The passing of others

These are two pictures of the wall of the foundation in the churchyard that has been turned into an AIDS memorial. The metal spikes are put into the wall as a memory for those they know who have died. Often there are fresh flowers put upon the spikes. In golden letters are the words in German "Verletzte Liebe"---"Injured Love". As you can see our dying camera didn't get such a good picture of this, but I still wanted to share it.

In my early and late twenties I lost so many friends and even my first partner to this disease. As I said in an earlier post my Grandpa was the first death of someone that I experienced and then just a year after I begin to see death all around me. The deaths of very close friends and many others not so close, but the numbers were staggering. So many died very painful deaths. One friend who was only twenty-five died from herpes covering his whole body. This was a time of great suffering for me as well, not physical but spiritually. Unfortunately, I didn't learn at this time how to keep my heart open. However, later with experience and from these experiences, I have slowly learned how to let the heart continue to open.

Lama Shenpen Hookham has some wonderful lines about this:

Connecting to the heart

"What we mean by heart is multifaceted and reich, and there is much about it that is relevant to how we approache death and thereafter. There seems to be meaning in talking about 'our heart of hearts', 'deep in our heart', 'holding someone in our heart', as if there were some kind of inner sanctum or place of innermost sensitivity. As well as being the seat of our deepest longing, the heart is often associated with warmth and genuineness of feeling, which mean so much at death. When one's whole world and all that it means to you is slipping away, it is only your own other people's hearts that can offer any sense of meaning at all."

Our hearts are connected to the One Heart, so there is no separation at all. A very consoling and joyful thought!