The Broken Teacup

Think of yourself as already dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.

Marcus Aurelius.

Recently I've been going through a period of insomnia. Well, not really insomnia but more like trouble falling asleep. When this happens I go through all my usual tricks…

1. Bringing the cat into bed with me and hiding her under the covers in the hopes that my husband won't see her.

2. Reading long and complicated bread recipes.

3. Counting backwards slowly from 100.

But when all of these fail, I turn to my last resort, listening to Buddhist parables. These parables don't necessarily make me fall asleep but they do serve to relax me. They also give me something more interesting to think about than my historically over-inflated worries and woes as I lie in bed, sleepless.

Last week I listened to a parable called The Broken Teacup. One day a Buddhist monk and teacher was instructing his disciples. He held up a beautiful jade-green finely made porcelain teacup and showed it to his students. “You see this cup?” he asked them as they nodded yes. “This teacup is already broken, already a useless vessel.”

“But no,” his students protested in unison, “it is not broken at all. You are drinking tea from it now. We can see that it's not broken.”

“Yes. It may not be broken now - but one day it will be. That this cup will change form at some point, like all things in life, is inevitable.”

I love this teaching, the core idea of which is impermanence. Everything in life, including the teacher’s beautiful teacup, is subject to change. Everything is destined to break, dissolve or transform. When we understand that the cup is already broken we can be free from fear of loss or change. This is a fundamental principle in Buddhist philosophy: the principle of getting comfortable with and even embracing impermanence. When we do not cling to the idea that things should remain as they are, when we accept that nothing in this world remains unchanged over time - we can let go of our fear of change. By accepting that everything is temporary we can gain peace...or so that Buddhist monk with his teacup would have us believe.

It is the end of my mother's life. I think. She is 90 years old and fading fast. But she has been fading fast for five years now…so who knows? Some days are better than others but last week she had a terrible day - or at least it was a terrible day for me. She is currently in a rehab facility recovering from a broken leg. In November she fell and broke her right leg. Once she was out of the hospital and her right leg fracture had healed she fell again and broke her left leg. It seems clear that once she recovers from this fall she will no longer be able to live independently. She will now, like a very young child, require constant supervision. 

She's been through a lot in the past few years and I have been there with her. I keep her company and try, as best I can, to be her patient advocate. Last week I arrived at her bedside one morning to find her unresponsive. Panicked, I called a nurse who tried unsuccessfully to wake her. She was not comatose; it seemed that she could hear us, as her eyes would flicker when we yelled in her ear, but she could not respond. I was crying, inconsolable, asking the nurse as the tears rolled down my cheeks “is this it then? Is she dying?”

“Well...this is not a great turn of events,” the nurse told me blandly, “but her vitals are stable. I don't know.” Then she ran off to find her supervisor. When the supervisor arrived I was happy to see a strong, sturdy, no-nonsense broad who did not have a lot of time to spend dithering about. “Mrs. Graham,” she barked into my mother’s face while shaking her vigorously. “Wake up!” she yelled, even louder than she had before. My mother hates people yelling, especially yelling in her face, so in a way I was happy that Patricia (her name tag told me) couldn't wake her up. That’s when the supervisor decided to employ what I learned that day is called “the sternum rub.” Patricia stood back, made a fist with one knuckle sticking out as if she was going to give someone a nuggie, and simply and without any fanfare, basically rapped my mother on the sternum, hard. When that didn't work she did it again, this time even harder. The impact made a lonely, hollow sound. As if my mother was not filled with blood and organs and tissues but with memories and dust. “What are you doing?” I yelled as the tears continued to fall.

“We need to assess her level of consciousness,”

Patricia informed me. “When all else fails to wake a patient we do this. It’s called the sternum rub.”

“That looks more like a sternum punch!" I told her, to which she responded all matter-of-fact and in charge.

“It has to hurt a little. Otherwise they won't wake up.”

Right then, as Patricia was going in for the third sternum rub, my mother's eyes fluttered and she looked over at me, confused and bleary, her eyes frighteningly unfocused. Like a newborn baby’s eyes, wandering, gummy, and half-closed. “What?” she rasped.

“Mom!” I screamed, “it's me! Your daughter! Olivia!”

She turned her head in my direction and in the feeblest whisper I have ever heard come out of her mouth she said haltingly and with great effort “don't.....yell... at...me.”

With that the nurses (there were two now hovering over my mother’s diminished body) laughed and one high-fived the other, while Patricia, all business and efficiency said “okay now Mrs. Graham, no more of that please,” as she swept out of the room.

I got my mother some water and put some Vaseline on her dry cracked lips. Eventually she was recovered enough to ask me to move her hospital bed so that she could be in a semi-upright position. 

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, seeing my red puffy eyes, once her own came slowly back into focus.

“I thought you were dying,” I told her bluntly.

“Well obviously I wasn't,” she sighed and then my mother closed her eyes and took a little nap. While she slept I thought about the teacup parable. “Your mother is already dead,” I reminded myself. “You and everyone you love and even your beautiful dog and cat are already dead. I am already dead. We are all already dead.”

After my mother’s nap I got her a snack and some coffee (she touched neither) and told her about the morning and me finding her unresponsive. “Where were you?” I asked her. “We couldn't rouse you at all.” I started to cry once again. 

“Don't cry,” she snapped with real annoyance, so I stopped.

“But really. Where were you?” I asked again, curious to know if she had been in some interesting and otherworldly state that morning - if she had hovered somewhere between life and death before supervisor Patricia had successfully sternum-punched her back into the land of the living. 

“I was off,” she said dreamily. “Off in the Elysium Fields I imagine.”

And that just made me cry harder, which annoyed her more. “Now what?” she snapped.

“It's just that...I will miss you...” I told her, “when you do head off to the Elysium Fields.”

“Why would you miss me?” she asked with real interest.

“Because,” I told her honestly, “no one else uses phrases like ‘Elysium Fields’ anymore. Words or phrases that have so much meaning, so much history. You and Dad used words like that all the time, references to Ancient Greece and Rome and the Bible and all those German words and Latin roots. You both had that old-school education. All that stuff that allowed you to do the New York Times Crossword Puzzle in pen. I'll miss all that.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“Yes,” I teased. “Yes. That’s the only reason I will miss you. And the only reason I miss Dad now that he is gone. You were both terrible parents but both really good for my vocabulary. I only tolerated having you around for that reason. And that's why I will miss you. No other reason at all.”

At this my mother half-smiled and lay back and closed her eyes. 

While she rested I read the Broken Teacup parable to her. “If we imagine we are already dead, our bodies already broken as the Buddhist teacher's teacup will be one day, we can enjoy each present moment as it comes. It’s a nice practice,” I told her, showing her one of the several skull bracelets I habitually wear on my wrist as a reminder of what is waiting for me at the end of this road. “If we keep the idea of death close we might be able to enjoy each day a bit more, knowing that it is a gift to be enjoyed, not a burden to be suffered through.”

“Well if it works for you,” she muttered, and then asked me to bring her a Diet Coke on ice - which I dutifully did.