To Look Without Blinking

An application for volunteer work with the Zen Hospice Project

I first learned about the Hospice Project from one of your current volunteers, Ellen Bruno. She and I worked together twelve years ago, in a refugee camp in Thailand. For a year now I've heard Ellen exclaim how "amazing" the hospice work has been -- what a very big part of her life it has become -- and I think it's time now to see for myself.

I should say right here at the outset that I don't know much about sickness and death, and this bothers me more and more as I grow older. At age thirty-four I'm too old to be as ignorant as a teenager about such an inevitable aspect of human existence. There's an old Shaker saying: "Live every day as though it were your last, and as though you had ten thousand more to live." I'm intrigued by the Zen-like paradox here. The message I infer is that I can't really begin to live until I accept the presence of death and the certainty of dying.

What do I know about death? Quite little. I've had glimpses, but they've never really gelled into a coherent picture or sense of knowing. Throughout my childhood, my parents always tried to protect me from anything as upsetting as death. ("We wouldn't want you to worry.") When I was nine years old, I was accompanying my grandparents on their way to the airport when my grandfather, who was in the front seat of my mother's car, was suddenly stricken and killed by a heart attack. I can never forget how one moment he was talking cheerfully about his travel plans, and the next moment his head jerked back and then wilted to one side. That was it, Grandpa was gone.

Despite what I'd seen, no one in my family ever spoke to me about it, and there was never any question that I would be allowed to attend the funeral. In my family death was as taboo a topic as sex. Even when, four years ago, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer (which had killed his father and his older brother), my parents chose to keep me in the dark until surgery was unavoidable, and his illness could no longer be hidden.

As you might guess from all this, I was raised a Catholic. As an adult I've come to realize that many Christian thinkers over the past two millennia have developed extremely sophisticated and nuanced understandings of death and its natural role as an end to the life of the body, but the suburban Catholicism of my boyhood seemed to contain a rather pig-headed denial of death, a refusal to acknowledge it. Despite the searing central image of Christ dead on the cross, the Church's greater emphasis, as conveyed to a middle-class, middle-American white boy in the sixties, was always on resurrection. Even at the age of thirty-four, I still cling, somewhere deep in my psyche, to the childish insistence that I'm immortal, that my own death would be just too-too awful and I can refuse to die if I've been very-very good. In my more mature moments I realize that my life can't really begin until I accept the certainty of my own death.

During my year in Thailand I became absorbed in the study of Buddhism, and a big part of its attraction to me was its almost brutally honest confrontation with the fact of death. Amidst all the hellish chaos and sickness and death of the refugee camp, I had no choice but to adopt at least some of the poise of the Cambodians, whose Buddhist models of the world and its ways served them far better than did my own. I was continually amazed and inspired by the wisdom and even serenity with which they made sense of their unenviable lives.

Since that time, I've continued to learn about Buddhist philosophy, but I have to confront the fact that it's principally a philosophy of right action, not of academic study. I tend to be a fairly bookish person. I know all too well that I need to adopt spiritual practices that turn my attention outside myself and my relentlessly egotistical desire to know the world in ways that are safe and easy. I've always been struck by the Tibetan customs embodied in the Book of the Bardo to teach the mindful care of the dying. (And leave it to the Tibetans to develop the practice of dismembering the corpses of deceased friends and family, to be left on high pinnacles as food for vultures . . . and of course food for thought. I idealize Tibetans as people who can turn anything into a spiritual enterprise, into meditation.)

I have at times maintained a fairly rigorous and faithful practice of sitting meditation, but for now I fear that this kind of turning inward is not the most appropriate exercise for me; it seems to indulge my tendencies toward introversion in a way that is as much escapist as spiritually nourishing. I need an outward-directed practice now.

I'm not sure what I can offer to the sick and dying except my own willingness to be with them, and bear witness to their struggles and wonderment in the face of life's end. I cannot say that I have any special insights into the nature of grief. I know that it is a dynamic process and has its own emotional trajectory. The various "stages" are so well documented that they're almost a cliché: shock, denial, anger, etc. I can guess well enough which patients are likely to be the most difficult; they are the ones with the most outrage, the ones who regard death as something criminal, a treacherously broken contract. I have observed that the grief of the dying is often less a problem than the grief of the living. At some point most dying people quit pretending that it can be otherwise and come to some kind of peace, while their survivors often go wild with the urge to blame doctors and even their dying relatives or friends for their own sense of loss. It can only help to have people present who are not so stricken in a personal way with that loss, who don't have to choose sides when families mete out blame. I won't presume to tell anyone how to live or how to die, but I know how to listen and I know that people in the foyer of death have the greatest need to share their stories, to feel that they are still in the presence of the living.

As for pain, I cannot pretend to tell a suffering person something shallow and silly like "Hey, just get your mind off it" or "Hey, I know exactly what you're going through." I've never been grievously ill in my life; I'm healthy and I want to stay that way.

Still, I have had a valuable lesson on the meaning of pain. A couple of years ago, I took part in an intensive ten-day Vipassana meditation workshop conducted in Sonoma County. Throughout that time we were not to speak, read, or write, but to turn all thoughts inward. This was to be "a very deep surgical operation," as the teacher kept saying. For the first week I experienced excruciating pain in my knees and hips. Try as I might, I just couldn't keep my mind off my hurting joints, and I couldn't sit still for an entire hour-long session. The teacher counseled that if we were experiencing any "discomfort" (Oh, God, yes! I thought), then we shouldn't run from it, but instead should seek out the exact source of that discomfort. He assured us that we couldn't really hurt ourselves just by sitting, that the pains were in fact the physical manifestations of the buried emotional hurts that we were dislodging with the intensity of our mediations.

Would I listen? No way! What did he know about my pain! I tried every ruse: counting forwards and backwards, visualizing myself far away from this torment. Others, I noticed, built up elaborate perches for themselves out of pillows, and I imagined myself quite a guy for toughing all this out without such crutches. At last I grew exhausted with my failures to distract myself, and began to try the teacher's advice. To my amazement, when I dared to direct my attention to the exact point of the pain, it would "jump away," or change its nature, or even vanish entirely. Whether or not my pains were free-floating sankharas I cannot say, but I know now that pain is a mental reaction to physical stress, a tyrannical order to do something. To run from pain is to succumb to it. Pain is not the source of suffering; suffering is the source of pain.

Of course I would never tell a dying man that his pain isn't real, or that he ought simply to face up to it in order to make it go away. The patients in hospice aren't just suffering from cramped joints, and for most of them the only release will be the stupor of drugs or the peace of the grave. Still, I believe that I know enough not flinch from the pain I see in others, but instead to acknowledge it as honestly and directly as I can.

I'm very attracted to the honesty implied by the very name of the Zen Hospice Project; it seems to refer as much to the "project" of doing service as a Zen practice as to the hospice work itself. Maybe I'm stretching the point a bit, but I take it that the volunteers themselves are very much the objects of the project's work, just as much as the patients to be cared for. One lesson of Buddhism is that we're all sick, we're all full of cravings and fears, we're all in need of help and we help ourselves by helping each other.

My real motives for wanting to take part in the Zen Hospice Project are varied and somewhat obscure, even to me. I wish that I could dignify my motives as pure, unalloyed Compassion and Generosity, like Walt Whitman's service as a nurse during the Civil War. There was nothing morbid about his work -- it was a very natural expression of his passion for life. In my own case I believe that such feelings are there, but so are others less noble, like simple curiosity and even a kind of greedy desire to learn as much about death as I can while I'm still young and healthy. All my life I've been prone to an almost narcissistic introversion. At least part of my wish to serve others is a desperate need to get out of myself.

I know from my experiences in Thailand that motives sort themselves out very quickly once the work begins, and the focus changes from me-me-me and my reasons, to others and their needs. "Helping work" is absorbing in a way that cannot ever be anticipated; the particular details of the work quickly become fascinating and frustrating in ways that overwhelm self-regard. This kind of absorption is exactly the goal of Buddhist practice, and I won't deny whatever selfishness is implicated in choosing to "do good" as a means to do well.

As for the one-year commitment, well, it sounds like a lot, but so does every commitment at the start. I'm not a quitter, and again and again I've been amazed to look back and see that a very daunting prospect has quietly become an even longer actuality. The three months that seemed so scary when I set out for Thailand soon became six months, then nine, and when I had to return to the United States after nearly a year it seemed that my work had barely begun.

In any case, I know that hospice work is a worthy endeavor, something I'm certain is right for me to take on as my practice now. I hope you'll give my application due consideration.

Berkeley, California

October, 1992

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