Chapter 3
A New Life
Now I was in fact a single parent, responsible for supporting Alec and Dan financially and emotionally while dealing somehow with the shock of Dave’s suicide. I continued as Kobun’s student. This provided stability and support, but my primary focuses became being sure Alec and Dan were okay and finding a job with enough income to support us. I didn’t have time to grieve, let alone to deal with the guilt I felt over not saving Dave. In hindsight, I was overwhelmed by his suicide. I couldn’t process it. It would take many years to work through the grief and anger generated by our divorce and his death.
The impacts on Alec and Dan were also complex, though different. As Dave’s alcoholism worsened over the years, Alec oriented his life more outside the home. Dave had not been unkind to Alec, but to my distress, he had not been a nurturing stepfather and never legally adopted him as I had hoped. Dave’s final abdication of filial responsibility must have underscored the disappointment I feared Alec experienced as he was growing up. His year of attending Alateen gave him some perspective about how little family members can do about alcoholism, so from high school onward he focused on his studies and his life outside the family. As a freshman in college 400 miles away, he devoted himself to his education. I supported him from afar as best I could, seeing that he had what he needed materially and encouraging him in his schoolwork and friendships. Summers he lived at home and worked as a lifeguard, and I could then support him more directly then. I worried that I didn’t do more to help him deal with Dave’s suicide, but he seemed to manage his life pretty well. In four years he graduated first in his college class and received a fellowship to study at Oxford University in England. For him, too, it would take years to work through the conflicting emotions our family experience created for each of us.
The first summer after Dave’s death, I did arrange for both Alec and Dan to see a child psychologist so they could process their emotions. After a few sessions (which I was not allowed to attend), the therapist reported that she felt they had worked through their initial emotions and could discontinue therapy. Perhaps because I did not want to interfere with their process, I never initiated any discussion about concerns they had about my responsibility in Dave’s death. That might have helped all three of us. I was dimly aware that I wasn’t doing as much as was needed, but I didn’t know how to address our grieving as a family directly.
Dan, fourteen and the “only child” now that Alec had returned to college, suffered more deeply. He was attached to his father and being still quite young was strongly impacted emotionally. Not only did he have to absorb the bewildering tragedy of the suicide, but also because now I had to work full time, I was no longer at home after school to nurture him. However, I had a brainstorm. I contacted the Big Brothers and Sisters organization and engaged a volunteer, Bob, a systems engineer, who became Dan’s Big Brother for three years. He took Dan on frequent camping trips to California’s national and regional parks, teaching him many outdoor skills. They also rebuilt our old VW Bug’s engine. This project gave Dan the initial skills to become a talented mechanic during high school and college and later to own and manage a car repair and tire business in Colorado. Dan benefited greatly from Bob’s guidance and big-hearted moral support. He eased Dan’s way through his teenage years and thereby greatly helped me in parenting.
During these years when the boys were in high school and college, I worked full time, moving strategically from job to job to develop a satisfying and well-paid career as a management and organization development specialist. All three of us were intently pursuing our interests, so there seemed little time to review or integrate the emotional calamity of Dave’s death. I regret that I didn’t help the boys more to process their feelings. Instead I supported each of them in pursuing their interests. In this way, I acted more as a father, the parent who bridges the child to the world, than a mother, who provides a loving refuge.
During this time at Haiku Zendo I joined the sangha board of directors and worked on the capital campaign Kobun had initiated to acquire a larger center. Over two years we raised almost three hundred thousand dollars but fell short of the amount needed to buy the Japanese-style mountain house we wanted. Eventually we used the money to purchase both a retreat center in the Santa Cruz Mountains (Jikoji) and a city center in Mountain View (Kannon-do). In the midst of this expansion, Kobun suddenly announced he no longer wanted to lead our sangha. Instead, he would become a traveling teacher. We were shocked. He assured us we were quite capable of practicing on our own. I remember puzzling over what that might mean for me. I knew only the traditions of sangha life and following the teacher. I was just learning how to develop a new career and be a single parent. How could I, who had come to depend on Kobun, take full charge of my Zen practice as well?
There was much consternation and discussion among Kobun’s students. A few refused to let him go and followed him to his new locations, first in Santa Cruz and later in Taos, New Mexico. I owed Kobun a profound debt of gratitude for his kindness to me. I knew the Buddhist tradition was to do as the teacher asks. After weighing the sorrow I felt at losing him against all he had done for me, I decided I must do as he asked. I must let him go. Now I was more on my own than ever. The next years were ones of intense personal, spiritual, and professional development for me as well as for my children. As it turned out, Zen practice and the opportunities it offered to understand my life supported me well as I went forth in the world.
When Kobun was still at Haiku Zendo and I was sitting zazen daily at home, my life had gradually stabilized. I began to feel stronger and calmer. I had found refuge. Daily zazen instilled in me the determination, discipline, and courage needed to face life’s challenges. Among them was the legacy of negative emotions from my adolescence onward—guilt, fear, shame, anger, resentment, loneliness. Zen practice would slowly heal me.
Six or seven years into practicing Zen, however, I still doubted that I was doing zazen correctly. This uncertainty probably expressed the deep lack of self-confidence I had learned in adolescence. Also, though I read voraciously in Zen and Buddhism, I began to realize I did not clearly understand the teachings. They were so different from Western culture’s logical, dualistic perspective. At the zendo I memorized and chanted the Heart Sutra, the mainstay of Zen practice, but I didn’t understand much of it: “Form is emptiness, Emptiness form.” What does emptiness mean? How could form and emptiness be interchangeable?
I sat zazen in half lotus for forty-minute periods, but I couldn’t tell if my disorganized mental activity meant I was letting go of thoughts or I was just agitated. I deeply loved zazen and bowing and being silent with others, but I couldn’t articulate what I experienced in zazen or why. It seemed dreamlike—the quiet zendo, the incense and bells, the bowing. Even as I was devoted to zazen, I still doubted myself. I did not understand it at the time, but I had begun to enter the unconscious mind of broader awareness that zazen offers. Zazen had begun to guide me.
One evening sitting zazen, I had the powerful insight that my spiritual understanding would be slow to develop. Observing how quickly a sangha friend was progressing along the path toward priest ordination, I recognized my practice was halting and hesitant, despite my devotion to it. I visualized myself sitting zazen on a pile of rocks—stolid, enduring, but slow to advance. This insight called to mind an image that had struck me a few years earlier. In a Zen study group we learned about “skillful means,” the ability of the Buddha to teach even the most deluded person. Kobun told us such people were called icchantika, a Sanskrit term from which the English word enchanted was derived. Icchantikas were beings who greatly desired enlightenment but were considered incapable of it. They were enchanted or benighted (though the Buddha could teach them). The word icchantika reverberated through me. Yes, that was my condition. For an assignment to write an autobiographical poem in a class I was taking