I watched a short video on social media the other day, where a little girl had asked a question of the late Buddhist teacher, Thích Nhât Hanh. 

Her dog had just died. 

“I had a doggy and my doggy died and I was so sad,” she said. “I don’t know how to be not so sad.”

Thích Nhât Hanh looked at her with great compassion and he said, “Suppose you look up into the sky and you see a beautiful cloud, and you like the cloud so much, and suddenly the cloud is no longer there.” He added, “And you think that the cloud has passed away. Where is my beloved cloud now?”

But he then offered, “If you have time to reflect, you’ll see that the cloud has not died, has not passed away. The cloud has become the rain. And when you look at the rain you see the cloud.”

And he continued, “And when you drink your tea mindfully, you can see the rain in your tea, and your cloud in your tea, and you can say ‘Hello, my cloud! I know you have not died. You are still alive in a new form.”

“So doggy is the same,” he said as he looked to her. “And if you look really deeply, you can see doggy in its new form.”

He words were met with an understanding smile from the girl. You could tell she really got what he had said.

When our loved ones pass on

His words really spoke to me too. I lost my Dad about a year and a half ago. The physical reality of loss hurts, but as Thích Nhât Hanh says, I think that in time, if we’re able to think about things more deeply, we can imagine that our loved ones who have passed on are still with us in some way, only in a different form.

Because what defines a person? Is it the shape of their body or their image and the clothes they wear? Perhaps, some of it is because we remember what they looked like. But is it not more about who they are? The person!

It’s their nature, their personality, the essence of them, that makes them who they are. If you think deeply about it.

For me, this defines a person more than their physical appearance. Because appearance changes in time. I see my Dad in my mind’s eye more as the way he looked in the last few years of his life because that’s more current for me, rather than what he looked like when I was a child. But the person is still the person. Grown up a bit, of course. But the same person. My Dad.

This essence of who they are is not a physical thing. And since it’s not physical it can never be lost. It’s indestructible. It can only change form.

A person who has died is in everything that you do now. Our loved ones become the wind in our sails. We see meaning in things that happen in our lives and we feel it has a connection with them. Because it does. 

I started work on a new book about 4 or 5 months after my Dad passed away. I didn’t feel like doing anything prior to that. I had lost a bit of my mojo, I suppose.

But my Dad is in the book. His spirit. My memory of what he was to me. I prayed to him for guidance. I felt moved to change the title of the book shortly afterwards. I spoke of him in the book too, in a couple of personal stories and experiences.  

When we lose a loved one, just like the cloud that Thích Nhât Hanh spoke of, they change form. The physical form ceases to be, but all that they were to us remains. And it infuses so much more in our lives.

I think this can be a comforting way to think of things.

It doesn’t necessarily take away the pain of not being able to physically be with a person anymore. I regret not being able to go for a walk with my Dad now. But thinking like this can help. 

To know that the non-physical part of them that made them who they were, is still here. It’s inside you, in your memories, in your awareness of them, and so it is in every cell of your body, and it infuses into everything that you do.

Like the cloud becomes the rain, which makes its way into the reservoirs, and then you drink it in your tea.

Stardust

And this is also true on a physical level. We are all made of stardust (see my previous blog on this). Every atom that exists on planet Earth was forged through nuclear fusion on a star, which exploded billions of years ago when its fuel was spent. 

The Earth and all of its inhabitants – you, me, your deceased loved ones, the animals, plants, clouds, air molecules – are stardust. Every atom is recycled by the Earth and rejoins the rest of the stardust again, taking up a different form each time, to become part of the trees, the clouds, the rain, and the bodies of other people, including you and me.

Everything is deeply connected. This is true spiritually and it is also true physically.

I think it’s a comforting way to think about things. It’s how I think about things.

Things – clouds and people – are never really gone. They just change form.

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