Our Long Marvelous Dying by Anna DeForest

Author:Anna DeForest [DEFOREST, ANNA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2024-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

Samsara

There is one white monastic at the place upstate. He talks more than any of the other monks. At dharma sharing, that father is still trying to find his answers before he takes his family home. They come all the way from Philadelphia for these weekends. They receive private counsel from a senior nun. What does she say, I ask, but then the bell rings, and after the silence the father does not tell me. I am suspicious of myself around him, of what I want to know. We sit in a circle and take turns asking questions. People ask about sitting or about breath, but the grieving father just asks again: What is the purpose of life? And the white monastic says, If I may. He tells a story about a hopeless monk who could not become enlightened, and the Buddha offers him, like, a white rag or something—the white monastic litters his speech with gentle colloquialism, suggesting constantly that he be taken with grains of salt, a nod to humility to excuse perhaps his constant acts of speech—and a king comes by on a horse, and one or the other of them wipes his face on the rag, which becomes, of course, white no longer, and this, while not provoking enlightenment at this exact moment, is helpful in a general sense overall.

I wonder if the white monastic knows the man has a dead son. After he tells me how it happened, he tells me he is afraid all of the time, most of all when he sees a rope: I see the rope and I am afraid. I wonder where he is seeing rope so often or if he kept the rope in question, keeps it someplace where he sees it often. Memento mori. I imagine his confusion and horror on entering the scene. I will complete his mission, the father says. I will find the purpose of life. The white monastic’s story had the gestures of wisdom, anyway. Maybe I am also a little sour that Brother Emptiness was, for so long, a banker. At the last monastery I visited, the Episcopal one farther up the river, I had also been disappointed by the brothers’ apparently shameless unseriousness, the catty way they spoke about the neighbors up the road with their garish and lingering Christmas lights. Here at least they have uniforms, soft brown pants and tunic tops, tan knit hats warming their shaved heads on the contemplative walks they take in the woods each day before lunch.

Were you kidding, I ask Sister Empathy. About the bears?

Eli has many friends. It must be the case that while he is away from home, he spends hours with them on the phone or in other places in the margins of our lives; he finds time to maintain friendships while I do not. One of these friends, while I am in fellowship, dies from a cancer that grew in his brain, glioblastoma multiforme. He had only a headache, some trouble with his eyes.

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