No Answers Whatsoever, But at Least Quite a Number of Questions

Some things being pondered today. One is the difference between the general situation and the particular situation. The general situation is that my father fell ill in April of 2022 and died in late 2023. My mother died on the exact same day two years later, which is to say one month ago today. In between, some 30 other people died, including a person of utmost importance to me, two friends, the spouse of one of those friends, the person who owns my building, my uncle, my neighbor (by murder), a fellow who did odd jobs next door (by murder), plus plus plus. 

(After the persons murdered my neighbor, whose body lay in a pool of blood in the back yard for a week, they then moved into his apartment, 20 feet, give or take, from my own kitchen window. I had to put down my shades for the first time ever and leave them down, because I didn’t really want murderers to get to know the look of my face. Was justice served in the end? No. The persons who did this got away with it, but at least they are not 20 feet from my kitchen window any more.)

Or did my mother die a month ago? Who was it exactly who died, given that she began going away a little at a time seven years ago? It seems that I am having to lose her twice, which doesn’t seem quite fair, given that I never wanted to lose her even once. Both losses are painful, in different ways. Sometimes she suddenly comes back to me as she was a decade ago, or two decades, or three, and then a wave of terror sweeps through me: How could that entire person be gone?

Yet the loss of my father feels like the more wrenching one in that he was exactly, precisely himself until about 48 hours before he died. He had been obliged (by me) to take up the role my mother had vacated years earlier, due to dementia, the job mainly entailing listening to a lot of tedious chit-chat. (He was nice about it. Once after listening to a particularly boring soliloquy, my mother said, “I’ll never get these minutes back.”) Therefore, when he died, he was the person I spoke to more than I spoke to any other person on earth.

He was entirely here, and then he was entirely gone. 

My mother, on the other hand, wasn’t quite herself, then was less herself, then this, then that, then even less, and then a final very gentle and peaceful moment. Whoosh. Gone. But who had gone?

So. The general situation is bad. I am overwhelmed by loss and sorrow; on top of everything else, in the month since my mother died, I had to have all four bottom front teeth pulled. I will get a bridge. It is not a catastrophe. I am extremely lucky I can get a bridge, but come on, a whole entire mother and four teeth gone within a few weeks of each other?

I obviously can’t tell all of this to everyone I ever speak to, but it feels weightily present all the time. But what does that weight consist of exactly? If I faithfully remained in just this moment, breathing the way my yoga teacher says to (“Inhale … belly rises … exhale … open your mouth”) and noting the input at the various sense doors over and over (I see … I hear … I smell … I taste … I feel in my body … The emotion most noticeable right now is … ), would there actually be anything other than the specific situation?

I have to say, I have gotten extremely good at sinking into the present moment over the past three and a half years, of necessity, and maybe an intensification of that practice is the entire answer. Or would that be spiritual bypassing: using my spiritual practice to avoid the kind of work one might do, say, in therapy?

Not only can I not tell all of this to everyone I ever speak to, it has often felt that I can’t tell it to anyone whatsoever, partly because it’s too much and partly because I’m increasingly particular about what kind of listening other people do. Being a chaplain kind of makes this worse. Unsatisfactory listening is glaringly obvious. If I tell someone something and then they never allude to it again, that’s not good. But then, if they ask a whole bunch of questions, that’s also not good. If they make a pronouncement about my experience, not good. If they tell me how I should proceed, extremely not good. If they laugh outright, absolutely and completely intolerable, and it is surprising how often that has happened. I have the gift, it appears, of being utterly hilarious no matter how emphatically I tell someone that what I’m about to say is not funny.

The most helpful person for me to talk to has been my Zen teacher, Joshin. We speak every couple of months. His advice has often been spot on, but that is half an hour or an hour just now and then. I haven’t seen my actual therapist often because I frequently end up in a rage during our sessions, but I decided I was overloaded with unshared woes and that I’d better see her regularly again. At our very first session, when I told her about something sorrowful—after warning her that it was sorrowful—she laughed merrily. It is surprising how often that has happened. I did not schedule a second session and concluded I was just going to have to carry all of this on my own? Or, like, share a tiny bit with literally everyone, including random strangers who happen to be passing by as I’m going in or out of my apartment building?

It seems that something needs to be done. It seems to me that the giant weight results in my acting in ways I feel remorseful about later (such as yesterday on the phone with the person at Fidelity). After such moments, it seems that the task is to be a better person. But who is the person who needs to be better? The person who was talking to Fidelity yesterday and, ahem, threatened to move every single one of her cents to Vanguard, or the person who bought her neighbor $100 worth of flowers and chocolate after he lost a parent?

No, I think, as Paul Haller of the San Francisco Zen Center says, that the task is not to be a better person but to reduce suffering. I am sure I did not improve the Fidelity person’s day; she probably underwent some suffering. But I can say for sure that I did. And what is the nature of that suffering? It consists entirely of reactivity, or the fruits of reactivity, the knotted-up stomach and so forth. When does suffering occur? The same time that anything whatsoever can occur: now. The only suffering that can be alleviated is that which is occurring right now, because that’s the only kind there is. The suffering of the past and the future cannot be alleviated.

How, then, does one alleviate suffering? Paul Haller says: By taking refuge, in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. What are these? The capacity to be aware and awake in this moment, and our historical teacher, whether human being or myth. The way things are—the truth—and also the teachings of the Buddha. The community of practitioners: friends and supporters to one another.

The words of Christina Lehnherr, also heard at the San Francisco Zen Center, seem helpful here, as well: Reaction is a way of not fully experiencing. 

So I think the task of alleviating the only suffering I can really alleviate, which is my own, has to do with deepening my capacity of tolerate my own experience in just this moment. There is a thought and memory component, too: Can I recall that it never goes well to call Fidelity or the bank or the wellness director for memory care when I’m already annoyed, and that it probably won’t go well this time, either? Sometimes I can remember that and sometimes I can’t.

But having spoken sternly to the person at Fidelity, shall I forgive myself or shall I not? I think the only answer is that I have to, because having done an unskillful thing + berating myself is, say, 100 units of misery launched into the cosmos, while having done an unskillful thing + warmly congratulating myself for the same is more like 73.4 units of misery, obviously better.

A friend lately said that if she does the latter, she feels like she’s letting herself off the hook. I quite understand that. It seems intuitively wrong to warmly commend ourselves for inflicting harm. What if it was great harm? At the extreme, shall I praise myself for having committed murder? And yet, am I more likely to alter my behavior in an atmosphere of self-hatred or one of self-love? Without a doubt it is the latter. I guess a key point is that this does not in any way foreclose doing everything I can think of not to repeat the undesirable behavior.