a voice gone silent

On Thursday night another resident of San Francisco Zen Center, David, was found dead. I assumed it was suicide, and his friend Brad Warner seems to confirm it.

Especially compared to the decades people sometimes live there, my time at SFZC was very short, just a few weeks in the summer of 2008. But what timing! A day or two before I got there, everyone had been evacuated out of Tassajara before the fires came, and its residents dispersed to either City Center or Green Gulch. I think the fires came the day after I got there, a story quirky and dramatic enough to have a new book about it: abbot Steve Stücky and 4 other monks stayed behind and risked their lives to (successfully) save the monastery. Back here, though, City Center was full of refugees, taken from their normal routines in a steep, un-electrified valley, and dumped in the middle of San Francisco.

David was one of the refugees. As you might guess, he suffered from mental illness, and had a bit of a mental break when he lost his home. So everything was pretty busy, with Tassajara having a crisis with the fires, City Center having a crisis trying to integrate the Tassajara refugees into the schedule and community, and David having a crisis of his own.

It's startling to me how much I remember of all those people I was only with for 3 weeks. Lou Hartman, impossibly old, but at 93(!) a model of dedicated practice, as the young people careened around him in the kitchen. The enigmatic, very large Jerome, silently shifting from his morning newspapers to putting on his big straw hat and venturing out into the world. And David.

I talked to him a few times when he got back from a few days in the hospital. I remember what everyone else remembers: kind, and smart, and funny. I also saw someone working so hard to be a part of the world, and maybe never quite feeling like he succeeded. I remember the subtle sadness behind his eyes, the shadows and fog of a fellow traveller. It's a special brand of hell, to experience life through that dull gray veil.

Really, I didn't know him that well, and I'm projecting a bit out of my experience. I just know that I found my way out, and he never did.

I often don't have much to say about these things. People die, and all at once we lose their participation in our world, and we get a brutal reminder of our own transience. It's rough.

On the han, the wood block used for signalling various events in a Zen temple, is always written a verse similar to this:


Life is short, and relationships are the only thing that matter. Go care about people.

passing

In 2008 I did the 3-week Summer Intensive program at San Francisco Zen Center. Zen Center is a mysterious place: started by Shunryu Suzuki more or less in 1962--nearly 50 years ago--it has a deep and dramatic history, as one of the epicenters of the transmission of Buddhist teaching to the West, and the setting for a spectacular organizational meltdown in 1984. There's a lot of history and old wounds there; as if it's grown old and wise, but there's a heartache that hasn't quite been let go.

There was a guy there who was usually hanging out in the tiny lounge kitchen, dressed in blue-jean overalls. Normally he'd be reading a newspaper, or if he was about to go out, he'd have a thermos and a big straw hat. He had a huge frame, and in aspect, sort reminded me of Lennie from Of Mice and Men.

Curious, I introduced myself, and the guy's name was Jerome. He didn't seem really keen on interacting, and the last guy I knew who looked like that had a diagnosis of major depression with psychosis, and it was just better all around to leave him alone.

Not getting much from Jerome himself, I asked around, and I still didn't get much information, except that he was a priest, now obviously retired, who had been there essentially forever.

Sometime after my time there, I stopped in at Forest Books, an excellent San Francisco bookstore whose selection I don't like very much. The owner turned out to be a student of ex-abbott Richard Baker Roshi (see link above--he was the meltdown), and we had an awkward conversation about Jerome.

"Did you ask him a question?"

"Nah, I just said hello. He didn't seem like he wanted to talk."

"Oh, you should ask him a really good question."

"Oh. I, erm, try to avoid asking people Zen questions."

"Well, if you ask him a good question, and really bring your whole self to it, you'll get a good answer."

"Uh...thanks."

And that's all I know about Jerome, except that he died a couple weeks ago. Maybe someday I'll find out more about his long history.

Maybe someday someone will be interested in finding out about mine.