In England, depression took root in me, spread through my limbs, blackened my blood, and dragged me down. I was mystified by it. How come? Wasn’t I in the swing of things now, having a great time?
The English air pierced through my woolen jacket, even in May. We passed through turnstiles, fences, gates, and farms. The river to my left ran over rocks and wound through the countryside, like in a Corot painting. Small trees, hazy with new leaves, were shadowed by dead, dark-black oaks. It was law, even written in the Magna Carta, that people should be able to walk through private property, passing through gates and fields. Occasionally we passed a couple, or a group of jolly older people, fit and healthy.
It was lambing season. All along the trail in the pastures, scruffy sheep were birthing lambs, small enough to tuck in a daypack. As we passed by three large stones, following a curve — behold! A tiny black lamb, just popped out, stood on our path, stunned, motionless. That soft vulnerability, that tentative melting transparent presence stopped me dead, sliced through my heavy heart. My depression crumbled in the presence of such radiance.
The next morning, depression flooded me again. But this time I didn’t bludgeon myself and wrestle with it, grab and manufacture every painful memory I could. I let it all be — and, like a mist, by late morning it dissolved.
The next morning the same thing. I’d known this from Zen. Don’t solidify. Don’t feed your thoughts. Allow all and everything to pass through. I had to discover it all over again.
The last day, we took a leap and rented a car — the steering wheel on the right, us driving on the left, English style. On narrow country roads, everything shifted to opposites. As we barreled out of the hotel that early morning, my instincts kicked in. I was careening merrily down the right — but now wrong — side of the road, staring at the green fields and stone walls. All at once a big silver Mercedes came at us. I honked the horn, indignant. Get on the left. Then, in a flash, Get over, Nat. The Mercedes slowed enough that I saw the gaping mouths of the couple inside, their disbelief at my arrogance. They probably surmised: Americans.
We were off to Haworth, an hour away, to visit the parsonage and home of the Brontë sisters. Three members of the family had died early, their mother from cancer and two sisters from typhus. Their minister father buried the three in the family vault at the parsonage. The remaining daughters consoled themselves with writing, often with their brother, creating wild fantasies, sometimes carried to the verge of insanity. But eventually the three sisters matured and settled around an oak dining room table, each working diligently on a story. After dinner they’d walk around the table, commenting on each other’s work. The sisters had little formal education except writing, writing, writing together at that table. These stories in the end became Emily’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. World-famous novels. Their creative lives flourished in each other’s company, close to the untamed land that was such an inspiration for them.
Yu-kwan and I stood a long time gazing into the dining room at that table. I’d spent my whole life teaching writing practice, encouraging people in small groups to do timed writing. It felt as though these young women sitting at this table after dinner — since they were five years old till their deaths, always writing — invented writing practice. And here was the original table where it all began in the early eighteen hundreds. I was mesmerized.
Afterward, we hiked the moors, miles behind the house, to the waterfalls where the sisters often went.
All the directional signs on the moor were in English and Japanese. The Japanese study the Brontë sisters in school and come to this island country on the other side of the planet to pay homage.
A group of thirty secondary students, visiting from Paris, chaperones in tow, was hiking ahead of us. At the crossing in the creek they stopped for lunch. We caught up and sat on the other side. When they left, we watched two young students linger and make out with all the power of first passion.
After the French students left, we were alone on the literary heath. We took the steeper climb to windswept Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse, which was where Emily placed the Earnshaw family house in Wuthering Heights — then, farther on, to the rock where Cathy and Heathcliffe met.
The Brontë sisters’ beloved brother, Branwell, died suddenly at thirty-one, a year after his sisters’ novels were published under pseudonyms. Soon after, Emily and Anne contracted tuberculosis. Emily never left the parsonage again, dying in December 1848 at age thirty.
Anne, anxious to try a sea cure, set out with Charlotte for Scarborough several months after Emily’s death, where she died four days later at the age of twenty-nine. To spare her father the anguish of another family funeral, Charlotte had her sister buried by the sea and then returned to Haworth alone.
Charlotte lived to publish two more novels. She married her father’s curate and, less than a year later, died at thirty-eight in the early stages of pregnancy. Outliving his wife and all of his children, Patrick Brontë died at the age of eighty-four.
I asked around. The local Haworth public schools did not read their famous authors, the Brontë sisters. The same in Ireland: I was told students there did not read James Joyce. It was an old story. We don’t recognize the greatness in front of us. We all long for another story, another place.
I was sixty-seven years old. That’s a lot more years than the Brontës lived. Sixty-seven is a long time. How lucky I was.
24.
THAT NIGHT, I sat in a window seat overlooking a valley. Yu-kwan was lying in bed, reading a book. I asked her, “Did you think you were going to die when you had cancer?”
She drew her head out of the pages. Until this moment, we hadn’t dared talk about it, even though it hovered around us all the time. “I wanted to last as long as I could. I worried so. There was a point — you didn’t know it — but we almost lost you. When there was a chance the CLL was morphing into something else. I’ve only prayed three times in my life, and that was one of them.”
“Really?” I gulped, tried to take it in. I almost died? Sure, I knew it but repressed it as soon as I could.
“Where would you have wanted your ashes?” I asked. “I never even asked — I assume you want a cremation.”
Yu-kwan sat up in bed. “For sure. But if I’m dead and only ashes, who cares where they go?”
“I care. I can’t decide where I’d want my ashes though. Maybe near Katagiri Roshi’s zendo on the bluffs of the Mississippi. Some of his are there. You can have friends take them different places. You can designate it in your will, even leave money for their travel. I thought of some at the Artist’s Cemetery in Woodstock, near Milton Avery’s grave; some out at the tip of Long Island, where Jackson Pollock is buried. It’s an awfully pretty place, and Betty Friedan and Hannah Wilke are there too —”
“Who’s Hannah Wilke?” Yu-kwan was alert now. “I want my ashes next to yours.”
“She’s the feminist who sculpted clay vaginas. Then there’s the Jewish cemetery up in Taos — or at Upaya Zen Center, if they start having a burial ground. A little with my family at the Hebrew cemetery in Elmont, near Belmont racetrack.”
“You’ve got a lot of places.”
“Maybe Paris, Yosemite — it’s hard to choose one. Fuck it, I don’t want to die.”
“You’ll exhaust your friends.” We start to laugh.
What we did talk a lot about during the cancer was our wills. Someone slighted us — we took them out; someone left a roast chicken at the door and we put them in. At one point the mailman left three great letters in one day. I was ready to leave all of my assets to the U.S. Postal Service.
Yu-kwan, who loved noodles but couldn’t eat them anymore — too many carbs — declared that the noodle place, where she often ate, on the East Side of Manhattan would get her estate. They could feed the homeless.
Then we wondered: Would there be anything left? Neither
of us was working. The cancer twins might go out starving.
25.
IT IS AUGUST 13. Kids in Abiquiú, New Mexico, are going back to school today. I feel sad for these kids, already tucked back into desks in rows. They should have a full dose of summer, of verdant shadows, the play of night crickets, bare feet, shorts, striped T-shirts, lake water against skin, hours of boredom, using a stick to draw in the dirt. Is this all a fantasy of a summer long gone? I don’t care. Everyone should taste no ambition, no goal, the big sky, and the dark cliffs.
I have often driven out alone this summer from Santa Fe, fifty minutes away, to swim in Abiquiu Lake. I come out here by myself to dive into this water near the Pedernal, the flat-top flint mountain that Georgia O’Keeffe repeatedly painted in the forties — her ashes on top — its wide flanks spreading to the east like a great embrace. I am supposed to be working on a book, but the Rio Chama is dammed into a blue lake in the desert against pink cliffs, and I can’t stay away. Summer is water — and swimming.
I had the privilege — I only understand that now — of spending many Julys and Augusts at the beach on Long Island, where I rode the forever-crashing waves, clinging to my father’s bare shoulders. This summer, after my year of cancer, I want more than ever to be by water.
Now I am driving back home, windows rolled down, in the late afternoon in my wet bathing suit. I swing into the Bode’s parking lot, the only store in the area. It was here even when Georgia was, back in the forties, when the local young called her Miss O’Keeffe. It’s a combination grocery and café, selling fishing equipment, souvenir cards, sunhats, sunscreen. Out front, piled high, is a huge supply of twenty-five-pound bags of sunflower seeds, which people lug home to feed wild birds.
At the back of the parking lot, near large shady cottonwoods, is a tiny shack, painted white with a sign: MR. FROSTY’S MALTS, SHAKES, CONES. And a banner hung from two poles: DREYER’S ICE CREAM. I like that brand. I shouldn’t have it on my cancer diet crosses my mind for the slightest moment. I step up to the window, the only person there, and order one scoop of butter pecan and one of coffee, in a cup. I pay my $4.50 — a fair price if you’ve eaten at those gourmet gelato places.
I sit down with my white plastic spoon and dig in. It’s just the right chill and consistency, so it won’t melt before I’m done — and I won’t be done for a while.
I take small mouthfuls; I want this to last. The butter pecan, a lighter beige, shot through with nuts, balances atop the darker beige of the coffee scoop. Proust and his madeleine have nothing on me. His cookie coalesces the past, but this ice cream lands me in the exquisite present. Where else would I want to be?
In this moment, I use the truth of death to my advantage, as leverage, an edge into this delicious present. How many more? Only this one spoonful at a time into my mouth, this best wet summer in forty years in this Land of Enchantment.
The coffee shocks my tongue after the less directed flavor of butter pecan. I am ready for it. No regrets. I down every morsel.
No worry about calories. This is my one heavenly life. This afternoon. This Thursday. This sun on the pale dirt and the cottonwood green leaves. This blue mesa in the distance, this gutsy temporary life lived as the Buddha taught — with gusto.
AFTERWORD
OF ALL THE painters I love, Pierre Bonnard is my secret favorite, the one I catch out of the corner of my eye, acknowledge again and again.
You cannot stamp his work into memory. Instead, his paintings move through you in waves. Color on color on color. I have seen this same sentiment expressed in interviews with other painters. When asked about their influences, they name a few. Then the interviewer mentions Bonnard. Oh yes, yes, of course him.
A few weeks after he finally married Marthe, his longtime muse, Renée Monchaty, his live model and mistress, committed suicide. For years afterward he painted Marthe in the bath, often in a deep tub of water. Though the paintings are beautiful, they also look haunted, like someone reclining in a sarcophagus. His late interiors give an initial impression of domestic contentment, but looked at carefully, they suggest disquiet, a lack of presence, an emotional absence of human fulfillment. Bonnard was silently grieving through the medium of paint.
I do not visit Bonnard’s grave. But twice — once in Paris and once at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco — I viewed the last piece he painted, a week before his death in 1947. Almond Tree in Blossom. Full of light. The tree in white takes over most of the canvas, and it feels as though it were about to ascend. It almost glitters.
When Japanese Zen masters approach death, they write a last poem to reveal their mind at the final moment. In this final painting, Bonnard does something similar, displays his lightening heart. Before the great question — How is it to live with eternity at your door? — Bonnard answers: In full bloom.
MEDITATION ON METTA
THIS IS the Loving-Kindness Chant (version by Maylie Scott) that I recited on the pier in the first chapter.
May I be well, loving, and peaceful.
May all beings be well, loving, and peaceful.
May I be at ease in my body, feeling the ground beneath my seat and feet, letting my back be long and straight, enjoying breath as it rises and falls and rises.
May I know and be intimate with body-mind, whatever its feeling or mood, calm or agitated, tired or energetic, irritated or friendly.
Breathing in and out, in and out, aware, moment by moment, of the risings and passings.
May I be attentive and gentle toward my own discomfort and suffering.
May I be attentive and grateful for my own joy and well-being.
May I move toward others freely and with openness.
May I receive others with sympathy and understanding.
May I move toward the suffering of others with peaceful and attentive confidence.
May I recall the Bodhisattva of Compassion, her one thousand hands, her instant readiness for action. Each hand with an eye in it, the instinctive knowing what to do.
May I continually cultivate the ground of peace for myself and others and persist, mindful and dedicated to this work, independent of results.
May I know that my peace and the world’s peace are not separate; that our peace in the world is a result of our work for justice.
May all beings be well, happy, and peaceful.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Susan Voorhees, who brought dinner every Tuesday night for more than a year; Upaya Zen Center, whose members fed me and were generally available while I had cancer; Jane Steinberg, who dropped off little boxes of perfectly planned macrobiotic meals; Rob Strell and Gary McAfee, who brought a whole dressed turkey for Thanksgiving, fresh from the oven with all the fixings, in the trunk of their car from Albuquerque; and Rob, who left at my door a perfect basket of spring apricots from his tree. Thank you to Mirabai Starr for her lamb stew; cousin Elizabeth Jacobson for the fat, hot roast chickens she delivered often; Onde Chymes for her special oxtail soup; Mary Feidt for her pie and Eddie Lewis for delivering it and for accompanying me to a biopsy and being a general support; Kitchen Angels for delivering meals; Katie Arnold, who insisted I walk, even if just down the road, and brought me smoothies she made with Maisy, her four-year-old; Mark Little and David Gardner for the brownies and the last-minute delivery of Mexican dinners; Rob Wilder for chicken and home-cooked pinto beans; Miriam Sagan for the organic squash dish; Joan Baker for hiring Bonnie Lynch to make homemade quick-frozen chicken soups; Bonnie Paul — I’ll never forget the barbecued ribs; Susan York for her lemon tart. I know some of this sounds like a gourmet feast, but fourteen months is a lot of meals, and food is always important. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
A special thanks to Wendy Johnson, Susana Guillaume, and Annie Lewis for their personal care and support throughout; my sister Romi Goldberg for her support over the phone and the gift she sent; Joan Halifax, who visited me almost every
day and always had my back; Genzan Quennell, who hooked up my computer to read test results at UNM; Carol Soutor, who stayed on top of medical research while at the same time tending to her dying sister, Ruth Albrecht Soutor; Dr. Erica Elliott, who e-mailed me encouragement every single morning of my illness; Ann Filemyr for going with me to the first oncologist appointment at UNM; Michele Huff for coming to the oncologist with me on several last-minute occasions; Sean Murphy and Tania Casselle, who gave me a perfect sixty-seventh birthday party in Taos; Joan Sutherland for our long talks and the ceremonial matcha tea with accoutrements.
Deep thank-yous also to Dr. Mark Renneker, Patti Stillwell, Julia Cameron, Bill Addison, Jacqueline West, Lib O’Brien, Ruth Zaporah, Mark and Iris Keltz, Asha Greer, Seth Friedman, Caroline Albin, Vicki Buckingham, Geneen Roth and Matt Weinstein, Lorraine Ciancio, Jean Leyshon, Carol Reisen, Patrick Flanagan.
Special thanks to the acupuncturists Sandy Canzone and Sharada Hall.
Thank you to Marise Maixner for discussing endlessly the preface with me.
My darling students Dorotea Mendoza, Pam Gustafson, Bonnie Sarmiento, Armely Matas, Ryder Finnegan, Justine Kaltenbach, Sharyn Dimmick, Kevin Moul, Sarah Rauch, Carolyn Antonio, and many more: your support really helped.
Special thanks to Saundra Goldman and Sonja Lillvik for teaching the France retreat.
Thank you to David MacDonald, who put me in touch with Zhan Zhou, who helped me mightily with Chinese translations.
Thank you to Mabel Dodge Luhan House, where I wrote an early draft, and to Barbara Zaring and Stephen Rose, in whose house one December I read the final draft.
Thank you, Stella Reed, for typing the crazy-quilt handwritten manuscript with great skill and intelligence.