"The Gandhi of Sri Lanka" Comes to My House, Eats Lasagne

Last June I returned from a two-week trip to India with a small but clear-eyed dream: to begin opening up my Brooklyn home to anyone interested in arriving on my doorstep exactly as they were, wherever life happened to find them in the moment.

I've lived in New York City for twenty-two years and adore the pulse, the energy, the creativity and spark of this place. But all too often the very things that give this bustling metropolis its sizzle can--if left unchecked--lead to a feeling of chaos, overcommitment, weariness and general disconnect.

It can be easy to lose one's compass here. To find oneself separated from what I can only call one's Quiet Sense of Knowing.

So ever since last July, once a month beginning at 7 p.m., I unlock the front door of my family's Prospect Heights brownstone. And whoever's around and game to simply breathe for an hour, to share--from out of this extended silence--stories and observations connected to a wide manner of reflections, and to be fed a vegetarian dinner is welcome to walk through the door and have a seat in my living room. (Though different in some regards, these Brooklyn meditations are modeled in spirit and intent on the long-standing Wednesdays gatherings of my cherished California-based Charity Focus friends.) Dr. Ari with the KarmaTube crew: Birju Pandya, JD, Adam Mastrelli, Shephali Patel, Dr. Ariyaratne, Silas Hagerty

Each meeting holds its own texture, its special delights and surprises. And last Thursday evening offered these and more as some 35 attendees had the honor of being guided in meditation by Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, the Nobel Peace Prize nominee informally known as "the Gandhi of Sri Lanka." Dr. Ariyaratne is the founder of the Sarvodaya Foundation , a long-standing NGO that's worked with 15,000 Sri Lankan villages and directly impacted millions. He's the subject of a not-long-ago KarmaTube Video of the Week which to date has generated 2273 hits. And he's the custodian (because Dr. Ariyaratne would say we own nothing, including our own bodies!) of quite possibly the kindest face I've ever seen. He entered the house and hugged those to whom he was introduced as if they were a long-lost brother or sister. Threw out a high-pitched giggle in response to whatever struck him as funny. Never hesitated to take another's hand in his.

Once we were seated as a group, Dr. Ariyaratne started off by sharing a bit about his work and his beliefs. He spoke about clarity of mind as essential for any mass movement to succeed. (Sarvodaya has become one of Sri Lanka's most powerful and respected groups for its advocacy of a peaceful solution to the country's 25-year civil war.) About our need to recognize each moment as distinct from those coming before or following after, and the misery we bring to ourselves by insisting this not be so. About selfless service and meditation, and the inextricable connection between the two.

In due course we were invited, gently and with a sure hand, to sit up straight, close our eyes, and breathe...

Who came? A reporter for a Japanese television network who did a story on Dr. Ari many years ago and never forgot him. Mothers and fathers. Some who write books and some who like to read them. My husband, Curtis. A 60 Minutes correspondent. A gardener. KarmaTube's east coast coordinators. Madeleine and Delilah, my 12 and 9-year old daughters. A student. A teacher.

Many had never meditated before. All were open to receiving.

Afterward, we crowded into the kitchen and conversed between bites of roasted vegetable lasagne. When it was time, each attendee by turn danced away into the night, perhaps altered just a wee bit--if for the moment.

Delilah's Song: A Lost-and-Found September 11th Lullaby

This morning I discovered the words below. They were typed across a single sheet of paper, which had been stuck haphazardly into the pages of a book on a high shelf in my office.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It is thirteen days since September 11th, and tonight my two-and-a-half year old daughter and I lay curled atop her lightly-battered Ikea toddler bed and waited for her to fall asleep.

I idly reached under her pajama top to tickle her bare back.
Delilah fidgeted for a bit. Grew still.
And out of silence, slowly began to sing.

Though her song took the form of questions, she did not wait for me to answer. Indeed, it seemed barely to matter that I was even in the room.

Mom, what happens to your body when you have a baby?
What happened to the pilot?
What happens to your body, Mom?
Who's gonna clean up the mess?
What happened to the Twin Towers?
Where are the bats?
Who's gonna clean up the mess?
What happens to your body?

There was a period of silence. And then Delilah began again.

Happily ever after
Happily ever after
Happily ever after.

Culture Crash: Notes on a Tokyo Prom

Note: The following is a draft for a forthcoming collection of essays, to be published in May 2008 by Doubleday.

WHEN YOU'RE AN AMERICAN TEENAGER GROWING UP IN TOKYO, the notion of attending one's senior prom takes on a peculiar kind of complexity.

For one thing, I'd never lived in America. (It was from London that I'd moved to Tokyo in 1970 at the age of seven, accompanied by a younger brother, a rather unsure mother, and a father who--having just accepted a position with Gillette--was newly charged with selling razor blades to a country of men with a known dearth of facial hair.)

For another thing, I wasn't even American. (My parents were both born and raised in Winnipeg, a city my dad sometimes joked was "best seen from a rear-view mirror," and to which neither held any real expectation of returning.)

I was a kind of pretender to a throne I could barely see.

And my prom would not offer much in the way of help.



IN THE SPRING OF 1982--MY 12TH IN TOKYO--I was granted admission to a college in "the States" (as we fellow expat kids were in the habit of calling your country, with a hand through the hair and a certain lock-jawed casualness). Having expended much effort over the years in a wobbly search for my own Americanness, the hunt had now accelerated to a full gallop. Such was my determination to avoid becoming part of the small sad clump of kids before me who'd gotten caught staying too long at the Ball-that-is-Japan, made awkward stabs at a life in America, and humbly returned some months later, to toil in soba shops or teach English in some distant suburb, endlessly.

I wouldn't be that, I told myself in bed at night.

But how to fortify against this? Where, then, to find my future self?

Not within the din of 24 hour pachinko parlors located just blocks from my family's sprawling Roppongi apartment, nor in the maze of street signs and alleyways put together in a manner defying all human logic. Not in the sizzling, soy-sauce smell of yakitori stands, in the hot splash of public ofuros, or in the scores of crisp-shirted, black backpacked schoolchildren who over the years had run up to me and shouted, shortly before dissolving into fits of collective giggles, the very first formal English sentence learned by all: “This is a pen!”

Not in the expensively-packaged, beautifully-designed stationery neatly displayed along the shelves of Kiddyland toystore on Omotesando, purchased mostly by young, prim-faced secretaries. “I’m a cowboy kid since 1642,” read one of my favorites. “Every morning for ten minutes a grapefruit rain falls.”

Hints of that elusive something I was searching for weren't to be gleaned even among the fragmented and rather random grouping that comprised Tokyo’s gaijin community in the time I was there. Not in the handsome late-20’s German who sidled up to me and my New Zealander friend Nancy at a Mister Donuts one winter afternoon. As Nancy inhaled a cigarette and we both idly nibbled on French crullers, the German leaned forward and looked deeply into my eyes.

"Tell me," he implored, "Why is it that no one ever talks about how good it feels to take a shit?”

MY DANCE WITH MY OWN AMERICANNESS WOULD BE A BEST-GUESS KIND OF ENTERPRISE--begged, borrowed and stolen, as necessary.

And so it was that the Dear Abby columns in each day's Pacific Stars & Stripes were must- read. Saturday afternoons were organized around Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, airing over the Far East Network. “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reeeeeeachin’ for the stars!” Kasem would coo, while I'd close my eyes and scan the instructions for their secret meaning.

Then there were my Seventeen magazines, delivered three months late and via sea mail and scrutinized behind my closed bedroom door, to the drone of the elevated Shuto expressway just outside my window.

Jayne Modean and Phoebe Cates, sun-dolloped and smiling while emerging from the surf, the self-serious Q & A's on How to Kiss a Boy or Squeeze a Pimple and oh, all that product! The rubber-soled Famolare sandals, the Tom McCann boots, the crème blush that went on white and slowly turned pink on one’s cheeks: perhaps these were the things that might lay claim to my Americanness! Having spent an entire spring fawning over a 12 oz. bottle of Chantilly perfume in Seventeen's glossy pages, I purchased some at a corner drugstore in Winnipeg one summer--and hauled the whole jug with me to school each day come fall.

I was betwixt and between for most of my growing-up life.

“You’re meso-culture kids!” Lavinia Downs, the Dorothy-Hamill-haircutted school librarian announced to a cluster of us. “I plan to write a book about you someday.”

“You’re citizens of the world!” my own mother suggested hopefully.

And while remaining deeply ensconced in my own continuing conundrum, somewhere along the line I seem to have made a decision: to leverage my meso-cultureness for all it was worth. For lack of any other card to play, I’d inhabit the role of an American--as seen through Japanese eyes.

"Cute American Girls": me and my friend Gail Smith--one a Canadian, the other a Brit--posing at the request of, and along with, a Japanese stranger in Harajuku. May 1981

To assist the pop group Sister Sledge in the promotion of its new single, “All American Girls,” I squeezed into a pair of hot pants and white patent go-go boots and spent an entire Saturday evening dancing on stereo speakers to that single song, over and over again in a series of Shinjuku discos.

For a print ad in which I was to pocket a tidy sum of yen, my bangs and ponytail were so shellacked with hairspray that jumping up and down for four hours one Saturday afternoon--as I and a dozen other kids my age were made to do--failed to prompt either to stir. A few months later, there we all were, in the midst of a popular magazine called Hot Dog, with a caption above us trumpeting: “That’s American Workers!”


"That's American Workers!"

I began appearing regularly on NHK’s weekly "Let’s Enjoy English,” performing surreal skits with the dancing-eyed Australian who became my first boyfriend.



I donned a neon yellow leotard and somersaulted out of a giant apple for a television commercial touting a new department store. On being caught sneaking past a guard, ticketless, to attend a Stevie Wonder concert at Budokan, a friend and I improvised exuberantly. “We’re with the band!” we cried, and a short time later were ushered to orchestra seats.

And on and on it went. With a new pair of cowboy boots, an amusing answer for what I liked to eat for breakfast and the inability to sing or play a single musical note, I was selected to judge a large-scale event at Bukokan called “The World Popular Song Festival.” Thousands would be in attendance, and I’d be assessing the relative merits of Christopher Cross (“Sailing”), Rupert Holmes (“The Pina Colada Song”) and Mary McMcGregor (“Torn Between Two Lovers”), each valiantly attempting comebacks among some thirty lesser-known performers from around the globe.


Modeling hair dye, at sixteen

“YOU'RE LIVING IN A DREAM WORLD, KID,” MY DAD WOULD MUSE. And while my sundry extra-curricular endeavors were indeed a long way from his own teen days selling shoes in Winnipeg, Dad and I were both inhabiting the same planet. In a matter of months, upon his being transferred to America and my enrolling in college there, the chauffeurs and club privileges and twice-weekly maid visits and generous "standard of living allowance" providing by his various employers over the years would vanish.


"Captain Dynamints": my father and his staff, getting pumped up to sell candy. c. 1979

In the meantime, what could we do?

My mom took flower arranging classes and sumie lessons, played paddle tennis, wrestled with her own feelings of strandedness, and volunteered for TELL—the Tokyo English Life Life—a suicide hotline for ex-pats. She also met Jean Boardman, mother of John, a missionary and parent to five, and partner in a weekly weekly bible study group for fellow wives which they called "The Wednesday Wonderfuls.”

It was during a visit to our apartment on an afternoon I wasn't there that John had spotted a framed photo of me and gone on to orchestrate an introduction. At the time he was, as he put it, “taking a break” after a year at the University of Washington in Seattle. Did this secretly mean he was bound for the land of gaijin soba ladlers, I wondered?

But he was too handsome and older-seeming for me to frankly care. On our first date, filled with energy and nerves, I’d brought a glass of red wine to my lips--and promptly spilled most of it into the lap of my white Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. We both found this highly and illogically amusing and soon thereafter, fell in love.

John and I spent much of the spring dashing into random photo booths, endlessly kissing, and now and again endlessly kissing in random photo booths. All of which was heightened by my eminent departure to the lone college to which I'd applied: Sarah Lawrence. My dad, having transitioned over the years from marketing razorblades with Gillette to gargle and Dynamints with Warner Lambert, was now pushing shampoo for Helene Curtis--and in a promotion, would be simultaneously moving the family to Chicago.

NATURALLY THERE HAD BEEN OTHER BOYS AND OTHER SCHOOL DANCES. In addition to my Australian friend, these included Dean Sasaki, the short, socially-awkward, highly-pimpled math genius who in my freshman year had trailed me down a long hallway at school to extend an invite to the Homecoming dance some four months in advance; Jeff Grable, the star long-distance runner on whom I harbored a crush until the precise moment he started to like me back; and Mark Barns, whose easy presence I enjoyed and who subsequently announced both his gayness and a new career as a flight attendant for Quantas Airways within the span of a single month.

But the prospect of attending a senior prom with someone with whom I was actually besotted proved something else entirely. Easy and lovely and grin-making amidst the various layers of odd.

There was nothing in the Tokyo shops resembling a prom dress (everything was ruffled and size zero and looked like it belonged atop a wedding cake and cost a million yen), so I borrowed a tight black polyester number from my sophisticated friend Amy Koch, who was soon bound for Yale and for whom the prom—any prom—had long since outlived any usefulness to her.


The prom itself was held at the Tokyo Hilton, in the Pearl Ballroom. I was a “prom princess.” The theme for the evening was Journey’s “Open Arms.” On the menu was beef "poivre” (this latter word in quotes). The band consisted of a handful of our bearded high school teachers, who called themselves Ibid.

And I know this mainly because the details are listed on the prom program, which I still have.

From the Hilton, John and I and some friends piled into a taxi and drove toward the discos (Tsubaki Ball, Lexington Queen, Nepenthe) near my apartment in Roppongi, to which “cute American girls” such as me and many others had long been granted free passes. We drank drinks with names like Violet Fizz and watched our fellow Japanese club-goers dance soberly and frantically to their own reflections on the mirrored walls around them.

On our way out, our photo was snapped by an aging handlebar-mustached guy by the name of Bill Hersey, who wrote a column called “Partyline” for The Tokyo Weekender.

“In and Around the Big Mikan,” the caption under the picture read when it came out a few days later. Beside us was a picture of Sylvester Stallone, in town to promote “Rocky II,” inspecting the rock gardens at the Okura Hotel.

Dawn found me sitting on John's lap along the steps of the Singapore Embassy as together we watched the sun come up. While I went off to college, John would remain here--to model, to teach English and to figure out what next.

“Wait for me, Jen,” he whispered. “Just for a year.”

I kissed the tears off his eyelids and considered. I told John I'd wait.


A few days later and after a lifetime of longing, I’d moved to America--to this country I'd long viewed as an intense and faraway crush, a seductive near-stranger from a strange land whom I hoped would not turn away once we were finally introduced.

On my first day at Sarah Lawrence, I clomped into my Philosophy of Religion class wearing an outfit closely copied, to the best of my efforts, from the pages of Seventeen: Calvin Klein jeans zipped so tight I could barely walk in them, high-heeled Candies sandals with one-inch platform soles, a gold metal cinch belt resembling an uncoiled garter snake, snapped together at the ends and worn over a polyester blouson top.

And several pounds of of makeup. To my unspoiled 18 year-old skin, I’d applied a thickish coat of pancake makeup (Cover Girl) to go along with now-weighty black eyelashes (Maybelline) and purple-glossed lips (Bonne Belle Kissin’ Sticks, which I wore around my neck, on a rope). My hair was freshly washed (Lemon Up!), conditioned (Agree) and blow-dried, and I’d carefully twisted its fine strands ‘round a stingingly hot (Helene Curtis) curling iron to give myself two perfectly symmetrical “wings.”

With their unshaved legs and eyes lined with khol, my classmates quietly took note.


That fall and into the winter, I sneaked weekly calls to John with a credit card number handed to me by someone who’d stolen it from—or so I was told--the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. On those pale blue, light-as-tracing paper tri-fold international mailers, John would fill every inch with his compact, comfortingly familiar back-tilting script, writing at least once a day. (A stack of eight letters once lay in wait once, each spelling out, one letter per letter, I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U.)

My roommate—a slope-shouldered, sad-eyed, shorts-wearing, long-haired girl named Ellen from San Antonio, Texas, who on being introduced had casually shown me an invite from her own mother to a “house cooling party” to celebrate a third divorce—was in the habit of inviting her two best friends over to your prison cell of a shared dwelling in the evenings. And while together the trio sat snorting cocaine long past midnight, by turns reading “Dante’s Inferno” aloud to one another, I lay in my flannel nightgown under my covers, curled up in a semi-fetal position with my back to them all. “John Boardman, John Boardman, John Boardman,” I’d silently repeat.

Being wholly unused to tipping (never done in Japan) and never much good at math, it took several long seconds to calculate what 20% of anything ever was.

Ordering spontaneously at a deli proved a performance art I was similarly unschooled in, prompting both anxiety and a spate of secret in-line rehearsing. ("Turkey on rye with a slice of tomato and some slaw and hold the mayo!")

In Central Park one Saturday afternoon, I ran up to a man I took to be Japanese. Before I could stop myself, I threw my arms around his neck and explained that I’d grown up in Tokyo, that I missed that city very much.

The man froze and held up his right hand. “Ah, sorry--me Korean,” he replied hastily before turning away.

John flew to Chicago for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, shortly before nudging into the pew of a famed church on Michigan Avenue for carol-singing with my parents and siblings, we'd book a room at a Best Western for a single golden hour, and have sex for the first time.

And miracle of miracles, it was more than I’d even hoped. Better. For the next four days, until he returned to Tokyo, we surprised and delighted ourselves with how easy and fun and ecstatic, really, it felt to be together this way. Like we’d been at this thing forever! The watchful, uncertain gaze of my mother barely registered; John and I would kiss her on the cheek and gaily skip out the front door, then scurry giggling up the back stairwell of my family’s pre-war Near North Side apartment building and on a concise patch of gray cement floor next to a fire exit, do it.

In March, John called tearfully to Bronxville to blurt that he’d been sleeping with one of his English students, a woman who happened to be named Yoko. Just wait for me, Jen. Over a long and confusing period of months, John and I would part.

John and Yoko married, bore a son together on whom they bestowed a peculiarly British name and within a few years, divorced. John next wed a (as he explained her) "farmer from Thailand" named Apple and some years after that, the Russian hostess of a Shinjuku bar. He’d remain in Japan, working in customer service for a series of Tokyo hotels and later as a seller of sports equipment. If he was bothered by a continuing “meso-cultureness,” he didn’t let on. What he did share, in an email written many years later and in reference to the prom, was this: “That night heightened both my feelings of being deeply in love with you, and my sense of insecurity as a missionary kid dating ‘out of my league.’”

On graduating from Sarah Lawrence, I interviewed with a Japanese television network at Rockefeller Center, making full and unwitting use of—as I was informed by telephone the following week—“the language of gangsters.” (Having foregone the formal study of Japanese in favor of Spanish in high school, on my mother’s advice that the latter prove “more useful,” I now only now came to understand the true consequences of picking the language up on the street.)

I was hired by Nippon Television as an associate producer, contingent on enrolling in language classes at the Japan Society.

My new boss, the head of the network’s New York office, was a short, kindly, older gentleman with coke-bottle glasses and a thicket of white hair. His name was Sumii—Sumii-san, we called him—and he favored expensive double-breasted wool suits and throwing lavish cocktail parties at his airy apartment overlooking Lincoln Center to which the staff was frequently invited. At work, on being asked for guidance on a delicate matter, Sumii-san was likely to furrow his brow, stroke his chin thoughtfully, and declare in heavily-accented English: “Fortunately or unfortunately, I could not say.”

For nearly three years, as an associate producer and then as a the office's “creative coordinator,” I helped produce such must-see items as a documentary on cattle mutilation by UFOs, a musical event from the United Nations featuring a young Lenny Kravitz (then calling himself “Romeo Blue”) and Run DMC, and a special appearance with Mike Tyson and his wife-of-two-minutes, Robin Givens. I'd also regularly escort groups of visiting Japanese executives to television conventions in places like Las Vegas--where I was also responsible for choosing girlie shows for them, and me, to see at night. It was my job to laugh when laughter was expected and remain unfazed by offbeat demands. I'd opt to leave the network only on being asked, in 1989, help develop a live New Years Eve special from the South Street Seaport. The suggested theme? "Happy New Year, AIDS!"

The normal life as the exotic thing, I’d scrawled on a yellow post-it some weeks after having left Nippon Television. I’d tucked the post-it in my wallet and kept it there, as a kind of talisman.

While riding the F train to Rockefeller Center on the way to work that fall, I'd be struck by a dashing, high-cheekboned, tousle-haired man I’d first spotted mid-commute several months before, when a robust comment he’d made to a stranger had made me smile. He worked as a photo editor at Newsweek, he told me now, and was also an artist, and while sharing impassioned details of his latest project (something about collecting dead florescent tubes from subway yards, and donning Tyvex suits to trespass on hazardous waste sites in Queens), I wouldn’t quite understand him and would be secretly delighted by this. I’d surprise myself by falling in love with him, this man whom I’d instantly assumed to be the naughty type, the kind with whom I was certain I'd embark on a lively foray with a clearly marked expiration date.

After some years we married, and some years after that produced two intelligent, quirky, surprising and wholly individual daughters together. Eighteen years later, amidst the bruises and bleeding hangnails and now-and-again tedium of any long relationship, I still loved very much this man from the F train, this man who’d remained present even in those moments when every ounce in both of us wanted to flee, who still dipped me in public and made me belly laugh in bed at night, and who on rare and unexpected occasions still struck me as so handsome that I’d momentarily forget I was even hitched to the guy.

Eighteen years later, I’d manage to calculate tips quickly, think up orders at the local deli, refrain from jumping into the arms of unsuspecting Koreans, talk to my neighbors in a language we seemed to mutually agree upon, and feel quite certain I deserved to live in Brooklyn as much as anyone did.

Eighteen years later, I’d open my desktop drawer and discover that old wallet, and in it, the post-it. The normal life as the exotic thing.

I'd stare down at the post-it sitting in my lap and and know I was blessed.

While understanding full well that I’d always be longing for then.

What Lucy Wrought

Some wise person--was it Gertrude Stein or Ben Franklin, I wonder?--once remarked that "guests, like fish, start to smell after three days."

And with the exception of Lucy Rogers, I'm inclined to agree.

This past May, the lovely Lucy left her apartment in London's East End for an indeterminate stay at Chez Douglas/Cravens. Six weeks later we four folded up the hide-a-bed and stared around ourselves--newly unsure of how to behave in our own family room.

Even the dog continues to miss her. (As does the dog walker.)

Lucy left behind the following portraits--a noted departure from her highly regarded body of industrial landscapes. As with any portrait, what intrigues me most is what the artist sees: I rather relish looking a bit like a headmistress on the cusp of caning a wayward charge. And I love the dollop of Christopher Walken-as-maniac that Lucy has found in Curtis.

The portraits are just back from the framer's, and will be hung in the family room (I mean, Lucy's room) this weekend.

Gail's Gift: Lessons in Dying

I grew up in Tokyo, during which my friend Gail served as a kind of second mother to me. And afterwards, too. As an at-times-befuddled Canadian teenager in Japan with no idea how or where to apply to college in this country, Gail (having moved back here with her family some years before my own did) expertly guided me toward a school that proved a perfect fit: Sarah Lawrence. My undergraduate years saw my frequent arrival on her Scarsdale doorstep for impromptu sleepovers, meals extending late into the night, and vibrant conversations about politics, literature, the intricacies of love. Gail attended each of my various graduations. Gave the first toast at my wedding. Cuddled my daughters in their beginning weeks of life. Remained my champion, always.

While driving her car one morning near Vancouver this past May, my friend--69 years-old and in the eyes of her longtime husband, Leigh, "in the prime of her life in many ways"--suddenly and without warning lost all feeling in the right half of her body. Within a day she was diagnosed with an advanced malignant brain tumor.

Gail is now on the cusp of death. More likely weeks away than months away. The following is an account of my visit to Vancouver a few days ago--to be with Gail, Leigh, their grown sons Will and Mark, and Will's young family.

17 August 2007 (Friday): YESTERDAY, I ASKED LEIGH IF HE AND GAIL had discussed the fact that she's dying.

Only obliquely, he answered.

"Soon after her diagnosis, she turned to me and said, 'I hoped we'd have had more time together.'"

This morning over breakfast, Leigh and I parried over the definition of the word "suburb": he thinks he can rightly call Prospect Heights a suburb of New York City, and I think he's full of baloney. I can tell Leigh enjoys our little banter--"suburb" is not the first word we've arm-wrestled over. (There've also been "agitprop" and "coda.") "I've had Gail boss me around for 40 years," he says. "Someone needs to keep me on my toes."

The back-and-forth exhausts me a bit but mainly I'm happy simply being Leigh's pal.

After an early morning walk together followed by raisin bran and fresh blackberries picked from the spectacular golf course behind their backyard, Leigh has an appointment at a hospice that he's pondering transferring Gail to--and asks me to join him. It's across the street from the Palliative Care Unit of Vancouver General Hospital where Gail is now, and convenient to her many friends who like to visit. The downside? It's far less "homey" than the other hospice across town, a place called Village by the Sea or some other such thing, with fireplaces and porches and rocking chairs and unimpeded views of the Pacific.

On the elevator ride up to see the head nurse of this place, Leigh mentions Gail's longtime battle with M.S.--which she was diagnosed with just before the family's move to Tokyo, around 1976 I think.

"You know, her response to the M.S. diagnosis says a lot about Gail's character," Leigh offers.

"Tell me," I ask.

"Well, not once did she say she didn't want to go forward with the move. Instead she took the news in stride: calmly lining up experts in Japan to be in touch with," Leigh explains. "It's just wasn't that big a deal. Another woman in her situation wouldn't have done that."


LEIGH AND I MEET WITH ANNE, the curly-haired, middle-aged CNL ("Clinical Nurse Leader") of the hospice, who I assume is probably gay. I like her. She strikes me as a kind of compassionate straight-shooter. Patient with questions and thorough with answers, even though in all likelihood she walks through this routine a gazillion times a week.

I ask what about hospice care has drawn Anne to this corner of nursing; she says it's the privilege of caring for others in their final passage of life, that here is a place--unlike the OR--where "patients can be treated as people and not as 'parts.'"

The cost to Leigh would be $29 a day, which creates an immediate note-to-self to renew my Canadian passport. Between the beauty of Vancouver and the low cost of dying, perhaps Mister C and I will want to move here in our old age.

In certain ways, our hospice conversation seems entirely matter-of-fact. With the morning sun pouring through our window and across our laps, we three could easily be settling down for benign cups of tea. Save for Anne's casual observation that when people's bodies start shutting down, they often don't want to eat (and that withholding food from loved ones is a particular problem for the hospice's Chinese population). And Leigh's now-and-again grumpiness: he interrupts Anne more than once, and stares down miserably at the notes he's brought.

As the elevator descends, I ask Leigh what he thought of the place. "Well, it's very institutional," he mutters.

"And I sure wouldn't wanna marry Anne." He looks at me sideways and smiles.


WHEN WE ARRIVE at Gail's room on the 16th floor of the hospital, she's in the final stages of being washed up by her nurses. It's quite an ordeal: there's her catheter to be navigated around, a fresh gown to be put on, a pair of knees to be propped up, her body to be rolled over and pillows placed just so under head, and at her side.

As a seemingly-young and lovely nurse (who incredibly has a 21 year old son, who even more incredibly is suffering from terminal cancer himself) briskly makes up the bed, she says with good cheer: "Life is made to be lived!"

Gail is suspended by a pulley, about to deposited into a wheelchair.

"Oh, dear," she says.

I HOLD GAIL'S HAND and tell her I'd had the good fortune of meeting Will's kids on returning from dinner with Mark the night before: the lovely Hannah, age 8, and Mara, age 4.

"They danced around me in the kitchen, both entirely naked except for paper angel wings clad to their backs," I report. I tell Gail that I slept in Mara's bed (in a room she usually keeps with Hannah) and that Hannah proved the consummate roommate--that we both read late and peaceably into the night and that Hannah didn't snore.

Gail smiles brightly and her eyes tear up.

I'VE BEEN GIVEN THE JOB OF FEEDING GAIL her breakfast: a hard-boiled egg, oatmeal, toast with honey. While delivering a second spoonful of oatmeal to her mouth, I accidentally spill a small glob on her chest.

Gail shoots me a raised eyebrow. "Slob," she says, and smiles.


SOMETIMES IT FEELS AS IF ONE CAN VIRTUALLY SEE THE CANCER eating away at her brain: Gail gets a thought, but there's no longer any good space available to carry it through.

"I....really...do," she'll say.

Or: "Tell me..."

Or: "I need..."

In the afternoon, an expression of worry crosses Gail's face. "I'm looking for my..." she starts, and stops.

"Give me a hint," Leigh urges gently.

"I don't have...a hint," Gail replies with exasperation.

"Is it something to do with clothing?" Leigh asks.

No, Gail shakes her head.

"Your makeup bag?"

Again, no.

"It'll come back to you," I suggest.

"No, it won't," Leigh replies.


LEIGH GESTURES TO SOME PHOTOS tacked to a bulletin board over on the wall. They were taken after Gail's initial stroke in late May but before her first big seizure, after which things deteriorated quickly. in the pictures, she's wearing street clothes and is sitting in a wheelchair with lipstick on.

"Do you remember what that occasion was, Gail?" Leigh prompts.

"Um, yes?'" Gail replies uncertainly. One can almost see the contours of her mind searching, with so much difficulty, for the right words.

"Oh!" she cries. "That's when Leigh became Canada!"

We all smile.

"Those pictures were taken on the morning I became a Canadian citizen," confirms Leigh.


AMONG THE MANY THINGS I'M TOUCHED BY over the course of the day is how tender Leigh is with Gail. He kisses her on the lips often. Reaches under the covers to stroke her thigh. Rubs her bald head. Smooths and tucks in her sheets expertly, reads her items from the paper he thinks might amuse her. Calls her "Spunky." There remains an undeniable wink and spark between them, and it is their many years of marriage that have brought them to this place--an utter ease with one another, mostly in the absence of language. Which is just as well.


IN THE AFTERNOON, GAIL NAPS while I hold her hand. It's a relief to see her at peace, to not have to worry after her, to take in how beautiful and smooth and rosy her skin looks, to savor her features at ease. It's a relief to be alone and it's a relief to be able to cry.

Gail coughs and her eyes flutter open. I wonder if I should make an effort to quickly be "brave."

But the jig's up. Pretending now seems rather beside the point.

"I'm so lucky to know you," I say, locking my fingers tightly though hers. "And I'm going to miss you very much."

She nods. I lean awkwardly over the railing to hug her, put my nose into her neck. Gail wraps her good left arm around my head and strokes my shoulders. And there we stay.



GAIL'S BODY IS GRADUALLY SHUTTING DOWN. She sleeps for ever-longer periods during the day, the nurses have tried twice to draw blood from her veins and can't get any, her skin is always cool to the touch. Everything is just slowly ticking to a stop.


DURING AN AFTERNOON DRIVE THROUGH THE CITY, Leigh muses: "It'll be strange to be invited to dinner parties, knowing there might be another single woman there for me to meet."

I'm both surprised and strangely heartened to hear him thinking this way, at age 75. Gail has left an indelible imprint on everyone she's touched, and naturally the deepest of these imprints lies on the skin and in the heart of her husband.

And life will go on.


I'M REMINDED OF AN EMAIL EXCHANGE between Nipun and me last week, during which I'd told him that the Margaret Mead Film Festival wants me to present KarmaTube as part of a panel discussion exploring the intersect of documentary and the internet when the fest convenes in November. We'd talked about other things too, including steps that might be taken to grow KarmaTube from here.

"Whatever the universe wants," Nipun had written.

I'd smiled at the reference then. Typical Nipun. Uttered by someone else (and were he not so incredibly effective), these words might be instantly dismissed, rendered fodder for a New Age joke. Since they weren't, and he is, I'm now called to ask myself: what might the universe want now and here, on this cloudy afternoon in Vancouver? What might it want from me? I look at Gail and her family and all that they are going though, and sometimes I imagine that I can actually ride the mystery of all this.

And sometimes I feel I just can't.


BOUQUETS IN VARYING STAGES OF DECAY line the shelf by Gail's long, hospital-room window. Sunflowers, daisies, roses picked from Gail's mother's garden.


IN THE WAITING ROOM TODAY, LEIGH AND I TALK about September 11th and about how we have each come to understand the idea of God. We talk about grace and ritual, my June trip to India and the lousy bosses Leigh has had over the years. I use the word "explicate" in a sentence and Leigh tells me I've said it wrong.


LATER IN THE DAY, I ONCE AGAIN FIND MYSELF ALONE WITH GAIL who once again has just woken from another nap and whose eyes have once again filled up. I bring my face close to hers and whisper that we will always love her and always miss her. I pause. And then I say that when the time comes, she can let go and it'll be alright. That life will be different but that we'll all be okay.

Fresh tears spill down Gail's cheeks.

She nods. "Okay," she says.

I choose not to share with Leigh this exchange. It feels almost like a secret. And I confess to harboring a shade of guilt about what I've both said (to Gail) and not (to Leigh). Who am I to tell Gail it's okay to let go?

And yet.


EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE GAIL SPEAKS A SENTENCE with the same rapid-fire fluidity as before. Given the norm now, a simple, complete thought from her feels almost like magic--like a birdsong.

"What am I going to send your mother?" she asks in a rush this afternoon, as if she's forgotten something and now must hunt for it, in haste.

"Um," I ponder. "How about your love?"

"Always," she replies with a smile.


"WHEN DO YOU LEAVE?" Gail asks.

"In two days," I answer.

"Stupid me," she says, smiling. "How many times have I asked you that already?"

"A few," I say. "And you can keep asking." A pause. "Can you stand having me around for two more days?"

Another pause.

"I can't stand....NOT having you around," she says.

From his chair across the room, Leigh cracks: "Glad you got that out right."


WHEN GAIL FALLS ASLEEP AGAIN, Leigh announces that he wants to take me on another drive--to show me some things. We head over to the University of British Columbia campus and he points out the dorm where Gail lived during her first year of nursing school there.

"She wore a gray dress and black tights everyday," Leigh says of the uniform Gail was made to wear for hospital work.

"Sounds kinda sexy," I reply.

"She didn't think so," he says.

We park at the Museum of Anthropology, where Leigh takes me around to the back and points out huge totem poles created long ago by Native Canadian "bands" (as tribes are known in Canada, Leigh instructs). He snaps my photo standing in front of a few of of them.

On our return, Leigh stops at the Botanic Garden, parks the car and signals for me to get out. It's a lovely spot for which Gail volunteered much of her time in recent years, as part of FOG--"Friends of the Garden." (Gail's fellow volunteers now appear regularly to maintain her and Leigh's own immaculate garden.) Leigh walks me over to a large covered archway with a gorgeous view of the sea.

"This is where want to hold a celebration of Gail's life," Leigh says. It's a perfect choice, I reply.

"I'm glad you think so," Leigh says.


WE NEXT HEAD TO A LINEN STORE, where Leigh returns five sets of twin sheets he purchased for Gail when she came home a few weeks before. When neither of them yet knew that she'd only be back a matter of days. When Leigh rejoins me at the car, he reports that he wasn't able to get his money back, but did make an exchange. "They convinced me I needed a summer-weight down comforter, and I realized they were right," he says. "I've never had one of those before."


WE MAKE A PIT STOP AT THE HOUSE. Leigh takes me down to the basement, now used as a playroom for Hannah and Mara, and speaks in detail about the renovations he plans to start in on, and soon--to create a separate rental unit. He'll put in a kitchen, update a bathroom, create a bedroom out of space now being used as a storage unit.

Then he casually drops what feels to me like a rather small bomb. "I need to get this place in order for when I sell it next summer," he says.

"Wow, I say. "I didn't know you were thinking that way yet."

Leigh seems almost indignant. "Listen, I'm still young!" he sputters. "I have to move on with my life!"

He'll probably look to buy a small apartment in downtown Vancouver, he muses. And maybe also think about finding a place in Whistler, since he likes to ski.


I TAKE A NAP IN MARA'S LITTLE BED, SLEEPING DEEPLY, AND WHEN I WAKE UP Leigh says: "I've laid Gail's handbags on our bed. Go in and pick one or two that you'd like to have."

I enter their bedroom and the site of her various handbags--made of eelskin, of straw, a couple of worn leather shoulder bags, one or two small bags from Japan--spread out in careful rows clutches at me. So this is what happens when someone dies. A cleaning out.

I choose a straw purse and a bag with wooden handles, somewhat beat up but evocative. Leigh expresses surprise at my choices. "I wouldn't have picked those for you," he says. Then adds: "You can look through her clothing, too, though I doubt any of it would fit you."

I pause, unsure of how to feel or how to respond. So intimate! So personal! Is Gail really not coming back? She was indeed bigger than me, though not tremendously so. And I've always adored her sense of style, which Leigh proudly informs me she pulled off without ever spending much money.

Leigh says he'll invite each of Gail's friends to come over and take what they want, and pack the rest of her stuff up for Good Will. He seems matter-of-fact about the process, practical. The good, organized banker that he is.

AND SO IT IS THAT I MAKE MY WAY THROUGH GAIL'S TIDY dressing room, and carefully open its drawers. There are belts, scarves, a few things from Eileen Fisher, some items from the Gap. Lots of taupes, creams, beiges, olives. A few blacks. A small handful of intriguing pieces--a beautiful heavy kimono-type coat I've seen her in before, a linen jacket with asymmetrical sleeves. And I'm intrigued to realize that, for having long been a deep admirer of her creativity and flair, Leigh is absolutely right: but for a very few pieces that looked like they cost something, she doesn't seem to have spent much on clothing at all.

I pick out a couple of silk scarves--specially made in Kazakstan, Leigh tells me later--and a well-worn yukata. I like the idea of wearing the scarves under a winter coat, of having a flash of Gail's brightness and whimsy close to me when it's cold out.


BACK AT THE HOSPITAL THAT NIGHT, Leigh and I silently move to opposite ends of Gail's bed, and each pick up one of her feet, which we begin to knead away at with the lavender and "Madagasgar vanilla" lotion that Maddie and Delilah, my two dear daughters at home in New York, had helped me select at the Delaware County Fair not a week before, for this purpose alone. Gail seems to enjoy herself.


"I'm not going to die," she suddenly says, with force.

I smile, unsure how to respond. Later, Leigh suggests that perhaps it had been a metaphorical thing.


HOME FOR A LATE DINNER OF FISH TACOS, prepared expertly by Ursula, Will's steady and strong wife. Ursula, Will, Leigh and I eat together at the kitchen table overlooking the garden, and drink wine poured from a box in the fridge.

Later, a good long talk alone with Will.


18 August 2007 (Saturday): WHEN LEIGH AND I ARRIVE AT THE HOSPITAL THE NEXT MORNING, Gail is being hoisted from her bed into a wheelchair via the pulley from the ceiling. For the briefest of moments, the pulley hoists Gail out of the reach of one of the nurses.

"Where are you going, Gail?" the nurse laughs.

"I'm flying," answers Gail, rather quietly and seriously.


I REALIZE I'LL MISS THE THINGS ABOUT GAIL that no one else I know shares--the quirky things, like her habit of taking small, sharp in-breaths directly before speaking. The specific shape of her body. The curve of her shoulders. Her jowls. I appreciate that she never dyed her hair. That she looked like herself at every moment of her life.


IN THE END, ONE CAN GET USED TO ALMOST ANYTHING: the sight of a mother figure now in need of a diaper change, of Leigh carefully brushing Gail's teeth amidst a tongue that refuses to behave, of idly biting into a slice of hospital chocolate cake with one hand while directing a forkful of overcooked string beans with the other.

LEIGH AND GAIL AND I TAKE A FIELD TRIP DOWN TO THE HOSPITAL lobby so we can look at some art hanging on the walls, made by a person with whom they're both acquainted.

Afterward, Leigh stands in line to buy us lattes at the lobby cafe. As Gail and I wait a few yards away from him, I squat alongside her wheelchair. To be closer to her. Gail reaches out her working arm and pulls me in toward her, then begins stroking my hair and kissing the top of my head. My calves burn within moments, a wheelchair arm digs into my ribs, the wheelchair itself inches incrementally forward due to my precarious grip on us and on it. An unexpected gust of warm wind blows through the nearby set of open glass doors and tosses my hair about.

This is our moment.

AT 2 P.M., I HEAD DOWN TO THE LOBBY FOR A SANDWICH. I haven't eaten since breakfast--Leigh seems to be okay with picking food off Gail's hospital plate--and I need to be alone for a few minutes. En route, I accidentally exit at the wrong floor and promptly get lost. I cry my way past the burn unit and signs marked "critical care," though various long corridors marked with empty stretchers, until I finally find a bank of elevators which takes me to more familiar surroundings. I order an egg salad sandwich and, while facing a window looking out to a parking lot, pick at it. A gang of raucous young men enter the hospital in wheelchairs, cigarettes in their hands. My sandwich, which cost $6, is stale. I eat only the egg off the bread and throw the rest of my lunch away.

ANOTHER PIT STOP AT HOME. Not sure if it's the accumulated time I've spent here, or the realization that this is my final day, but I feel like I'm drowning in sadness.

I make my way to Gail and Leigh's small pool house, where I know I can talk and breathe freely I call Curtis and the girls. "Mom, I have a lot of compassion for you," Delilah says soberly. I sit back in the humidity of the space and give way to tears. Wild tears, for just a minute or two. I realize that when we next head back to the hospital, in just an hour or so, I'll need to say a final farewell to Gail. And I'm dreading it.

MADELEINE, GAIL'S SPRY AND VERY ALIVE 96 YEAR-OLD MOTHER, has arrived from Penticon--a five hour drive away. When we meet, she throws her arms around me and cries out, instantly, "You were Gail's daughter."

Madeleine hasn't seen Gail in several weeks. Over drinks in Leigh and Gail's garden--which we share with Madeleine's other daughter, Lynne, and Lynne's husband, Barry--Madeleine is full of worry and warmth and questions. "Gail's been my rock," Madeleine says quietly to me, the skin beneath her mouth twitching. "At the beginning I just couldn't believe she wouldn't be getting better."

I can't imagine what it must be like right now for her.


LEIGH AND I DRIVE MADELEINE TO THE HOSPITAL. I sit in the middle of the backseat, scooted up toward the front with my knees practically at my chin--like a child. Madeleine reaches back for my hand and I'm very happy to hold it.

When we enter Gail's room, it's almost more than I can bear. Madeleine goes directly to her bedside and takes her daughter in her arms. They both break into heavy sobs.

"I'm too old to take this," Madeleine cries.

Gail lets go her embrace and looks her mother squarely in the eyes. "No, you're not," she replies, clearly and slowly.

Madeleine holds Gail. I hold Madeleine. We're like dominoes.


My heart is in knots at the prospect of saying goodbye. I lean in closely and whisper, "Gail, I have to go now." Gail nods. She understands. Her forehead wrinkles up a bit.

A quote by Edith Sitwell comes to mind: "Love is not changed by death, and nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest."

Over the course of four days, I've had the opportunity to say everything I've needed to say. Amidst my sadness, I am grateful and empty.

"I'll see you sometime," I offer with a cocked head and a small smile, knowing full well that my words are completely inadequate to the task.

Knowing full well, as we both do, that it matters not a whit.

What Happens with What Happens to Us

Lately I’ve been thinking that it doesn’t much matter what happens to us over the course of our lives. What matters is what we do with happens to us.

Despite our best efforts to make it not be so, anything can happen. And anything usually does.

Maybe we’ll get the job we imagine we richly deserve, the work we know to be so right we can feel it in our backbones and in the afternoon rustle of the trees in our backyard.

And maybe we won’t.

Maybe we’ll live to be 102, and tell a fabulous, detailed, dirty joke on the eve of our dying day.

And maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll die young, for reasons that can’t be explained. Maybe we’ll win the lottery. Maybe we’ll score a Pulitzer Prize. Maybe we'll find ourselves on the cover of People Magazine. Maybe something tragic and untimely will happen to a child of ours.

And maybe it won’t.

Maybe all of this will happen. And maybe none of it will.

Knowing this, what interests me these days is a single question: how can I respond gracefully, moment to moment, to whatever it is that comes my way?

Other questions trail just slightly behind. How can I give myself over to the big "yes" of life, while understanding full well that I may never understand? That life might forever remain an awe-inspiring mystery? Can I move from the space of "yes" for the sheer lunacy of it?

And might heartbreak be viewed in another way entirely? As perhaps an opportunity to not only not cease up, but to do the opposite--to relax and become better acquainted with compassion, so that our hearts might be opened wider still?

Can I dare myself to do the unthinkable, to love at all costs?

My practice, always. And always so much to work with.

Voices of Tibet: "Arriving to Depart" in Bylakuppe

After completing ten days of interviews with Tibetan elders living in exile in India for an oral history project we've come to call Voices of Tibet, Tashi Chodron, Silas Hagerty and I climb into a car to begin the careening six-hour drive north that will return us to Bangalore from Bylakuppe.

On our way out of town, we pay a visit to The Karuna Home for the Disabled, outside of which, thumbtacked to a bulletin board, is the following message. It's entitled "Rites of Passage." The paper upon which it is printed is torn and weathered. No author is credited. And as I read, I can't help but think of the occupants of this place, the elders of Bylakuppe, me.

Given our unique space, context and notional truths, time comes and goes away. Its passage is marked by arrivals and departures of people, places and events. The observance of these rites of passage becomes important as all of us arrive to depart. The brook emerges from a hill to merge into a stream. Time flows into space and man dissolves into oblivion. There may be homogeneity in these processes as each assimilates the other to define its own uniqueness, and the end of one signals the beginning of the other. All of them are ephemeral in their own distinctive way. Therein lies their beauty. We die to be reborn; we go away only to return.

If need be, there's always the next life to figure stuff out.