Polly was a determined woman. It was almost impossible to say no to her. In the end, I couldn’t. I went to the retreat, and she was right, it did change my life. I ate big bowls of hot oats on brisk mountain-cold mornings, showered communally with women in the warm midday sun, sat for hours in the deep peace of the adobe meditation hall. I slept in a rustic cabin with three other women, who told me after the retreat was over that I had cried in my sleep every night.
I’d inhaled that deep silence and the Buddhist dharma like a starving child. The very atmosphere was suffused with a kindness I hadn’t known I’d needed so profoundly. I went back to Connecticut incandescent, touched with light in places scarred by my rigid religious past, my son’s death, my abusive girlhood.
And I continued my practice by “sitting” many more retreats—at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts; Cambridge Insight Meditation Center; Gaia House near Totnes, in Devon, England; at a boy scout camp in Hawaii; I did a seven-day training for health professionals with Jon Kabat-Zin and Saki Santorelli and sat with Thich Nhat Hanh at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. I’ve done years of yoga training, extensive reading on Buddhism, and further education in mindfulness practice and psychotherapy.
Now, I could not imagine life without all of that.
I sat cross-legged on a cushion most days, as I had been taught, paying careful attention to what transpired in my mind as I breathed in, breathed out. Joseph and Sharon had instructed us in how to “note” our thoughts—fantasy, desire, planning, aversion, remembering, restlessness, greed, doubt, clinging, grasping, dwelling. The idea was, in short, that real awareness of what was in our minds would lead to wisdom, helping us to relinquish our attachments and thus lessen our suffering. All in life was imperfect and incomplete, because our world was subject to impermanence. Happy moments pass by, as do sad ones, as will we.
A more lofty aspiration, enlightenment, achieved by long and devoted practice, a far-off goal that I never even contemplated, was the nirvana of no-self. “Aim for the North Star,” the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh had once said, and I’d thought that was enough for me right now.
But my mind was full of clinging and dwelling, fantasy and desire, aversion and memory. I wanted Geoff back, and couldn’t stop hanging on to how much; I was furious at his death, its complete unfairness, and the terrible disruption in my life it had caused. I fantasized constantly about his fall, falling with him, about his dying alone in the night. I imagined him crying out in fear and anguish for me and his father, for his friends, to save him, feeling continual torment that I hadn’t been able to. I’d tried to open to these thoughts, acknowledge them, and then let go, over and over again, teaching my mind to carve new neuronal pathways. It was hard going. It still is.
But after being at Touchstone all these months, I began to notice that my thoughts had shifted. Now my mind was full of the girls, their faces, their stories, their traumas, their voices. Geoff continued to be a visitor, but not the constant presence he had been. My mind was possessed by a new object.
I had fallen in love with a group of young women society labeled “delinquent.”
“How old are you, Sharon?” Mayra wanted to know toward the end of our next meeting.
All the girls had been able to come this afternoon, a few weeks after Tiffany had joined. We were meeting in the dorm basement now, and the regular space was helping with the group’s stability. There were fifteen minutes before our time was up; not enough to write another piece, but time to talk.
“I’m fifty-seven.”
“Do you have kids?” Brisa asked.
“Yes, I do. One son living, and one who died.”
Their questions poured out. “How do you feel? How did it happen? Did you save his clothes? Keep his room?” They wanted me to tell them if he had he been a virgin, had a girlfriend, a baby. Was he on drugs? Was he shot? What had I put into his casket with him? What was his funeral song? Would I sing it?
We’d had “Blowin’ in the Wind” played at his funeral, I told them. Music that sang of no answers. The only Bob Dylan they’d heard of was from the movie Forrest Gump.
The staff member there today was getting concerned. “Do you want to talk about this?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. “It’s okay, really. It’s not a problem.” Brisa’s face was riveted on me. They were all rapt.
“Here’s what happened,” I said. “He was twenty-one, on his junior year abroad in college, living and studying in Rome. It was the night before his last exam, and he went out to dinner with a friend and then to a pub afterwards. But he didn’t stay at the pub, he got up and left and never came back, without telling his friend where he was going. The friend stayed there drinking beer with an American girl. We think Geoff—that’s my son’s name—was having an asthma attack and went to look for the backpack he’d left at the restaurant they’d been at. His inhaler was in it.”
They all nodded. Many of them had asthma and knew what an inhaler was.
“So what happened was that he fell off a very high wall along the Tiber River—fifty feet high. No one saw him, it was late at night. We think he’d been heading back to the dorm, or maybe to his apartment, and just couldn’t go on because of the wheezing, stopped to lie down or sit on the wall, and then he fell, somehow. He had a branch in his hand, he must have grabbed it knowing he was falling.” This is the place I can never get beyond in the telling without tears. “The police found him the next morning.”
“Aww, Sharon.” Kaylee, who hadn’t left yet despite her avowals that she’d be gone when I returned the following week, came up and put her arm around me.
“Don’t you wish you had a daughter?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” I said. “I do. But now I have all of you.”
They laughed and smiled. “How do you stand it?” someone else asked.
“I’m like you,” I said. “I try to work at getting past the hard place, the place that hurts and keeps me stuck—but there’s a place in me, a hole, what had been there gone forever. I’ll never be the same again.” I could see Brisa nodding in understanding. Maybe she’d read to us next week.
“And I write, a lot, and it really helps, and that’s why I want you to write too. We all have important stories to tell. And now it’s time to go for today. Thanks for asking about Geoff, and for caring. You can ask me anything, anytime.”
They looked solemn as they lined up for transition. There was none of the usual pushing and jostling and complaining. I’d told that story so many times, but somehow this time was different. It had felt like they’d really wanted to know about Geoff in a way others usually did not. Most people asked to be polite, out of curiosity, or because it was the right thing to do. Sometimes they backed away, looked down, or changed the subject. They dreaded the emotion that might come up in me, or themselves.
But, as I gave the answers to the girls’ questions, I sensed bridges of shared pain building between us. It was almost like all we’d lost was in the room with us, aching and breathing, a big beating pulse of abuse and betrayals, deaths and assorted other wounds, a presence we had to honor in a new way, with each other.
Maybe, I thought, maybe I’m not so alone. Maybe Geoff has led me here, to these strong, beautiful, real young women, to comfort me, to steer me away from my grief over his absence and push me into the hearts of others.
On the ride home that thought kept coming up—as it would for years.
It upset everyone in my families that I couldn’t be happier at this time of year. Geoff’s birthday was December 1, and that began the