part0061

In keeping with Tibetan Buddhist practice, the body of a departed spirit should be left undisturbed for a few days. The soul is at a critical point of transition, and this final link to the world of the living should be maintained, to let the soul take its leave in peace, and in its own time. Though we were not practicing Buddhists, similar practices are found in many shamanic traditions, and it seemed to make sense. So Terence stayed with us in his bed at Jack and Ricci’s place while I arranged for a cremation at the Mount Tamalpais Mortuary.

The ceremony on April 6 was simple and small. Finn and Klea did not attend, having chosen to honor their father in their own way. Only Christy and I, and Terence’s old friends Lisa and Erik, loyal to the end, were present. Terence looked good. He was lying in a cardboard casket, dressed in his favorite tweed jacket, with amulets and necklaces from his close friends encircling his neck. He looked at peace. We closed up the casket, which was elevated on a bed of rollers. The attendants slid it into the oven and closed the door. We retired to the chapel to wait. It took just over an hour for the cremation to be finished. There were no sermons, nothing formal. We sat around and reminisced, about the days in Berkeley and even earlier, the days in Menlo Park and Lancaster when Terence was just Terry and we were just happy hippies, unknown and obscure, full of hope and idealism, dreams and delusions. How young and innocent and guileless we were back then.

A year or so after the cremation, I had an Ayahuasca experience in which I relived the cremation from Terence’s point of view. In my vision, it was just a flash of searing flames and heat, and it seems right somehow that it should be that way. At least that was the vision of cremation that I was granted by ayahuasca. I have no idea if it matches reality or not, but I was grateful to share the experience vicariously with Terence. After all, we had shared so much in life, to the point where at times I had felt we were like one person. It seemed fitting somehow to be able to share this final moment of alchemical transmutation.

Even in the face of death, life, ever impatient, hastens us along to the next act. We are not permitted the luxury of indulging the impulse to pause and reflect. That’s how it seemed after Terence’s death. Even before Terence’s body was consigned to the flames, I was summoned to a meeting at the lawyer’s office for a reading of the new will, the one that had been crafted in secret and in my absence. Terence’s former will was a simple, two-page document that basically stated his intent to bequeath all of his possessions to his children. The new will was a ten-page, densely worded document with an eleven-page appendix specifying gifts of specific personal property. It had been drafted and signed on March 24, a day during the period when I had been absent. Nothing about it sat well with me. I wondered how Terence, in the terminal stages of brain cancer, unable to speak and perhaps not fully capable of clarity of thought, could have participated in the drafting of such a document when his only way to respond would have been to raise a finger or nod. It seemed to me that his children had gotten short shrift. In particular, the new will specified that Terence’s beloved library was to be placed in a trust under the curatorship of a wealthy couple, friends of Terence’s and benefactors of the Esalen Institute. Terence had promised the library to Finn and Klea in earlier conversations in the summer of 1999, one of which I witnessed. The revised will nullified his intent as he had expressed it prior to his apparent change of heart. According to the new will, the library was to be donated to the Esalen Institute after probate had been settled.

I was named as the executor of Terence’s will, as I had requested of him. I had no previous experience with legal matters of this kind, and I wanted to carry out my duties within the letter of the law. I was also still grieving; the will was read two days after Terence’s death, and I don’t think I was thinking clearly. Looking back on it, had I been thinking more clearly, and had I better understood my prerogatives and rights as the executor and next of kin, I would have contested the will on the spot, on the grounds that Terence had not been of sound mind when it was drafted. But I did not take such action at the time, and the opportunity was lost.

The probate process turned into a can of worms that dragged on for years. It caused me a great deal of stress as I tried to balance my fiduciary duties with my wish to heal some wounds and find closure. Other than his art and his books, Terence had no real assets, so in order to pay off his medical bills and other expenses I was forced to put the house in Hawaii up for sale. This was difficult because the property was part of a collective ownership agreement and had no free title and no insurance. It took years, but I eventually found a person who was willing to buy Terence’s “shares” in the hui. Though far from perfect, it was the best resolution of the matter that I could manage under the circumstances.

Fulfilling Terence’s directive to bequeath the library to Esalen was the most contentious and stressful challenge I faced. Its resolution turned out to be tragic. The executor of a will has a great deal of power; but that power must be exercised within constraints. The executor’s duty is to carry out the wishes of the deceased as expressed in the will, even if you disagree with those wishes. I felt this tension acutely. I was torn between wanting to do what I felt was right and carrying out the directives of the will that, as the executor, I was bound to do.

I knew there would be problems within a couple of weeks after Terence’s death, when I received a strident and dictatorial document from a lawyer representing the curators Terence had named. The point was to tell me what I was going to do with the library and how the matter would be handled. I thought this was unnecessarily adversarial, as I had every intention of carrying out the directives even though I didn’t agree with them. At the time, the library was under my protection as the executor, along with all assets of the estate. This is standard procedure in probated wills, because if there are liens against the estate, assets may have to be sold to settle the debts. None of the assets of the estate, even those bequeathed to other purposes, are shielded until the obligations are settled. In the case of Terence’s estate, there were liens, primarily because of medical bills, and the possibility existed that some of the more valuable titles in the library would have to be sold off. I had engaged the services of a lawyer by this time, and had instructed her to notify the curators that the library would be released to their curatorship only after probate had been settled. Until then, any and all decisions regarding the assets of the estate were mine to make.

Fate has a way of intervening in unexpected ways, and it did in the case of Terence’s library. As the probate process ground on, I managed to work out an agreement with the curators about when and how to transfer the library to Esalen. The books sat in the house on the Big Island for far too long, but after a time they were packed up and transferred to a storage facility in Kona. The curators and the estate reached an agreement to ship them to the mainland, where they were stored in a space overseen by Esalen in an old building in downtown Monterey. As I’ve noted earlier, the plan had been to store the books there until a new building had been constructed where Terence’s collection, among other works, could be suitably housed.

On the evening of February 7, 2007, a fire broke out in a sub shop on the street level of the building where Terence’s books and personal papers were stored. The flames spread quickly, and Terence’s entire collection was soon lost. I didn’t learn of this tragedy until the next morning when I picked up a voicemail from David Price, who was the son of Esalen’s co-founder Dick Price, and who Terence knew well from his long association with Esalen. Both David and Gordon Wheeler, Esalen’s CEO, were distraught and upset by this disaster, but I assured them that I didn’t consider it their fault. The books were not insured separately from Esalen’s property insurance, so there was no possibility that the family would receive some modest compensation for the loss. The books were stored at the facility on shelves, so technically they were accessible as per the conditions of the bequest. But Terence’s wish, that they be accessible at a site on the Esalen campus in Big Sur, had not been fulfilled.

Although the administrators at Esalen expressed heartfelt regret over this tragedy, I never heard from the curators, a fact that speaks for itself. That Terence lost not one but two irreplaceable and unique libraries to fire—the first in Berkeley in 1970, and the second in 2007—is now part of his life story. It’s a double tragedy. Terence’s friend Erik Davis later posted a moving essay about the loss on his website, Techgnosis . So much of Terence’s soul and being was bound up in his library it was almost like a living part of himself. After this fire took that away, irrevocably and forever, I began to feel that he had truly departed this world.

The conflicts that arose over Terence’s will, and the turmoil that created, dragged on for years and caused me great distress. Over the years, and with Betsy’s help, I have achieved a kind of closure with most of those involved. I don’t see any point in nursing old grudges, as they poison mainly the person that holds them, and there is already enough pain associated with Terence’s life, and death, to last the rest of mine. In the end (so I tell myself) we each lived through these difficult times together, and each tried to do the right thing. We differed in our understanding of what that was, but I give those with whom I differed the benefit of the doubt. We may never be close friends, but I will always be grateful for what they did for Terence in his time of need. That makes up for a lot.

Time, in its way, just keeps flowing, no matter how much we might wish it would stop for a moment and let us catch our breath and gaze back along the distance we have traveled. In my story, at least, I have arrived at such a point, and I think I’m going to leave it here. Terence’s departure from the realm of the living on that early April morning of the year 2000 was not really the end of his story, or the end of mine, or the end of our intertwined destinies. A tale such as ours never really ends, any more than it ever really begins; it is a frozen snapshot of an infinitesimal slice of time, pressed between the pages of an expired past and indeterminate future like a dried flower in a weighty tome. We behold it for an instant highlighted by the strobe flash of scrutiny, reflection, and recollection; and then the light moves on, leaving only a fading afterimage in the mind. Finally, even that vanishes into darkness and is gone.

A lot has happened since Terence took his leave just over twelve years ago. During that period, our collective experience of historical time has accelerated in a cascade of staggering events: the hijacked elections of 2000, the attacks on 9/11, wars in the Middle East, earthquakes, tsunamis, oil spills, global financial meltdown, looming environmental collapse, exploding technological change. Terence didn’t live to witness these events, but they would not have surprised him, as a prophet of his times. We are gripped by the intuition that we are heading toward some sort of unimaginable historical singularity; Terence articulated this intuition for us. He envisioned the future in all its terror and promise, and made that vision real for the rest of us. He made us reflect on our existential, cosmic, and historical dilemma; he made us think, he made us laugh, and, most importantly, he gave us hope. It’s for that reason, I believe, that he speaks to us from the past in a voice that rings so true and timely today.

An important part of me died with Terence; nevertheless I soldier on, diminished and damaged but still standing, for how much longer I do not know. At times, my intuition tells me it won’t be that long; at other moments, I feel I could live for decades. If I’ve learned anything from being granted a relatively long life, it’s that the whole point of the exercise is to live and cherish each day as if it were our last. As trite as that sounds, it is a profound truth that requires a lifetime to realize. As a milestone marking a finished leg in life’s journey, the completion of this book is an important one for me. Whether other works will follow I cannot say. But this story is one I have wanted and needed to tell for some time. I know it will be reviled and praised, criticized and mocked, loved and condemned. Trust me; no one is more acutely aware than I am of its serious imperfections. Yet, it’s the best I can manage. It’s a tale told as well as I am able to tell it. Make of it what you will. It’s the tale I set out to tell, and now it is done.