Devotion (16 page)

The great yogi B. K. S. Iyengar once wrote, “The moment you say ‘I have got it,’ you have lost everything you had. As soon as something comes, you have to go one step further. Then there is evolution. The moment you say ‘I am satisfied with that,’ that means stagnation has come. That is the end of your learning; you have closed the windows of your intellect. So let me do what I cannot do, not what I can do.”

I was in no danger of self-satisfaction. I had arrived at an understanding of all I could not do, which felt like reaching the edge of the world. Once I realized that the things I had habitually used to prop myself up (the new pair of shoes, the good piece of news, the great review,
whatever
) were as fleeting as a sugar rush, they lost their luster. I had spent years—my whole life!—taping myself together like so many torn bits of paper, bolstering myself up with ephemera. What was I supposed to use to hold myself together, now they were gone? Oh, what’s that you say? The idea is not to hold myself together at all?

It felt as if another step, and I would free-fall. Another step, and who knew what would happen? There was no stopping, no pausing. Truly, there was no comfort. How long had I been at this? A year? Two? It was no time at all, in the greater scheme of things, and here I was. I had arrived—in the words of Thomas Merton—at an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and apparent
chaos. This, Merton believed, was the only point at which faith was possible. But most days, I felt the chaos without the faith.

I had entered the closest thing to a solitary life that was reasonable for me, given both my nature and my circumstances. I spent my days alone. I didn’t answer the phone. I sat at my desk, walked the dogs, got up and stretched, sat back down. I lit a fire in the fireplace, unrolled my mat, practiced yoga. I sat on my
zafu
and meditated for fifteen minutes, twenty. I went back to my desk. Eventually three o’clock rolled around, or four, and it was time for Jacob to come home from school. I didn’t know how to transition from one to the other: from hermit to mom. From silence to homework. From inwardness to snack-making and
Honey, how was your day.
I struggled to get inside myself, and then—as if trapped there—I struggled to get back out.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a fifteenth-century text considered to this day to be the classic work on Hatha yoga, was written by an Indian yogi named Svatmarama, about whom little is known. Svatmarama lays out the optimal conditions for the practice of Hatha yoga (
hatha
meaning simply the physical practice of yoga) in the following way:

“The Hatha yogi should live in a secluded hut free of stones, fire, and dampness to a distance of four cubits in a country which is properly governed, virtuous, prosperous and peaceful. These are the marks of a yoga hut as described by masters practicing Hatha:
a small door, no windows, no rat holes; not too high, too low, or too long; well-plastered with cow dung, clean and bug free. The grounds are enclosed by a wall, and beautified by an arbor, a raised platform, and a well. Living in this hut, free of all anxieties, one should earnestly practice yoga as taught by one’s guru.”

The tumors in my mother’s brain looked like dust, sprinkled there on the black-and-white lunar landscape of the X-ray. The oncologist pointed to them with the tip of his pencil. “There,” he said. “Do you see that? And there.” He kept moving his pencil. Finally I began to see that the grayish blur he was showing us was actually dozens—maybe hundreds—of minuscule tumors.

“So how do we get rid of them?” asked my mother.

I sat next to her, close enough to touch. Her winter coat was folded in her lap, and her cane rested against the side of the oncologist’s desk. For the first time, my mother looked brittle, as if her bones might break from a fall.

“We don’t,” the doctor answered. “We can treat them, but…” He trailed off, shrugging his shoulders as if to say that these specks were too much for him.

“Mostly, Mrs. Shapiro, what we can do at this point is make you comfortable.”

“Comfortable,” my mother repeated.

I focused on the doctor’s coffee mug.
I’d Rather Be Driving a Mercedes
, it read. Despite his taste in mugs, I liked this guy. He was the
fourth oncologist my mother had been through, and I hoped she wouldn’t get rid of him as well. He was more honest, more direct, than the others had been.

“Mom, do you understand what the doctor is saying?” I asked. No one had actually come out and used the D word. Death was delivered one euphemistic blow at a time:
comfortable, palliative, nothing more we can do.

“I think it’s time to talk about hospice care,” the doctor said.

My mother didn’t flinch. “That’s it, then.”

I reached over and held my mother’s hand. Her skin was papery, thin. An old woman’s hand. According to what I could sort out from the Internet, she had a couple of good months left. The terrible mess of our past no longer mattered. Those sessions in the therapist’s office were a distant memory. There was no hope for our relationship, at this late date. “No hope at all,” the therapist had said. I had no illusions that now, in some final and dramatic flash of revelation, we would understand one another. We were done. It was a fact of my life—intractable and sad—that our relationship had been a failure. Still, with her prognosis came one last chance to be her daughter.

But what did that mean, to be my mother’s daughter? I wasn’t sure what she wanted or needed of me. Of course, there were the practical matters. The home health aides, hospice nurses, accountants, lawyers. The paperwork, as if death could be arranged in carefully labeled file folders. The power of attorney, the safe deposit box, the bank statements. The sudden physical intimacy: the nakedness, the commode, the bedpan.

Years earlier—as a twenty-three-year-old—I had rented my mother an apartment and furnished it so that she would have a
place to start her new life as a widow in New York. At the time, I wondered what would happen to her. She was still quite young. She had money. She was smart, and beautiful. Would she find herself? Possibly have a second act? Would she stop being so angry at the world? I had hoped she would change. But then the years tumbled by in a blur of sadness and blame. Now—a long time and several apartments later—all she wanted to talk about was the dispersal of stuff. She had spent a lifetime collecting fine things, and wanted to be sure I’d take good care of them after she was gone.

The Nakashima table is worth a lot of money
.

There’s vintage Pucci in the closet.

That painting should be reappraised.

She walked unsteadily from one corner of her apartment to the other, pointing out objects of value, and I followed her, pen in hand. Of course, this was the easy part, if there was an easy part. This, I could do. I kept lists upon lists.
Nakashima—look up mid-century modern dealers. Pucci—consignment? Call insurance agent.
These were my acts of devotion.
Armani jacket in closet—tags still attached. Return to Bergdorf?

Well-meaning acquaintances would occasionally suggest that my mother and I had an opportunity for closure. That this could be a healing time. They didn’t know my mother or our history. It was something you say in these situations. Along with
God doesn’t give us more than we can handle
and
Everything happens for a reason
came the idea that surely, between a dying mother and her only child, there would be important moments to be shared. Private sorrows, joys, admissions, apologies.

Instead, I took notes.
Eames chair
, I carefully wrote.
Original upholstery. Turkish rug from the 1930s. Hand-blown glass from Jerusa
lem.
I can still hear my mother telling me, with the tremendous urgency of a confession: “Don’t forget, Dani—the pearls are good.”

The message popped up on my screen one freezing cold morning. I was at my desk, nursing my second cup of coffee. The house, quiet. The dogs asleep at my feet. The e-mail was from someone I barely knew.

I hated getting e-mails like this, because they made me feel guilty—like I should somehow participate. For a moment, I tried to think of twelve friends who wouldn’t mind receiving it. I couldn’t even come up with one.
Last chance to make a wish.
That wasn’t a very nice thing to impose on a friend, was it? Wishes, prayer, confusion, guilt—all wrapped up in one tidy little paragraph.
If you don’t make a wish, it won’t come true.
I deleted the e-mail. I sat there and stared at my screen. Then I pulled it out of my trash. But I didn’t send it on.

Does a seeker ever stop seeking? Or is the very definition of a seeker one who keeps searching, driven by an insatiable hunger for knowledge, awareness, wisdom, peace? The very idea of craving peace struck me as vaguely oxymoronic. Craving, after all, was the antithesis of all things peaceful. It meant living with a constant itch. A dissatisfaction with
what is
. But could there be such a thing as spiritual satisfaction?

Some days, during my yoga practice, when I played the CD mix Michael had made for me, invariably I found myself in
vashistasana
, or side plank pose, listening to the lyrics from the Eagles song
Desperado
: “It seems to me some fine things have been laid upon your table, but you only want the ones that you can’t get.” As I
lifted up into side plank, balancing on one hand, focusing on the treetops in the distance, I promised myself I wouldn’t be like that. I would recognize the fine things on my table. I wouldn’t want the ones I couldn’t get. Wanting more meant
upadana
, the Pali word for clinging, which translates literally into “fuel.” Clinging, craving, desiring, all add fuel to the fire of suffering.

I wondered if there was an end to the journey—other than the obvious Big End. Certainly, I knew people who were all set. My aunt Shirley and her entire brood, for instance. They didn’t question whether Judaism was the answer for them. They were Jewish! It was the answer! Their lives were lived in shuls and around Shabbos tables, and if they had questions and doubts, those were framed within the context of their Judaism. I thought of occasional people I had encountered along the way: Jews, yogis, Buddhists, Christians, who seemed to be absolutely sure they were in the right place.

At lunch with Steve Cope, in the Kripalu cafeteria, over steamed kale and hot water with lemon, I brought up these questions once again. What did it mean, to have arrived at a place that felt real and right and true? Was there an end to seeking? Or was it simply a matter of saying,
Okay, this is good enough. I’m stopping here
?

Steve leaned across the table, as if telling me a secret. “You know, there’s an ancient Christian mystical teaching about being one with the flame,” he said. “The flame is always there—call it whatever you want…God, the Holy Spirit—but the idea is that we try to bring ourselves into alignment with it.”

I thought about this for a moment. All around us in the enormous cafeteria, Kripalu guests were eating healthy lunches, before returning to their programs: “Coyote Healing: The Power of Native American Spirituality.” “The Self behind the Symp
tom: How Shadow Voices Heal Us.” Everyone was hoping to feel better. Everyone was seeking something.

“But what would happen if you became one with the flame all the time?” I asked Steve. “Wouldn’t it be too intense? Wouldn’t you…I don’t know…burn yourself up?”

Steve took a sip of tea, then smiled.

“Oh, I don’t think we need to worry about that,” he said. “You can put that at the bottom of your list.”

We joined the huge modern white synagogue near the highway. It seemed like the thing to do. The synagogue had a Hebrew school—the only one I was aware of within a thirty-minute drive. So I wrote a painfully large check, and Jacob began his twice-a-week religious education, which seemed to mostly entail bringing home arts and crafts projects like laminated place mats decorated with the Hebrew alphabet, and quarter-annual badge ceremonies held on Sunday mornings, in which the kids sang Israeli folk songs and parents were handed sheets with the transliteration, so we could sing along.

Months went by, and we hadn’t attended a service. There was always a reason: a late piano lesson, a dinner plan. The truth was, it wasn’t a priority. But increasingly I felt like we had to at least
try
. Each week, I received e-mails inviting us to one event or another:
Learn how to cook, Jewish-style! Moms’ Night Out! Come shmooze and check out our Hanukkah boutique!
What was the point of sending Jacob to Hebrew school if we weren’t going to be part of the commu
nity? We had to do this. Given that we had chosen to live here in Cheever country, it was up to us to reach out.

Michael, Jacob, and I piled into the car and drove to the synagogue early one Friday evening. As we walked from the parking lot into the glass-walled entrance of the main building, I felt like we were in the wrong place. I tried to shake my mood, but this place didn’t feel like shul to me. There were no men in black coats and yarmulkes. No women and children dressed in their nice clothes. That brisk, efficient bustle that I associated with the onset of Shabbos was lost amid the SUVs and minivans in the suburban parking lot. As we entered the main sanctuary, I scanned the room. Not a soul looked familiar.

We slid into the back row and waited for services to begin. Jacob was already squirming. Michael was squirming too.

“Come on, guys. Let’s try to have a good attitude,” I said, as much to myself as to them. I pulled out the siddur to take a look at it. Almost the entire prayer book was in English.

The rabbi climbed three stairs to the bimah, and stood at the pulpit. He was a small man, bald under his yarmulke.

“Shabbat Shalom!” he greeted the congregation.

“Shabbat Shalom!” the group called back.

The service began. I had been looking forward to this part. The singing, the music, always brought my father back to me. At pretty much any Jewish service, I could close my eyes and feel him in the room. His voice, his warmth, the scent of his tallit. My childhood was always available to me in the language of the siddur.

“We will read responsively,” said the rabbi. He cleared his throat.

“Come my Beloved to greet the bride,” he read.

“The Sabbath presence, let us welcome,” responded the congregation.

Oh,
no.
Was the whole service going to be in English? In my mind, the familiar strains of “Lecha Dodi” played like background music.
Lecha Dodi, likrat kalah, penei Shabbat nekabela…

I could hardly sit still. The entire service went on this way, punctuated by occasional singing by a female cantor, which seemed more like an operatic performance than a ritual of prayer. At a few points, the congregation was asked to sing a little something—usually comprised of
lai, lai, lai.
People swayed and put their arms around each other. The next thing I knew—what the hell was happening?—congregants had stood and formed a large circle, and were doing some sort of Israeli folk dance. A woman wearing a tallit and a helmet-sized embroidered yarmulke was leading the dancing.

“Help,” Michael whispered in my ear.

Jacob was kicking the back of the pew in front of us. I had made him wear nice shoes to go to synagogue. All the other kids were in sneakers—a fact which had not gone unnoticed by him. My guys were not happy with me, not at all.

“Mommy, what time is it?” Jacob asked. It was his way of asking how much more he’d have to endure.

“It’ll be a while, sweetie.”

The conga line swirled around us. The yarmulke lady threw back her head as she danced. I wondered how the yarmulke stayed put. Here, in a suburban shul off the interstate highway, was a whole form of Judaism to which I hadn’t been exposed. It was…
ecstatic
. It reminded me of people I had seen on TV, speaking in tongues or falling to their knees in fits of religious fervor. And yet there was something so ersatz about it. Ersatz ecstasy. I wanted to bolt.

But we couldn’t leave. I mean, what kind of message would that send to Jacob—that his parents thought it was okay to sneak out of shul? The rabbi returned to the dais and faced the congregation. It was sermon time.

“On this Shabbat, as we read the Torah portion, I find myself thinking about Alex Rodriguez,” he began.

Michael squeezed my hand hard.
A-Rod?
I wasn’t sure which was worse: that the rabbi was using a baseball player to illustrate the Torah portion, or that he was a Yankees fan.

“When A-Rod plays, what we see is incredible determination—”

“Okay,” I whispered to Michael. I nudged Jacob to get up. “Let’s get out of here.”

We slid from the last row. The three of us tiptoed out like teenagers.