After two days in Paris, still jet-lagged, we rent a car to drive down to the retreat center where I will teach. The estimated travel time is two and a half hours. But at the Orléans exit an hour south of Paris, I veer off the highway. I want to see the town whose name is referred to repeatedly in Paris: Porte d’Orléans, a subway stop; Velodrome d’Orléans, for cycling races; below the clock at Musée d’Orsay, Paris-Orléans; a dock called Quai d’Orléans.
My assistant—a longtime student, wife of a rabbi, and PhD in art history—and I will have some fun. I keep repeating that word, strange to a Jew, but I consider it important. This is it. This one great life. Let’s take some pleasure, even when this Orléans turns out not to be much of anything: bland streets, one cathedral, one nasty tea shop—the only one open at 3:00 P.M. But we make the most of it: we go to their one musée des beaux-arts, which has a Gauguin and a slab of a hind leg of raw animal meat painted by Soutine and a quiet Corot we forget as soon as we pass it. But still, name a town in North Dakota that has anything equal. And there are fresh peaches in the market here in June, not to be seen till August in New Mexico.
The problem is we can’t manage to drive out of the town. Around and around we go, with no map. Forget the GPS on Saundra’s iPhone. You are here, a metallic female voice repeats when we face a dead-end street at the edge of a river bluff. You have arrived. Very Zen of her but not helpful.
But at last I am relieved of the burden of planning—this retreat has been in the works for almost two years. Justine, another longtime student, has a French grandmother who has a retreat center that her uncle, a conductor in Paris, developed for musicians. They’ve taken a barn and made it acoustically perfect for concerts. We will use it as a zendo. The first Sit, Walk, Write: True Secret Retreat ever on European soil. Many American students—and also ones from Canada and the Netherlands—signed up within a week. One student gave a donation for several fellowships. The stipulation: they must be longtime students who could never imagine—or afford—coming across the ocean. I called four in the winter evenings and told them to pack their bags.
Justine’s father was a serious Zen practitioner under the famous Zen teacher Taisen Deshimaru. He was delighted this was happening on his mother’s farm.
Saundra and I manage to arrive at Villefavard twelve hours late, just before the nearby Protestant church clangs out twelve midnight gongs. Then Saundra confesses she has been nervous the whole time, a natural Jewish state of mind. The lights are out and we tramp up the steps. Soon we drop into a sleep disconnected from country or the twirling Earth.
Two nights later, about to begin the retreat, I am met at the bottom of the steps by Steve, a burly, tall, ponytailed man who has studied with me before. The twilight is casting a yellow glow on his face and on everything around us. He tells me, “Aunt Katie has hit her head, and she lay unconscious for eight hours before they found her. She’s in the hospital. The blood thinned by the pills she took for her heart condition seeped into her brain.”
I grab the front of his shirt and lean into his chest. He is the nephew of my dear friend Katherine Thanas, who is eighty-five, insistently independent, living alone in her own apartment. Bloody Kleenex was found upstairs—they figure she tried to minister to herself. Whenever it was that she went downstairs, she blacked out.
A black chasm opens in front of me: we are losing her. Through muffled sobs, I manage, “Any chance?”
“None.” Her nephew chokes on that single word.
I’d seen her last in early January. I had brought her bright red-blue-black striped wool socks.
“Katherine, we need to jazz you up.” She wore white cotton toe-fitted ones for the zendo’s highly shined wood floor. Traditional Japanese.
She laughed. “These won’t fit. I’m size eleven.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. We’ll go to the men’s store.”
“We can try. They won’t be as colorful.”
We found her shocking-pink-and-black-striped socks at a corner shoe store.
“Warm,” she said, delighted. It was freezing cold in her apartment. The usual California attitude: a denial that it ever gets cold, so the housing is miserably insulated and heated.
We ate at a Japanese restaurant. She’d been on an absolute no-fat—not even olive oil—diet for three years. The doctor said it would help her heart. He also said no one could follow such a stringent protocol. That, along with weekly energy work, turned her heart around. No open-heart surgery. The doctor was amazed.
. . .
I met Katherine in the late eighties, around the time my Zen teacher was dying. She visited him in Minneapolis. He was one of her teachers when he first came to America to help Suzuki Roshi in the early years of San Francisco Zen Center.
“He was not a good example. He was too perfect.” She lifted her elbows to show how erect his gassho was.
Or maybe I met her first after he died and she asked me to do a benefit for her small community. The money they made from the writing workshop would build a bathroom for the zendo, formerly a Chinese laundry.
She picked me up in her manual-drive Honda at Yvonne Rand’s home in Muir Beach, and we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, continuing southwest, down to her shoulder of the peninsula. As we drove the long highways, her energetic foot pounced on the clutch.
Five years later was my true meeting with her. I had taught writing for a week at Tassajara Zen Monastery and was given a week on my own, in exchange, to soak in the springs and stay in a new stone guesthouse. I was teaching myself to do abstract paintings. Form detached from meaning, meaning expressed in color. I had six cheap oil pastels and an even cheaper packet of 8 x 11 sheets of paper.
Katherine was there that week at Tassajara, leading a Zen and yoga retreat. She had lived at Tassajara for many winters after the summer guests left. That’s when Zen students faced the wall for long hours, far away from city distractions, settling deep into remote silence.
She leaned over my shoulder as I sat on the dirt path looking up at the waterfall. “Not quite abstract—not realistic, either.” She pointed her index finger along the blue line.
“What was it like to study with Diebenkorn?”
“I knew I couldn’t be great. I was pulled to Zen.”
That week I sought her out. I practiced Zen with all of my heart but loved writing and painting. At that time they were still opposing each other. Katherine knew about both.
She came up behind me on the third day, her fingers pointing up at the tree, my finger smeared with brown. “I like this line. But you don’t have it yet.”
“Why don’t you paint anymore?” I asked her.
She laughed and said nothing.
I can hear her voice. Whenever she picked up the phone there was delight in it, ready to take on any person on the other end. No small talk—how was your relationship, your job, your feelings about your cousin? She wanted the truthful deep answers below polite chatter. She joined you in any challenge, always wanting to understand what it is to be human. Right until the end, at that January sushi lunch. “I don’t understand relationships,” I said. She gave me a jaunty sigh and a head shake. Nothing ironic. And then she asked the most surprising thing: “How do you know love?”
Even that last visit, I could not keep up with her darting up the stairs. And she insisted on driving. She had another version of her old manual Honda, and we careened around the many corners of her tight neighborhood.
We call back to the States the first night, the second night. Each day, Katherine is still in the hospital.
A year earlier she had visited me in Santa Fe and popped up after each meal to clear her plate. “Don’t wash the dishes. You’ll make more of a mess. Katherine, you can relax and let me do the work.”
“I want to be useful.” Always the Zen practitioner: when you can no longer work, you can no longer eat. We were brought up on the raw edge of Japanese ancient teachings, transmitted through great human effort, challenging all adversity.
On that visit she brought a gift of not only Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter but also a memoir by Oe’s English translator John Nathan, whom she knew. “I wish John had written less about his life and more about what it’s like to translate.” She tapped the cover. “But interesting just the same.”
It was typical of her. A fresh slant on the novel—the translator. She read widely, and it showed in the curious bent of her mind. No matter how nonchalant or vague you might be in a particular moment, she came back at you.
That visit in New Mexico, her nose bled from the altitude. It was the blood thinners. The same ones that came to get her, even though she did not eat a drop of fat.
We gather wildflowers in the French countryside to make a fat bouquet, plant it in the middle of the retreat circle with her name on a placard.
Steve tells us, “Aunt Katie sent me Rilke, Charles Olson, Laurens van der Post, three of Natalie’s books, Jack Kornfield, Norm Fischer. My whole childhood she sent me books. I’m a writer today because of that.
“She had a great sense of humor. Just three years ago I wanted to see her zendo. She showed me around—then, in front of the altar, she jumped up, kicking her heels together. ‘I’m the abbot, I’m the abbot,’ she sang out.
“But she could also be tough. I wore a weird long, multicolored coat and she told me straightaway it looked terrible, that I didn’t need to freak people out.”
I smile. Katherine had told me that conversation in detail and had worried she hadn’t handled it well.
Back in January we had talked about her coming to this French retreat. “You could relax, look at cows, eat baguettes—no cheese—and once during the week you could give a single dharma talk to my students.”
Three days into the retreat they take her off life support. Miraculously, she keeps breathing. Her students convince the hospital to let her go home and be on hospice, surrounded twenty-four hours a day by people who love her.
Each night after the last class session, Steve and I stand in the stone courtyard, near tall grass pastures, clumps of brown Limousin cows in the distance, and try to call California in their early morning, almost half a globe away. Often our cell phone can’t make contact. We stand in the darkening shade, hearing electric noise, clasping the metal to our ears.
Katherine was the only one in the dharma world who, after reading The Great Failure—my memoir about finding out after he died that my Zen teacher had been sleeping with students—called me and directly said she didn’t like it. No one else spoke to me; they all silently disappeared. But after our call, Katherine and I did not see each other for four years. I was sorely aware of that rift and calculated from a distance her aging.
Then one day the phone rang: “Younger students have been reading your book and telling me, ‘It’s really good.’ I thought: Am I not a Zen teacher? I must be open-minded. I reread it. I got it all wrong the first time. I was blinded. When can we see each other?”
I was in Santa Cruz on a book tour soon after. We ate Japanese for dinner, as we always did, and she sat in the front row at the reading. I was grateful to be reconnected.
Once I asked her to conduct a three-day meditation retreat in the solar adobe zendo I’d just built in Taos.
Each day she gave a lecture. “I rented a car at the airport in Albuquerque. Getting to Taos was fine—only one highway pointing north—but then I had to follow Natalie’s directions on these dirt back roads. I got lost. I realize now that when I listened to her over the phone, I pictured in my mind what she was saying, and when the markers appeared in actuality—for instance, the right at an abandoned adobe—they weren’t how I’d pictured them, so I ignored them and went looking for what matched my vision. Isn’t that how we also work in our life? We don’t see reality.”
The last evening in France, just before the students break silence, Steve comes up to me and whispers in my ear, “I just spoke to my brother. Katherine let go.”
I nod and proceed to the zendo in a trance.
I’m unable to recall anything I taught that night. But these forty students traveled far to be with me. I have to fulfill my obligation—garner my energy—even though someone I love has slowly been dying far away.
So many times this has happened. I am teaching while something important is happening somewhere else.
That night, after the ending ceremony and festivities, in the long early hours past midnight, alone in the third story of a French farmhouse, I fall into the unformed chasm of grief.
The next morning, still in my clothes, I hear a hesitant knock at my door. “It’s past breakfast and class is in five minutes.” Saundra, whom I twirled on that twelve-hour drive down, opens the door a crack.
“I can’t do it,” I growl. “You teach.”
A flicker of hesitation. Then she sees my face. “I couldn’t be with her,” I cry.
. . .
When I leave the retreat, I walk for seven days in the Dordogne Valley, through fields of corn; among walnut trees, sunflowers; and at the edge of a wide, swollen, meandering river. So much in bloom.
We are no different from a flower, I think. It gives off its radiance—then dies. We don’t expect that same flower to come back next June. Another takes its place.
But there must also be something else. My rambunctious friend, where are you now? Wherever you are, there is still so much to say.
Bright pink zinnia
my friend Katherine
one candle burning