When I was a boy, my dad sometimes took my brother, Barry, and me out to the Detroit River to watch the hydroplane boat races. More airplane than river craft, these immensely powerful boats flew over the water, their hulls hardly touching it as they reached unthinkable speeds. During World War I, Gar Wood, an inventor and boat maker, set speed records on the Detroit River, not far from the Ambassador Bridge where I first kissed Girija. He won races with a boat called Miss Detroit, en route to becoming the first man to exceed 100 miles per hour on water. When these hydroplane boats skim the river, a high plume of water arcs behind them. Locals call its distinctive curl a rooster tail.
We don’t usually see our own rooster tails as we zoom through life at high speeds. It’s rare to see the effect we have on others, the ripples of karma’s wake. The course of our lives, the arc of our rooster tails, is a mystery except in retrospect. In medical school, students joked that the only accurate instrument for diagnosing disease was the very rare retrospect-o-scope. The passage of time has provided me one of those rare scopes. After forty years of an improbable journey, the trajectory of my life begins to make sense.
The 1960s and 1970s brought with it a lot of turmoil and change that became important to the history of America and to the entire world. It was an important time for me as well. These years—of travel, exploration, growth, and action—zoomed by like the hydroplane boats on the river.
In 1962, I met Martin Luther King Jr.; by the mid-1960s, I was a political radical marching against discrimination and protesting the Vietnam war; in 1970, I was on Alcatraz and then met Wavy and the Hog Farm. In 1971, we pitched a teepee and planted the Whole Earth flag by the Bosporus Strait. In 1972, Girija and I were together in Maharaji’s ashram in a mystical corner of the Himalayas. By the autumn of 1973, Maharaji was gone and I was a United Nations medical officer dropping leaflets from a plane on WHO headquarters. By 1977, smallpox was gone, I was a professor at the University of Michigan and consulting for UN agencies, and Girija was getting her Ph.D. in public health. In 1980, WHO sent me back to Delhi to close down the smallpox office and retrieve the files documenting every move every smallpox warrior made. There I happened upon D. A. Henderson’s note in WHO records, that on interviewing me for the first time, I seemed like a good kid but he worried that I was too Indian, that I had “gone native.” He still allowed Nicole to hire me, and he teased me about my counterculture roots right up until our last conversations, weeks before he died as I was finishing this book.
San Francisco, civil rights, the Hog Farm, Ram Dass, the bus ride to the East—my experiences had all turned me into a creature of the sixties. But now that I’ve got more miles on my odometer, I am aware that I am also a creature of the spiritual revolution that followed, as well as a beneficiary of the public health revolution that fueled the eradication of smallpox, and the technological revolution of Silicon Valley. And I am one of many who wander the path of the eternal quest for meaning, for answers to questions about why we are born, what a purposeful life looks like.
The counterculture transformed many into more deeply spiritual, noble, and generous people. But others died falling down elevator shafts with heroin needles stuck in their arms. Many thrived in stable relationships that lasted decades; two longtime married couples, Wavy and Jahanara (Bonnie Jean), and Girija and I, have been friends for more than forty-five years. Pretty amazing. Yet others have ended up alone, living on the streets or in psych wards. Some people prospered materially; others lost everything to bad drugs, bad luck, or bad decisions.
The best of those days were pure magic, the worst a hell. It was a complicated blend. It was neither all political revolution nor all spaced-out hippies singing and dancing in the streets. It was neither all Martin Luther King nor all Charles Manson. We came of age sexually in the golden era between the advent of birth control pills and the epidemic of HIV/AIDs. Spiritually, it was like a greenhouse in which the most beautiful flowers blossomed alongside the most vicious weeds—sometimes even in the same person at different times. Personally, I like the hothouse. I want to see the flowers grow fast like the forest springing to life after the monsoon in India. I will take my chances with new flowers and remain vigilant for weeds. That’s the risk taker in me, the adventurer, the adrenaline junkie. I will bet on the new technologies that arise from Silicon Valley, knowing full well the risk of their potential dark side. Progress demands that humans try to create better conditions for everyone, and change requires risk. What I have learned is just this: leave room for God, leave room for love, and never, ever lose your sense of humor.
Embracing the history of the counterculture is so important for the survival of America, for the restoration of hope, idealism, and optimism. I wish we could have back one specific part of the counterculture, that feeling that the revolution of goodness, mercy, and kindness was right around the corner. I also wish we could do things differently—smarter and more pragmatically. My generation squandered a lot of our moment. The universe opened up, and an instant of possibility appeared, like when the Enlightenment shattered the superstitious hold of the Middle Ages. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” Margaret Mead said. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Clusters of people, empowered by the times, set off to change the world—and some groups accomplished just that. Change starts with ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The path to the extraordinary is open to anybody at any time.
With the last case of killer smallpox, Rahima Banu, Girija and I felt that this part of Maharaji’s task was complete. In gratitude, we made a pilgrimage, the adu padu vedu, to six temples sacred to the Hindu god Subrahmanyum (also called Murugan and Skanda) in South India, as we had promised our teacher before he died.
Saying goodbye in Delhi wasn’t easy. The WHO headquarters, the people, the building, the neighborhood, had been the place where I grew up and where I learned to bring all of me—the spiritual and the practical—together in one mission. It was hard realizing I wouldn’t see Mrs. Boyer, Nicole, or M.I.D.—Papa—every day anymore. The team was dispersing to the four corners of the world. Nicole wanted an adventure. “I’ve heard no woman ever drove alone from New Delhi to Paris,” she said, so she set off in her old banged-up Toyota with a suitcase, a starter pistol that looked like a handgun, and, being French, a dog. She spent time with J.R.D. before leaving. She said she had to fire the starter pistol to fend off unwanted sexual advances in half the countries she drove through. Typical Nicole.
Girija and I both wanted a formal public health education. We spent time in New York with the satsang and helped Karmapa with his temple. We thought we’d go to Columbia University, but University of Michigan made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.
The School of Public Health dean Myron Wegman had been head of the WHO regional office in the Americas and knew about my work in smallpox. He got us retroactive status as Michigan residents so that we could pay a lower tuition and get scholarships. We entered programs in epidemiology, public health, and management. I eventually became associate professor of epidemiology, and Girija got her doctorate.
Though there had been no more cases of killer smallpox, the global commission was visiting every country to confirm the absence of disease. Still there were a few countries like Iran and South Africa over which there was concern about smallpox being stored illegally. In October 1978, WHO asked me to go to Iran to conduct a “special program to confirm Iran’s status as free of smallpox.” In 1971, the shah had held celebrations of the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire in Persepolis, near the tomb of Cyrus the Great, and he suppressed reporting of smallpox cases in Iran. Dozens of kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, even Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, attended. Some of the heads of state were unvaccinated; none was informed that there were active cases of smallpox in the area—men, women, and children begging along the parade route could have had infectious smallpox. It was also known that living smallpox viruses had been widely used in Iran in benign medical laboratory tests. The Islamic Revolution was gaining momentum in 1978. WHO worried about whether or not smallpox still existed in the country, and, if there were live samples in labs, whether Variola major might accidently fall into the wrong hands and be used as a biological weapon. We did not have the label “weapons inspector” then, but that was part of what WHO wanted.
Tehran was tense when I arrived. Ayatollah Khomeini was rumored to be returning from exile in Paris—which he would do three months later in February 1979, overthrowing the shah less than two weeks after his return. D.A. asked me to set up camp at the Hilton in Tehran. Every day at 4 A.M., the surging mujahedeen morality police knocked on my hotel room door. “You have British Airways hostesses in here? You are fornicating with them?” they asked. It had become a comedy routine in which they searched every nook and cranny for invisible stewardesses.
Facial scar surveys confirmed that smallpox had indeed been epidemic in Iran but was now gone. I did find vials labeled “smallpox” in medical school labs containing material that looked like very old smallpox scabs. Samples were sent back to WHO, which confirmed that, at least in the samples we took, there was no infectious smallpox found. Eventually only two authorized laboratories, in the United States and in Russia, were allowed to keep the virus stored deep in liquid nitrogen.
One of the darkest chapters in the history of smallpox was during the Cold War. The Soviet Union created a secret plan to weaponize smallpox and even combine it with Ebola—creating an apocalyptic virus that would spread like smallpox and kill like Ebola. D.A., by then the dean of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, brought this to light through former Soviet bioweapons experts who revealed the Soviet Biopreparat “Vector” program to Congress. Through his testimony we learned that some of the bioweapon program’s smallpox seed stock might have been carried from India by Russian epidemiologists who had worked in the WHO eradication program. I cannot imagine which, if any, of my friends—Russian colleagues I worked happily alongside—would take scabs from a child with smallpox in India, bundle them up as if they were mementos from a holiday trip, and deliver the samples to be weaponized and possibly used against the United States. How could anyone who has seen a child writhe in agony and die from smallpox help build smallpox into a weapon? It is unthinkable, madness, more horrible than any other act of terror, because after the first attack, smallpox could reestablish itself as a new pandemic for a new millennium.
The Biopreparat program was said to have been authorized by Mikhail Gorbachev, but no one really knew the whole story.
I got a call in 2006 to attend a lunch with President Gorbachev, who came to San Francisco to meet with environmentalists at Madeleine Albright’s suggestion to help Gorbachev develop a political afterlife in philanthropy. I was invited to sit with Gorbachev to talk about establishing a foundation. I was surprised by how much I liked Gorbachev and how comfortable it was to interact with our former antagonist. After most everyone left the room, I whipped up the courage to ask him the question that had been burning inside me for years—and I imagine inside everyone else who had battled smallpox. I wanted to know if it was true that he had signed that five-year plan to spend $1 billion to create that half-smallpox-half-Ebola monster weapon that some Russians threatened could kill 100 million Americans.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
The former Soviet president heaved a deep and weary sigh, as if centuries of intrigue were being shed from his Russian soul. He took off his glasses, tossed them onto the table, and sat down on a chair with a heavy thud, forehead cradled in his hand.
“It was the worst decision of my life,” Gorbachev said, looking up after a long silence. Like a defendant pleading his case, he asked for understanding. “Your president Reagan told me that your economy could allow America to both build nuclear weapons and feed its people, and that he did not need to bomb us into the Stone Age when he could spend us into the Stone Age. We kept pace with nuclear weapons for a while, but our economy wasn’t strong enough to keep up. There was dissatisfaction among the Soviet people with the price of bread and the lack of basic goods. As the economy weakened I started moving money away from weapons systems and into food production. One day several generals came to my office in the Kremlin, closed the door behind them, and announced coldly, ‘Mr. President, we cannot lose the arms race. If we cannot have nuclear weapons, we need something else for our back pocket. You must authorize biological weapons, or else, Mr. President, we will be forced to get a new Mr. President.’
“So, da, I signed the five-year plan. I deeply regret it. It is part of the reason I want to try to give back to the world, to make amends.”
When President Clinton turned over the White House to George W. Bush, he singled out known biological weapons programs, like this one, as a priority for the new president. That fear was one of the reasons President Bush in October 2007 issued a presidential directive (HSPD-21) establishing the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee. I was appointed the first chairman on this subcommittee and served on it for two years. During this time, I learned that a team of some remarkable men and women from CDC and other agencies were permitted to inspect the Soviet biological weapons facilities to help remove any materials that could be used in bio warfare. But removing old weapons is one thing; proving that the world is safe is a more complicated issue. Although we think that the Soviets never succeeded in creating their superbug, the old saying “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” remains more true than perhaps most people know.
While the United States has the other lab authorized to keep smallpox, we have been sloppy about minding risks from old smallpox stores here. As late as 2014, live smallpox was found in the United States in an abandoned FDA lab in an NIH facility in Bethesda, Maryland. Until this discovery, I did not favor destroying the remaining legally kept smallpox samples. I felt we might one day need them to create better remedies. But the careless way live smallpox was forgotten in the heart of the United States made me change my mind. WHO should vote to destroy all the smallpox virus in the world and carry this out without delay. Rapid advances in synthetic biology—which means science can now synthesize the Variola virus—render my previous concerns outdated.
Smallpox has been used as a biological weapon even in early U.S. history. The first smallpox bioterrorist was a British officer, Lord Jeffrey Amherst. During Pontiac’s War, with Native American tribes over the Ohio Valley and the Alleghenies, Amherst proposed mixing smallpox scabs with blankets being distributed in order to kill some of the “disaffected tribes of Indians.” History has preserved his writing, expressing his clear intentions to use germ warfare in an attempted genocide. Amherst left hundreds of Indians killed by smallpox, buried in “pox acres” not all that far from the eponymous Amherst, Massachusetts, and the eponymous Amherst College, which I visited when my son Jon was thinking of attending. So many great minds have emerged from this institution. But the city and college are named after a smallpox bioterrorist. For someone who held a little boy in his arms who was killed by smallpox in Tatanagar, Amherst is a name of shame.
The smallpox warriors stayed in touch. Nicole, in particular, went to Beirut during war and unrest in Lebanon to volunteer with the International Red Cross not long after the smallpox eradication campaign ended. She helped build factories for artificial limbs for amputees who had lost legs during the violence in the region. She and I began writing to each other about working together on something else. We wanted to scale the mountain again, and do something as meaningful as smallpox eradication. This time I wanted to bring in people who had less formal training but huge hearts, like Ram Dass and Wavy, to see what their spiritual common sense could bring to a public health initiative. “Oh,” Nicole said when I told her, “you are starting the hippie Red Cross.” We didn’t know which problem we would end up solving—I wanted to raise money to stop diarrhea, which still kills too many children every year. Wavy suggested we raise money for it by putting on a massive concert with the Grateful Dead and call it “No Shit.” When we couldn’t get that off the ground, we kicked around other ideas until, as usual, a serendipitous event determined our direction. Nicole, during a WHO conference in New Delhi, discovered a huge and solvable problem—blindness in Nepal—along with funding for it. “We have the money to do a blindness survey,” she cabled me, “if the Hippie Red Cross is willing to work on it.”
Around the same time, Girija and I wrote an article, “Death for a Killer Disease,” about our time in India during smallpox eradication, urging that more be done for global health. Many readers of that article sent us envelopes with small amounts of cash in them, adding up to nearly $20,000. Determined to find a good social use for that money, we invited all the people we had written about in the article to come to Ann Arbor to figure it out. The founders of what would become Seva gathered in Michigan in 1979, representing all the threads of our lives coming together in one room: the Hog Farm, smallpox warriors, Maharaji’s devotees, CDC and WHO epidemiologists, and eye specialists from America and India. While we came to a consensus that blindness in Nepal would be our first project, in a short time we were relitigating Trungpa and Wavy’s argument over meditation and action, but this time the fight was between Ram Dass and Nicole.
“Don’t be in such a rush to cure blindness that you do violence to morality,” Ram Dass said, “or we will lose our souls.”
“Who cares if I burn in hell for a thousand years?” Nicole countered. “If we slow down, that’s one more person who will die blind.”
Back and forth it went, the argument over being and doing. Wavy and others chanted, “Do be do be do be do.” I had learned by then—from Maharaji, from smallpox, from working with the Tatas—that it had to be both. We had to be good and do good, or we would be of little use to the blind.
We named the organization Seva, which means “service” in Sanskrit. The office was established in our garage in Chelsea, Michigan, just outside of Ann Arbor. I raised the initial $100,000 through a grant to research and write a peer-reviewed academic book, The Management of Smallpox Eradication in India, published by University of Michigan Press. Nicole became the WHO blindness program manager in Kathmandu, and I would be the survey director. After the birth of our first son, Joseph Seva Brilliant, I got a leave of absence from Michigan for the six months it would take to do the survey. Girija and I took baby Joe to Kainchi and then to Nepal; his first words were in Nepali. Since its founding in 1979, Seva’s programs, grantees, and partners have restored sight to more than four million people in two dozen countries. Most of these surgeries were done for free. So much of Seva’s success was due to Dr. Venkataswamy, “Dr. V.,” who founded the Aravind Eye Hospital in honor of his teachers, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother of Pondicherry.
Steve Jobs, who had just taken Apple public, read about the smallpox success and remembered our lunch at WHO. He periodically phoned me and offered to help if we ever set out to do something like that again. When he heard that a group of smallpox veterans was going to start a new organization to conquer blindness, he and his former roommate from Reed College, Sita Ram Das, sent $5,000 apiece, our largest individual gifts up to that point. Steve helped a lot with Seva, sending us computers, software, and a dial-up modem so that we could stay connected from Kathmandu.
Evergreen Helicopters donated a much-needed helicopter to fly doctors to remote villages—some of which were as high as 12,000 feet. Wavy got Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead to do a concert just to raise the money to transport the helicopter to Kathmandu. The aircraft performed flawlessly, ferrying eye doctors and epidemiologists to 108 villages, where we treated more than 40,000 villagers for eye and other disease. On the last day of the survey, Nicole and several eye doctors were finishing up in a remote area in the flat part of Nepal. On their way back to Kathmandu, they stopped to pick someone up in the country’s second-largest city, Biratnagar. As they left Biratnagar, the helicopter engine let out a loud shriek at about 300 feet in the air. The engine had digested itself, and the helicopter began to fall “like an oak leaf fluttering from the tree in the fall,” the pilot, Darryl Ward, later said. He would be awarded helicopter pilot of the year for white-knuckling the craft to a safe landing. No one was hurt.
The logistics of getting a new engine installed in the helicopter and lifting the old engine out of the area were unprecedented. Other aircraft that had crashed in Nepal years earlier were still there. Because Steve had given us that acoustic modem, and a local UN satellite expert was sitting in the next room in the Kathmandu office, I was able to connect over satellite to the University of Michigan computer system and set up what was called a computer conferencing meeting. From Seva’s offices in California and Michigan, we connected the UN office in New York, Evergreen’s headquarters in Oregon, and the Paris office of Aérospatiale, where the helicopter had been built, as well as WHO in Geneva. Using a software system called Confer, we were able to get everyone to agree on who would pay for transporting the new engine to the crash site and how the old engine would be helicoptered out to Singapore. Within seventy-two hours, the problem was solved. I had never seen WHO work so fast. I became intrigued with this new technology.
The communication thread from the computer conference call looked just like the transcript of a telephone conference call, and nearly exactly like Gmail threads look today. When I returned to Ann Arbor from Nepal, I used a variant of that system to hook up Seva offices around the world via computer conferencing.
Steve Jobs came to Ann Arbor in 1982 or 1983, after we got back from Nepal, to give a talk about his growing company, Apple computers. When he came over to our house, I showed him how the system we called “SevaTalk” worked. Later that day, I awkwardly asked him for more money for Seva. He laughed hard and said, “You have your own fucking technology now. Build your own fucking company and fund your own fucking nonprofit. I will help you and show you how.” And he did. He eventually joined Seva’s advisory board, and the SevaTalk platform became the foundation for what would become the Well, one of the first digital social networks. After I co-founded the Well with Stewart Brand in 1985, Wired magazine called it “the world’s most influential online community.” I had taken the company public years earlier, made some money, and, over the course of the next twenty years, worked part-time in technology to earn enough money to feed my public health habit—my need to work in the field directly addressing blindness as well as polio eradication.
It was the tsunami that hit the day after Christmas in 2004, killing hundreds of thousands in Asia, that turned me back toward thinking about pandemics. There was a historic outpouring of generosity, especially for Indonesia. But Sri Lanka, where the passenger train had rolled over, tossed like a toy in the waves, had not received as much attention, so many victims were hurting. Cash donations of more than $100,000 rushed into Seva. The money was needed quickly in Sri Lanka, so I decided to avoid the UN bureaucracy and carry it myself to Colombo to put it into the right hands.
I stayed at various Tata-owned hotels in Sri Lanka and lingered in the country looking for a way to help. I headed to Hikkaduwa, the village where the train had been forced off its tracks. Just as happened in Bhola Island after the cyclone, saris and shirts were stuck thirty feet high in trees. Under the canopy of clothes was a tent city of aid organizations from all over the world. They were short on doctors, so I volunteered to stay and treat wounded Sri Lankans for a couple of weeks, dispensing medicines, rebandaging wounds, and addressing psychological trauma. In the refugee camp I met several WHO doctors, including the director general, who were very worried about refugees getting the newly spreading H5N1 virus, a pathogenic bird flu, and infecting the volunteers, who could then spread it to every part of the world, as smallpox had spread from Tatanagar, setting off a brand-new pandemic. After a couple of weeks in the refugee camps, I got sick myself with dysentery and had to come home.
While recovering at home in Marin County, California, where I’d moved in 1989, I had a lot of time to think about how we could better prepare for pandemics. I convened a new organization I started in November 2005 called PanDefense 1.0 to talk about it. A few months later, my phone rang. Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, told me I won the TED Prize. The prize was $100,000, but more important, Chris told me I was supposed to think of a wish to change the world, and the TED community would rally behind it and might provide more resources. It was a turning point in my life. My wish was to create an early-warning system for pandemics. Chris sent me to talk about the TED Prize and my wish at technology companies, such as Google, which was about seven years old at the time. I gave a talk about how we eradicated smallpox and how we could use that experience to plan a warning system for pandemics. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in the back of the lecture room. Two days later, then–vice president Sheryl Sandberg called and asked me if I wanted to join Google as the first executive director of Google.org. Sergey and Larry had written that they planned to give away a billion dollars to address things like poverty reduction, pandemics, and climate change around the world. I called Steve Jobs about the idea—Apple and Google were friendly then. He was very excited by what Google was doing and was “super in favor” of me working with them. “Mark my words,” he added, “one day Larry Page will become CEO of Google. He is a really smart guy.”
Google announced my appointment the day before I gave my TED Prize talk. The rush of publicity for these dual events was heady. Fortunately, my friend Bill Foege was one of the first to call and congratulate me and, as always, found a way to help me stay balanced. Whenever something big happened, my smallpox mentors—M.I.D. “Papa,” Bill, D.A., and Nicole—still helped me find direction; with Maharaji gone and Karmapa having passed in November 1981, these extraordinary human beings were who I turned to for support. That the world sometimes gets things right was demonstrated when M.I.D., Nicole, Isao Arita, D.A., and Bill were all awarded the highest honors in their respective countries in recognition for their contributions to public health: the Padma Shri in India, the Legion of Honor in France, the Japan Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the United States. In characteristic style, Nicole delayed receiving her award for several years because French custom required the medal recipient to kiss the French president on each cheek. Nicole hated President Mitterrand and initially refused to kiss his cheeks. They finally worked something out, and she was awarded the honor in a beautiful ceremony.
We all visited one another many times over the ensuing years. “Papa” played in the snow with us in Michigan. I saw Bill and D.A. continue their extraordinary leadership in public health. One of the most difficult reunions with the group was in 2010, when Zdeno, Lev and Lydia, D.A., Girija and I, and others gathered in Geneva to recognize two anniversaries: thirty years since the eradication of smallpox, and one year since Nicole, the godmother of our son Joe, died of lung cancer. She was buried walking distance from WHO headquarters, as she requested in her will. In her wake, she left many wealthy and powerful leaders quaking, but for her team, she was a leader without peer, and an unforgettable force of nature with a will of steel and a heart of gold.
My daily drive from Marin County to Google in Mountain View was about an hour and half. Steve Jobs lived near the campus and I sometimes stopped at his house on the way home. We often talked about “doing well and doing good,” the catchphrase then in Silicon Valley.
“Larry, do you still believe in God? Do you still believe in Maharaji?” Steve asked when I answered the phone one day. Just like him; right to the point. Hardly a “hello.”
“Of course I do, Steve.” I had seen so many children die of smallpox, seen so many others blind or stricken by polio, and had just come back from seeing the power of nature’s devastation from the tsunami, yet I had reached some personal kind of peace. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why are you really calling?”
He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and wanted to talk to me about it.
I had seen thousands of children suffering with smallpox, but I had not been gripped by the personal fear and grief that he and his family were caught in. I thought seeing all the death in India, losing my dad and grandpa, sitting in front of enlightened beings like Maharaji and Karmapa, had immunized me in some way against the pain of death. I would soon realize my faith was superficial; it would falter not long after I started at Google. Girija developed breast cancer and was operated on. Our middle child, Jon, who was on a Fulbright in China, came home to comfort his mom.
Jon became ill in Beijing a few months later and he came back to the United States for diagnosis and treatment. After scans and biopsies and months of uncertainty, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. There are no words to describe the shock our family felt. Steve jumped in, interviewing doctors, helping us find the best doctors for Girija’s and Jon’s cancers. Steve was a real mensch to those who really knew him. He and Jon became cancer friends, comparing notes on chemo.
After six months of surgery and radiation, Girija fully recovered from her cancer. Jon, at twenty-six, did not. Neither did Steve, who died less than a year later.
After Jon’s death, I didn’t believe in anything anymore. Girija and I removed all the pictures of Maharaji and Karmapa, angry at God for taking our boy, through a disease I could do nothing about. It was worse than when I was in India, angry at God because I thought he must be a lousy manager to allow little babies to die from smallpox. Losing Jon was the hardest moment for my entire family and I found it impossible to function afterward. Google was kind to me and gave me the title Philanthropy Evangelist, but I was no use to them or anyone else.
It has taken a long time, and I can still get lost in the dark hole of pain. But gradually, I understood that I have been given a new assignment, to be there for Girija and my daughter, Iris, and my son Joe, to help us stay whole, to find some things beautiful in life. I fail every day, but I also understand that part of my job is to transform my grief at losing my son into somehow being grateful that we had this wonderful person in our lives for twenty-six years. This is the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. Every once in a while, I escape my own grief for a second by remembering the tens of thousands of mothers and fathers who lost their son or daughter to smallpox while I was in India. Every once in a while, I recognize fully that the depth of their grief is as deep as mine. That sense of being in the same boat, of being human together, lasts just a second. I do not understand it. The Buddha taught that we grow old, get sick, and die, and that is true. Yet I do not understand why it needs to be that our lives are finite and our deaths so painful. I take some solace in what Maharaji often said: “It is better to see God in everyone than to try to figure it all out.”
And I surely do not know how to think about these things in a way that might help anyone reading this. None of us is untouched by suffering or death. But let me answer again Steve’s questions: Do I still believe in God? Do I still believe in Maharaji?
I have seen a great deal of death. But I have also seen a great deal of life and joy, and I still believe that there is much more good than bad in the world. What I did finally come to grudgingly accept is that there is more to this life than I can ever understand—solving the great mysteries of life is above my pay grade. Yes, I still believe in God. I didn’t for a while, when I held so many children dead or dying from smallpox, and of course when Jon died. But doubt is the constant companion on the journey toward faith. And while the pain of loss does not go away, and I miss my son more than I can say, I also have found as I have tried to be honest, digging deep inside, that I love my two other children even more than I thought I ever could, and I realize how lucky I am to have such wonderful young human beings so close to me. There is so much for me to be grateful for. Smallpox was eradicated and I got to see Rahima Banu. Girija and I still love each other after nearly half a century. And we have since put the photographs of Maharaji, and all of our holy pictures, back on our walls.
I think still about Maharaji’s prophecy: “Smallpox will be quickly eradicated. This is God’s gift to mankind because of the hard work of dedicated health workers.” He was saying that progress is possible, a better world is possible, that one kind of terrible suffering can be alleviated by a global, international community joining forces. He did not say that there would not be suffering. He did not say Buddha was wrong to tell us that all of us must face the truth of old age, suffering, and death. But he also said, “Sub ek,” “All one.” All religions are one, all nations are one, all men are brothers. I suppose we’ve all heard that before, and already know it someplace deep inside to be true. But Maharaji taught that this realization is only the beginning. The next step is understanding that there is something tangible to do, specific work to try to help those who suffer needlessly. Smallpox eradication is but one proof that something can be done, that little by little we can make this planet a place with less suffering. We are still finite beings, yet we can still create a world with infinitely more love, more joy, and less pain.
If after all the death and suffering I have seen, I can still find reason to be optimistic, if I can still love God and find love for everyone in my heart, then I would like this story to lift you—from your pain, your losses, and the relentless twenty-four-hour news reports of violence and hate, environmental disasters, rapes, muggings, terrorism, war, and vile racist rhetoric—and catapult you into another world, where the horror of a common enemy once brought together competing nations to prove that global efforts can accomplish great things.
Yes, I do still believe in God. Of course I do.
I want this story to steal your heart and plant a vision of what is possible. If smallpox, one of the worst diseases in history, the cause of hundreds of millions of deaths and tormenter of countless little children, can be conquered, then other miracles are surely possible. If a kid from Detroit, the first in his family to go to college, can pass through the stages of anger, self-righteousness, hedonism, and risky adventures through the minefield of drugs, prophets, and ideologies to find a harmony in an attempt to serve and honor God, so can you. Your path will be different, your obstacles different, your faith may be different, but that harmony and that pathway are always open to anyone who is ready for it.
I think back to that day I sat in front of Maharaji at Kainchi ashram, the day that began with me wanting to flee a strange cult in a foreign place and ended with me discovering I was already home. Not long after, Maharaji allowed me to use an empty room in the ashram as a makeshift medical office to treat minor medical illnesses of the local Kumaon families. He started calling me Doctor America publicly all the time after that and would playfully ask me to treat him with various Western medicines, which he would balance on his head instead of taking. The first time Maharaji balanced a tin of Tiger Balm on his head after telling me he wasn’t well, he giggled and said to me, “Doctor America! Doctor America! Will you write a book? Will you write a book?”
At the time, I didn’t answer. For many years, after I finished my academic book about smallpox, I tried to write a book with stories from the ashram and smallpox years, the book I was sure he was referring to, this book that you have in your hands. For forty years I have told these stories to my children and friends, but I could not write them. Looking back now I wish I could teleport myself to that day four decades ago and answer him, “Yes, Maharaji. I will write a book. It may take a long time, but at the very least, I will try.”
Guru Purnima
July 19, 2016
Mill Valley