Caravan of No Despair

by Mirabai Starr

  As Jeff was kneeling on the dock that day at Hanalei Bay and a southerly swell crashed against the pilings and lifted Jenny’s ashes from his hands, a couple of young guys were leaning over the railing around fifty feet behind us, pointing to the shore break and calculating surfing conditions.

  “What a world,” Jeff said later. “Two people who lost their daughter scattering her ashes in the sea, and two surfers talking about waves.” Grateful that, for a moment, I was not alone in my status as an alien, I smiled. “I wonder if they had any idea,” he mused. “But why would they? Why should they?”

  They should because a child died, and we were her parents, and the sky should open for people like us and light our path forevermore.

  It’s easy to speculate about who Jenny would have turned into if she had lived. Our family used to do that with Matty. Every few years we would wonder aloud what he would be doing now: at eighteen, at thirty, at fifty-five. Maybe he would be an activist, volunteering in Africa or New York City. Or living on an island, building boats and raising babies. By the time Jenny was nine years old she had her sights set on Harvard Medical School. Would she be on her way to manifesting that dream now? How about now?

  Or would she be living on the streets somewhere, dancing with the goddess in the temple inside her head, growling at anyone she perceived as a threat? Would the mania that took her over the mountain to her death have killed her in some other way? If Jenny had survived the onset of bipolar disorder, she would have lived with mental illness—either managing it with drugs that muffled her holy genius or forgoing intervention and spiraling into a vortex of mad joy and paralyzing despair. Either way, my-daughter-the-doctor is a fantasy. And so is my-big-brother-the-activist-artist. Matty had a brain tumor that invaded his little body and killed him. Jenny went crazy and died.

  But I have trouble holding onto the facts. After Jenny’s accident, our family therapist said, “Please understand, Mirabai: if Jenny had lived she would have been a torment to herself and to you for the rest of your life.” I translated that statement like this: “Mirabai, it is a blessing that Jenny died in that accident, because if she had not, your life would be a living hell forevermore.” I don’t know if I would have tolerated such a pronouncement from anyone else. But I trusted Larry, and something in me understood that he was right.

  Still, certain milestones would devastate me. When Jenny’s high school class graduated, the seniors walked down the aisle carrying a framed picture of their dead friend, and they placed it on a chair beside them on stage. The headmaster—one of my oldest friends, who had drifted out of my life years before—handed out diplomas to the living graduates and then called me up to give me an honorary certificate for Jenny. We wept in each other’s arms while the entire gathering made a space for this sad thing on their happy day. I hung the document in my office for a while (Jenny’s old bedroom), until the fantasy began to unravel and I took it down and put it away. Later, as Jenny’s friends started coupling up and reproducing, my heart would contract with sorrow with each new wedding and birth, even as I blessed the particular flowering of their aliveness.

  Whenever I would witness parents yelling at their children at the aquarium or showing more interest in texting on their smart phones than watching their smart children navigate the monkey bars at the park, I would stifle the impulse to charge forth and shake them: Don’t you know how fucking precious this is? Wake up! Still, to this day, when I see a mother and a teenage daughter jogging together or shopping for jeans, my envy takes my breath away. I would give anything to listen to the music my daughter had downloaded onto her device or feel her rest her head on my shoulder in an airplane.

  And the truth is, I would endure losing her again and again to institutions and homelessness and the wasteland of psychopharmaceuticals if it meant I could hold her in my arms one more time and tell her that I love her. That I love her forever, no matter what. Doctor or prostitute. Nobel Laureate or broken blue goddess.

  30

  THE SECRET MEDICINE

  There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they cannot hope,” Rumi promises. “The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.”

  When Jenny died, all my spiritual practices failed me. I could not meditate, and the very thought of silent sitting infuriated me, as if someone were offering a Band-Aid to slap over a gunshot wound. Rituals were for regular people—people who were busy navigating the mundane obstacles of everyday life—not for those who have been stripped, shattered, and blessed by tragedy. Reading had always been my refuge. Now the only thing I could bear to read was literary fiction; I craved beauty, not philosophy. Sacred scriptures were written in a code I could not decipher, and I lacked the energy to try. Self-help books sounded ridiculous, presumptuous, and whenever I picked one up I would have the urge to throw it across the room. None of the tricks I had developed over decades on the spiritual path were adequate for mending my brokenness.

  Meanwhile, my career as a translator of the Christian mystics began to flower. Book after book unfolded, each one reflecting some facet of Christian wisdom teachings. Various publishers invited me to write something for their particular house, and the invitations were seductive. I accepted them all, and then I had trouble keeping them sorted out. My publishing promiscuity could have gotten me in trouble except that I was up front about my non-monogamous proclivities. Speaking and teaching invitations started flowing in, and I found myself in the position of being the contemporary translator of the Spanish mystics in particular and a leading voice in Christian mysticism in general.

  This was fine, except I was not a Christian. I was a Jewish agnostic with Pagan inclinations, a lifelong devotion to a Hindu guru (Neem Karoli Baba), an established Buddhist meditation practice (currently on hold), and an abiding connection with at least three Sufi orders. The one religion missing from my interspiritual youth was Christianity. As Jews, my family had recoiled from Jesus language. Now I caught myself apologizing to my Jewish relatives, minimizing my work among my Eastern-leaning friends, and overexplaining to strangers on airplanes what it is I do for a living.

  The more successful I became in my field, the more bewildered I grew. How had this happened? I was a wild bird trapped in a gilded cage. Every day I received tasty morsels, fresh water, clean straw. But no one understood me when I cried out, “You’ve got the wrong bird!” They thought I was singing.

  And yet with each book I wrote, my heart healed a little. Every one of the masterpieces of mystical literature I translated offered me a dose of secret medicine. But my preconceived notions of Christianity, coupled with a severe case of dark night of the soul, obscured my ability to recognize what was happening.

  John of the Cross was teaching me to rest in radical unknowingness. Teresa of Avila was rekindling my yearning for union with the Beloved. Francis of Assisi was inspiring me to renew my vow to minister to those on the margins. Hildegard of Bingen was showing me how to praise God’s greening energy rippling throughout the natural world. Our Lady of Guadalupe was reconciling indigenous wisdom and Christian theology in my own troubled heart. The Archangel Michael was infusing me with the fearlessness of the spiritual warrior.

  Everything I needed to make my way through the landscape of loss—navigating by starlight, subsisting on nettles and honey—was hidden inside the body of work I was busy trying to escape. “One day I will graduate from these Christians,” I consoled myself. “I will speak in my own voice.”

  Which is what I am doing now.

  And which (I see at last) I could not possibly have done without the Christian wisdom figures who lit my path and kept me safe and cradled my broken heart with boundless generosity and tenderness.

  It is through his friends—both living and long dead—that I have come to know and love Christ. Lucky for me, the Prince of Peace has never demanded that I swear sole allegiance to him. He seems to venerate my interspiritual heart and bless my bridge-building hands. This makes me love him all the more.

&nbs
p; Dear Daddy, Matty, Phillip, and Jenny,

  I’ve stopped hating October—the last month I remember playing with my big brother before he was taken one last time to the hospital. The last month I touched my daughter’s face before she drove my chariot into the sky and never returned. Now I watch the aspens turning colors on Taos Mountain outside my office window. “Writing is eighty percent not writing,” I reassure my little brother (who, in his mid-forties, is composing his own version of our counter-culture childhood. It’s very, very good, you’d be pleased to know). Now the nameless sorrow that used to seep into my heart this time of year has a name.

  Ours is not a caravan of despair.

  Randy Sanders died last spring, on the first day of my writing retreat in Costa Rica, where I had gone to finish telling the story of Jenny’s death. He was in a nursing home by then, suffering from severe dementia. I had not seen him in many years and had no inclination to do so. “He’s already taken enough from you,” Mom pointed out, very practically, when Randy Sanders’s first wife wrote to suggest that I visit him in the facility. I agreed with her. This decision helped snap the last cords that bound me to him: the threads of resentment. It’s not exactly like I forgave him; it’s just that what happened didn’t really matter anymore. Bewilderingly, his death reopened the door of communication between his kids and me. This has been an alive and loving thing. I’m a little scared about what they’ll think of this memoir, but I have to tell my truth. All four of you taught me that.

  Thanks a lot for bequeathing me the soul of a poet, Dad. (I’m only half-sarcastic, here.) I still can’t help but wonder why acute sensitivity to the beauty of this world seems to come with an equal measure of permeability to pain, but I’ve come to accept this package. When you told me that your urge to drink was a misplaced desire for transcendence, I believed you. I believe you still. There have been a hundred times since your death when I have had the spontaneous thought, Oh, Dad would love this recipe, or, My father would be proud of my writing career, and these moments are accompanied by a sweet ache I cherish. You weren’t so skilled at parenting, but you were an interesting human being, and I know you loved me.

  Matty, the other night Amy and I were looking through boxes of old photographs to put in an album we’re making for Mom’s eightieth birthday. We found pictures of you we had not seen in years—images of the full spectrum of your ten years of life—and we came to know you all over again. Our invisible brother, who hovered over our complicated childhood like an angel with a limitless wingspan. Whose death left us with a fierce devotion to each other. As if your love were the glue pressing the other siblings together. You enfold us still.

  In a small valise where Grandpa Jack kept his mementos, I found a letter I had written to him, telling him how sad I was that Grandma Minnie had “gone to her heavenly rest” (where in the world did a seven-year-old Jewish child come up with that?) and reminding him that my brother, his grandson, was now in the hospital. “When they put the stone up where Grandma is buried, could they put this note on it?” I wrote. I drew two lines, one with a yes under it, and the other with a no, and instructed him to mark his answer on the appropriate line. “Yes, my darling,” Grandpa wrote. But he kept Grandma’s note, in which I inform her that I cry every night for her and also for my sick brother. The tenderness of my little-girl heart brings me to my knees now.

  It was the fuel of your death, Phillip, that blasted me like a rocket across the universe and into the arms of God.

  When I wrote your eulogy, Jenny, only days after your sudden death, I recklessly vowed to write your story. It has taken me thirteen years to fulfill my promise, but I offer it to you now. This is my love song to you, my baby. A lullaby to lull you to sleep. Sweet dreams, pedazo de mi corazon.

  EPILOGUE

  Nine years after Jenny’s death, I stood on the bridge over the Little Ganga at Kainchi, Maharaj-ji’s ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was dawn. I had been up since four, enacting the timeless traditions of India: wake to the sound of gongs and bells; bathe with a bucket; gather prayer book, prayer beads, prayer shawl; and head to the temple for morning meditation. Move from deity to deity—Lakshmi, Shiva, Hanuman—offering songs like flowers at their feet.

  I had been preparing for this pilgrimage all my life.

  When Jenny was around eight years old, we began saving for a trip to India. I set up a gallon pickle jar next to the woodstove and dropped loose change into the slot whenever it occurred to me. But it was too easy to rob our modified piggy bank when finances were tight, intending to replenish the amount—with interest—as soon as I was solvent. Which never happened. Then Jenny started high school, and I promised that we would go to Kainchi as a graduation present. I would have four years to get the money together.

  Jenny died in her freshman year.

  Nine, according to the late American sage Ian Starr, is the number of completion in many esoteric traditions. Nine days of Navaratri leading to Durga Puja. Nine Durga Pujas since the full-moon night of Jenny’s death. And now here I was, honoring the ninth anniversary of Jenny’s transformation in the place where it all began: the little temple in the mountains near the border of Nepal where decades ago Ram Dass sat with Maharaj-ji, and the ripple from that encounter transfigured a hundred thousand lives. Mine. Jenny’s.

  I had come here to complete something.

  I leaned over the railing. The full moon was setting in the west, and the first rays of sunrise were tumbling over the walls of the canyon, dropping into the stream, and bouncing off the boulders. I took a tiny packet of human ashes from my satchel and opened it into the air. They drifted to the water below. These were not Jenny’s ashes I was releasing, but rather a small pinch of the burnt body of the son of a woman I did not know, who had asked me to carry this trace of him to the sacred land where our mutual guru had lived. Someone had done this service for me once, and it seemed right to pass the blessing on to another bereaved mother.

  The sun climbed with more confidence into the morning sky, and I moved from the upstream side of the bridge to the downstream side, to accompany the flow of ashes with my eyes. I called on Jenny to befriend this man-child and help him navigate his journey beyond the body, and on Maharaj-ji to protect him in his blanket of love. Suddenly a pair of monkeys came scrambling down the banks of the river and splashed into the water. They began to play. They lifted handfuls of river water and poured them over each other’s heads, shrieking with joy. They chased each other, ran away, leapt into each other’s arms, and ricocheted off. Then they both paused, looked up at me on the bridge, and for a moment became as still as stone, before promptly resuming their monkeyshines.

  I let magical thinking have its way with me and recognized our dead children greeting each other in these joyous monkey bodies, cavorting in the ancient land of the yogis, blessed by the king of monkeys, the incarnation of Hanuman himself, Neem Karoli Baba. Why not?

  The monkeys disappeared into the forest, and I headed back through the temple gates for chai. As I was crossing the courtyard, a rustle of excitement passed through the devotees gathered there. Sri Siddhi Ma, Baba’s successor, was emerging from her rooms. Everyone rushed into position to prostrate themselves at her feet. I drifted toward the front of the crowd. Ma walked over to where I was standing, and our eyes met. She did not smile, yet her gaze exuded a kind of childlike mischief and delight.

  “Ah, Mira,” she said.

  “Pranam,” someone behind me whispered. I dropped to my knees and pressed my torso against the stone floor at Mata-ji’s feet. I rested my right hand on her socks.

  Philosophically, I did not really approve of the practice of bowing to another human being. “The age of the guru is over,” I had preached. “This is a time of collective awakening, of mutual empowerment. We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Etcetera, etcetera. But the urge to pranam before this elderly being, who was revered as a saint, overrode my opinion on the matter. Oh, just this once, I thought. Just to see what it’s like
.

  Here’s what it was like: It was like becoming snowmelt and flowing down a mountainside into a waiting lake. It was like meeting ten thousand years of Vedic history in my own body. It was like finding a cave in the snow where a fire is burning and a kettle of stew is simmering. It was ordinary and holy and utterly appropriate.

  When I rose, Mata-ji was speaking to her attendant in Hindi, who turned and said to me in English, “Mother will see you this afternoon.”

  I floated through the day in a state of radical simplicity. Being at Kainchi untied my knots. I did not worry about anything. Everything pleased me.

  “Your daughter was a great being,” Mata-ji said to me later, as I sat at her feet in her private room at the back of the ashram. “She died at exactly the right time, in the perfect place.”

  My eyes filled with tears.

  “Don’t cry.” She shook her head and wagged her finger. “She is with you. She guides your steps.”

  I wiped my eyes.

  “Now,” said Mata-ji, “what special thing happened this morning?”

  I was about to tell her about the ashes and the monkeys when I remembered. “The amrit,” I said. “It was delicious.” Mata-ji pressed her hands together and beamed at me.

  Today was the celebration of Rasa Lila.

  In the Hindu tradition, the first full moon of autumn commemorates the mythic night when Krishna, Lord of Love, danced with the gopis (milkmaids) in the moonlight, fulfilling the deepest desire each maiden hid in her heart. The day before, devotees prepare khir, a sweet rice pudding, and leave it outside all through the night where it soaks in the juices of the moon and is transformed into amrit: divine ambrosia.