The Still Point Of The Turning World (19 page)

Last year on July Fourth, Ronan snored through the fireworks that boomed through our Los Angeles neighborhood, rattling the thin walls of our studio apartment. We went to a pool party in the Palisades and I bounced him as he screamed and then, in a rare moment of calm, chatted over his head to a friend. A different year, another life. In these nine months a new world had bloomed, terrible and true.

Fireworks were discouraged in Santa Fe due to fire season and the drought, but there was still a sanctioned city display visible from our backyard. Rick and I watched a few explode in the middle distance, and then we went inside, slowly closing the door that leads into the house, careful not to wake our child sleeping in his room.

22

By scribbling I run ahead of myself in order to catch myself up at the finishing post. I cannot run away from myself.

—Franz Kafka

O
n a sunny and cool late September afternoon, Rick and Ronan and I took a walk along the familiar arroyo path: past a woman weeding near the chain-link fence that separates the narrow neighborhood paths from the paved public path; past two mutts that, briefly separated from their owners, bounced along behind us for a few minutes, panting hopefully for treats we might have stashed in our pockets. We walked toward purplish-blue mountains; the sun was a bright bead behind us. A snapshot of another sleepy Sunday with our son. A new week was beginning, with appointments to keep and classes to teach and workouts to muscle through and chores to complete and people to call/e-mail/Skype. Part of my Sunday ritual has always been imagining how the week will roll out, eventually easing out and slowing down into the weekend, with its lightweight to-dos, writing and resting and reading hours and phone chats, all plotted and mapped around Ronan’s nap times and feedings and physical therapy sessions. So began the tidy little story of a week. Or so it would seem to an outsider.

The seasons were changing; time was passing. A few hours earlier Rick had stood on a ladder in Ronan’s walk-in closet for almost an hour, filling shelves and hangers with outdoor gear and new sweaters and socks and shoes. Clothes for a bigger baby, a little boy. I watched him for a while, Ronan on my shoulder, and then the two of us retreated to the living room couch, where I tried to make a to-do list and found that I could not. I could no longer flip ahead to 2012 in my calendar. I didn’t dare look at the following week of 2011. This small thing, whisking ahead in my old-fashioned paper planner, something I once loved to do—look at all those activities coming up! Check out the sparkly, challenging future!—filled me with dread, with haunting, unanswerable questions.
When will Ronan die? October 2012? July? Two months from now? Tomorrow? During which week and which year? Next year or the next?
Planners, I decided, are about planning to be immortal, and we all assume that we’ll get another day, another week, another year. It’s part of how we pretend we won’t die. But when you have lived with and cared for and loved a child who is actively dying (or at least dying more quickly than the rest of us are), you learn to live in the present moment.

It was an uncomfortable, difficult lesson, one I had been given the opportunity to absorb more fully at the “Being with Dying” training session at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe a few weeks earlier. The four-day retreat of meditation, teachings, and work practice was designed for hospice care workers and others who are actively caring for dying people and wish to integrate a contemplative meditation practice with compassionate end-of-life care. The idea is that a person who is hysterical is not the best companion for someone who is experiencing the final moments of life. The weekend was designed to help care workers cultivate a loving presence for their patients or loved ones. I signed us up because soon after Ronan’s diagnosis I realized that Buddhism might be the only religious or philosophical system that has any true integrity around death, which is often treated as an issue to be avoided instead of an inevitable reality.

The first meal at Upaya—a beautifully tended community of temples, adobe structures, and vegetable and flower gardens—was the only one when we would not be observing “noble silence.” When I was asked why Rick and I were at the retreat, I said, just this once, that our baby was terminally ill. The woman I told, who I’d later discover was a student in the Buddhist chaplaincy program, nodded her head. She did not react with histrionics or howls or a grimace or apologies. Feeling a palpable sense of relief, I realized again that the effort of dealing with Ronan’s illness was divided between my own emotional maintenance and the management of other people’s reactions, assumptions, accusations, or bland offerings of comfort/Bible verses/platitudes/pity. Here I had tossed death across the table at a stranger who looked straight at it without blinking.
There’s something to this Zen business,
I thought, and finished up my vegetarian rice and beans that had been prepared (we were told) by Jane Fonda’s personal chef, a woman with red-orange hair and soft-looking hands. For the next few days, as a member of the lunch cleanup crew, I scrubbed big wooden boats of salad and beans and rice. I secured leftover squares of cornbread in plastic bags labeled with the date. The residents moved quietly from building to building, their hands folded inside front pouches. There were edible flowers in our food. Between sessions everyone quietly drank cups of mint tea.

Having integrity is different from having answers. If anything, Buddhism offers very little in the way of consolation, acknowledging that nobody really knows what happens to us as we are dying (during the “labor” of dying, as our teachers put it) or after we die. “I don’t console,” Roshi Joan, one of the retreat leaders, told us in one of the first sessions, and I was strangely relieved. What could possibly console me? What event or success or accomplishment or experience could ever be compensatory for the loss of a child? No, it wasn’t consolation I needed or desired, but the tools to walk through this fire without being consumed by it.

Too bad one was left to contemplate this while attempting to meditate, to “not think,” an activity I have always found maddening if not impossible. But meditate we did at Upaya—for up to three hours a day, beginning at seven o’clock in the morning. After the second hour of meditation on the second day, after hours of working in the kitchen in silence, eating in silence, walking in silence and finding none of it “noble,” I felt as though I were moving inside a dark and dangerously heavy circle of sadness. A gong was ringing in my chest. I’d felt it before, on the day of Ronan’s diagnosis, when I had also felt intimately connected to all of the people I knew or had known who had lost someone they deeply loved. I broke the noble silence around two o’clock in the afternoon with hysterical sobs after motioning Rick out of the quiet library and into our car, parked in the lot. “I can’t do this,” I said. “It’s too much. I just want to be with Ronan.” The not-thinking of meditation left me with only this ringing, a sonar sound that grew and grew, attracting more grief. I could not even begin to approach it. It was like walking into a screaming mouth. Rick convinced me to stay, at least through the next session. Through tears, I agreed.

The next session began with photographs of dying people or the “death portraits” of people who had just died. Death, in the Christian tradition, is linked with life only in the sense that the sacrifice of Jesus cancels out the tragedy of death, overcomes death for the one who has been granted eternal life on account of his or her faith in this very possibility. It is the ultimate overcomer narrative, the “light in the darkness.”

In the Buddhist tradition, dying is an inevitable part of life. Learning how to live is about learning how to die, both figuratively and literally. Dying to delusions. Dying to the relentless and unending demands of the ego. We were reminded that everyone we know or love or will know or love or have known or loved will someday die (I thought of the lyrics of the Flaming Lips song “Do You Realize”); that our physical bodies, our intelligence, our wealth, our careers and our relationships—our whole identity—will be of no use to us in that final moment. All must come unbound and undone. All will unravel. It’s one thing to accept this on an intellectual level, but it was an entirely different experience to hear those truths spoken aloud while looking at the faces of people who had just died, some of them showing the marks of struggle, others peaceful, some newly born, others so thin the bones of the face looked almost transparent. Some with open eyes, fearful eyes, open mouths, clenched fists, soft baby skulls. I had the thought that this was perhaps my first moment of being an adult, and that I was, just now, finally prepared to be a mother to Ronan. Other people had weathered this, I thought. So could I.

But I began to feel a drop in my stomach whenever I saw a new baby out in the world—in part because the mother who looked at her baby as if he would outlive her had disappeared for me, that blissful, sleepless and wacky time, but also because I was now uncomfortably aware of the fact that all of those babies will die somehow, someday, and maybe sooner than we liked to think or imagine, leaving behind a grief-stricken path of mourners. Everyone seemed to be walking around with the shadow of a skeleton following close behind. Everyone felt impermanent and in danger. In a sense, that’s true, and people working in hospice are intimately aware of this.

Hospice workers often create rituals in the months and weeks and days and hours before a person dies. They might haul out photographs and arrange them on the bed, make videos of the ocean or another favorite place, encourage reunions with estranged family members, offer the choice of reconciliation through letters, phone calls, invitations. One woman dying of a progressive, incurable illness decided to stop eating and have a “living wake.” For weeks people came to tell her the stories of her life—how they would remember her, why they loved her. Others create altars, write songs, throw parties. It’s a way of honoring life without privileging that individual life above any other, which doesn’t make it any less special. Do we become what happens to us? In Christianity, yes. We’re saved. In Buddhism, no. You are bigger than yourself, elemental and amazing and true, but you are also not so important, not so terribly special. You are as impermanent and transient as any other being on this earth at any other time in history. No heavenly reunions, no special ribbons or crowns, just passage into what we do not know.

On that fall Sunday several weeks after the training, I was browsing the news online when I stumbled upon a link:
Dr. Oz recommends one-minute ways to live a little longer.
Last year I would have read each suggestion and maybe tried to do one or two of them, maybe all of them, hoping to thicken that planner a bit, add a few more months and years, without realizing that’s what I was doing. Nine months into Ronan’s diagnosis, sitting with his little boy body snuggled securely in my lap, smelling his garlicky hummus breath and trying to loosen sleepers from his long eyelashes, all I could think was—why not just live?

I was motivated to unearth the book
Zen Action, Zen Person,
which I had studied for a comparative religion class at Harvard years ago. The pages are thick with yellow highlighter and my illegible margin notes. I vividly remember finishing the last page at Widener Library on a cold fall day, and later that night, blurry with fatigue, talking with a friend several times on the phone, changing the thesis for my term paper after every conversation. We had been charged with using Buddhist philosophy to make “moral sense” of a particular event that occurred during the Holocaust, an incident of ordinary men acting in an extraordinarily evil way. Buddhism felt slippery to me, too inclusive, floppy. I felt as if I had emptied my head in the cavernous Widener stacks. Nothing had stuck to my brain. Images of Jesus and Mary kept floating through my vision, which didn’t help. But Buddhism seemed to have little to cling to, and it seemed to lack the condemnation that I felt the situation deserved and that I kept trying to sneak into my paper. There was no cage to put around what had happened; no code to decipher the meaning, moral or otherwise.

Thirteen years later I flipped through the book and thought, Z
en action, Zen baby. This is Ronan.
Up to that point, although I had acknowledged what Ronan was teaching me about being a human being with this myth of his life, I had actively resisted thinking of him as a teacher, some kind of baby guru, because I’d felt that it somehow justified his suffering, or made the gravity of the loss somehow less aching, less real, less intense. As I reacquainted myself with the book, Ronan’s way of being in the world did begin to make him seem like a baby sage; he fit perfectly the nickname his cousin Iain had given him—Baby Buddha.

I am not a Buddhist, or at least not a very good one, although arguably a Buddhist would try to go beyond rigid judgments of good or bad. No parsing, no taking this and not that thought or feeling, only deep acceptance, mindful awareness. Easier said, written or thought than done. I desire, defend and distract on a daily basis. Meditation makes me want to scream, even though I feel its calming benefits hours later. I am full of the poisons of envy, anger, greed, all of it, and much of the time I do not examine the root of these emotions or their effects on others or the world. Which makes me human, I guess, and flawed, and in this flaw is the seed of perfection and peace. Or at least that’s what I gathered at Upaya.

I decided that I could plan for tomorrow, at least tentatively, and one of the weekly appointments on the calendar was Ronan’s meeting with our physical therapist. I glanced over her notes from the previous week:

Ronan stood three times at the table. Helped his hands and feet elongate with assisted play with plastic farm animals. Also worked on his mouth with a gloved hand to help practice swallowing and closed mouth breathing with more active lip movements. He enjoyed helping hold my gloved hand and it was clear when he was done.

We kept these narratives, written on yellow pieces of paper, in a folder—worried, I think, that we’d forget what Ronan did from moment to moment. A collection of little “he did” lists. Not a ritual for dying, but little rituals of living, moments from Ronan’s life. I thought about what Frank, another of our teachers at Upaya, said to Rick and me on the last day when we told him about Ronan and thanked him for his presence, his stories, his wisdom: “Remember that there’s a whole person behind whatever physical affect presents itself.” Writing about him was a way to remember Ronan and to honor all the moments of his short life.

During our break on the final day of the retreat at Upaya, I walked up the road and found a series of trails—perfect for a trail run or a meander or just a brisk walk in the morning. The echo of hammers and the sound of Spanish floated over the empty path. I did feel a lift of sadness, a weight removed, or if not removed, then acknowledged. This was the path I would walk. I didn’t have to “like” it or even “manage” it, but I did have to accept it. As the other dragon moms reminded me in the weeks after Ronan’s diagnosis, I had no other choice. This is part of being an adult, I thought, part of being a parent. I thought about something Roshi Joan had said the day before: “You feed and wash the baby, even if you know it will die in the morning.” She hadn’t been speaking directly to me, of course, she’d been telling a story, but she might as well have whispered in my ear—the words went straight in, and this time they stuck.