Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
then not look at her for hours. It had made her stomach ache. Well,
now her mother could see what that felt like.
“Man, this is so worth it,” Wyatt said. Wendy nodded, silent
for once.
Heidi had not felt stillness like this since the murder. The water
buoyed her, and the mist took her worries away. She realized, after a
while, that she had not thought about bad things, like the boat tip­
ping...No, she put it out of her mind, and turned her face toward
the mountains.
Here the lessons of Buddhism seemed true, Vera thought. Life was
merely an illusion you must release. As she grew older, she was aware
of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of
death was philosophical, in her thirties it was unbearable, and in her
forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more ra­
tional terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heir­
looms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for
her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosoph­
ical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of
releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release your­
self from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration—all the
accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you did, you would disappear,
leave no trace, like the mist at dawn over the lake, evaporating into
nothingness, into nibbana.
I was appalled at the idea. Evaporate? Would that happen to me? I
wanted to expand, to fill the void, to reclaim all that I had wasted.
I wanted to fill the silence with all the words I had not yet spoken.
T HE PAPERMAKER WAS the first to report to the military police
that he had seen the missing tourists. “You saw them before or after
they disappeared?” the police asked.
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