“The Tibetan term bardo, or ‘intermediate state,’ is not just a reference to the afterlife. It also refers more generally to these moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives. In American culture, we sometimes refer to this as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling ungrounded. These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are what is being referred to by the term bardo. But to be precise, bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us.”—Pema Khandro Rinpoche
When I was 34 years old, I accidentally discovered a large lump in my neck. It turned out to be a nodule the size of a golf ball that was growing on my thyroid gland. After multiple doctors’ visits, biopsies, and a delayed surgery because my affliction was considered a pre-existing condition, it was finally diagnosed as papillary thyroid cancer. I was lucky: it was a slow growing cancer, its recovery rate was high, I was young. It should all be ok.
Nevertheless, I can say what I experienced then and for the span of about two years, was rupture—
I was no longer able to manage my outer image, no longer able to suspend myself in pursuit of the ideal self. Pretense and striving fell away, and life became starkly simple.
Towards the end of my treatment, as a patient in the Nuclear Medicine Department at NYU Langone on 8/2/2010 I was administered radioactive material for therapy. I received 99.4 mCi of I-131 (radioisotope). I had to self-quarantine for 10 days hereafter, away from my children and family. I had already spent two years in an intermediate state of suspended reality, and now I was sinking into a solitude I had never experienced before.
During my time in “bardo,” I made these images. These photos show a basic level of being—raw, unmanaged, unmanipulated.