Fighting In The Zendo

WHEN THE DOCTORS TOLD US Jeff was dying of leukemia, he and I began to fight. Jeff was twenty-nine, I was twenty-eight, and we’d been building a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot timber-frame cabin on a small hill of hard ground in Vermont’s Green Mountains. For temporary shelter we used a tent, and then, when winter hit, a salvaged aluminum trailer with walls no thicker than a teaspoon turned sideways. We had no electricity, no phone, no running water, and no heat other than an open fire. But back then, difficulty and discomfort passed for adventure. And we believed it was only temporary.

The fights were always about our dream cabin — its design, its function, its budget — and they always occurred in the car. We were in the car a lot. Jeff needed to go to Boston for blood transfusions two, sometimes three times a week. I’d pack a thermos of hot coffee and forty or fifty ungraded student papers, and we’d barrel down Highway 89 at ninety miles per hour. “If a cop pulls us over,” I reasoned, “we’ll just ask him for an escort straight to New England Medical Center.”

Our first fight was about composting toilets. Jeff wanted one; I did not.

“They blow up!” I screamed, slamming my palm against the steering wheel. “You want to beat leukemia, then get killed by flying toilet shrapnel?”

“Where did you hear they blow up?”

“In that magazine you bought last week.”

“The new ones don’t blow up.”

“How well tested are they, if they’re new? Besides, those new ones are the price of a basic septic system. Jeff, do you want to be puking in a composting toilet?”

“I’m not always going to be puking.”

Cars are the worst — and therefore the most likely — place for an argument. No one can go anywhere. Both sides just keep throwing words at each other like heavy stones. Jeff and I always ended up bruised and crying — and still arguing:

“You’re turning this cabin into everything we thought we were going to leave behind,” he said.

“I’m thinking of you, Jeff.”

“No, you’re thinking of you.”

“That’s because I’m the one who does all the caretaking!” I could hardly see the highway, my eyes were so full of tears. Ever since Jeff had begun his chemo treatments, which knocked out his immune system, I’d had to sterilize everything with scalding hot water and antibacterial sprays. I had to clean every surface — doorknobs and ax handles and floors and walls and countertops — twice a day. Sheets and towels had to be laundered every other day. Every bit of food Jeff ate had to be boiled a minimum of twenty minutes. How could I keep this up (along with my teaching job) in a funky cabin with no running water and fermenting shit in the basement?

TWO YEARS LATER, Jeff and I must still fight for his survival, which is even more tenuous after a relapse of his leukemia. In autumn I find time to take a weekend-long break from chemo and cancer to attend a Zen retreat in another state. I arrive at the monastery near midnight and stumble directly from car to dormitory. Yet I rise at 4:30 am to explore the castle-like building and its grounds.

Outside, the sky is a rich black, like the most expensive chocolate. Quietly, I close the heavy wooden cloister door behind me and step out onto the frozen ground. Every blade of grass, every leaf of lamb’s ear, every blood red wintergreen berry has iced over during the night. It all glitters in the moonlight. Even the shadows of the stubborn maple leaves on the stone walkway seem frozen in place. I can’t decide if the world is weeping tears of ice or glowing with promise.

For the first time, I inhale the air of this new place: it tastes of pine and soil and a deep, cavelike cold. Mountains, even darker than the night sky, reach up on both sides of me, and on their high ridges, coyotes yip. In my imagination, I can see the animals clearly, their ragged fur and knobby spines, narrow noses lifting to the darkness, howling.

A gong sounds behind me, within the monastery’s stone walls. I turn and reenter the zendo, which is as sensuous in its own way as the early-morning outdoors. Wooden floors gleam under the soft light of candles, and the air smells sweetly of the incense burning in golden bowls on the altar. Reflected light flies from these bowls like small golden birds while dozens of people in black and gray robes brush gently by me on both sides, as if we were a school of minnows, familiar with each other’s gills and fins. Watching the others carefully to know what to do, I remove my shoes and sit down on the meditation cushion marked “Sarah.” I pull my legs into a cross-legged pose, then place my hands on my lap in the correct position: left hand overlapping the right, thumbs touching so that they create a perfect o at my navel. Another gong sounds, and I prepare for two hours of meditation.

Lowering my eyes and letting my attention move inward, I notice I am breathing hard and fast, as if I’ve been running. Throughout the whole of the morning’s meditation, I continue to gasp and pant. I feel my heart racing, stumbling, like a wounded deer trying to outrun the coyotes I heard earlier this morning. Toward the end, tears I’ve held back for years begin to fall, but they do not soothe me. Rather, they rankle me and make me bitter. I entered the zendo to leave my story behind, yet here it is, on my lap, in my head, screaming, arguing, hurting like hell.

JEFF AND I never resolved the composting-toilet issue. Instead, we began to play language tapes in the car to and from the hospital. Together we repeated the Spanish or Russian for “Where is the bathroom?” and “May I have a room for the night?” Because these car rides took place late at night, we would occasionally be too tired to practice. I thought we wouldn’t have the energy to fight, either, but of course when people are tired is when tempers ignite.

The next argument was about electricity. Jeff wanted solar power; I wanted the electric company’s steady flow.

“You have two ivs!” I reminded him.

Jeff was driving this time. One iv was hooked to the garment hook, draining magnesium into him. The other — full of antibiotics for the ride home — was in the back seat, packed in ice.

“And some of those ivs need to be pumped,” I said, “not just drained. What am I going to do on a cloudy day: take you in to work with me and plug you in?”

“I’m not making long-term decisions based on my disease.”

“That’s not fair!” I screamed, as if Jeff were the God that had let him get so sick. “You refuse to deal with reality, and so I end up slogging through it for both of us!” I envisioned myself wading through hip-high snow to our iced-over spring to pump bucket after bucket of water, then boiling the water over a stick fire to sterilize our motley collection of knives, spoons, and bowls. The image was not romantic; it made me feel sick. “You need to know who we are now!”

“I know who we are!” Jeff was not just crying at this point, but sobbing. He jammed his foot on the brake, and the car skidded to a stop alongside the highway. He left the motor running, our headlights glowing. “I know who I am,” he said through tears. His lips and chin trembled like tiny animals. “But do you, Sarah? Do you?”

Jeff’s gaze wasn’t incriminating. It was deeply loving and utterly sad, his eyes as green and forlorn as a white pine in winter. Spots of blood had appeared on his lips and even on his forehead; his platelets were so low that cuts were opening up all over him. I knew we were not going to return home after this transfusion. Despite a year of chemo treatments and a bone-marrow transplant, Jeff’s cancer persisted. He could not make his own blood, and living off blood transfusions was only a short-term solution. The doctors had warned us we’d hit a dead end, and that night, gazing at Jeff’s tear-filled eyes and bloody gums, I knew this was it.

“I don’t want to live off nuclear power,” Jeff said, his voice barely audible. “It’s why I’m dying. It’s why so much of this planet is dying.”

I leaned toward him and with my own lips began to gather up his tears and the spots of blood. I knew who we were: we were the meat that our bodies were made of, but also, inside this wet skin, we were our values and our dreams and our united will. Jeff had lost twenty pounds. His complexion was as white as fresh-fallen snow. He could not hold a fork or a pen without suffering hand tremors. He had no hair — not even eyelashes or eyebrows. But still we believed that our love for each other and for the land was stronger than chemo, radiation, surgery, hospital bureaucracy, and even the global toxicity that created cancer inside young, green men.

I leaned my head against Jeff’s chest and cried with him — but just for a moment. “We have to keep going,” I said. “You need blood bad.”

AT THE END of my morning meditation session, I rise quickly, dust off my pillow, and rush out of the prayer hall, slipping between the slow-moving monks. I slam a hand into the heavy monastery door and fall out into the frozen air, seeking a private place to cry.

The monastery is situated on acres of preserved forest and meadow along the base of Mount Tremper. I race along a gravel path that leads up a hill into some trees. Now that dawn has arrived, the sky is gray. Mist rises from the ground, and dew drips from the tall pines along the path’s edge, blurring the outlines of everything. I could be walking into my own mind: my sorrow is dissolving the world.

I feel rather than see a waist-high garden gate, built of pine logs. I untie a frayed rope, swing the gate inward, and walk across patio stones till I face an eighteen-foot-tall Buddha sitting cross-legged on a deck made of thick logs. He has been carved from a great slab of stone two stories tall, just enough rock chiseled away that the Buddha’s limbs are fully rounded, and his body seems to float before me: a man resting on a cloud of nothing. His expression shows an exquisite calm, and the peace of the Buddha flies into me immediately, like love’s well-aimed arrow.

I don’t know how long I stand before this seeming apparition. I must lose consciousness, for I wake up on my knees on the stone patio. A strong outdoor light above the Buddha beams over my head into the gray forest behind me. Though I can sense the tall pines and low, bushy ferns, I can see nothing but the Buddha. I’ve never been enchanted by a material object before. I’m Jewish; I believe that God is intangible, even indescribable, an omnipotent force that exists beyond the human senses. But here I am, bent before a statue of stone, trembling.

Personal. Political. Provocative. Subscribe to The Sun and save 55%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE