Who is Asking To Be Born, Again?

There are days when you feel so helpless about getting through the same day every day — unplugging the PEG tube, not being able to eat, sleeping with a tube attached to the stomach. Once the body was strong, effortless, full of thoughtless motion. Now, every movement is a negotiation, every breath a pact between fragility and perseverance.

I’m 45, or close enough, and I’ve carried cancer through my bloodstream, through the ache of radiation, through the fog of chemotherapy. And I carry it still, in the scars and silent complications—the PEG tube nestled in my abdomen, the threat of aspiration that shadows my sleep. This isn’t survival in the triumphalist sense. This is endurance, raw and intimate.

Some mornings begin with the pain of open wounds—raw, unrelenting. They throb not only in flesh but in memory, dragging the mind back into the truth of what the body endures. Sounds echo in the ears like distant thunder, a reminder that silence isn’t always peaceful. Even speaking takes effort, the neck stiff with tension, muscles strained and unforgiving. You speak in half-whispers, careful not to trigger the tight pull across the throat. The voice becomes a soft echo of the one that once sang, shouted, laughed.

I used to think of sickness as something that happened to others—distant, abstract. But cancer broke that illusion with brutal intimacy. The deterioration came slow, then all at once. The body that once danced, laughed, ate with joy, turned into a battlefield. I remember the taste of metal in my mouth from chemo, the sheer exhaustion that felt like gravity had doubled. And then, after all the treatments, a new challenge: I could no longer eat safely. I had to learn to feed myself through a tube. It felt dehumanizing at first. But with time, it became part of me, part of my strange new survival.

Facing death, not once but repeatedly, changes the architecture of your soul. I started turning to the Dharma—not for answers, but for understanding. Buddhism didn’t promise miracles. It didn’t offer easy comfort. But it spoke of suffering, and more importantly, the end of suffering. That idea gripped me. Not just because of my physical pain, but because of the deeper ache—the one that lingered beneath the surface, the one that cried out with every question I couldn’t answer.

The Buddha said, "I teach suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path. That's all I teach."

I started seeing life through the lens of Samsāra. Birth, aging, sickness, death. Not as poetic notions, but as lived truth. The relentless spinning of existence. And it made me ask: who is it, exactly, that keeps being born into this? In the Dhammapada, it is written: 

"All conditioned things are impermanent—when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering."

The more I studied, the more I practiced, the quieter my world became. I noticed things I never had before—the exact texture of silence, the moment before a thought arises, the softness of a kind intention. The PEG tube, once a symbol of brokenness, became a reminder of impermanence. My suffering was not unique. My body, my pain, even my thoughts—they were all passing clouds. Buddhism gave me a language for this. It gave me refuge.

But this is not detachment in the cold sense. I feel everything more deeply now. I cry more often. I laugh more honestly. I love more fiercely. And still, the question haunts me: Who is asking to be born, again?

When you’ve brushed against death, you can no longer pretend life is permanent. You see through the facade. You see people scrambling to hold onto illusions, and you want to whisper to them: it won’t last. None of it. And yet, there’s beauty in that. There’s freedom. Because when nothing is solid, everything can be sacred.

As the Heart Sutra says, "Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form."

These days, I don’t look for a future without pain. I look for presence within it. I try to meet each moment fully, however it comes—through a feeding tube, through breathlessness, through gratitude. And in those moments, I sometimes feel it: a stillness, a clarity, a knowing that maybe, just maybe, the one asking to be born again... doesn’t need to be born at all.

Maybe the question itself is the answer.

And maybe that is enough.