[One] who kisses the joy as it flies
lives in eternity’s sunrise.

– William Blake

Our dear Valley Insight Sangha member Debby Garretson died on Sunday, March 2, 2025, at the Jack Byrne Center for Palliative Care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. Debby had been skillfully navigating the care plan suggestions put forth by her much-loved and highly respected oncology team. She was dealing with a lung cancer which was initially diagnosed through a surgery last May. It became very clear this February that neither the chemotherapy nor the immunotherapy was effective in slowing the disease. Cancer had spread to a number of her organs, including the heart. Many of us from Valley Insight were involved in supporting her over this year, and with our continued help, Debby was looking forward to returning home from her final hospitalization under Hospice Home Care. However, she soon realized that, because of the fragility of her heart muscle, she did not have the strength to go home. Instead, she chose to go to the nearby Palliative Care facility, where, by chance, she was given the same room in which her Sangha friend Jim Bell had died a bit less than two years ago. Upon learning this fact, her body visually relaxed and her already bright spirit lifted.

Debby was remarkably bright and almost always kind. Her long and deep practice of mindfulness and of metta enhanced her natural generosity. I was with her often during her year or more journey as a patient in a vast and modern medical system. I witnessed that her instinctive, steady movement outward, with an open-hearted, open-minded, interested friendliness and gratitude, never wavered. She knew the names and a bit of the life stories of just about everyone who cared for her. Her attentiveness to her caregivers evoked and allowed a wonderful sense of love and compassion to stream towards her. She received and returned it, creating a lovely, reciprocal flow.

Debby’s last hospitalization was spent in an acute cardiac unit. She was touched by the staff’s happy demeanor as they came into her room. When she asked one of her nurses why the staff seemed to enjoy being with her, the nurse reflected, “Debby, there are a lot of people on this unit that are just as sick as you are. You are the only one who greets me with a smile when I wake them in the morning.” Debby rarely let a person leave the room without thanking them for specific elements of the care they gave.

We are not here alone. Debby knew this.

There is a wonderful myth, a metaphor in early Buddhist traditions, about the birth of a buddha. It is said that when a buddha, an awakened one, appears in our world, four “amazing and incredible” things occur. The first of these is that an unimaginably bright light shines: it is a light far greater than that of the sun and all the stars combined, and it shines equally everywhere in the world. This light touches everyone, all of us sentient beings––meaning those who have the capacity to feel pleasure and pain––and it reveals to us all, without any doubt, that there are other sentient beings here, who, just like us, are alive and vulnerable to the “ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows.” We are not alone.

Debby also knew the truth that what we do, say, and think in this world affects others––just as others affect us. In this way, we co-create our realities. She was not ignorant of suffering and intentional cruelty. In her earlier life, she had served as a translator in the US-Russian disarmament talks. As a former Dartmouth professor in the Russian and Slavic Studies Department, she was a clear-headed, astute scholar of many subjects––including our current political situation. She deplored it; and she was deeply committed to not recreating it in her own, shared relational life.

I had the privilege of spending time in the medical world with Debby over this past year––both in its out-patient and its in-patient aspects. Increasingly, I noticed this world to be a kind of antidote to the greed, cruelty, complaint, and delusion rampant in our current political climate. Often, especially during these past weeks, it felt like a place of refuge. I know that––to some degree and at various times––it did for Debby too. Anukampa is a Pali language word that is often translated as “caring.” As I investigated and reflected on these feelings, I began to realize that the people working in the medical worlds of the Upper Valley are all doing the work of caring. That is where their energy and attention are. Most often, the people working in healthcare are skilled in goodness: practicing wise compassion; balancing a sense of what is possible (equanimity); appreciating the dynamics of a patient’s life and personality; and offering, in the best of times, a demonstration of a genuine desire to connect. Debby saw this too, and her refined mindfulness added the much-needed-in-our-lives element of gladness, mudita––true, authentic, appreciative joy. Sometimes as I approached her room in cardiology, I could imagine the bright, morning sunshine light of mudita spilling out from her room into the halls. She said to me more than once, “In my next life, I want to come back as a caregiver.”

Debby’s day and a half in the Palliative Care Center continued along this anukampa path. To her delight, one of her primary nurses had taken a class in Russian with Debby in 1989! They had the opportunity to sit and remember those days; and the old student got the opportunity to tell her old teacher what a wonderful teacher she had been. It turns out that all the palliative care nurses are beautifully attentive and highly skilled in mindfulness of the body, reading every nuance which might indicate the discomfort of pain or anxiety––and addressing it. Compassion and equanimity reigned “abundant, exalted, and immeasurable!” A quiet sense of gratitude and appreciation for a life well-lived abounded. The presence of her dear niece and a dear friend  brought an additional intimacy to Debby’s gradual fading. Two of us were with her in her final moments as her breathing gradually ebbed and ended. Her appreciative joy and her wisdom continue always.

 I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward . . .
the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

From “The Arrow and the Song,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow