by Susan Moon
I thought constantly of my father. As the days went by, I got a painful crick in my neck, and I didn’t sleep much in my armchair, but it was nothing to what my father had gone through—and he had still ended up blind. I felt him cheering me on, urging me to keep my head bent to the side in spite of the cramp in my neck, urging me not to lie down at night no matter how tired I was, urging me to do whatever I could to save my sight. I knew he didn’t want me to be blind. Sometimes, thinking of him, I pretended I was blind, and I felt my way around the house with my eyes closed. But the most ordinary activities were beyond me, like making a cup of tea, or putting on matching socks, or getting the toothpaste onto the toothbrush—all the things he had to learn to do over again when he went blind at age sixty. His courage in meeting his blindness was evident to me in a new way.
Each day the gas bubbles got smaller and I could see more of the rest of the world around them, and on the sixth day, they were gone. I drove myself to the doctor and she said that now I could uncrick my neck. All was well with my eye, and my retinal tear was healing. I’ve been able to see just fine since then, except in the dark, of course.
A couple of months after my retinal detachment, I was one of a group of writers and artists at a monthlong residency in the Adirondacks, in northern New York State. One November night a sudden blizzard enveloped us, accompanied by thunder and lightning and howling wind. “What about the chickens?” exclaimed one of the writers. “They’ll freeze!” Several people grabbed flashlights and set out into the storm, and I tagged along. We walked a couple of hundred yards up the road to the vegetable garden, to catch the chickens and put them back into the chicken coop for the night, so they wouldn’t perish in the unexpected snow. Some people shone the flashlights on the chickens, while others crawled on their bellies under the garden shed to catch the frightened birds. But I had neither a flashlight nor knees that allowed me to crouch down in the snow, and realizing I was useless, I started back to the house.
My feet could feel the smoothness of the road, and I could see the lights of the house through the trees. Every once in a while there was thunder and lightning. But after I’d been walking for a while, I noticed that the lights of the house weren’t getting any closer, and I realized that my feet had found a road, yes, but the wrong road, the road that branched off to the tennis court.
I knew the right road was just a short distance away, on the other side of a little rise, and so I struck out through the trees, aiming straight for the lights of the house. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away. The snow was deep and my sneakers and jeans were immediately soaked. Then all of a sudden the lights of the house went out. The power had failed in the storm. There was nothing to aim for and no path under my feet. The wind was blowing and the snow was falling. I called out as loud as I could, “Hello! Can anybody hear me? Hello!” but my voice was thrown away by the wind. I walked slowly in what I thought was the direction of the house, putting my hands out in front of me to keep from walking into a tree. I might as well have been blind.
Then the ground suddenly dropped away in front of me and I slipped down an embankment and landed in the snow, striking my knee on a rock on the way down. I sat there for a minute, taking stock. I was all right. I would be able to get up and walk some more, but which direction? How stupid I had been, not wanting to miss the adventure of the chickens, and how cold. No hat, no gloves, and worst of all no flashlight. I imagined myself stumbling in circles in the dark, disoriented by the howl of the storm, stumbling and falling. No one would know to look for me, because they would all assume I was back in my room, asleep in my bed. Even the chickens were probably safe in their coop by now. I could freeze to death during the night, a stone’s throw from the house.
I struggled to my feet, and just then there was another clap of thunder. The flash of lightning that followed showed me, just for an instant, the house, fifty yards away. Luckily I was facing the right direction to see it. And then it was gone again. I aimed through deep snow toward where it had been, testing each step before I put down my weight, and when I got a little closer I saw candlelight flickering in the windows. Having my retinas still attached made all the difference. I thought of my father, and I was grateful for the advances in ophthalmology that had come too late for him but not for me.
I remember when I saw my father blind for the first time. He was standing at the baggage claim in Boston’s Logan Airport. I had flown in from California to visit him. My father’s back was to me. He stood beside his wife, one arm through hers, the other holding a white cane. What got me was the way he held his head cocked, listening. It was the stance of a blind person, and I cried as I came up behind him. I had never seen my powerful and charismatic father standing like that before, waiting, just waiting.
During my visit, he kept asking anxiously what time it was, as if to orient himself in the days that now passed without any change in the length of the shadows. I went to the Boston Society for the Blind and bought him a Braille pocket watch—he had always used a pocket watch, fastened by a splice of rope to a belt loop. He cried when I gave it to him, and he kept it handy the rest of his life. After he died, his wife sent it to me. The white enamel of the face had been rubbed away by his thumb.
Leaving the Lotus Position
I SIT IN A CHAIR. Yes, of course, but I mean I sit zazen in a chair. Zazen is Zen meditation, and in English we call it sitting, just sitting. Meditating in a chair is a recent development for me, arising no doubt from a karmic web of causes and conditions, but the primary one is osteoarthritis in my knees.
Everybody knows that a Zen student truly dedicated to the way sits cross-legged on the floor. Buddha was sitting cross-legged when he was enlightened under the pipal tree twenty-five hundred years ago, and there are millions of Buddha statues to prove it—sitting cross-legged on altars and bookshelves all over the world. Several of them are in my house.
The image of Buddha in seated meditation is the essential icon of Buddhism. And eight hundred years ago, Master Dogen, founder of Soto Zen in Japan, instructed seekers of the way to “sit either in the full-lotus or half-lotus position.” These are ancient yogic asanas, sacred positions—they come with a warranty. Back in my limber days, I believed that I was bound to get enlightened if I just sat still long enough in half lotus on my black zafu (round meditation cushion). Now I see how unreasonable it would be if the cross-legged people were the only ones who got to cross over to the other shore.
These days sitting cross-legged causes me pain that is more than instructive. Everybody knows that not turning away from suffering is at the heart of Zen practice, and this includes not turning away from pain in the knees. Sesshins (long Zen meditation retreats) are an opportunity to learn to sit through pain. When there is pain in the knees, if I can see it as nothing other than pain in the knees, then I will be a happy person with pain in my knees. So I have been taught, during more than thirty years of Zen practice.
Some years ago, when I was still a floor sitter, a fellow practitioner had to move to a chair after knee surgery. (My anecdotal evidence suggests that a remarkably high proportion of Zen practitioners require knee surgery.) I asked how he liked it, and he said he missed his pain because now it was “harder to focus” during zazen. That threw me for a loop. I too have found that pain focuses the mind, but what does it focus the mind on? Pain! Is that useful?
Another friend had an epiphany in zazen. He was hurting, but he promised himself he wouldn’t move before the end of the period, no matter what. The pain got worse and worse, and he just stayed still and stuck to his wall-gazing, and a few minutes before the end of the period, the whole universe opened and he saw that everything was everything. “No pain no gain,” he explained, when he described the experience to me later. That never happened to me, though.
A teacher once told me, “If you avoid pain now, what will you do down the line when you are old and sick and have pain you can’t avoid? Don’t you want to learn to live with it?” I’ve deci
ded to cross that bridge when I come to it. I figure there’s enough pain coming my way anyway, why should I take on extra?
I have learned some things about pain through my sitting practice. If I move to adjust my posture prematurely, the pain will chase me wherever I go, but if I just sit still when the pain starts, it often goes away, or recedes into the background. That kind of pain is like a child who wants attention and gets bored if you don’t respond. This anti-fidgeting training also has useful applications to secular life beyond the zendo, to the concert hall for example, or the business meeting, or the MRI gurney.
I have also learned that there comes a point in zazen when the pain is so intense that I know it’s not going to ebb away—it just gets worse, until I am raging against it and against a spiritual practice that would ask this of me. Pain is, after all, an early warning system devised by evolution to prevent us from injuring ourselves. The reason it hurts when you touch the hot stove is so that you don’t burn the skin off your hand.
Pain is an important aspect of ritual in various religious traditions: the penitentes beat their backs bloody during Holy Week; some pilgrims climb up stone steps on swollen knees to sacred shrines; Native Americans on vision quests stand still and naked in the sun’s burning heat. But these are special rites of passage, not everyday practices.
I have come to the point of diminishing returns as far as sitting cross-legged goes. When I started practicing Zen, I was thirty-two and sat in a half-lotus position with manageable discomfort. My legs hurt in sesshin, but I knew this was part of the bargain. Now in my sixties I have arthritis in my knees. I can sit cross-legged for a little while if I make elaborate arrangements with several extra support cushions propping me up, but after about fifteen minutes the pain begins in earnest anyway. When I consulted an orthopedist last year about the trouble I was having with my knees, I mentioned that I do Zen meditation and he scolded me for sitting cross-legged. I now have doctor’s orders to sit in a chair. I could have asked him for a note for my teacher, but I didn’t need to, because these days, fortunately, all the Zen teachers I know have become tolerant of chair-sitting. It’s allowed, even though it’s not exactly de rigueur. The harsh taskmaster within is the one who still gives me trouble.
So it was a turning point when I swallowed my pride and sat my first sesshin in a chair. There were several other chair-sitters, and I was grateful not to be alone at this higher elevation, not to have my lone head sticking up like a sore thumb in the thin air above the clouds. Lo and behold, this was the first sesshin in years in which I wasn’t fighting myself—Why the hell am I doing this? I settled down. It was the first sesshin in which I didn’t once pray for the bell to hurry up and ring for the end of the period. I was able to be here now—or rather, at this writing, to be there then.
I praise the chair as a spiritual aid. A chair is a tool for sitting in, a gift invented and produced by human beings for human beings. This body knows how to sit in a chair. There’s a lovely geometry to a person in a chair, with the legs, seat, and back of the living body parallel to the legs, seat, and back of the chair, in a double zigzag, expressing the rightness of right angles.
Sometimes I miss being down on the floor—it feels good to be grounded, to get down. So I remind myself: if I am sitting on a chair and the chair is on the floor, then I am sitting on the floor. Besides, it’s important to be able to get up again when the bell rings. There are two parts of Zen practice: sitting down and getting up, and for me, getting up from the floor takes too much time away from the next activity. I don’t want to miss my chance to use the bathroom before the next period of zazen.
In a recent sesshin at a traditional Zen practice center, my second in a chair, I was the only chair-sitter, even though I wasn’t the oldest person. This gave me pause. Was I the only one because I was the person with the least amount of cartilage in my knees, or because I was the wimpiest person, or the person who cared the least what others thought of me? I realized, sitting there in my chair, that it didn’t matter. The only real question was and always is: am I making my best effort? If I am making my best effort while sitting in a chair, then I am sitting perfectly.
There are plenty of challenges to chair-sitting, so don’t worry that it’s too easy—you can still be miserable. The five hindrances of lust, sloth, ill will, restlessness, and doubt assault me in a chair as easily as they did when I sat on the floor. Pain visits me, too, on occasion, sharp and hot between the shoulder blades, but I know it’s not injuring me, and it doesn’t stay.
Sitting in a chair, I feel gratitude for the practice. I enjoy sitting upright. I enjoy my breathing. I am not guarding against the onset of pain and I am not fighting with myself for being a sissy. I am not making bargains with myself the whole time, such as: ten more breaths and then I will allow myself to move. I check my posture: I feel my feet firmly planted on the floor, I feel the uprightness of my spine, I feel my sitting bones on the seat of the chair. I am close to the others in the room; whether they are on the floor or in chairs, we are practicing together, held by the same silence.
What’s next? Perhaps I’ll go on to hammock practice, or sitting zazen in a chaise longue, poolside. I’ll let you know how that goes when I get there.
The Breathing Tube
On a Sunday afternoon in late September, my eighty-four-year-old mother, Alice, went out for a drive with an elderly man she jokingly called her “boyfriend,” who took her places after she gave up driving. Going north on Chicago’s Outer Drive, they came over a rise and crashed into a stalled car in the middle of the road.
THE FIRST WEEK
MY MOTHER’S SWOLLEN HANDS stayed where they lay by her sides when I leaned down to kiss her at the hospital. Her breath smelled rotten. Worst of all was the breathing tube they had plunged down her throat, a thing I knew she never wanted. It looked huge, this blue plastic pipe that snaked out of a machine and into her perpetually forced-open mouth. She couldn’t speak because of it, but she looked at me with her open eye and blinked in greeting. The other eye, the droopy-lidded one, was now, inexplicably, all the way shut. Her blue-and-white hospital nightgown had slipped off one shoulder, exposing part of her breast, as if she had been running away and her pursuer had been pulling at her clothes. I pulled it up and tucked it back around her shoulder.
Dr. M. talked with me and my three siblings—all of us having flown in from far away—in the corridor of the ICU. Red-haired, forty-something, he spoke in an uninflected voice as if to bring calm to a situation that wasn’t calm at all. It was he who had taken out our mother’s ruptured spleen when she arrived in the ambulance. He said that when she came into the emergency room, she had been not only conscious but irritable, and we took this to be a good sign. He explained that she had broken some ribs, fractured her collarbone and a bone in her neck, and badly bruised one lung. He said that if she were young and healthy she’d be able to recover from everything easily, but because of her age and the fact that her lungs were already compromised by emphysema, she had a struggle ahead.
Her friend, the driver, had been shaken but not seriously injured, and was released from the hospital wearing a neck brace.
“We’re aiming to wean her off the ventilator as soon as we can,” said Dr. M., “but her bruised lung will have to do some healing first.”
It was clear to us she wanted to be unhooked. Her wrists were tethered to the bed rails to keep her from pulling out the breathing tube, but she kept raising an agitated hand in the direction of her mouth. A plastic clamp was wrapped around her face to hold the tube in place; it was tight across her upper lip, below her nose, and the pink flesh of her lip swelled out beneath it like a bubble. Whether she was awake or asleep, she always had one eye open and one eye closed, as if in simultaneous commitment to the dream world and the world of the ICU. She was heavily sedated, but when the nurse told her to wiggle her toes, she wiggled her toes.
We stood around the bed and sang, afraid to stop. We didn’t know what to do if we weren’t singi
ng. We sang the songs our father used to sing, when we were children. All the songs seemed to be about death, but my mother wasn’t paying attention to the words. Her heart rate slowed as we sang: “You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.”
“Would you like me to rub your feet?” I asked when the song was over.
She nodded and I took one foot in both hands and stroked the smooth skin on the top, feeling my way along the bones to her toes. I could tell by the way she gave me the weight of her foot that it she liked it. I knew the look of her feet, of course, with their perfectly graduated toes, but I had never formed the thought: My mother has beautiful feet. Nor had I ever rubbed her feet before. My mother had had to put herself in the ICU to get me to come as close to her as she had always wanted.
My mother had written a living will, stating that she didn’t wish life support to be continued if she was stuck in a comatose state, and she had sent us copies years before. A few days after the accident, we found another paper in her apartment—an undated note in our mother’s handwriting saying, “Do NOT put a tube down my throat to keep me alive.” The pressure of the pen had a commanding tone; I could hear my mother’s voice. Upset, we showed the note to Dr. M.
“This is different,” he said. “She was in a car accident—it’s not as if we’re keeping her alive in a vegetative state. I understand your concern, but she’s getting better!”
“How long can a person be on a ventilator?” we asked.
“You don’t want to go much more than two weeks,” he said. “At that point we would recommend a tracheotomy if the patient still needs breathing support. But I don’t foresee that happening in your mother’s case. I hope to wean her off the ventilator in a few days.”