In MINI-morium

The guy from the body shop let me know in a voice mail. "Looks like your car will be a total loss." The accident that led up to this was relatively minor, so I was blindsided by the news. Even more unexpected, though was the awful feeling that flooded me. This whirlpool of disbelief, anger, sadness--wait a minute! This is grief! I'm feeling grief-stricken over a car?

As soon as I identified it, my first thought was to dismiss it. What kind of shallow idiot grieves for a machine? Cars don't last forever. They break. They're replaced. (We had, as a matter of fact, just replaced our other car with a late model hybrid.) Though all of that is true, it's also similar to the self-talk I've used to deny myself the right to mourn human beings.

I have been cultivating a belief in Buddhist understanding of impermanence. But as one not very far along on the path to enlightenment, I tend to draw the wrong conclusions. Like thinking I should be somehow less fazed by death and dying. Which then leads me to run away from the dying or the bereaved. Which isn't something I feel particularly good about.

Understanding that a person's life is no more or less permanent than an insect's, or a car's, or a planet's brings a certain amount of comfort--but it's not an either-or trade for the grief process. Feeling grief when someone dies is as natural and unavoidable as feeling pain when touching a hot stove. In the case of the stove, the pain tells us to back away and put ice on the burn. Grief reminds us of the precious connection between sentient beings and of the need for compassion.

I'm going to let myself grieve for my car. Our culture anthropomorphizes cars--we name them, we bathe them, spend several hours a day with them, we rely on them for our livelihood and our safety--why not mourn them? Maybe this will give me a little more courage the next time I'm faced with human death.

RIP Sunny the Mini