Bruno's Score

Abstract

Many of our experiences in hospice and palliative care medicine are challenging. We support dying patients and their families as they struggle with the transition from life to death and continue to support those in mourning. Many times, in America, it is difficult to even appreciate a glimmer of spiritual grace as our patients die. We easily remain stuck in the material and distance ourselves from the spiritual. Some exits are quite graceful, however. I present the case of an exceptional person, who enjoyed an exceptional life and had an exceptionally graceful dying process and death, in hopes that his story may encourage other healers as much as he inspired me. Bruno was a composer and cognitive musicologist, whose art forms of light and music simultaneously move and challenge virtually all the people and other artists he interfaced with and taught, including his talented wife and family, his friends, his acquaintances, his students, his colleagues, and his deans. He embodied theories as diverse as mathematical strange loops, continually paradoxical/recursive illusory art, contrapuntal fugues, and artificial intelligence. Bruno's spirituality was uncommonly profound. It spanned and interconnected many eclectic faith traditions, theologies, and philosophies, including Taoism, Greek mythology, distributed cognition, mathematics, and Tibetan Buddhism. It resonated strongly with Zen and Christian mysticism. Some of Bruno's being and transformation to nonbeing was obvious; some of it was inscrutable.

Keywords: Christian mysticism; Taoism; Tibetan Buddhism; Zen; dying; interconnectivity; music; nondualism; spirituality.