She Left As She Lived – In a Huge Whoosh of Energy!

by Swami Divyam Gunjar

In September 2000, Yuthika was quite convinced she would die very soon, partly because when she was first diagnosed she had heard one of the doctors say, “She’ll last about a year.” She took that in and blocked hearing later doctors who gave her up to two years.

In early December, she had a series of blood tests. After seeing the results, her oncologist pointed out that she wasn’t about to leave, rather that she had at least six months to live. Gradually, she came back. She began to look better and put on a little weight. At the same time, this took her into despair! While she had been going to die soon, she had been relieved, “Soon I’ll be out of this misery of feeling ill all the time and being too weak to do anything!” Now she had to face a prolonged space of time in the nightmare of limbo.

By February, she seemed to have slid up onto a plateau, at a better level than where she had been for the last nine months or so. But this wasn’t about getting “better,” just a delay in the inevitable. Still caught between her fear of death and the wish to leave, she was desperately unhappy. Secretly, she was getting just a tiny bit of hope that a miracle was happening. But, in late February, she crashed again. Suddenly much weaker, ill and black, that little bit of hope dashed.

At the same time, things were getting more and more beautiful between us. In the evenings she had to go to bed earlier and earlier as time went on. Once she was settled, I would join her to have a long sweet time of cuddling, silence, and chatter together. When she was ready for sleep, I’d get up and go work on the computer or do housework till my bedtime; usually she would only half rouse when I came back. In the mornings, I’d bring her a cup of tea, her early morning drugs, and come back to bed with my coffee. This was our playtime – she would have the energy to talk and laugh a bit – a time for us to sort things out between us, to be clear with each other about what was happening. She asked me for honesty about what I saw happening to her, not to foster unreal hope, but to tell it like I saw it, so she could have an ongoing reality check.

In May, she fell off the plateau with a bang. A small hemorrhage in her liver created liver distension, causing her very severe and uncontrollable pain and nausea for a few days.

No sooner did the liver start getting better, than she lost her voice. Pressure from the lung tumor on her left laryngeal nerve paralyzed her larynx, leaving her a loud whisper. Coughing didn’t work very well and drinking/eating became a test of awareness. At first it sent her into a huge spiral downward, but she turned that around and came out in a way she hadn’t in a long time, burning quite brightly, more open to being around people.

She was still on her feet, still had a sense of humor – wicked at times. She looked incredibly beautiful and childlike, just radiating sweetness.

In mid-June, she decided to have a Saturday afternoon girls’ party. She got other people to make food and put it all together. As a boy, I was banned from both getting it ready for her and being there. I can’t tell you about it, I wasn’t there, but everyone said it was a great success, and that she had a good time catching up with people from the past. She enjoyed it to the point of exhaustion.

Here is an excerpt from one of the very few e-mails she sent this year, where she spoke about the party: “I might one day soon sit here and type a full-blown account of my mind but in the meantime this is just to let you know that I felt like sitting here for five minutes!

“I seem to be physically holding up well but the trouble is the mind is now driving me crazy. I feel too agitated to read and so desperate for something to absorb me but nothing comes that I have a huge yes to, so it is bloody torture at the moment. Realized that as long as I have something to look forward to life is fine but when there’s nothing going on it’s bloody awful. The girls’ party was wonderful. The last few who came said you could hear the noise four houses away!”

In late September, after a chest x-ray, it all became clear. The second lung was now so diseased that she maybe had 10 to 15 percent lung capacity. She’d obviously been running on borrowed time for a while, and now it had caught up with a vengeance. The doctors set out to stabilize her condition, while making it clear that she didn’t have very long to go. They were saying two to six weeks, suggesting that she might have to stay in the hospital for the remaining time.

Gradually, things settled down, and I brought her home. It was just so good to have her back, though it really brought home just how awful it would be when she wasn’t ever coming back.

She was much better at home. I set her up in the front room on a hospital bed with one of those super-duper pulsating air mattresses, just by the window so she could look out at the vista of sky, roofs, and trees. She was fully conscious, much more peaceful, and couldn’t wait to get out of the body. She was more than a bit impatient. When the doctor came, Yutes proceeded to ask her if it would speed things up if she stopped using the oxygen. This suggestion was met by a chorus from me and the doctor of: “NO, it would only make life totally horrible for you.” So she took that one back to the drawing board.

What I haven’t mentioned is the change that began taking place the day she went into hospital: A relaxation and surrender began. This grew in hospital, but really started flowering when she came home and discovered that she was no longer driven by the need to “do.” She lay there being amazed that, “I can just lie and do nothing and enjoy it for the first time in my whole life!”

The sweetness in that room was almost excruciating. Over the next few days, she stopped even being in a rush to leave. Happy to just “be” aware that internally she was flat-out processing all the things she couldn’t while she was in misery. Her being was doing the work, all of it unfolding without any conscious effort on her part. A lot of the time it was a Prati Prasad, going back through her life. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know the person I was meeting when I went into her room, whether from her childhood or earlier adulthood. Sometimes she would ask, “So do you mind if I stay a little longer? I don’t want to be a burden, but I feel I’ve got more to do yet.” How to get it across to her that she wasn’t a burden at all, just the most beautiful gift I’d ever been given?

Near the end of October, she was cruising happily with it all. She said she was not quite ready to go yet, but nearly. We stopped having visitors, only the crew who came to be here when I needed to go out were with her. It was much better that way, she needed the time for herself!

Nij and I went to pick up her coffin, and it gleamed immaculately, sitting on my session-room table, waiting, waiting...

Sandhya and Sindhu began organizing the music and singing for the celebration. Yutes and I put together the details of what she wanted for the celebration, and I printed it up.

A few of the things she wanted were:

“I want to be dressed in my maroon robe (the half-length one, with all the embroidery on it), with another full-length one underneath that. My Osho hat and mala. I want the silk shawl Nityam gave me to be used for my shroud (to lie on).

“I want Gunjar to give a portion of my ashes to my mother and take the rest to Pune and scatter them in the river below the burning ghats near the ashram.

“On the crypt my mother has reserved for my ashes, please write: ‘You before me standing Oh my eternal self since my first glimpse you have been my secret love’ Ma Prem Yuthika”

She left the body at 3:15 on November 1, not drifting off, but quite aware. She saw Shunyo the day before, and was exhausted, not in a bad way; rather as though she had just completed something major which took all the energy that she had. When I reminded her the night before that I was in no hurry for her to leave, she said that she might not have much choice anymore in when she left.

She asked me to put on an Osho tape. I held her hand, and we sat listening for a little, close but with space for her, till her breaths were half a minute apart. A couple of minutes before the breathing finished, she left as she lived – in a huge whoosh of energy!

People came to sit with her body and left the room blissed out of their little trees. The experience was very powerful. She was so beautiful, and the bliss that came to her in the last three weeks was still subtly shining out of her.

Oh what a celebration it was! A beauty for our beauty. A couple of hundred people gathered. The energy was at first very soft, almost tentative, gathering strength as it went, till it became really fiery and joyful. The coffin was heaped with rose petals and flowers, with the picture of her and me on top, and a large photo of Osho beside.

Love, Gunjar

gunjar@wn.com.au