By Adele Hulse

This month my friend Jenny Brown is occupying this space. A respected journalist in international and Australian newspapers, Jenny got me into newspapers 16 years ago and I got her into Buddhism with the gift of Geshe Rabten and Geshe Dhargyey’s Advice from a Spiritual Friend.

A couple of years ago a close relative, both in age and the experience of a clannish upbringing, took her own life. The violence of the rope was an ugly contrast with the gentle frailty of this soulful, poetic young woman. In the tragic atmosphere of her funeral an undermurmuring sense of anger was also unexpected.

This week another girlfriend took that same path, alone at the end in unimaginable pain and found by her parents. Another human butterfly quivering with a sensitivity to beauty so acute she made her living taking photographic portraits of flowers, creating fantastic mosaics of color and form in petals and stems.

I’ve shed a few tears, overflow from the heavy rain that now seems to be falling in my heart. The news travels fast, drawing in a net of old friends, suddenly horribly reminded that we really are very important to each other. There is no point in being anything other than sincere, sharing pain and the sentimental snapshots of golden remembrances.

Everybody, it seems, can tell a similar story: “Couple of months ago … same thing … two small children … daughter of friends … no one had any idea …” Heavy breaths punctuate each phrase.

In the darkest hours of our deepest ignorance, many of us have peeped into the doorway of suicide. I have – before I was taught the inestimable preciousness of this human rebirth. At a time when I hadn’t slept for months – the insomnia of unhappiness – and one night I considered the methods by which I might end a feeling of utter futility, perused a catalog of options, scripted my own violent end in a shocking sequence of visualizations. In the early hours of that morning my nightmare was interrupted by three gunshot blasts, then silence. Then sirens.

Someone out there was much more desperate than me. I shook myself awake and was shoved in a new direction. Looking back at my diaries of that time I can see that from that point on I was progressing inevitably toward the Dharma. The spiritual community of Buddhists was the first group I ever wanted to join – it felt just right.

Of course the mutual spiritual embrace is no insulation from life’s rich and varied sufferings and the occasional slide into bouts of self-cherishing misery and the depths of depression where pain grabs more pain. I’ve been there in the long insomniac nights. But now I notice that as my mind reaches out for some prop or evidence of misery, I find Dharma books and the images of lamas intrude. There on an old newsletter the right words appear before me like a wake-up call, reminding me of the purpose, the task – this wholly delightful duty: “The purpose of being born as a human being is to eliminate the sufferings of others and to bring them to happiness.” This quote from Lama Zopa Rinpoche is pasted across the bottom of my computer screen.

These sudden deaths make me feel I have failed somehow at the task, with guilt and talk of what we didn’t do for this special girl. Guilt and heart rain. Neither of these two women acknowledged a spiritual dimension in their lives, neither had access to a faith which told them of a purpose greater than sense desire. I tried to share mine with both of them, only to be rebuffed. In the numb review of could-haves, might-haves and should-have-beens, I can only arrive at an acceptance that it just wasn’t the right time.

I find the loveliest photo of my friend, put it on the altar and light a candle for her, offer a prayer and sigh again. I gather together the gifts she gave me and vow to remember her whenever I am in the garden, she who so loved flowers.

New Guineas hold the view that such lost friends and relatives when held in the mind are “the living dead.” So maybe as I hold her in my prayers it’s still not too late to share the Dharma with her.