Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (19 page)

until I gave up on sewing. I hated her when she grumbled, “I’m

not your servant!” while cooking our dinners and cleaning our

toilets and reading Betty Friedan.

After I graduated from college and spent a year working for

a lawyer in Aspen, Colorado, I returned home for a couple of

months before my final move to California. At one of her parties

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katy butler

I inflated a few weeks of volunteering at the
Aspen Times
into the journalism career I dreamed of. She said sarcastically, in front of a

lovely woman with red ringlets from San Francisco, “Oh! So you’re

a
journalist,
Katy, are you?” And yet her eyes filled with surprising tears a few weeks later as she watched me load the Rambler I’d

been issued by a car transport agency, carrying a map of America,

my handful of newspaper clips, and the three hundred dollars I’d

earned cataloguing votes in a
My Weekly Reader
presidential poll.

When I got that Rambler stuck in a ditch in a Colorado bliz-

zard, I did not call her for help, nor did I after I was fired from

my first job in San Francisco, reading the news on an FM rock

station. I didn’t ask for money. I applied for unemployment and

food stamps and Medicaid. I interned for an alternative weekly.

I told her nothing.

I hated her on the Christmas Eve when I returned to Connect-

icut wearing a pair of used thirteen-button wool navy pants and a

new red turtleneck and green cardigan bought especially for the

trip and got into my parents’ car to hear my father say, “Doesn’t

she look nice?” and my mother say, “Too many colors.” I wrote her

off as a perfectionist housewife and a frustrated artist resentful of

the role she was trapped in, jealous of my creative expression and

my childless freedom. I disdained in her everything her genera-

tion of educated, childbearing middle-class women had become

and I feared becoming myself: what Adrienne Rich called “the

victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr.”

And all through my twenties, whenever I walked on Stin-

son Beach, I remembered how she longed for the long, empty

sweep of the South African beaches of her childhood. When I

saw a single oak rising from a cleft in the tawny flanks of Mount

Tamalpais, I thought of her collecting dried wild weeds when

we walked around Lake Waban in Wellesley, and how she’d

cull and crop that armful of scratchy things into an arrange-

ment of improbable, austere beauty. When I saw the Golden

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Gate Bridge light up ruby in the day’s last light, I’d miss her and

wished she were with me.

That is how things stood between my mother and me until she

and I independently discovered Buddhism. My moment of awak-

ening came by accident when I was twenty-eight. Heading for a

camping trip in the Grand Canyon, my North Beach flatmate and

I decided on a whim to detour to a hot springs we’d heard about,

inland from Big Sur, deep in the Ventana Wilderness. In my dusty

secondhand Toyota hatchback we crawled seven miles up a wind-

ing one-lane dirt road, stopping at its highest point, Chews Ridge,

to look out. All we could see were the jagged green Santa Lucia

mountains, overlapped like spearheads arrayed on their sides,

their knife-edges rising skyward, their bodies, enrobed with trees,

flowing down into the canyons to wet their feet in Tassajara and

Church Creeks, which feed the Arroyo Seco River. We got back

in the car and drove the road’s serpentine twists, gravity push-

ing us downward as I beeped at the blind turns and pumped the

brakes to make sure they didn’t scorch and fail. We parked in the

hot dust where the road ended and walked through a massive,

dark, Japanese gate into a wooden settlement that looked like a

cross between a medieval Buddhist monastery (which it was in

the winter) and a New Age hot springs resort (which it was in the

summer). The sign out front read, “Tassajara Zen Mountain Cen-

ter: Zenshinji.” It turned out that an old friend, who’d disappeared

months earlier from the leftist political scene in San Francisco,

was a Zen student there, and he showed us the garden, the stone

zendo,
and the “Goodwill” free closet, where you could drop off unwanted clothes and take what you needed.

I woke up at dawn in a redwood cabin, hearing running foot-

steps and the jangle of a handbell followed by the deliberate

Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!
of a mallet against a wooden block hung

from the eaves of the meditation hall. Dressed in dark pants and

a long-sleeved T-shirt, I hurried down the path in the chill, past a

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katy butler

young man in a wide, black, medieval kimono limned by a white

collar, as elegant as a man in a tuxedo, as he struck the final

chuckchuckchuck
rolldown on the
Han
after checking his digital watch. I put my flip-flops on a shelf, skittered down a walk-

way, lifted my left foot over the left threshold as I’d been shown,

bowed to the gray stone Gandharan Buddha statue in the dim

space, and took my seat in half-lotus on a black, pebble-shaped

cushion facing a white wall. I counted my deepening breaths in

the safe, communal silence in a practice not so different from

those that nurtured generations of my Quaker ancestors.

A handbell dinged. My left foot was asleep. We rose. I put a

flat, padded
zabuton
on the floor and, with my weight on my one good foot, made nine full bows, along with everyone else, touching my forehead to the cushion. For a religion that some adher-

ents claimed was not a religion, it sure had a lot of ritual—more

genuflecting than the Catholic Church, it seemed. Together we

knelt and chanted from a translated Japanese poem that I loved

but did not understand: “Yes, in darkness there is light, but don’t

see it as light. Yes, in light there is darkness, but don’t see it as

darkness.” My knees hurt. We chanted some more, about filling

a silver bowl with snow and hiding a heron in the moonlight.

I loved the language. It pointed to something that I, a lifelong

maker of phrases, couldn’t put into words. “Sentient beings

are numberless,” we chanted. “I vow to save them.” When it

was over, I walked out into the clear morning light. Something

nameless was alive inside me, a pool of pure water long hidden

in a covered well. I had time and I had space in a way I’d never

before known. I didn’t care that we chanted in languages that I

didn’t understand or that young men named Tommy and David

and Reb had shaved their heads and put on robes and now went

by Issan and Tensho and Tenshin. I wanted more.

*

*

*

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When next my mother came to stay with me in San Francisco, I

was living in a three-flat building I’d bought in the slums with a

loan from my father, not far from the city headquarters of San Fran-

cisco Zen Center, which owned Tassajara Hot Springs I shared it

with a roommate and my brother Michael, who was then work-

ing as an electrician and also practicing Zen. Before my mother’s

arrival, I vacuumed out a small utility room, tucked sheets and

blankets imperfectly around a single-bed mattress on the carpeted

floor, and set a tiger lily in a glass jar atop a fruit crate I’d taken

from the streets in Chinatown. On the bottom of the crate, I put a

book for her:
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,
by the late Suzuki-Roshi, who’d founded Tassajara and my new religious home.

She was among the first off the plane and smiling—wary,

pleased, and expectant. The plane had been oversold, and,

thanks to her perfect blonde chignon, silk scarf, and subtle

jewelry, she’d been bumped to first class. On the drive home

in my cluttered Toyota, she told me that sometimes the worst

things in life turn out to be the best things. Breast cancer had

led her to a support group run by a cancer doctor named Ber-

nie Siegel at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and that had led her to

yoga and opened her mind to meditation. I was thirty then, and

my mother was fifty-four. Eight years had passed since her two

mastectomies. I’d seen her scarred body soon after her surger-

ies—she’d once burst into my bedroom in Middletown, naked

and gesturing, “Look at me! Look at this!” The flesh over her

ribs was so thin that I could see her heart pulsing. But when she

was dressed, you’d never have known.

We pulled up at my building in the gentrifying and seamy

Western Addition, and she made all the right noises and thanked

me for the lily. Together that weekend we drove across the Golden

Gate Bridge to Green Gulch Farm, a pocket in the green coastal

hills of Marin County, and walked silently into Green Dragon Zen

Temple, housed in a renovated bull barn. There she sat for forty

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katy butler

minutes with her back straight and her legs folded up like mine

in half-lotus, facing the wall. Afterward, in a living room full of

bold abstract paintings, black meditation cushions, and couches

set at right angles, we listened to a shaven-headed American Zen

priest whose life energy seemed to radiate palpably yet invisibly

from every cell. Tears filled my mother’s eyes, her hands clasping

and unclasping. The priest was speaking about embracing this

instant, with its joys and pains, and he picked up his teacup with

a sense of the sacred that did not require a god. My mother whis-

pered, “I’ve been waiting to hear this all my life.”

We drove the four hours to Tassajara, down crowded Highway

101, past the lettuce fields of Salinas and the rich second homes

of Carmel Valley, past a dusty trailer park on the Cachagua Road,

past a scattering of houses in the settlement of Jamesburg, and

finally onto the fourteen-mile dirt road over Chews Ridge, famil-

iar to me by then. Down we went into Tassajara Canyon, trun-

dling our bags to a small redwood cabin with a tatami-mat floor

and two low futon mattresses. She was paying for me.

The Zen aesthetic accorded well with her exquisite minimal-

ism. Outside the zendo one evening she exclaimed (loudly enough

to disturb those meditating inside) over a bowl carved into a stone

block, fed by water trickling from a hollowed-out bamboo stem.

On a shelf in our room, a tiny glass vessel held a single bud.

We walked across an arched wooden bridge to an old stucco

building whose hot springs had warmed the joints of the Esselen

Indians and Victorian travelers who arrived by stagecoach, and

in the 1930s, Hollywood movie stars. I slipped into the commu-

nal hot pool on the female side, joining other quiet women. My

mother filled her own tub in a small private room: she was shy

about her missing breasts. When I was hot enough, I stood up

and made ready to head naked down the stony bank to an area

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of Tassajara Creek sheltered by sheets of rush matting, where

other pink and naked women lay, letting the cold waters wash

over them. My mother hesitated to join us, ambivalent, ashamed.

“You are not only doing this for yourself,” I said. “You are doing it

for all the women here today who will someday get breast cancer.”

She took my hand and together we walked into the water.

No matter how bitterly we fought after that day—and we

did—my mother was no longer only my mother to me. She was

my dharma sister and my spiritual companion. The next year,

when I took a leave from the
Chronicle
and worked in the Tas-

sajara kitchen all summer, she came again to visit. She took

black-and-white photographs of an elegant monk named Issan

Dorsey, who had once been a meth addict, a female imperson-

ator, and a prostitute.

My mother went home, printed and developed her photos of

Issan, and took up the Japanese practice of
sumi-e,
painting the
enso,
the highest and simplest form of Zen calligraphy, making

circle after bold, one-stroke circle, each a unique expression of

the state of mind and body of the artist and the circumstances

of its moment. From then on she would send one every Christ-

mas to my brothers and me, along with a check for three hun-

dred dollars and a note reading “love, Ma,” embellished with a

heart. I gave her books like the
I Ching
and
The Tao Te Ching.

When I was thirty-four, I wrapped myself in a white silk kimono

with sleeves, lined in red silk, so deep they nearly brushed the

ground. Around my waist I wound a cream raw silk obi my

mother had sewn me and pinned it closed with a borrowed topaz

brooch, a bowl of brimming yellow water, bought by my father