My father, 1928-2013

Dad was in a cooler.

Saturday afternoon, Mom said, “I need to see him again.”

They were keeping him over the weekend. He’d wanted nothing. No chemicals. No box. No ceremony. Ashes to ashes. And fast.

But he died on a Friday afternoon. So he did get no chemicals. He did get no box. He was going to get no ceremony. But paperwork had to come before ashes, paperwork that had to be processed by offices that weren't open on weekends in that semi-rural Texas town two thousand miles from where he’d grown up.  

“He’s in there all alone. And he’s so cold.” Mom said.

I'd flown back -- just two weeks after I'd helped them move there. “I know, Mom, but it’s good he’s cold. It’s like a blanket for him now.”

“I suppose…” And then a few minutes later. “But he’s in there all alone. I can’t stand to think of him in there all alone.”

She had no choice but to leave him in there all alone all weekend. She’d asked my brother, the one who lived there, to make sure that, when she went in to sign all the papers, that Dad would be out where she could see him again. One last time.

There was only one funeral home in Brazos county that would cremate a body. Only one. You couldn’t be born yet again if your entire body wasn’t in the ground. No seed, no body, no resurrection. Resurrection required nostrils, there, ready to breathe in the breath of the Divine even if those nostrils would soon be dust by time and life feeding on itself. Cremation was for heathens.

To get to that one funeral home, we took turn after turn through ramshackle residential streets. Low yellow brick houses, one with plywood over a window, a dog barking, another with a car on blocks, most with high green grass fed by the heavy wet air. I thought we were going through this area to another. But we weren’t. At a low red brick building, my brother turned in to what I thought was just a wide open graveled dirt lot with one big tree in the middle and standing pits of water too large to be called puddles. I looked for a funeral home like the ones back east. I looked for the too perfect former house of every funeral home I’d ever seen and, when I didn’t see it, I thought my brother was stopping here to tell us all something, to leave one of the cars for some reason, to change directions. But he turned off his car and my brothers got out.

“I guess we’re here,” I said to Mom.

“Where?”

“There, I guess.”

In front of us was a worn house that had once been painted white with dark green trim. It was attached to the back of the brick building. There was a small sign over a bent screen door, a sign like motels have, that said “office.” 

When I opened the car door, a humid mass of unbreathable air flopped like gelatin inside the once-air-conditioned car. I stood up and went around to the passenger door to help my mother out. Kevin, who'd flown in to be with me, followed behind. She took my arm and we picked our way slowly around muddy pits of water and loose piles of scree.

At the office door, there were no stairs, just a step up off the dirt over discontinuous slats of worn white wood, one with a wide wedge rotted and gone.

From the look of it, there weren’t enough heathens in Brazos County, Texas, to support even this one funeral home. 

We stepped up into an office as bad off as the outside of the building. The mat by the door meant to clean dirt off muddy shoes had all the dirt and mud it could take and the carpet it was supposed to protect needed none: it was threadbare and worn.  Floor boards sagged in places and office equipment sat on top of old metal file cabinets with their thick wires running to large, completely filled multiplugs. Worse, when we walked in, no one was there. The five of us, my mother, husband, two brothers and I, stood, listening for any sign that it was worth calling out for someone.

I wanted to scream at my brother, what were you thinking taking our east coast surgeon Dad here? Were you thinking at all? How could you do this to Dad, to Mom, to us?

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it without making things worse for Mom, without making things worse for all of us. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t saying it, wasn’t reacting to any of it, when an only slightly subpar upscale hotel could make her reel.

She was standing like she was underwater, a current flowing through her seaweed hair.

But no one said anything. Not one of us. For the first time in our lives, the scene wasn’t written by Albee or Williams or O’Neill. No, we stood there, kind – or, rather, not inflicting on the others what we thought their “kind” should sound like, look like, be.

In 1968, when I was eleven, I’d seen a movie - I don't remember which one - in which time and space stretched out for eons before and for eons after me, the me that I’d never considered in relation to time, to space, to stars, to planets, to rocks, to mountains, to grains of sand and the oceans that made them and I was in terror. I flew out of my bed and into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. My father was asleep, the acrostic book on his bedside table. Beyond him, the rise of my mother’s hip, her arm on top, the orange glow of a cigarette in the blue light from the television.

I ran around the king bed to her side and threw myself down on the floor. I knew better than to try to crawl in bed with her. As I whispered and cried my incomprehension, my fear, she took the cigarette she'd been smoking out of her mouth, stubbed it out in the large ashtray on her bedside table then, before she took another out of the pack with her mouth, she said, “Don’t be such a little fool.” She flipped her silver lighter open, spun the flint wheel, and leaned her cigarette down to the flame. A drag of air drew the fire towards her and, when the end glowed red, she snapped the lighter shut and put it back on top of the cellophane–wrapped pack on the table. “What happens after? Nothing. When it’s done, it’s done. That’s all. That’s it. And there’s really no point in thinking anything more about it. You're too old for this. Now stop your foolishness and go to bed.”

I did go back to bed - there was no place else to go - but my foolishness didn’t stop, not then, not ever, I just learned to hide it better. I learned that no one really knew what to say about death, that the ones who did were just making it up to anesthetize themselves or to make me shut up and go away. I learned that I was going to have to build my own structure to cope because Mom didn’t need any and she thought I was damaged if I did.

But I did need one. I was defective.  It's probably the seed of this entire project.

After waiting for too long in the funeral home office, my brother went to find someone but came back without results. Finally, a vague woman wandered in to the office. She seemed surprised to see us standing there, her eyes magnified by her large glasses. We said we had an appointment.

“Oh,” she said, then went away. When she came back, she said, “Ricky will be out as soon as he can.”

“Is there someplace more comfortable for my Mom to wait?”

“Oh, yes. Sorry. Right this way.” She walked up the short set of stairs and then disappeared into a room. When she realized we weren’t right behind her, my mother couldn’t move that fast, she came back out and stood at the top of the stairs and said, “You can wait in this room here. May I get you some water or something?”

I didn’t want anything but thought some caring action was better than nothing. “Yes, please. That would be nice.”

The room was an ochre cube. An oval conference table too large for the space was on the diagonal so people might be able to get to the plush chairs on wheels around it. There were only four chairs and soon to be six of us: my mother, my brothers, Kevin, the funeral director, and me. My older brother helped Mom sit down.

I said, “I don’t want to sit.”

No one else did either. 

The shelves along the wall advertised the funeral home’s services, casket upgrades, choices of headstones, keepsakes and special jewelry, urns for ashes, possible flower arrangements along with pamphlets offered by plastic holders, all in bright pinpoint spots.  “Helping Yourself Heal”, “When Your Parent Dies”, “Accepting a Loss”, how to deal with those who are only in the process of dying and another about how to help children understand what’s going on. Yeah? Some bullshit pamphlet was gonna do that? Help me understand what the fuck was going on? Help any one of us clueless panicked parents make sense for our children of what doesn’t make sense?

What was going on was Dad was dead, his unpreserved body in a cooler somewhere, rotting in this rotting place, and Mom wanted to get him out of the icebox to see him again, wanted us to go with her and what choice did we have but to wait in the ochre box that wrapped us in advertisements for what we should be buying if we really loved him, the “deceased”, my dad, the man who’d tickled me on the den floor until I couldn’t breathe, the man who’d held my hands so I could stand on his feet and walk as he walked, the man who’d made me Halloween costumes year after year until the Tin Man’s wrapping paper tube legs came without knee joints and I told him I wanted to be like everyone else with plastic princess masks from the five and dime, the man who'd made big garage clean-ups fun, the man who’d broken up the spin the bottle game at Doug’s because Doug was four years older, the man who’d taken us to the science museum and liked pushing the buttons as much as we did, the man who'd take me to the penny candy store to buy red hot dollars that weren’t hot, the man who’d bury us up to our necks in the cold wet sand and then walk with me on his shoulders into the waves, the man who'd bring boxes of donuts home with him when he had to see patients on the weekends.

You know, the deceased.

The vague woman was back with small warm bottles of purified water she put in a clump on the table. Behind her was Ricky, a squat middle-aged man wearing a yellow shirt and brown striped tie. He stood just outside the door jam until she left.

My brother who lived in Texas sat down next to Mom. He was in charge of this part.

Ricky sat down at the table with papers. He left to get more papers he’d forgotten. He explained. He spoke with a mouth with too much spit. He turned papers over. He pointed to lines to sign. He smoothed his shiny dark hair. He talked about faxing and state regulations and turn around time and office hours and how long “it” would take once all papers were signed and faxed and approved. He told us what day and time he thought we could return to pick up the cremains (i.e. Dad) and did Mom want a special box? Oh, and did she want to take his wedding ring now?

The air conditioner strained against the heat outside the small wooden building. My other brother leaned against one of the walls and looked over at me. I gripped my lips thin and saw him do the same, something I’d never noticed we had in common.

Mom nodded, her hands abandoned, palms up, on her lap.

Ricky stood and said, “Now, if you give me a moment to make sure the room is ready…” and backed out the door.

We listened to the building’s hum. The sound of a door. Some footsteps walking on carpeted sagging wood. A copier working.

“He never took off his ring,” Mom said. “Ever.”

She waited for an answer from someone.

I said, “I know, Mom.”

Too soon, Ricky was back. His hands in front of him as though that was more respectful. He stood back from the door and motioned for us to walk down the hall.

I had decided I wasn’t going in the room. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing my father like that. He hated viewings. He told us so. It was part of the reason he wanted to be cremated and as fast as possible. If he'd been there, he would have told me to forget about it, to not go in, to run, that he didn't want to be seen like that, that it meant nothing to him, that he was gone, done, dead, and what was left was "nothing but chemicals." He'd said that so many times at the dinner table. Nothing but chemicals. Complex chemicals breaking down into simpler ones. Order to disorder. Energy released. I knew he wanted to make sure no one ever saw the beginning of his personal breaking down from order to disorder. At eighty-six, a doctor with a bad heart he'd kept a secret, he'd made a choice to go suddenly instead of a visible slow decline in a hospital. He wanted his body gone the moment he died. And I thought my mother felt that way, too. 

There's a Buddhist practice - I think meant mostly for monks - of sitting in a crematorium until you truly accept how impermanent you are. And a story Swami Sarvadevananda told me about a Hindu abbot or head of a monastery who was throughly fed up with how distracted all of his monks were by a particularly beautiful woman so, when she got sick and died, he made his obsessed clerics sit and watch her body decompose so they understood how empty and meaningless their obsession had been. Gruesome to think about.

But here, in this country in 2013, we have almost no contact with death and as little as possible contact with the sick and dying, like it's an embarrassing and unseemly thing to do, best kept out of sight. Even here it wasn't always like this. But medicine has gotten so good at keeping us alive to an old age and then medicalizing our final decline, that most of us have precious little experience with death. My grandparents all died suddenly so my only experience of their deaths was a phone call. Two of them had no funeral and my parents kept us from the two funerals that did happen. The only funeral I attended as a child was that of a great-aunt I adored, my father's favorite aunt. Her body was on display with make-up she never wore looking like she never looked in life. It was horrific. My father thought so, too. 

I’d decided to walk Mom to the door and then wait for her outside. My younger brother helped her up and then she took my arm, looked up at me, and said:  “I want you to come in with me.”

My mother, who talked about open caskets like they were for ghouls and crazy people. My mother, who thought people who needed some belief structure to cope with death were weak. My mother, who hated maudlin emotional displays. My mother, who never went to funerals. This was the woman who said: "I want you to come in with me." 

“Uhm, okay, Mom.”

We walked around the corner and into a room only marginally less rundown than the rooms we’d been in before and there, at the far end, was my father’s body under a fake pieced quilt, the kind with the squares printed on them, the top edge folded back as though he was lying in a bed. But his face was gray, rigid. His cheeks, sunken. Aside from the blanket, the only other thing they’d done was to comb his baby-fine white hair. It had comb lines in it but it wasn’t the way he combed his hair. And it was straight down to the pillow and then it hung, shaggy, above the top edge of the pillow. There was no other attempt made to pretend he was anything other than dead. We hadn't paid for it.
        My brothers and husband were back by the door. Mom hadn’t given me that choice.

I felt embarrassed to look at him. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to look at him like this, so helpless, so defenseless, so lost. So dead.

That wasn't my father lying there. But it was. But it wasn't. He, the him I knew, wasn't there. But what wasn't there? That was his body, his face, his hair, his neck with the scar he'd gotten in the Korean war when he'd stepped between two privates having a knife fight, but...
         I would have given anything for any shred of faith, for any story that I could believe, that would make it stop being this.  

When she got close to Dad, Mom let go of my arm to put her hands on his chest. She bent down to whisper, “You know how much I love you, don’t you? You knew, right?”

I felt like I was watching something I wasn’t supposed to see, a child walking into a tangle of bodies in the dark, something that shouldn’t have had any other eyes, any other witnesses, an act sacred because of its privacy. But I was standing there, listening, watching.

My mother said to my father’s body, “I’m really not ready for you to leave me. Not yet.” She kissed his cheek, softly patted his chest and said, “But I’ll see you soon.” Then she turned away and left me there.

I would have given anything to have a ritual other than this.

I looked at my Dad. I didn’t know what to do.

I touched his soft white hair. 

I don’t think he’d have minded that.
         

Massacre of Buddhism: Ongiin Khiid

I had no idea, when I agreed to help my friend Susan celebrate her 50th birthday by going with her to Mongolia, that I'd end up standing in a place that would make me feel some of what I felt in Auschwitz-Birkenau: the ruins of the Buddhist temple complexes of Ongiin Khiid in the Gobi Desert.

Susan and I had just finished a three-day horse trek to the lakes of Naiman Nuur so we were mostly focused on getting a hot shower and a restaurant meal -- the short walk to see the local sites was an afterthought. And it was a pretty raucous walk at that, what with peals of laughter from three small boys who kept sneaking up behind us and then running away again when we turned to look. I bother to tell you this to explain how blind-sided I was by my feelings as I began to understand what I was looking at -- and the scale of it.

Ongiin Khiid is now mostly just the smashed remnants of two enormous monastery complexes (Barlim Khiid and Khutagt Khiid) on either side of the only year-round river that runs through Dundgovi province in southern Mongolia. They were destroyed in 1938. What's left of the original buildings and the communities that supported them are the foundations of countless buildings, a few feet of wall here, some broken bits of adornment there.

In person, the ruins of Ongiin Khiid were devastating but, because the buildings were made of the earth at the site, the vast and overwhelming scope of the wreckage is difficult to convey in photographs. There were  ruins as far as you could see. The wrecked altar alcove that once housed a Buddha icon overlooked it all. 

I cannot explain the effect of this site on me. We'd already been to two other ruined and slightly rebuilt monastery sites, Erdene Zuu (pix here) and Tuvkhen.( pix here) They were a mix of sad and hopeful, touristy and sacred, run-down and beautiful. But the raw violence of the destruction at Ongiin Khiid was still visible, still palpable, even though it happened over seventy years ago. 

Mongolian Buddhism had its roots in Tibetan Buddhism and, like Tibetan Buddhism, it incorporated some of the indigenous shamanistic traditions as it evolved. 

In the first decade or so of the 20th century, Buddhism was at its height in Mongolia, with over 2000 temples, more than 700 of them resident monasteries, with something like 115,000 lamas. And it was then that its persecution by the Soviet-backed government began and escalated.

Mongolia is now an independent parliamentary republic but, in the early 1900s, it was fighting off Chinese control and even a brutal invasion by a renegade division of White Russian soldiers led by Roman von Ungern-Sternberg - the Mad Baron, so they turned to Russia for help. While the Mongolians we met believed that their country would not be independent today if it weren't for their long relationship with the Soviet Union, the Soviet-backed government all but wiped out Mongolian Buddhism for fifty years.

The attack on Buddhism began slowly, with requirements that all Buddhist lamas, temples and monasteries register. Then came the restrictions - on teaching, on replacing the Eighth Bogd Qaan (the national spiritual leader) when he died - and the propaganda campaigns with images of lamas as pillagers and parasites, the confiscation of property, the purges of Buddhists from government positions, etc. Sound familiar?

Not that anyone told us this while we were in Mongolia. The details were remarkably vague when we asked what happened and why. It never went beyond "it was part of the Stalinist purges." So, when I tried to read more about it when I came home, I felt like I felt when I walked through the horrific exhibit of orders and propaganda the Germans plastered all over Polish cities after they invaded -- the drip, drip, drip of one ordinary freedom after another stripped away, all of it the methodical and planned separation of one group from another, of individual human beings from their humanity. Then came the final orders to destroy and close all of the monasteries, remove all of the lamas, and outlaw Buddhism.  By 1939, the work was complete.

The pretext the Stalin-puppet regime of Qorlogiin Choibalsan used for the final order in 1938 to do this was the threat of invasion by the Japanese: they were supposedly using the Buddhist infrastructure to infiltrate and undermine Mongolia.

Every one of the lamas who hadn't disrobed in the preceding years was either murdered or arrested, sent to labor camps or conscripted into the army. Some estimate that between three and four percent of the population was slaughtered, among them 18,000 lamas. There are accounts of lamas shot in the head at the edge of the graves they'd just dug.

Standing on the foundation of one of the ruined buildings at Ongiin Khiid, I felt I was looking at the dark heart of what's driving me to do this project, wanting answers. Again.

My parents know, with certainty I envy, that religion itself is the cause of things like this, of most wars, of group hatred, of the Auschwitzs and Ongiin Khiids throughout history. But is it? Maybe that's just the rotten figleaf of an excuse given by those who are really trying to grab land, money, power. If not, if faith is in some way the cause, is it faith itself or something that happens when belief and faith are misunderstood or misused? Or maybe it's just something that goes awry sometimes when groups of people get together and religion is just one of the reasons groups of people get together.

I know I am pathetically attached to getting my hands on a clear cut, defined story to tell myself, to find some way of ducking the stark facts of the Holocaust, of Rwanda, of 9/11, of the slaughter of Native American tribes, of early Christians, of Muslims during the Crusades, of Ongiin Khiid, etc because I no doubt believe that effects have causes so find the cause, find the cure, no? I mean if you can find the wheel spinning that tends to lead to suffering, wouldn't it be worth it at least to try to jam a stick in its spokes? I think that may be the unfortunate underpinnings of my drive to do this project: the desire to find something To Be Done.

I want to find The Reason, to assign Blame, to find The Cause as though that will mitigate the horror and give my story-telling brain the bedtime story it so craves. Were the lamas at the time too close to political power? Had they grown corrupt? No, even if any of that were true, it's no excuse for the murderous violence of what happened. Perhaps it wasn't faith that was to blame for the jagged walls and the broken buildings and all they signify, but an insane world in an insane time; Stalin was at work in the Soviet Union, Hitler in Germany, the second World War about the begin.

No, no I can't tell myself that either. I can't tell myself that it began and ended there.

After the deeds were done and Buddhism outlawed, the Choibalsan government used the few temples left standing as storage facilities, barracks for Russian soldiers, or prison camps. In 1944, one monastery just outside Ulaanbaatar, Gandan, was reopened, staffed by lamas who were specifically banned from teaching anyone or talking about Buddhism. The stories say this was staged, initially, for the benefit of a visit by United States Vice-President Henry Wallace in 1944.

That so few people know about these massacres is small wonder: before Choibalsan began getting rid of Buddhism in earnest, he threw foreign visitors and organizations out of Mongolia and then instituted laws that prevented Mongolians from talking about Buddhism or the massacres.

But Mongolia is open again. People became free to practice religion again after the democratic revolution in 1990 and Buddhism is on the rise. It is, once again, the most widely practiced religion, followed closely by shamanism. Many of the sites have a rebuilt structure or two and some, like Erdene Zuu and Tuvkhen have lamas living there. There didn't appear to be any lamas living at Ongiin Khiid but there was a rebuilt temple, a ger with some items recovered from the rubble, and a monument to the lamas who didn't survive the massacre.

I went back alone to the site again the next morning, long before the village boys were up. In the little time I've spent in the shallow beginning of learning about Buddhism, I keep hearing that everything is Buddha. Even this. 

No Buddha is Buddha, too. 

I don't know if that answer is good enough for me.

But it is better than making up some story to pretend that any of this makes sense.

ruins of Ongiin Khiid, Dundgovi Province, Mongolia

I'll be back with a lot of new content soon but...

... I'll be without internet access until mid-July.

In the meantime, here is a very moving video in which a longtime Buddhist practitioner, Sexton Bourke, talks about the value of an ongoing meditation practice as he faces his death.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_popout&v=6Jtfo-0hke4#t=90s

The power of storytelling...

"By telling a story, things don't control me anymore: it's in my vernacular, it's the way I see the world. Our stories ask our big questions...what's funny in this world, what's sacred -- And, even more important, by asking them in front of people, with people, even if we don't find the answer, by the asking we find we are not alone and I find that's even more important than the answer." 

I found this interview that Krista Tippett did in her radio program On Being with Kevin Kling inspiring and moving, especially this short excerpt from one of his shows in which he says:  "Every scar is a monument to a battle survived. Now, when you're born into loss, you grow from it but, when you experience loss later in life, you grow toward it."  Kling is a performer and writer who was born with a defective left arm followed by a motorcycle accident in his forties that almost killed him and paralyzed his good right arm.

That first quote of Kevin Kling's about questions without answers reminds me of something Bernie Glassman said in a talk he gave in Germany this year. In starting a conversation with a group, he invited people to ask him questions so he could get to know them better. "But I'm not going to answer them. Because I don't believe answers are useful. In fact, answers can be very deadly. Questions have a lot of energy, they have a life. With a question, you can go on."    

The trick is getting comfortable living without answers. I think Kevin Kling has it just right: asking questions in front of and with other people does make you feel less alone.

Stacks of paper

After dinner, I came early to the first group meeting and the room was empty except for Andrzej Krajewski, the coordinator of the retreat from Poland. He was busy sorting stacks of paper so I asked if he wanted help.

"Yes, take from here," he said, indicating the box next to him filled with stacks of paper, "And please count twenty or twenty-two pages and put them in piles here."

Okay. I started to count, to stack. I assumed I was creating piles of twenty-two copies of the same document. But, as I counted, I started to notice that, no, each page was different. They weren't the same document.

"What are these?"

"These are names of the people who were recorded at the camps, the ones who made it through the first selection and actually worked at the camps before they died. No one knows how many actually died at Auschwitz because many were sent directly to the gas chambers so their names weren't recorded. There is no record of them."

There were at least twenty to twenty-five names on each page and a box full of pages. We were making piles of the names we were going to read aloud over the course of the retreat.

When we were done making all the piles we needed, the box was still full of paper, still full of the names of the people who had died in the Auschwitz camps, many more than the pages we had counted out. Andrzej picked the box up and walked towards the back of the room to put it away for another time. I wanted to grab them from him, to tell him no, not again, we can do it, we can do them all. We have to.

But we couldn't. We couldn't do them all. There were too many for the time we had.

There's a reason why people don't come to places like this. Whatever you do, you have it ground into your face, into your gut, into your bones, again and again, that it can never be enough. There is no matching this horror with anything "appropriate."

I sat down in that big empty hall filled with chairs and couldn't even cry.

Auschwitz One...

The Polish coordinator of the retreat, Andrzej, a tall, gray-haired bear of a man with warm sad eyes, opened our first meeting as a group with these remarks:  "Tomorrow is a very special day. It's the most important holiday in Poland: it's the day of all the saints. You go out to the cemeteries to honor your families, your dear ones, so Poland is in a very special state of mind these days.

"One more thing. Oświęcim, the name of the place, is an old Polish name that means 'enlightened place or place which is made holy.'"

Holy place. Enlightened place. Auschwitz?

We came to Auschwitz I for the first day of our retreat to hear and see what happened here.

I didn't realize that Auschwitz (the German translation of Oscwiecim) is really a constellation of three concentration camps: Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Monowitz-Buna. Auschwitz I, originally a Polish military barracks, was the administrative center for the camps. It was also, they told us, where the use of Zyklon B gas to kill people was developed and perfected.

We walked underneath the "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("work sets you free") sign and to our first stop: the original crematorium, the first one the Nazis built for the purpose of killing people with gas. Once the entire group crowded inside the poorly lit room, Bernie Glassman who started the Bearing Witness Retreat more than 16 years ago, said, "This is a gas chamber. At Birkenau, where we will spend the rest of our days, it was much more efficient, many more people were able to be gassed at once. We're about 105 people. Normally the gassings that took place here there were 700 people...in this space. And the largest that they know of was 900 people. The crematorium is next door."

The first gas chamber

The official description of the retreat says that our main teacher is this "Place", these camps where unimaginably horrific things happened. While the retreats are organized by Glassman who is a Zen Roshi (abbot) and the Zen Peacemakers, they are explicitly multi-faith. In addition to the many Buddhist leaders, with us were an Hasidic rabbi, the German priest who ran the Center for Dialogue and Prayer where we were staying and even a Native American tribal elder.

Okay, I note that I just tried to duck writing about how I felt in that cement room by giving you admittedly relevant information but not the most important information. The important information is that I was afraid, that I kept not just imagining what went on in that room, but also the how and the why of it. The important information is that I kept trying to stand inside the brains of the people who didn't die here, the people whose job it was to run this place, the ones who came to work here each day day, and who, on occasion, joked around a little with their co-workers, who ran out of paper clips or ink for their pens and had to go get more, who took a break from the gassing and burning of bodies to eat lunch, who sometimes stopped off for a beer with friends after work, then went home, washed their faces, brushed their teeth, and got in bed to rest for another long, hard day at work. The important thing is that, if Auschwitz was the teacher, I was terrified of what it was going to teach me.

In Zen Buddhism, the stories we tell ourselves are something to notice and then leave behind. But what is there below, beside, or beyond this story? On its own, this "story" is so impossible to take in, to know, that I was quite certain at that moment I did not want to go beyond the facts of what happened, that whatever is beyond, beside or below it, felt like The Unnameable dread that lies inside our worst nightmares, our existential fears, our moments of terror, not just that there might be no meaning or point but, worse, that there is some shapeless malignancy just beyond what we can know. What I knew, as I stood there in that place of horror, was that I did not want to learn what this Teacher had to teach me.

We followed our guides out. Below are photographs of what we saw, ending at the execution wall where we had a ceremony. Because it was All Saints Day one of Poland's most important holidays, people had left memorial candles and flowers at most of the killing sites, especially the execution wall. One final note: I was completely unprepared for how beautiful it was, especially with the fall color. The guide told us many of the trees were there at the time, some were planted by prisoners, so they had this fall color to look at, too. However, it was only high overhead. We were told that none of the trees had leaves within reach of the ground because people had eaten them. The grass, too.

(A note to my retreat-mates or anyone who might be reading my blog for the first time: this entire effort is a work in progress and depends on the corrections and additions of people who know more than I do. Please do not hesitate to give notes, to comment, or to send any additional thoughts ...) 

Zyklon B pellets & canister  

Our Polish guide

No one spoke as we walked through
and we were not all in one group
...yet everyone who had a camera ended up taking
a picture of this shoe

How can one specific pair of shoes
have the power of a pile of thousands of shoes? 

Note that the windows overlooking the execution wall are boarded up
so people in the building won't be disturbed by the sight

Execution wall on All Saints Day

Mortification...#742

Now I'm not sure whether or not to share this but I guess the truth is the truth and it's hopeless to hide the enormous and mortifying depths of my pockets of ignorance.

We were all warned that the weather would be unpredictable and variable and that we'd have to sit out in it for hours no matter. I wanted to pack light so I essentially brought layers of black or dark gray clothing, one of them a hoodie sweatshirt I'd bought in the Los Angeles airport on a previous business trip when I'd forgotten to bring something to keep warm on the plane. I'd gotten compliments on it when I wore it around fun people from work so I thought nothing of it when I wore it to this first meeting.

As we went downstairs after it ended, a sweet man named Eric, a furniture-maker from New York, quietly pulled me aside in a way no else would notice. "May I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"Did you know that that is a Nazi symbol?" he said, pointing to this image on my sweatshirt.

I had been sitting in the opening meeting for a retreat at Auschwitz wearing a sweatshirt with a Nazi symbol.

Mortified.

Gemmon in Krakow

Never plan to see a friend you haven't seen for almost two years for the first time at 10pm if you want to get any sleep.

When I got back from visiting Luke, Gemmon was in the hotel. We started talking that night and stopped long enough to get a few hours of sleep before setting off first thing in the morning in search of Amon Goth's house, the infamous concentration camp commandant of the Płaszów camp on the outskirts of Krakow.

I'd forgotten that Gemmon had decided to become a Buddhist, in part, because of the Holocaust. About 40 years old now, Gemmon and her generation grew up in Germany with their faces shoved squarely into their country's culpability for the atrocities committed by their elders during Hitler's reign of terror and it's hard to imagine anyone more fearless and obsessed with owning the full weight of that responsibility than Gemmon. She knew so much more about precisely what happened than I did. To this point, I've learned only what I had to about the Holocaust, what came towards me at school and in popular entertainment but Gemmon told me she first began reading the accounts of Germans who lived through the period because she wanted to know "how in any possible way they could have survived this without feeling failed as a human." Then she began to read as many of the survivors' written accounts as she could as well as the diaries of people who were killed in the camps. "I kept asking myself: could I?  Would I?  Finally, this was the reason I got into practice."

Gemmon hadn't changed much in the year and a half since I saw her last. She no longer has the shaved head of a Buddhist priest, although she remains one, she says, "for now." After things didn't work out at the Zen Center, Gemmon went back to work as a hospice nurse, this time in Zurich. I asked if she missed the zendo, missed Los Angeles. She teared up. "I sometimes miss the Pacific and I sometimes miss Roshi but never the Pine House." (where Roshi lived and the workplace personnel conversations took place.) And Gemmon added that she didn't think she'd have a teacher like Roshi or live in a community like that again but that didn't mean she was no longer a Buddhist priest. "For me, my robes are alive."  While Gemmon had clearly processed her feelings of loss - much of into gratitude - still, after almost two years, Gemmon's hurt seemed fresher than I expected.

I cannot continue to feel this way for two more years. Perhaps it was just that, in catching up, my more recent parallel tale of job woe stirred up her old feelings...or maybe it's that, while I only lost a job, Gemmon lost a job, a home, a teacher, a way of life, and a country.

We'd come to the Auschwitz retreat for slightly different reasons. I'd decided to come to leave behind my tiny ego bruises, to plunge fully and completely back into this effort, and to begin my approach to Judaism. Gemmon's reasons, the questions she was asking, were much more complex. "I don't think it's difficult to have compassion for the victims, but the perpetrators? Is it possible to have compassion for them? I've read their stories. I've heard them talk. They don't have nightmares. They compartmentalize what they did. They killed people - for them it was just another day at work -- then they went home to their children. How do you have compassion for that?"

Am I supposed to have compassion for that? What happens if I can't?

This is the really tough part of Buddhism, the dark side of "we are all connected, interrelated."

Gemmon said, "You are right that it is tough but I think it is actually even tougher to be attached to our hatred as we are suffering under it." She sent me a verse of the Dhammapada about this which is below.

 I guess that's what we are all here to face at Auschwitz and Birkenau. For a week.

The verses of the Dhammapada that Gemmon sent 

Never here by enmity

are those with enmity allayed,
they are allayed by amity,
this is the timeless Truth.

Hatred is, indeed, never appeased 

by hatred in this world. 

It is appeased only by loving-kindness. 

This is an ancient law.

For hate is never conquered by hate.
Hate is conquered by love.
This is an eternal law.

Chapter 1 of the Dhammapada as it is in Wikisource

1:1 (1)

The mind is the basis for everything.
Everything is created by my mind, and is ruled by my mind.
When I speak or act with impure thoughts, suffering¹ follows me
As the wheel of the cart follows the hoof of the ox.
1:2 (2)
The mind is the basis for everything.
Everything is created by my mind, and is ruled by my mind.
When I speak or act with a clear awareness, happiness stays with me.
Like my own shadow, it is unshakeable.
1:3 (3)
"I was wronged! I was hurt! I was defeated! I was robbed!"
If I cultivate such thought, I will not be free from hatred.
1:4 (4)
"I was wronged! I was hurt! I was defeated! I was robbed!"
If I turn away from such thoughts, I may find peace.
1:5 (5)
In this world, hatred has never been defeated by hatred.
Only love² can overcome hatred.
This is an ancient and eternal law.
1:6 (6)
Everything will end.
When I understand this, all quarrels fade away.
1:7 (7)
As the wind topples a brittle tree
So will temptation³ topple me
If I am lazy, unrestrained, apathetic, seeking only endless pleasure.
1:8 (8)
The wind cannot uproot a mountain.
Temptation cannot uproot me
If I am alert, self-controlled, devout, unmoved by pleasure and pain.
1:9 (9)
The saffron robe⁴ is perfectly clean
But I am not ready to wear it
When I have not cleansed my spirit,
When I disregard truth and neglect to practice self-control.
1:10 (10)
When I have removed all defilements,
When I am filled with self-control and truthfulness,
Then I am truly worthy to wear the saffron robe.
1:11 (11)
When I see the truth as false,
When I believe illusion to be reality,
I am unable to find the truth.
1:12 (12)
I must see the essential reality as real,
And discard illusion.
Only then can I find the truth.
1:13 (13)
As heavy rain will penetrate a poorly-thatched roof,
So passion creeps into an unreflecting mind.
1:14 (14)
The rain will not penetrate a well-thatched roof.
Passion does not enter a tranquil and reflecting mind.
1:15 (15)
I grieve now, and I grieve in the future.
When I do wrong, I am doubly-grieved.
I mourn and suffer when I see the results of my actions.
1:16 (16)
I rejoice now, and I rejoice in the future.
When I am virtuous, I doubly-rejoice.
I smile and give thanks when I see the results of my actions.
1:17 (17)
I suffer now, and I suffer in the future.
When I do wrong, I suffer doubly.
It pains me to know that I have done wrong,
And it pains me even more to see the consequences.
1:18 (18)
I am happy now, and I am happy in the future.
When I am virtuous, I am doubly happy.
I am delighted to know I the good I have done,
And I am even more delighted to see the consequences.
1:19 (19)
Even if I can recite large portions of sacred texts,
If I do not put those into practice
Then I am like a shepherd counting someone else's sheep,
No closer to enlightenment⁵.
1:20 (20)
If I know just a little of the sacred texts,
But I put those teachings into practice,
Casting off desire, ill-will, and delusion,
Practicing wakefulness and meditation,
Free of attachments to anything, here or in the future,
Then I may become enlightened.

Empty

Krakow - main square

So this big idea of mine's not going so well. This trip is supposed to be the end of wallowing in the hurt of losing my job and the reclamation and re-dedication to this project. I've been trying so hard to get back to this full-time, I should be thrilled, right?

To allow for jet lag, I arrived a few days before the Auschwitz retreat actually began. Maybe that wasn't a perfect plan. A little too much time alone to think...

Wawel Castle

Krak's Mound

Pedestrian bridge with lovers' locks

I walked all over Krakow this morning - through the market square just as the sun came up, to Wawel castle and down through the kitschy dragon's den, through the reviving Jewish quarter (Kazimeirz), all the way to the prehistoric Krak's Mound, then back across a pedestrian bridge covered with padlocks with lovers' initials carved or written into them that wasn't on my map, and finally back to St Mary's Church.While I walked and looked, I was fine. But, stop for a hot chocolate, and I'm a mess again. Still. I can't get myself back. The hurt won't burn itself out. Dented ego or work head that doesn't want to get it: it's over.

Done.

Move on.

Funny. The job was different than anything I'd done before, different than anything I thought I'd ever do, but I'd just decided to stop questioning my decision to be there. I could see the good it was doing in a place that had the money to have an impact and I was working with people I adored. So, just three weeks before the end, I bought two new suits.

I hate those suits.

I can tell you I am not wearing either of those suits right now.

I know, I know: it's a good thing the job ended or I wouldn't be walking around Krakow, I wouldn't be back working on this project, I wouldn't be able to get some cattle car cheap ticket to go visit Luke while he's on his semester abroad. But the hole I'm in is deeper and scarier than even the job loss. I'm having trouble getting back in to this project.

It took me so long to get comfortable with what I'm doing, to get over the embarrassment I sometimes feel when I tell people who have known me for a long time what I'm doing. A number of them have been supportive, some even enthusiastic. But I've also lost a few friends who think I'm nuts.

Before getting on the plane, I tried to sit down to catch up on some of the old notes that I haven't posted yet but I got nowhere. Instead, when I had any energy at all, I obsessed about a friend who hasn't seen me since I told her about this project several years ago. When I told her about The Heathen, she smiled. She tried to look interested. She was not a convincing actress. I haven't seen her since. I hadn't really thought much about it but, every time I sat down to work, I couldn't think about anything else. It feels like part of a wall of shame between me and returning to the work that really means something to me.

I feel empty.

Empty. Empty. Empty.

And I don't think it's the kind of empty Zen Buddhism wants you to feel.

I am suffering because I am attached to what other people think about me and to what I think about myself. And that sucks.

Outside St Mary's Church - point taken

On the plane...to Auschwitz

Why am I doing this? So many reasons. The initial provocation may seem odd. In early August, after about three days of full-blown grieving the unexpected loss of my job, of going from 200-miles-per-hour excessive -- truly excessive -- work to a cold, brutal full stop, I was tired of standing in my back yard and crying. But there seemed to be no end in sight. None. So I decided to go to Auschwitz.

As I write this, even I can see how crazy this sounds. Depressed? Lost your job? Helping your aging and frightened parents unhappily downsize? Facing a soon-to-be-empty nest? What better cure than signing up for a week as close to you can get to catastrophic evil!

That exclamation point should be puffy with a circular dot underneath. That would be, in part, honest.

Bernie Glassman
from the Zenpeacemakers site

But there is more. As bereft as I felt about the loss of the job at the same time I was helping both Matt and Luke get ready to leave for college, I also knew it meant I could come back to this project, at least for a while, full time. If I could get myself up off the couch. If I could stop compulsively staring at the Facebook posts of my former friend and supervisor.

But in the same Facebook news feed was this: a post by Roshi Wendy Egyoku's teacher Bernie Glassman, someone whose books I've read and have long wanted to meet, with a link to the registration form for the up-coming "Bearing Witness Retreat in Auschwitz."  A Zen retreat led for the last 16 years by a Roshi named Bernie Glassman in a place deeply associated with Judaism - the religion I intend to learn something about next. I filled out the form and sent in the deposit. At least I had taken some action to get back to this work and out of my self-pity festival. It was two months away. I had two sons and two parents to pack up so I got to the to-do lists. Nothing like the salve of to-do lists.

The two months flew by in a blur of packing and unpacking boxes...and more tears.

Yesterday, when I called to say good-bye to Matt, he said he was worried about me and this trip. "They're not going to shave your head or anything, are they?"

"It's not a re-enactment, Matt."

"Okay, but it sounds kinda strange, you staying at the concentration camp."

"I know. It will be, but I don't think our dormitory is right on the grounds but just outside."  Then, to put it terms he could understand, "Like the Trianon Hotel is just outside the gates of Versailles." My royalist child.

"Oh, okay. Will you call or skype when you get back to let me know you are okay?'

Now that I'm sitting on the plane on the way to Krakow from Frankfurt, Germany, I am a bit nervous, too. Coming in through Germany - an accident of the quest for cheaper fares - only added to strangeness. I've just had my passport stamped by a blond, blue-eyed German official whose grandparents lived under Hitler's regime.

Not long after I made the plans, I realized I was going to have a ridiculous sixteen hour layover on the way back, so I'd sent an email to Gemmon in Zurich (for those who haven't read anything else*, Gemmon is the German Zen priest who Roshi "fired", a woman who made me laugh a lot) to see if she was going to be home in Germany when I was passing back through from Poland or if she might be able to me me there.  She said she couldn't but why, she wanted to know, was I going to be in Poland?

I told her.

Her answer: "WE WILL MEET FOR FIVE DAYS IN AUSCHWITZ!"

Gemmon was going, too.

~ ~ ~

* NOTE: the better part of my time learning Zen is not posted yet but will be before long so you will not be able to find the posts that tell this story right now...