houses. They are invitations of good will and are meant to bring good luck and prosperity to their owners. Not quite Buddhist, not quite Hindu, but Thai. Some time later we would travel to Thailand, walk the cities and villages for a period of two weeks, during which time these San Phra Phums were present at nearly every home and street corner. They would be visited by people of all walks of life; wealthy, poor, young and old alike would bring food and drinks to place upon the house as offerings.
I met Don early on in my career. We had a common link insofar that both Don and my ex-wife had spent some time in pharmacy school. Don had left that venture to pursue others which eventually led to him and I crossing paths through our work. We would come to be partners for about two years on the ambulance wherein we discussed life, children, divorce, the job, and just whatever you might imagine two people in an ambulance would talk about for twenty-four hours.
I had my first pediatric cardiac arrest with Don. I had worked in emergency medicine for about ten years by that point but had up until then never been in a position where I thought there may be a chance to save the child before us. The mother, as it would happen was an ER doctor and noticed her infant wasn’t breathing in the car seat as she was driving down the road. When we arrived she was pulled over to the side of road doing chest compressions on her infant. In medicine if an arrest is witnessed, the chances for survival go up exponentially. Moreover, in children and infants the cause of the death is typically respiratory-related and in lieu of congenital birth defects these are the best scenarios for survival.
Despite all the best efforts and intentions of will, that child was not meant to live that night. I know this to be true because she is dead. It is a careful reminder to people who proclaim as if their words would carry the weight of divine edict
Children are not supposed to die.
Says who? Clearly this is not the case. I still carry the tiny pink and white sock she had on that night. It fell off in the ambulance when we were trying to find a place to put the needle in. Later on at the hospital when I was cleaning up the empty medication boxes and supplies I found it on the floor of the ambulance. It is my own reminder. Our grievances toward this objective truth does not outpace the fidelity of death’s clear but indiscernible grasp on each of us, including those which we consider our most innocent. The sorrow of the death of a child is present in all that has experienced it, but the disbelief that it could happen is a pain for which you cannot point a finger to and the pursuit thereof is a fool’s game which leads to unnecessary and impotent suffering. This is the second arrow of suffering as it were [citation needed].
Don was there to bounce these ideas off of. Not in the way that I have described them here, but they are informed by Don’s patience with a young guy who had children roughly the age shape color and size of this one that was now a remnant of the life her mother so desperately clung to. I was in a place in my own life wherein Don was probably the only one I could talk to in my positively beguiled state. After all, children aren’t supposed to die, right? And that was emotionally very much my disposition at that time.
Don was twenty years older than me with older daughters. Moreover Don had been in very position I now found myself in throughout his own career. And that is not to say that I agreed with then or do now all of his thoughts on death or other opinions for that matter. That wasn’t the point. It wasn’t so much what he believed as it was that he was willing to allow me to avail my own insecurities about the thing. And in letting his own fears show in regards to his girls and their frailties, I was able to see that this is not a longing that leaves you.
And that was how in that nascent and broken state I could see that our love extends beyond our days and that to ask to be delivered from that longing is to ask that you no longer be human. Our humanity is tied inextricably with our ability to love that which will not last. And in the case of our children, just because if you are to get your way - and you’re not there to see it through - does not mean that it is not going to happen.
I’ll love you forever
I’ll like you for always
As long as I’m living
My baby you’ll be
Don had demons as did I. And in the course of our time together we got to see a lot of them. And I saw how he was wrought by the things that clawed at his soul and his attempts to get a grasp on them. But he was willing to show himself to me in a way that invited my own holes to show; and in that generosity - likely unbeknownst to him - it afforded me the opportunity to lean into the things that brought me to my own gilded knees.
It is apparent to me now what I had missed before about the Tibetan Prayer Flags in the dispensation of good will. You cannot wish good will upon yourself. It would be like the knife cutting itself, or the fire illuminating itself. No, you wish good will on others, don’t you? Because it has a different feeling when you have to kind of trust the universe to keep watch over people you have no control of. (the spoiler is that there never was control, even if you thought there was).
Likewise in the case of the prayer flags, the wind that blows through them is a reminder that what is here will soon be gone, regardless of human will. A clenched fist holds no sand. But there was something else, too. The reason why these things are meant to be given as gifts is because you don’t remember the purchase like you do the person. A good gift is one that speaks to the person who is receiving it. And when people come over and see the San Phra Phum I tell them what that means in English and some of course the history of their significance.
But more than anything I tell them about Don. How he was in Thailand and thought of me and in that spontaneity of kindness, asked this woman to bring life to this symbol of kinship through deity. I tell them about the relationship that was forged over years of seeing way too many people die, and being told to go back in and do it again. And we did.
All of those grief-sodden happenings are in lock-step with the recognition that comes from deeply examining what is being sturred up in us there: ourselves in them and their families. And for me it seems so clear that for a second, perhaps the eye can see itself. It is to look in the mirror and see the original face, as the Japanese koan would suggest; but the beauty is that it is in others that it makes its appearance. That is to say that if the knife can then cut itself, to see humanity in its most vulnerable form, with eyes unclouded, it is from that encounter(s) with the razor’s edge where I can say “My heart is broken. I don’t ever want it to heal.”
And yet so many of us will try to deflect from that. Lean. Lean into it.