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42. DEATH'S TERRIFYING PORTAL ( II ) (Dec. 2003)
When we were together, Nudjarin and I were lying in bed one night, and somehow
the subject of 9/11 came up. Actually, it came up fairly often. See my long
essays-- Nud came closer to dying on 9/11 than many.
Nudjarin is religious, a
believing Buddhist. She took me to the Buddhist shrine near her parents' home in
northeast Thailand, with its large Buddha, and wouldn't let me photograph it out
of respect. When she was a small girl, she and a little friend would walk
together as if to school, but then run away to a temple in the woods and play
around it all day. She actually never went to school for several years. (The
royal whooping her father finally gave her when he discovered! Bright girl, she
managed to catch up to the other little readers and writers quickly.) I remember
how she and her mother stopped to pray at her sister's small Buddhist shrine
before they rejoined us in the cars that would take Nud and I to Bangkok, and
then to our new life far away. She would join her hands in prayer to Buddha in
the bed each night. In our last conversation, many months ago, she said she
thought maybe she'd return to Thailand and become a nun at a temple, and--
realizing how over it was between us-- I said I thought it was a good idea,
perhaps she could find peace that way. She told me she believed in an afterlife,
a Heaven for the good, and a Hell for those who deserved it, and she wasn't to
my satisfaction able to reconcile that belief with her simultaneous belief that
we travel through a series of reincarnations, one afterlife after another, all
here (until, except, we finally escape into Nirvana). But I married a girl not a
theologian, and anyway what does it matter now. We started talking about 9/11,
and then she mentioned the people in the plane over Pennsylvania, and then she
asked "What did they feel when the plane was falling?", and something dark went
into her and blanked out her faith, and she sat up and said "Oh my god!" and
began making wild waving motions with her arms as if she was doing a terrified
breaststroke, "What did they feel when they were falling?! They knew they were
going to die!"
If I'd been cruel, which
I never was, I'd have taunted her: "No, right? they weren't going to die,
sweetheart, you told me how they were going to Heaven or about to be reborn." Or
I could have been kind: "You're not in the plane. You're here safe with me. Come
to bed." Actually, I said little, and let her work it out for herself, for the
moment.
Bad husband.
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