Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (20 page)

decades earlier in London. My husband-to-be and I knelt on the

floor of the converted bull barn as a priest named Yvonne told

us to “give up your small selves and take refuge in each other.”

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 121

1/31/13 12:27 PM

122

katy butler

My mother was in the front row, wearing a flowing dark red silk

aoi dai
she’d sewn herself. “I take refuge in the Buddha as the

perfect teacher,” I recited as she and my father watched. “I take

refuge in the
sangha
as the perfect life.” In one of our wedding photographs, my new husband and I run smiling through the

dark carrying flowers, caught in the flash with our heads bowed,

through a hail of thrown rice to the old black family Mercedes

his parents had given us. Our hair is shiny, our skin unlined, our

faces confident. My mother is spotlighted in the darkness in the

background, and her tiny beautiful face holds the infinite sad-

ness of a woman who knows marriage and its small deaths and

quiet disappointments.

The AIDS epidemic hit, and people I loved were plunged into

a medieval world of death before which medicine was power-

less. Issan Dorsey, one of the Zen priests whom my mother

photographed at Tassajara, founded in the Castro District of

San Francisco a hospice he called Maitri, the Sanskrit word for

kindness. I’d left the
Chronicle
by then, and I interviewed him for the
New Yorker
’s “Talk of the Town” section. As he patched

his old summer meditation robe, he gave me a lesson on dying

that went right over my head. “Half of the people in this com-

munity are going to die within the next five years,” he said. “It’s

just our daily life. It’s nothing to get out of or wish wasn’t hap-

pening—it’s happening.

“More and more certainly I know I’m going to die. I know

people who are taking courses in the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

but think it’s too late for a crash course in dying. This is your

preparation for dying.” He put down the robe he was sew-

ing. “Right now. Just to live your life more completely in each

moment. The way I get ready for my death is by sewing these

things and talking to you.”

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 122

1/31/13 12:27 PM

knocking on heaven’s door

123

Issan died of AIDS two years later, while I was trying to avoid

another kind of death, the death of my marriage, by studying the

Mahayana Buddhist sutras in a monastery in southern France

with the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Alongside Viet-

namese war-refugee nuns who knew in their bones what the

words meant, I chanted every morning, “I am of the nature to

grow old. There is nothing I can do to escape growing old. I am

of the nature to die. There is nothing I can do to escape death.”

In the end, we chanted, we would lose everything and everyone

precious to us. “My actions are my only true belongings,” went

the last lines. “ I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.

My actions are the ground upon which I stand.”

From France I sent my mother a photograph of me smiling in

a conical straw Vietnamese hat, and a watercolor I’d painted of

a bursting orange flower, with this message:
Taking the first step

of the day, I enter the wondrous realm of reality.
She pinned them on her bulletin board and never took them down. After I came

back to America, quit my newspaper job, and separated from

my husband, she listened to me cry for hours on the phone, as

wrenchingly as any widow. For my next birthday, she bought me,

and herself, subscriptions to
Tricycle, the Buddhist Quarterly,

and later she read the essays I wrote for it.

I was touched and surprised by her interest in Buddhism

but more impressed with my own. I was the one who’d medi-

tated at dawn in a cold stone barn for months at a time, avowed

my ancient twisted karma in a black robe on the night of the

full moon, studied the great master Dogen, and been given the

dharma name “True Lotus.” I was the one who’d read the
Flower

Garland Sutra
and the
Ratnakuta Sutra
and meditated on my body falling apart and becoming a rotting corpse.

Buddhism did not make my mother an easy woman, any

more than it made me an easy woman. She struggled till the

day she died with what Twelve-Steppers call character defects,

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 123

1/31/13 12:27 PM

124

katy butler

Buddhists call
samyojanas,
or internal knots, and she called her besetting sins. But after my father’s stroke, it would be she, not

I, who lived her Buddhism.

I rounded a ridge, and the peak of Mount Tamalpais revealed

herself, rising. I remembered the Indian devotional poet Mira-

bai, who sang, “I worship the mountain energy night and day.”

I missed my mother. I wanted the pain in my heart to leave

me. I wish I could tell you that my heart went out to her in

her suffering or that I thought about the price she was paying

for caring for my father. That I rose above myself, understood

her unremitting stress, transcended being a needy and resentful

daughter, and forgave her. I wish I could say that I remembered

the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth: that suffering is caused by

wishing that things (and people) were different or trying with

equal vehemence to stop things from changing in an evanescent

world, likened by poets to a drop of dew. But thirty years of

self-help groups and therapy and off-and-on Buddhist practice

had done only so much for me. I still sometimes reacted like a

five-year-old left in the street by a dominant and overwhelmed

young mother. I was preoccupied with my own pain.

The trail switchbacked, taking me down deeper. An hour after

noon, I stopped at a thick wooden memorial bench just above

Muir Woods, in a grove of old-growth redwoods that the log-

gers left behind. There I sat, following my breath, watching my

thoughts and feelings rise and fall, robed in silence and filtered

brown light. The natural world restored my soul. It soothed me

like a mother. I laid my burdens down before it the way I’d seen

Christians at a Taizé ceremony rest their heads upon the cross.

I thought of how my mother had suffered at the hands of
her

equally critical and perfectionist mother, Agatha, who liked to

say, “If there’s a wrong way to do something, Val, you’ll find it.”

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 124

1/31/13 12:27 PM

knocking on heaven’s door

125

I thought of Agatha’s childhood as a neglected little girl, tend-

ing a mother constantly felled by migraines, or “sick headaches,”

as they were called then. I thought of the neglected child my

mother had been, with badly matched parents who didn’t speak

to each other for days at a time, a little girl so lonely that she

fantasized being found drowned like Ophelia by her parents, who

would weep over her body and finally, openly, show how much

they loved her. I thought of her as a newlywed, who saw her

accurate and naturalistic watercolors of exotic fish published in a

landmark book,
The Sea Fishes of Southern Africa,
when she still had hopes of becoming an artist—until she discovered she’d accidentally become pregnant with me. How far back did it stretch,

our lineage of maternal deprivation, artistic frustration, and sor-

row? My female ancestors were like the orphaned lab monkeys in

Harry Harlow’s experiments, raised on cold, wire monkey-moth-

ers, who grew up incapable of intuitively mothering their own.

I grew up in England after the Second World War, when

the British psychoanalyst and attachment researcher John

Bowlby, fascinated by the psychological effects on British chil-

dren who’d been separated from their families to escape the

Blitz, was studying interactions between children like me and

mothers like mine. One day, two of Bowlby’s successors, the

researchers Mary Main and Judith Solomon, watched a little

girl enter a room where her emotionally unreliable mother sat in

a chair. The little girl resolved her fear and ambivalent longing

by walking toward her mother backward. I had done the same.

Away from her, I missed her. Next to her, I wanted to flee.

A few weeks after I came down from the mountain, I got an

envelope from my mother containing some newspaper clippings

she thought might interest me, and a note. She acknowledged

that I’d come east without seeing them. I called her. Neither of

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 125

1/31/13 12:27 PM

126

katy butler

us said I’m sorry, or I love you, or I forgive you. It was a standoff:

we just went on. But in the years that followed, she would never

again shout at me or criticize how I ate. She would be more

tolerant. She would repeatedly tell me how much my father had

loved me, and how proud of me he had been. She would, at

my request, check with me before making a major medical or

financial decision. She even wrote me checks so that I could

hire a bookkeeper and free up my weekends to compensate for

the time I spent helping her. She sent me a calligraphy reading,

“Strive for imperfection.”

My father had never stopped writing me, and he soon sent

another letter, this one containing an oblique reference to the

fact that he would someday die and leave me. “All of our affec-

tion goes toward you so you must cherish it,” he wrote. “Think

of it often because it will sustain you.” He signed it, “your Death

Father.”

My mother went back on Remeron, bought herself a self-

help book on patience, and returned to her old comfort, Bud-

dhist meditation. She reread a book I’d given her years earlier:

Full Catastrophe Living,
by Jon Kabat-Zinn. In it, Zinn described a Western form of mindfulness meditation stripped of bells,

robes, and Asian religiosity. He’d introduced it to people suf-

fering from chronic pain at a hospital in gritty Worcester, Mas-

sachusetts, and many had found some relief. It was a paradox:

facing and accepting the present moment, however painful,

could make things feel less painful. My brother Jonathan called

it accepting life on life’s terms.

My mother rose alone each morning at 5:30. For the next

hour and three quarters, she was free. She slipped a Kabat-

Zinn disk called
Body Scan
into the CD player I’d given her, lay down on an old, padded, cotton, sleeping bag by the living room

window, and followed his voice, mentally sweeping her body

from top to toe, releasing her diaphragm, noting each sensation,

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 126

1/31/13 12:27 PM

knocking on heaven’s door

127

breath, mood, and thought without judgment. When the CD

was finished, she did an hour’s worth of yoga. Then she went

upstairs, got my father up, and began yet another day—a day

whose stresses increased with each stage of my father’s decline.

She wrote in her journal that she found herself more patient,

responding rather than reacting. She felt she could face what-

ever came her way.

For the Christmas of 2005, a little more than a year after our

blowup, I came home. It was four years since the stroke, and

my father was now eighty-two: quieter, more easily fatigued and

confused, and more unsteady on his feet. He was still exercising

at the pool, but Toni often drove him there. The second upstairs

bathroom had been renovated since my last visit: my mother

had brought in a construction crew and replaced the tub with a

walk-in handicapped shower.

I took my father with me one evening to steal a frond of dry

bamboo from the Japanese garden behind Wesleyan’s Asian Arts

Center—the kind of petty larceny that my mother and I loved

to indulge in, and that had once sent him into paroxysms of

embarrassment. We brought it home in the darkness, and my

father hung up his own coat: my mother had finally moved the

hook down to where he could reach it. We strung the bamboo

stalk with shiny Christmas globes and tiny lights.

My mother roasted a duck for Christmas dinner, and we

invited over one of my parents’ friends, a dying architect named

T.J., who’d designed the vestibule added onto my parents’ house.

His wife had died a month earlier of breast cancer at home

under hospice care. T.J. had congestive heart failure, and the

African woman caring for him drove his station wagon through

our backyard, across a snowy slope in the darkness, to get him

as close as possible to my parents’ sliding glass back door. My

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 127

1/31/13 12:27 PM

128

katy butler

mother and I stood on either side of him as a light snow fell, and

we helped him in.

Even though Brian and I usually gave holiday dinners for his

sons and his old friends, Christmas had not meant much to me

for a long time. When I was in my twenties and broke, my par-

ents had never offered to pay my flight east. When I’d worked for