Devotion
Authors: Dani Shapiro
A Memoir
For Michael and Jacob
Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises—a mother speaking downstairs, a grandfather rumbling in response, cars swishing past on Philadelphia Avenue and their headlights wheeling around the room. We need the little clicks and signs of a sustaining otherness. We need the Gods.
—
JOHN UPDIKE
A woman named Sandra was cradling my head in her…
Jacob ran ahead of us toward the wooded banks of…
I had reached the middle of my life and knew…
Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green! Here…
Just a few months ago, Michael and Jacob had been…
Maybe books weren’t enough. Maybe I needed to travel to…
When I was little, I used to sit and watch…
Were there signs in the universe? And if so, when…
On our last afternoon in Venice, Michael, Jacob, and I…
These days, when I am in the middle of my…
“We have an answer, and it isn’t the one we…
I didn’t believe that God had caused this to happen.
I sat on a meditation cushion near the back of…
The eleven benefits of metta according to the Buddha:
When Sylvia gave us the list of metta’s benefits, she…
“I never forgave your mother for marrying your father.”
“Did you pray when Jacob was sick?” I asked Michael,…
When I was growing up in New Jersey, I had…
I was watching Jacob build a tower of alphabet blocks…
I went to see the osteopath in his Connecticut office…
After a few days—after the thin layer of ash blew…
My father’s mother lived on the twenty-seventh floor of a…
I have become intimate with a stand of trees in…
The house in the country was on top of a…
The small white leather-bound prayer book is embossed on the…
The summer after we first moved to Connecticut, we were…
When we were still living in Brooklyn I craved comfort…
After returning home from Kripalu, I promised myself that each…
My parents had been driving home on a New Jersey…
I stood on the front stoop of my aunt Shirley’s…
One early spring afternoon, I met Steve Cope for lunch…
I started thinking about the Sabbath. I had been reading…
In my twenties, I spent several hours a week in…
We took a drive—the three of us—up north, into the…
I didn’t write during the year that Jacob was sick.
These days, my conversations with people invariably turn to God.
Sometimes it feels as if I’m building a bridge. This…
My cousin Mordechai—Shirley’s oldest son—has seven children. One or another…
Closure (business): the process by which an organization ceases operations
Deep within my body, the past is still alive. Everything…
In the years following my father’s death, any time I…
Samskara—latent impression; predisposition; consecration; imprint; innate tendency; innate potence; mold;…
If God doesn’t give us more than we can handle…
I’ve been having trouble maintaining a sense of solitude. Oh,…
On the morning my father died, his younger brother—my uncle…
Writers often say that the hardest part of writing isn’t…
We don’t get a lot of unexpected visitors. Our driveway…
I didn’t know how to pray. I knew the Hebrew…
In Connecticut, on our hilltop, life was quiet. Gone were…
Lacuna (manuscripts): a missing piece of text
Some of my best conversations with Jacob take place in…
Is it ever right to give up on a person?
A small group of people gathers together at my friend…
Michael and I were out to dinner with another couple—very…
I kept coming across the term householder. In Buddhist readings…
Accomplish faith. There was a time in my life I…
Life was very different in Connecticut. Though we were only…
My mother’s mother—the only grandparent I ever really knew—spoke in…
Michael is seven years older than I am. He remembers…
By the second day at Garrison, I felt intimately acquainted…
After the surgery—the clean bill of health (You dodged a…
I was having lunch with an editor who worked at…
I needed to figure out how we could live as…
From the time of our twelve-week sonogram, we knew we…
The great yogi B. K. S. Iyengar once wrote, “The moment you say…
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a fifteenth-century text considered to this…
The tumors in my mother’s brain looked like dust, sprinkled…
The message popped up on my screen one freezing cold…
Does a seeker ever stop seeking? Or is the very…
We joined the huge modern white synagogue near the highway.
The calls came a couple of times a year. A…
Seventy-two. According to the Kabbalah, God has seventy-two names. A…
Before Jacob turned six months old, people started to ask…
The Pali word dukkha—often translated as “suffering”—is central to Buddhist…
My mother did not want to be buried in the…
I met Sylvia Boorstein for an early dinner one cold, wet…
So what is to be done? It was the question…
I climbed the stairs to the glass front doors of…
The Sanskrit word for devotion is bhakta. It comes from…
It took several months to clean out my mother’s apartment.
Steve Cope calls early meditation experiences the noble failure. The first…
We discovered that I was pregnant the fall after my…
I wasn’t getting any closer to a personal relationship with…
Every once in a while, the darkness was too much.
Along with thinking of my daily meditation experience as the…
Our basement is filled with dead people’s stuff. Boxes line…
I was having tea with one of my smartest friends…
It was hard to trust that everything really was okay.
Sometimes I check my e-mail while driving.
I was blessed—or was it cursed?—with a highly attuned sense…
I have practiced yoga with many different teachers since walking…
It was a hot summer Sunday. Michael and Jacob were…
Michael’s parents are getting old. His father’s eightieth birthday is…
Any place can become a sanctuary. Some of my most…
Yes, I had begun to recognize sacred places when I…
Sometimes when I’m sitting in meditation, my sense of my…
Jacob has just learned to ride a bicycle, and on…
According to the legend, the Buddha was a man of…
The mezuzah we bought in Venice remained in the satin…
Michael, Jacob, and I wandered through the cemetery looking for…
This morning I wrote a condolence note to an acquaintance—a…
I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor, trying to listen…
A woman named Sandra was cradling my head in her hands. We were in a small room—just the two of us—and it was so quiet I could hear the ticking of her watch. The air smelled faintly of eucalyptus. A high window overlooked a parking lot, and beyond the parking lot, mountains. I tried to relax—that was the point, wasn’t it?—but I wasn’t relaxed at all. I had signed up for something called Master Level Energy Work, thinking it would be like a massage. But this was no massage. For one thing, she was sighing a lot.
After some moments, she spoke. “I see some sort of teacher. Do you have teachers in your life?”
“Yes.” A few people came to mind: a man in his seventies who had a shock of white hair and wore baggy suits; another man, younger, with a closely trimmed dark beard; a tiny gray-haired woman, also in her seventies.
“Do they assume a form? How do they appear to you?”
I hadn’t realized talking would be involved. Had I known, I never would have made the appointment. I wanted to lie still and be silent; it was peace I was after. I had been waking up in a cold sweat nearly every night, my heart pounding. I paced my house, worried about…well, worried about everything.
“Your teachers…,” Sandra prodded.
“Well, sometimes we have coffee,” I said. “Or we exchange e-mail.”
“But what do the forms look like? Do you see a light? Do they seem…spectral?”
Ah. She meant
otherworldly
teachers. Beneath my closed lids, I rolled my eyes. This wasn’t going to work for me, this talk of spirits. I started wondering how long I had been lying there, and how much longer this process was going to take. Would she be insulted if I got up and left? I was twitchy, impatient. Disappointed, too. It was rare that I allowed myself such a self-indulgent, not to mention expensive, hour.
She sighed again, a bit more loudly.
“Are you feeling…pushed?” she asked. “Like someone’s pushing you from behind?”
That precise feeling had been plaguing me for as long as I could remember.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”
I was always racing. I couldn’t settle down. I mean, I was
settled down
—I was happily married and the mother of an eight-year-old boy. But I often felt a sense of tremendous urgency, as if there was a whip at my back. I was fleeing something—but what?
Her hands on my neck began to tremble.
“It’s your father,” she said. “Your father is pushing you.”
Had I told her about my father? No. I thought about what she might have gleaned from looking at me: blond woman, mid-forties; wedding band; tank watch; yoga clothes; a necklace dangling with two charms, M and J. How could she have known that my father was dead? Did I have a “tell,” like a poker player?
“Was your father a religious man? A man of faith?”
She said it as if she already knew the answer and was only waiting for my confirmation. I was suddenly very alert.
“Yes, he was very religious.”
“And you have a young son?”
“I do.” She had a fifty-fifty shot of getting that right. The charm necklace was a giveaway that I probably had at least one child. I relaxed a little.
The trembling in Sandra’s hands grew more pronounced.
“Your father apologizes. He’s a very gentle spirit.”
A stillness settled over me, gauzy and soft. I wasn’t frightened, not exactly. Sandra’s fingers were hot against my neck. I pictured my father. His sweet round face. His kind, hazel-green eyes behind rimless glasses. His easy smile.
Hiya, darling!
I could summon his voice—always a bit louder than he meant it to be—as surely as if I just heard it yesterday.
How’s my girl?
“Your father is trying to help you,” Sandra said. “That’s why you feel pushed. He wants to share with you what he believes. He didn’t get a chance to—”
She broke off. Another heaving sigh.
“Is there anything you want to say to your father?”
I tried to remember what Sandra looked like: around sixty, reddish hair, a weathered face. Ordinary. Like she might be standing in front of me on line at the supermarket, rather than behind me, her hands on my skull. What was happening between us defied everything I believed, but I had entered a place beyond belief. I was here now. On the other side of logic. In a place that felt true, if not quite real.
“That I miss him,” I said. My own voice sounded strange and
far away. I was weightless, tumbling. Tears began to leak from the corners of my eyes. They soaked my hairline, but I didn’t move an inch. Even if my father wasn’t in the room, it was the closest I had been to him in twenty years.
“He died when I was young, and everything I am—everything I’ve become since that day—is because of him. Because I had to make his death mean something.”
Sandra moved her hands slightly to the left.
“He acknowledges that,” she said.
She rocked my head from side to side.
“Your father is asking if you want him to stay.”
“Yes.” I was weeping now. My father didn’t live long enough to know my husband or son. It was my greatest sorrow. “Yes, I want him to stay.”