Living With Grief - Life Wisdom #65

In Savati, in the time of the Buddha, there lived a young woman whom everyone called Kisa Gotami, Gotami the Thin, because she had been born poor and of frail health.

She was married into a family of merchants who looked down on her at first, until the day she gave birth to a son, and only then did they make room for her in the house.

The child grew and learned to walk, and one morning he fell ill without anyone knowing why.

A few days later, he was dead.

Kisa Gotami would not let him be taken away.

She held him against her chest and went out into the streets of the town, knocking on doors to ask for a medicine that would bring him back.

Some people stepped aside as she passed, and others pitied her in low voices.

In the end, it was an old man, moved by her distress, who told her to go and find the Buddha, who was staying nearby.

The Buddha listened to her until she had finished without interrupting, and then he told her that he knew of a remedy, and that to prepare it, he would need a handful of mustard seeds.

Mustard was the commonest spice in India, found in every kitchen, and he set only one condition.

The seeds had to come from a house where no one had ever died.

Kisa Gotami set off at once, the child in her arms, and knocked at the first door, where they hurried to hand her the seeds before she had even asked her question.

"Has anyone ever died here?" The woman who had opened the door lowered her eyes and told her about her husband, taken by a fever the winter before.

Further on, it was a brother who had fallen from a roof, a newborn who had lived a single night, parents gone so long ago that their names were no longer spoken.

She went from door to door like this until evening, and each one opened onto a story that resembled her own, so that by nightfall her hands were empty and her heart had changed.

What the Buddha gave her that day looks like no remedy at all, and yet it is one of the wisest responses I know to the death of someone we love.

He could have spoken to her about impermanence and explained that everything born must die.

He chose to send her into the village instead, so that she would discover it with her own feet, door after door.

The woman who had left that morning believed she was alone in the world with her sorrow, as almost everyone believes after losing someone, and she came home that evening among her own people.

This episode is about grief, about what it does to us and how we can make our way through it, and also about how we can stand beside those who are living through it.

I have no mustard seed to offer you, and I would be wary of anyone who claims to have one.

My only hope is that those of you listening with a recent loss will feel a little less alone on the road.