Devotion Read online

  What did she mean, God told her? Was there some sort of sign?

  “I got on my knees and asked God what to do, and he said that it was all right—it was time, now.”

  I looked at her hard. She was a bright woman, sophisticated, well-traveled. Nobody’s fool. How could she believe God spoke to her? Maybe God did speak to her. Maybe he just didn’t speak to me.

  I remembered a story my aunt Shirley had once told me. A famous Orthodox rabbi, Joseph Soloveitchik, paid his respects to my grandmother during her convalescence after a massive stroke following my grandfather’s death. My grandmother had already lost use of the left side of her body, and had lost most of her ability to speak. But through Shirley, she managed to convey her question to the rabbi. Why, she wanted to know, would God visit such hardship on an ordinary woman? She understood the trials God inflicted on great men like Abraham and Isaac, but why on someone like herself? The rabbi’s answer was this: Mrs. Shapiro, do you realize what you’re asking? You’re asking to have a dialogue with God.

  I didn’t think I wanted a dialogue with God. What I wanted was an awareness of him: the unspeakable beauty, in the words of Thomas Merton, of a heart within the heart of one’s life. I was enormously comforted by the idea of that inner, glowing, invisible heart.

  84.

  Every once in a while, the darkness was too much. It had been quite some time since I had woken up in the middle of the night and into an abyss of terror. But here I was. It was two in the morning, and the monsters had crept their way out of the closet. Every thought led to bleakness and despair. Three in the morning. Then four. I tossed, turned. Got out of bed, went downstairs. Drank a Diet Coke. Came back upstairs. Turned on my computer. Read Internet headlines, went on Facebook. Scanned through the status updates of perfect strangers. Went back to bed. I couldn’t soothe myself. I wanted to be a person who would make a comforting cup of tea, curl up in an easy chair with a soft blanket, read something helpful. Perhaps listen to some Chopin nocturnes. Ride out the storm. But if that person had been accessible to me, I wouldn’t have been in the state I was in to begin with.

  What had set it off? It was a random Sunday night—nothing special. In fact, we’d had a good, busy weekend: a sleepover for Jacob, some errands, an early dinner with friends. Michael had finished a screenplay he’d been working on for months. We’d all tucked in early. Now, my mind had become a flip book of the most painful, devastating thoughts and images. They went something like this:

  Michael clutching his arm, collapsing.

  Me in a doctor’s office—the prognosis dire.

  The two of us in a car, a truck speeding toward us in the wrong lane.

  Our wills—we hadn’t redone our wills.

  Money was tight. We always gambled a bit on our future.

  What if Michael couldn’t sell his next screenplay?

  Our house—we could lose the house.

  The phone ringing. The school. A freak accident.

  Or an allergic reaction. Or—

  The what-ifs continued. I thought about waking Michael. I could hear him snoring in the other room. But I didn’t want to ruin his night too. I tried the metta phrases: May I be safe. May I be happy. But the simple words, which I usually found centering, were slippery. I couldn’t hold on to them. I felt as if I were scrambling up a muddy incline. There was nothing to grasp. Just handfuls of dirt. May I be strong. Live with ease.

  My heart pounded in my ears. My chest and stomach felt tight. I couldn’t breathe all the way in. Maybe I was having a heart attack. It wasn’t unheard of, after all. I resisted the urge to look up symptoms of heart attack or stroke on the Internet. No good was going to come of that. I imagined an ambulance racing up our driveway, lights flashing in country darkness. How had I gotten here—again? All the yoga, meditation, learning. All the brilliant teachers, the searching, seeking, reading—all the goddamn thinking, and still there was this: the waiting out the night. Face-to-face with my absolute aloneness. With the certainty of change. With precisely the suffering of which the Buddha spoke. We know only that our entire existence is forced into new paths and disrupted, Heinrich Heine once wrote. That new circumstances, new joys and new sorrows await us, and that the unknown has its uncanny attractions, alluring and at the same time anguishing.

  In the darkness of my house as my family lay sleeping, all I could feel was the anguish of the unknown. Its uncanny attractions seemed like a mirage that could only be made out in the light of day. May I be safe, I kept repeating until finally the sun began to rise. May I be happy. I thought of something Jack Kornfield had once said while teaching meditation, which had later been repeated to me by one of his students: This too, this too, this too.

  85.

  Along with thinking of my daily meditation experience as the noble failure, I also began to think of it as the daily reminder. Each day I unrolled my mat on my bedroom floor. I practiced yoga and watched random thoughts float like dust motes through my head. Even in physically challenging twists and inversions, I could be elsewhere, thinking. I started to keep lists of what I found myself thinking about. Usually, it was some combination of what had happened earlier that day, or the day before—or what was about to happen later. I recalled that bit of Ayurvedic philosophy that Steve had once shared with me: Be careful what you surround yourself with, because you become what you surround yourself with. When I was able to notice the contents of my mind, I saw exactly how true that turned out to be. If I had talked to our accountant, he was in there. If I had received an e-mail from a student, she was in there. If we had been at a dinner party the night before, the guests were in there.

  What was cluttering my mind when I wasn’t noticing? Sometimes, particularly while driving, I would realize with a jolt that I had covered many miles in my car without the slightest bit of awareness. The outside world was a blur. Where was I? I had no idea. Instead, I was lost in some story—usually a story that hadn’t even happened. What was the use of that? Over time, I began to wonder whether these stories had anything in common. I knew that neural pathways in the brain deepen over time: anxiety creates more anxiety, depression more depression. Maybe these stories also created their own pathways. They seemed to be variations on a theme. But what was the theme?

  During my retreat at Garrison, forced inward by the silence, I found some clarity. I saw that no matter where my mind went, it all boiled down to this: it kept comparing. How am I doing? it constantly asked. Am I up or am I down? How do people see me? Does she like me? Does he think I’m smart? I cared—I saw this—far too much. It was horrifying, in fact, to realize how much of my mental chatter involved either shoring myself up, or tearing myself down. How am I doing? Over and over again, my mind asked the question in one way or another.

  The awareness that I was always comparing was hard to tolerate, particularly in the silence. Did other people do this? I looked around the meditation hall at the other participants. The woman with the curly hair who carried a pot of lip balm with her all the time—she probably didn’t compare herself to other people. What about the young guy in the front row, wearing a yarmulke? It would never have crossed his mind.

  As I took stock of the room, comparing even about comparing, Sylvia and Sharon were giving a dharma talk on the Brahma Viharas—Buddhism’s four most central virtues: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. The path to achieving these virtues was strewn with stumbling blocks, of course. These were called the far-enemies and near-enemies.

  “The far-enemy of sympathetic joy is envy,” said Sharon. “And the near-enemy is comparing.”

  My ears pricked up. The near-enemy of sympathetic joy was comparing? I hadn’t paid much attention to sympathetic joy. I felt joy for other people—easily reveling in the happiness and success of others. So I hadn’t really paid much attention to this Brahma Vihara. I figured I had it down.

  “It’s painful and unskillful to compare,” Sharon said, “no matter what conclusion we draw. Comparing creates agitation in
the mind.”

  I felt Sharon’s words go through me like a shock. There was the lesson and the internalizing of the lesson all at once. Comparison itself was the problem. Whether I was up, or down, or sideways was incidental to the very act of comparison, which was agitating. I understood this to be absolutely true. I thought of how I felt when I compared myself—whatever the result. It was diminishing, slightly sickening. Unskillful, that perfect Buddhist term.

  In the months following Garrison, I attempted greater skillfulness. I unrolled my mat and began the process of my daily reminder. Comparing? I tried to talk to myself kindly, something I had learned from Sylvia. Don’t do that, honey. Come back. Lost in a story? Come back, come back. Where were my feet? Ah, right there. Beneath me on the ground. Where was my breath? It filled my lungs, whether or not I paid attention. Where was I? Held in the infinite arms of the present.

  86.

  Our basement is filled with dead people’s stuff. Boxes line the walls, some of them still taped closed. Plastic bins contain college diplomas, award plaques, golf trophies. Sets of china, cut crystal. The lifetime achievements of aunts, uncles, grandparents—what do you do with such things? Throwing them away is impossible. Recently Michael came upstairs from a foraging trip to the basement carrying a shoe box. Inside the box were several dozen tapes from different eras: regular-sized cassettes, microcassettes, even a size that I hadn’t seen before, midway between the two. Accompanying these was a clunky tape recorder.

  “What do you think these are?” I asked.

  We examined them. Some had dates, written in my mother’s hand.

  “Maybe she taped her patients,” Michael said.

  Here I had an ethical dilemma. My mother had gone back to graduate school when I was in college, and had become a psychotherapist. I had never been able to imagine my mother as a therapist. She had been a terrible listener, only able to talk about herself. Her response to any story was, That reminds me of when I… I marveled at the fact that she had patients, and had occasionally wondered about them. While my mother was ill, the phone rang one day, and it was a young woman who identified herself as a patient. “You must be Dani,” the young woman said. I was speechless. How did her patient know my name? “Your mother talked about you all the time.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out.” Michael put some new batteries into the odd-looking recording device that had been in the box, and plugged in a random tape.

  First there was a hissing sound. I sat hunched over at our kitchen table, half hoping the tapes would continue this way: a vast, impassable emptiness. But then, as if from a great distance, the sound of my mother’s voice became audible through the hiss.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Penny. It was a terrible weekend. Just terrible.”

  My mother wasn’t talking to a patient. Penny. A name dredged up from the depths of the past. I felt like I was going to be sick.

  “Do you know who she’s talking to?” Michael fiddled with the volume.

  “Paul doesn’t have any life in him,” my mother went on. “He’s nothing but a wet noodle. And Dani—she’s eighteen years old, you’d think she’d—”

  I reached over and pushed the off button. Penny.

  In 1978, the film An Unmarried Woman was released, the story of a wealthy Upper East Side woman struggling to find herself in the wake of divorce. The tagline of the film read: She laughs, she cries, she feels angry, she feels lonely, she feels guilty, she makes breakfast, she makes love, she makes do, she is strong, she is weak, she is brave, she is scared, she is…an unmarried woman. In the film, the central character, played by Jill Clayburgh, goes into therapy. The fictional therapist in the film was played by a real therapist named Dr. Penelope Russianoff, who was already something of a celebrity, having written best-selling books such as Why Do I Think I’m Nothing Without a Man? and When Will I Be Happy?

  My mother saw the film and pictured herself as the sophisticated, urbane character portrayed by Jill Clayburgh. She then sought out Penelope Russianoff based on her performance in the movie. An image came to mind: a tall, handsome woman with long gray hair, wearing a flowing caftan, an arm stacked with bangles. A sunny office furnished only with pillows on the floor.

  “These are my mother’s therapy sessions.” I turned to Michael.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Exactly.”

  We both stared at the cassette recorder as if it might be a nuclear device. What was on those tapes? In the privacy of a therapist’s office, had my mother found the courage to express something that she hadn’t been able to share with my father or me? Maybe the key to my mother’s psyche was on these tapes. Fear mingled with hope—and guilt. This seemed the ultimate violation of privacy. On the other hand, my mother knew the tapes existed. She knew she was dying. She’d had ample time to destroy them if she had wanted to.

  “What do you want to do?” Michael asked.

  My finger, as if of its own volition, hit the play button again.

  “Dani couldn’t find her driver’s license,” my mother was saying. “She’s so immature. I had to drive her all the way to Trenton to get a new one.”

  It was very nearly unbearable, listening to my mother’s voice. The way she said my name, she practically spit it out.

  “I was eighteen,” I said out loud. As if maybe my mother could hear me.

  “Irene”—now here was Penny Russianoff—“Irene, you’re a stunningly beautiful woman. You don’t have to put up with this shit. You look incredible for your age. If you don’t mind my asking, have you ever had a face-lift?”

  Whaaat? I had met Penny once. She seemed a little New Agey to me, but not like a complete and total quack. Why was she talking about face-lifts?

  I switched off the recorder again.

  “It’s too awful.” I felt numb, floaty. “She really hated me. I mean, I knew it. I knew all this. But still—hearing it like this—and her therapist is an idiot—”

  “You don’t have to listen to any more of it,” Michael said.

  “No. I want to.”

  I picked another tape and stuck it into the machine. More hissing. Then, a rambling description of a dinner party: the outfit she had worn, the way her friend’s living room was furnished, the meal itself. What was the point? Her voice was reedy with unhappiness, so tightly strung it seemed ready to snap, and yet the content of what she was saying was utterly inane. Why had my mother gone into therapy? Obviously she recognized her own misery, but she didn’t want to get to the root of it.

  “If I were Penny, I would have fallen asleep,” Michael said.

  I switched off the tape player. Over the next months, whenever I felt strong enough, I would summon up my nerve and plug in another one. My mother’s stories sounded rehearsed, as if she never lost sight of the tape recorder. Always, she saw herself as a rare and exotic bird—Jill Clayburgh trapped in the suburbs. Penny’s occasional responses to her seemed like a parody of a 1970s feminist therapist: “Irene, this guy”—that would be my father—“this guy sounds really depressed. What’s a vibrant woman like you doing with a depressed guy?”

  I would listen for maybe five or ten minutes at a time. I still haven’t heard all of the tapes, and doubt I ever will. At a certain point, I realized that there was nothing new to learn—and that very nothingness was something more painful than the deepest, darkest revelation might have been. My mother would remain, as she had always been, a great source of sadness and confusion. How could she have been my mother? How could I have been her daughter? When we first found the tapes, I called a friend to tell her about our discovery. “I’m worried for you,” she said. “I think you’re going to find out that your mother had some sort of secret life.” I didn’t know how to explain to her how much I wished my mother had a secret life.

  87.

  I was having tea with one of my smartest friends when she asked me if I had arrived at an answer. Did I believe in God? I knew this friend was an atheist. She had been dubious about my s
earch from the beginning. “Why,” she wanted to know, “would you take on such a thing? I mean, is this something you’ve thought a lot about? You’re not a religious scholar.”

  There’s nothing trickier than trying to talk about personal belief. Add on top of that trying to talk about personal belief with a very smart atheist. But I had some things to say. And wasn’t that the whole point, really? To opt back in? To form—if not an opinion—a set of feelings and instincts by which to live?

  “I would say yes.” I took a leap. “I believe in God more than I did a couple of years ago. But not the God of my childhood. Not a God who keeps score, and decides whether or not to inscribe me—or anybody else—in the book of life.”

  “So what exactly do you believe, then?” She sipped her tea and waited for a better answer. I wanted to tell her that exactly and believe don’t belong in the same sentence.

  “I believe that there is something connecting us,” I said. “Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we’re gone. I’ve begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are bound up in that greater consciousness.”

  I looked at my friend for any sign of ridicule, but saw none. She was nodding.

  “An animating presence,” she said.

  That was as good a word as any: presence. As in the opposite of absence. By training my thoughts and daily actions in the direction of an open-minded inquiry, what had emerged was a powerful sense of presence. It couldn’t be touched, or apprehended, but nonetheless, when I released the hold of my mind and all its swirling stories, this was what I felt. Something—rather than nothing. While sitting in meditation or practicing yoga, the paradox was increasingly clear to me: emptiness led to fullness, nonthought to greater understanding.

  “Where does Judaism fit into all this?” she asked.