I promised you the end of the story of my mom’s cremation. So here goes. I finally got a call from the Flower Mound Family Funeral Home on Friday about two hours before I was supposed to get on a plane and head back for Los Angeles. The cremation was set for the following morning around nine. I hastily re-arranged my travel plans and stayed over an extra night at my dad’s.

The crematorium was a far cry from the ones you find in Japan. Those are well-maintained solemn places for saying your final farewells to your loved ones. This looked like a reconverted garage or perhaps a waste disposal facility which, I suppose, is the way they conceive of it. The floor was dirty concrete. There was nowhere to sit down. There was a big riding lawn mower sitting over to one side. My mom was in a lousy cardboard box with the word “head” printed on one end so the guys handling her could figure out which end was which. Now that I think about it again, the thing they slid her into looked kind of like a giant pizza oven and the box looked like a big long pizza box. Mom liked green peppers on her pizza, the only person I’ve ever known who actually liked green peppers on pizza. I should have put some green peppers on her as a tribute. The people who worked at the place were standing around in jeans and flannel shirts. You’d think they’d make some kind of concessions to people who wanted to pay their last respects. But it looked to me like that idea had never come up before. Weird.

So they slid her into the big pizza oven and switched on the heat. I chanted the Heart Sutra, and my dad and I just sorta stood there for a few minutes. Then we went out and had some breakfast at a place my mom used to like. I had biscuits. My dad had eggs. I think mom would’ve been happy to know we went along to keep her company.

The death of your mom is one of the hardest things to face. Yet it’s something pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point, seeing as how most of us are considerably younger than our mothers. My mom had a very hard time of it the last few years. So, for the most part I feel like this was for the best. A lot of us imagine that dying must be the very worst thing that can possibly happen to a person. Our philosophies, our movies, the stories we tell each other and even our legal system seem to work based on this assumption. But I wonder if it’s always true.

Certainly it’s usually better to stay alive than it is to die. But there are many cases when it is not. At some point every one of us will end up in a state where the best thing to do is to die. And when it’s better to die, then death doesn’t need to be seen as such a horrible thing. Obviously it’s the end. But do we really know what that means?

I do not believe in Heaven and Hell, at least not in the conventional sense. Nor do I believe in an afterlife or in reincarnation. On the other hand, I know from real first-hand experience that human life isn’t at all what most of us conceive it to be. When looked at from one side, we are each individuals with our own lives and our own deaths. No one else in the entire universe will ever experience your life or your death. And yet, when viewed from the other side, none of us are in any way separate from each other or from the world we live in. My mom is dead and yet the universe continues on. Where has she gone? I don’t know.

The words “I don’t know” figure big in Buddhist philosophy. But most of us have a very hard time understanding these words because we always rush to put something else in after them — some kind of qualifier intended to shield our ego from having to admit there are things beyond its grasp. When we use the words “I don’t know” we usually actually mean, “I don’t know, but I wish you’d tell me” or “I don’t know, but maybe if I study the matter hard I’ll know.” Our teachers, our parents and our friends make us feel foolish and inadequate if we answer "I don't know" to their many questions. The Buddhist “I don’t know” is different. I don’t know is a definite conclusion after which there is nothing else. I don’t know — full stop.

If you really want to come to terms with reality, you need to be able to accept this “I don’t know.” There are many, many, many things in this universe that are absolutely beyond your ability to conceptualize or comprehend intellectually. No amount of study or practice will ever yield any conclusion on these matters. What’s worse is that there are infinitely more aspects of this life that you can never comprehend than there are aspects you can comprehend. You really know nothing at all.

You know your name, you know your phone number, you know your shoe size. If you’re really clever you might even know your ass from a hole in the ground. You extrapolate from the fact that you know these things and believe that if you got really, really, really clever you might eventually be able to understand what your life is in the very same way. You think you might be able to work out the answer and then file it away in your head the way you file away your wife’s middle name or your sister’s birthday. But you can’t do it. No one can.

Life and death can be explained in various ways. Some of these may be better than others. The idea that people die and then God sends their souls to Heaven or to Hell is clearly ridiculous. I figured that out by the time I was five and I have no patience with anyone any older than that who hasn’t managed to work at least that much out for themselves.

The idea of reincarnation is a bit better, but it’s still pretty idiotic when you probe into it a little further. Sometimes Zen teachers like to explain life and death with metaphors about rivers and candles, and some of those are OK as far as they go. But they’re still more like words of comfort than anything else.

You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.