Inexorable

Today was my last day teaching spring semester classes at Framingham State: on Saturday morning, my students will submit their final essay portfolios online, then on Monday and Tuesday mornings, I’ll proctor their final exams before spending the rest of the week grading, grading, grading. Through long experience, I’ve learned that semesters move forward as inexorably as seasons: in some ways, it feels like the end of the semester has been a long time coming, and in other ways, it feels like the end of the semester has come (again) before I’m really ready for it.

The last week of classes is always a bittersweet time. On the one hand, I’m always tired and eager for the (brief) respite that comes at the end of the semester; on the other hand, I’m always mindful of how much grading stands between the last week of the semester and Done.

When I taught at Keene State, the last week of the semester was typically when I’d find myself looking out my classroom windows at Old Silver, the sprawling silver maple I’d nicknamed the Failure Tree before he collapsed with an earth-shaking thud three years ago.

Old Silver had a lot of help in his final years from the Keene State College grounds crew, who tethered his trunks together with wire cables, and I always took quiet encouragement looking out the window at him during the final weeks of the semester, when I was daunted by my paper-piles and unsure whether my students had really “gotten” anything I’d tried to teach them.

Old Silver stood alongside me for most of my teaching career at Keene State, but he never really listened to any of my lectures, preferring to figure out his own approach to “tree-ness.” Sometimes the most lasting lessons happen despite everything a teacher does—or fails to do—in the classroom, and the last week of the semester is when I find myself quietly hoping that my students got something useful out of my class, if only by osmosis.

I haven’t (yet) found an acceptable equivalent to Old Silver at Framingham State: I’m still getting to know the trees there. The closest candidates are the two massively sprawling oak trees on Larned Beach, the grassy patch of real estate between Hemenway Hall and Whittemore Library. Both of these oaks are estimated to be a couple hundred years old: one is hale and hearty, the other is dying after being struck by lightning, and both are slated to be felled later this month to allow room for new construction.

If you’ve been alive and paying attention long enough, one of the lessons you eventually learn (if only by osmosis) is that even the oldest and sturdiest trees eventually fail and fall. Some, like Old Silver, choose their own time, defying gravity with a little help from attentive groundskeepers. Others, like Framingham State’s two massive oaks, have their times chosen for them, progress moving inexorably whether you’re ready for it or not.

 

Being there, now

On Sunday when J and I took the T into Boston to see the samurai at the Museum of Fine Arts, we stopped at Copley Square to visit the makeshift memorial that has arisen near the site of the Boston Marathon bombings. I wanted to see where it all happened—I wanted to stand on the very spot—even though the bombings happened in a place where I’ve stood many times before. Somehow, I hoped that being there, now, would help me understand what it must have been like to be there, then.

The Marathon bombings happened in a place where I’ve frequently been. Years ago, during the first year of my Master’s program at Boston College, I lived in a depressing, ant-infested apartment in Malden—a lifetime away from campus, it seemed—and the Boston Public Library at Copley Square was like a second home to me.

During the second year of my Master’s program, I lived in a garden flat in Beacon Hill, a stone’s throw from Boston’s Back Bay, so I’d regularly watch the marathon near the finish line on Boylston Street, right across from the library. In those days, I’d typically show up in the afternoon, after the elite front runners and fleet-of-foot had already finished, when the injured, the underdogs, and the unlikely—the folks, in other words, who really needed an audience to cheer them on—were gamely limping their way to the finish line.

Revisiting Boylston Street cemented the realization that the only thing separating me and countless other Marathon spectators from being at the Right Place at the Wrong Time was simply time and chance. If tragedy struck at 2:50 pm on April 15, 2013, it could have easily struck minutes, hours, or even years earlier: then rather than now, that year rather than this.

Why did tragedy strike here and now, with these particular people and passersby present? That is the great unanswerable question in the aftermath of tragedy, a version of the scandal of particularity, as theologians call it. If either grace or grief (take your pick) can happen anywhere and at any time, why did one or the other happen Now and Here? It’s not morbid curiosity that has been driving Bostonians to visit the bombing site in droves: it is the abiding, unanswerable question every survivor at some point asks: “Why not me?”

In the aftermath of tragedy, there is also a curious desire—one that might seem counter-intuitive, if you’re observing it secondhand—to immerse oneself in a large, anonymous crowd, or to simply be outside with others. Since the Boston Marathon happens on a state holiday, many of us watched coverage of the bombings in the relative isolation of our homes, with only our closest loved ones present. “Stay away from crowds” was one of the warnings issued in the immediate aftermath of the attack, as Boylston Street was blocked, the Marathon was cancelled, and confused runners were re-routed to safety.

This isolationist message was underscored on Lockdown Friday, when venturing outside and gathering in crowds were officially verboten. After the second bombing suspect was captured and the city-wide lockdown was rescinded, the collective psyche gravitated irresistibly in the opposite direction. Now, there is something hugely soothing about being outside and with others, whether at a memorial service, candlelight vigil, or bustling baseball game. The impulse is insistent: we will get through this together, and we will do it by coming together.

Sunday was a positively gorgeous spring day, a perfect day to take the T into town and walk around with throngs of placid pedestrians. Our trolley was packed with Red Sox fans and a woman who was proudly taking her grand-daughter to the Big Apple Circus, just as she had taken the girl’s mother years before. On Sunday there was a home Celtics game in the afternoon, a home Bruins game in the evening, and “Art in Bloom” all day at the MFA: a little something for everyone on a mild and sunny day when it felt like all of Boston was finally blooming.

It was, in other words, a bustling day in the city, with the entire world (it seemed) showing up stroll down Boylston Street and pay their respects at a makeshift, open-air memorial.

After arriving in Copley Square, J and I had to wait in line to view the piles of offerings left along a quadrangle of metal barricades set up in Copley Plaza to contain a teeming outpouring of flowers, running shoes, stuffed animals, handwritten notes, signs, paintings, T-shirts, rosaries, ball-caps, and origami cranes adorning every available surface.

In one corner of the memorial area, there was a heap of bracelets and meditation beads; atop another pile of flowers, someone had left a waterlogged copy of a favorite children’s book. Elsewhere, someone had left an unopened box of spaghetti and a tin of cookies—a nod, perhaps, to a marathoner’s pre-race stint of carbo-loading—and I saw several separate piles of coins, as if the impulse to leave a memento led onlookers to empty their pockets, offering anything at hand.

At the memorial, there were rubber ducks and stone angels, a plaster Pieta and candles. One tree was draped with rosaries and faded prayer flags, and another had seemingly sprouted a bouquet of American flags from its base.

The sheer volume of stuff was both amazing and overwhelming: such an outpouring of love for the dead, the injured, and for Boston on the whole.

As large as it was, the memorial mound continued to grow as we wended our way through the piles, pointing and reading notes and snapping photos.

One father helped his little girl add her contribution to the pile—it was shiny and sparkly, decorated with ribbons and glitter—while a loose cluster of twenty-somethings wrote messages on blue and yellow strips of paper that they added to an ever-growing chain, every link a prayer.

It was incredibly moving to see such an abundant, seemingly worldwide outpouring of love: a tidal surge of well-wishes from everywhere, as if a wave had overwhelmed us with a great teeming detritus of remembrance.

When we witness tragedy from afar, whether from across town or across the country, we want to do something in response, even if all we can do is sign a banner or leave a handwritten note.

Examining the neatly arranged assortment of offerings felt like browsing a giant yard sale or flea market where every item carried words of encouragement rather than a price tag: priceless.

But out of the many came the occasional one, individual messages that stopped me short with their poignancy: the note, for instance, from police officers in Colorado promising to take over the watch for slain MIT police officer Sean Collier…

…or the child who drew the “poisonous bomb” the only way he knew how, which was like something out of a Road Runner cartoon.

But the individual item that hit me hardest—a surprise surge of sentiment that threatened to turn my Boston Strong into Boston Sobs—was a still-packaged plaque showing a young boy with hands folded in prayer: the kind of thing you’d give a little boy for his First Communion.

I don’t know if eight-year-old Martin Richard was Catholic, but this much I know: he won’t be taking Communion with his classmates this year, having achieved a premature oneness with eternity instead.

I’m not sure I found any answers by visiting the Boston Marathon bombing site, but what I found was an upsurge of hope. Whether they acted alone or with accomplices, the Boston bombing suspects can’t possibly outnumber the people who came out to walk on Sunday or the people who continue to heap their blessings on a city it’s easy to fall in love with all over again.

Click here for a complete photo set of images from the makeshift Boston Marathon memorial in Copley Square, or click here for my earlier post about (and pictures from) this year’s Boston Marathon.

 

One week

At 2:50 pm last Monday, I was taking a break from grading to sort through and edit the photos I’d taken at the Boston Marathon that morning, which I used to illustrate yesterday’s post. It wasn’t until about a half hour later that J and I received a phone call from a relative asking if we were okay: our first indication that something bad had happened in Boston, and we should turn on the news.

I spent the rest of last Monday not grading papers, listening to news coverage while continuing to sort through and edit happy, festive photos that in no way matched the version of events I was hearing, as if I were watching one movie while listening to the audio of another.

Today at 2:50 pm, I was taking a break from grading to sort through a handful of photos I’d taken around lunchtime–the photos illustrating this post–when an alarm I’d set earlier in the day went off, sounding with a cascade of cathedral bells. The governor had requested that Massachusetts citizens observe a moment of silence at 2:50 today, one week after the first Boston Marathon bomb went off, so when my alarm sounded, I stopped what I was doing, closed my laptop, and sat in silence for a minute, thinking about the people whose lives ended or were irrevocably changed one week ago today.

 

Quiet commemoration

Earlier today, I took a lunchtime walk at Edgell Grove Cemetery in Framingham. I technically didn’t have time to go walking between my classes at Framingham State, as it’s the time of the semester when my paper-piles loom. But if there’s any lesson I took from yesterday’s Boston Marathon bombing, it’s that life is short, so you have to walk while the walking is good.

There’s something oddly comforting about taking a lunch hour walk at a woodsy cemetery, especially when you’ve been watching too much news coverage and have a heavy heart. When you walk at a cemetery, you’re alone with your thoughts, moving at the speed of your own footsteps, with nothing to do, really, other than gaze at the tombstones of strangers. Photography is prohibited a Edgell Grove, so I kept my camera in my purse. Freed from the desire to visually document my visit, all I was left with was the silence of my own solitary company.

Yesterday was Patriots’ Day, so the veterans’ graves at Edgell Grove were decorated with flags: so many flags. On one hillside, nearly every headstone bore a flag, as if the families in that quiet corner had promised to dedicate at least one child to military service, as Catholic families used to vow to dedicate one child to the church.

Although many of the stones at Edgell Grove Cemetery are old and worn, their flags commemorating wars I’ve only read about in history books, there were two more recent graves that caught my eye, both marking the graves of people who died young. The first was a stone with a photo inset that showed a cherubic toddler smiling for his portrait: the grave of a two-year-old. The second was a flag-decorated stone in the shape of two hands holding a heart: the grave of a 22-year-old Marine.

I don’t understand a world where young children and twenty-somethings are taken before their time, and I don’t understand a world where cruel-hearted people detonate pressure-cookers filled with ball bearings. But I understand the quiet calm that comes when you commemorate the dead who went before you, whether those dearly departed were your loved ones or the loved ones of strangers. I don’t understand the ways of sometimes cold, cruel world, but I understand the feel of the bare earth underfoot on a mild spring day, and I hope that a quiet walk in a sunny cemetery counts as a kind of commemoration, each footstep a word of unspoken prayer.

 

When the world seemed safe

J and I are safe. We watched the Boston Marathon passing through Newton earlier today, arriving in time to watch the elite front-runners then staying to watch the first mass of regular, “average Joe” runners, as we have in the past. Both J and I took dozens of pictures of runners, spectators, and the atmosphere of festivity that always surrounds Marathon Day here in the Boston suburbs, as we have in the past. We watched the race, stopped for lunch, and walked home, as we always do…and then we learned about today’s explosions.

Now when I look at the pictures I took today, before the explosions, I feel a queasy heaviness in my stomach, knowing that had we and the folks around us been further down the race route, those pictures could have been very different. Although it’s been years since I’ve watched the Boston Marathon near the finish line, where the explosions occurred, J and I are accustomed to watching the race where it passes within a mile of our house: a world-class event that occurs in our own neighborhood. It’s sickening to think that a family-friendly, festive event–one I’ve enjoyed blogging in the past–is now associated with death, injury, and trauma.

So instead of showing any of the happy photos I took earlier today–photos of local folks, family, and friends cheering for runners, and the runners themselves–I’m showing you two photos I took yesterday, when Marathon Day still seemed like a happy occasion to look forward to and Boston and its suburbs felt like a safe place.

 

The revolving door

Last night was one of those nights when I could think of a million reasons not to show up for practice at the Cambridge Zen Center. I’d spent the day juggling face-to-face and online teaching obligations, teaching classes at Framingham State then grading papers and submitting online grades between classes. It was (and still is) unseasonably cold and windy—blustery conditions perfect for catching a cold—and I’m still clogged and froggy from last week’s bronchitis. After tending the online graduate course that ended on Sunday, the online graduate course that started on Monday, and the three undergraduate classes that are ongoing, all I wanted to do yesterday afternoon was come home, plant myself on the couch with a book and a blanket, and not be bothered.

Instead, I came home, changed clothes, ate a quick dinner, then drove to Cambridge, where I took a quick, brisk walk to check out the neighborhood graffiti before heading to the Zen Center, spending the next three hours chanting, meditating, and walking, all in the golden glow of the Dharma room Buddha. Sometimes you need to get away from it all, and other times you need to get in touch with it all, tuning in rather than tuning out.

On hectic days like yesterday—too often, in other words, than I’d care to mention—working my day job feels like spinning in a revolving door, with students constantly coming and going while I go nowhere but ’round. I’ve taught face-to-face classes for nearly twenty years now, and I’ve taught online for ten, and I can’t begin to count the number of students I’ve worked with, much less the number of papers I’ve read, commented upon, and graded over those years. You collect one batch of papers; you hand back another. You read, hand back, then collect some more. When one semester ends, another begins: you read final papers, submit final grades, then promptly rewind and begin again, again, and again. Your students finish your class, take other classes, then graduate, moving on to whatever’s next while you, their teacher, keep revisiting the same lessons over and over and over. It’s a nonstop ritual that makes me dizzy just thinking about it.

When it feels like you’re spinning in circles, you have several options: namely, you can keep on spinning, or you can stop. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking your day job is more rote or repetitive than others’, but actually life itself is a revolving door: we wake, bathe, bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, clean up our mess, tend our kids or pets, plant ourselves on the couch with a book and blanket, then go to sleep, destined to repeat it again tomorrow. We are born, grow up, grow old, then die, stuck in the epic catastrophe of human life, a drama culminating with the dire trinity of old age, sickness, and death. Surely, we say to ourselves, there must be something more than this; surely, the Buddha said to himself, there has to be a way out.

Last night at the Zen Center, I reminded myself of something I’ve long known but constantly forget, time and again: it takes only a second to stop. Swept up in the rat race of your mundane life, you think the earth itself will stop spinning if you power down your laptop, shut off your phone, and step away from your to-do list…but having done these things, you realize nothing has changed but your own perspective. The emails are still there to be answered when you reboot your computer; the to-dos still beckon from their list. But you yourself can change; you yourself can re-charge.

From your dizzying perch atop life’s revolving door, it’s easy to grow queasy from the ceaseless swirl of activity we call life, but the second you step off that dizzy-go-round, the world slows and solidifies underfoot. This revolving door called life is filled to overflowing with discreet moments, each one marching in turn. You can grow sick from the spinning redundancy of it all, or you can zero in and focus on This Present Moment, then the next, then the next. Suddenly the cycle isn’t sickening but wonderful: a glorious procession of moments staged just for your own enjoyment, so don’t miss it.

Last night at the Zen Center, I had the same realization I always have at the Zen Center: why did I stay away so long? The rat race is always there, ready to welcome me back as soon as I return to it…but the rat race holds no power over me the second I decide not to run. There’s nothing more repetitive than spending three hours chanting, meditating, and walking, your own breath coming and going through the revolving door of your own body: inhale, exhale, repeat. The cyclic certainty of your workaday life is enough to drive you mad, and the cure is to reacquaint yourself with another kind of monotony: this breath, this body, this moment, each instant following the next like a foot stepping into its own footprint. It takes only a second—this second—to return to it.

 

After Wave

I finally finished Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, which I’d originally reviewed here. When I wrote that review, I had read only the first half of the book. Now that I’ve finished the entire thing, I’m still thinking about it. Wave is a book you read slowly, then spend a long time processing.

At first glance, Wave is a memoir of Deraniyagala’s experience losing her parents, husband, and sons in the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, but the book struck me as being several memoirs in one: or, more accurately, a memoir that recounts the cyclic and spiraling cycles of grief. Grief isn’t something you get over, as if life after loss could ever be the same again. Wave describes the way in which grief goes through its own seasons. In the first half of Wave, Deraniyagala is beside herself with sorrow, harassing the tenants who move into her deceased parents’ house and endlessly Googling ways to kill herself. In the first half of Wave, you aren’t sure whether Deraniyagala is going to make it: yes, her body survived the tsunami that claimed her kin, but will she survive the aftermath of that maddening loss, body and soul?

There is no clear dividing line between the first half of the book and the second: there is no clear corner that Deraniyagala turns. But in the latter parts of the book, the focus seems to shift from what Deraniyagala lost to what she shared with her husband, sons, parents, and the friends who remain by her side as reconstructs a life after unspeakable loss. Gradually, the book isn’t about a wave of destruction but a swelling surge of remembrance.

There are parts of the latter half of the book–most memorably, an account of a whale-watching excursion in the very ocean that swallowed Deraniyagala’s family–that are hauntingly beautiful, with Deraniyagala longing for her husband, Steve, and sons, Vik and Malli, who she feels should be on the boat watching whales with her:

I shouldn’t be on this boat, I thought, as I nibbled on a ginger biscuit to stop feeling seasick. Vik never got to see a blue whale. I shouldn’t be out searching for whales when Vik can’t. It will be agony without him. I’ll have hell to pay.

Deraniyagala will have hell to pay, indeed: how can you do things alone that your lost family would have loved to have done with you? And yet on the whale-watching boat, Deraniyagala discovers that she is never alone. Not only are there whales, as blue and enormous as the sky, gliding through the water beneath her, but the persistence of memory means that Steve, Vik, and Malli are somehow gone but never far away:

As the first blow of a whale was sighted, our boat speeded up, and I was in our living room in London. Vik and I on the red sofa watching The Blue Planet. I could hear him catch his breath as two blue whales appear on the screen, impossibly huge even as the aerial camerawork dwarfs them in an infinite ocean. He twists his hair faster and faster as they cruise and dive.

Whales are huge and mysterious, easily inviting awe. As much as Deraniyagala cannot stand seeing whales without her husband and sons, she experiences a moment of tranquility and calm in the presence of these huge, aquatic beasts: creatures who live in the very element that proved to be so deadly.

Where were these whales when the sea came for us? I wonder. Were they in this same ocean? Did they feel a strangeness then? Another whale who was in the distance has come closer now. I hear a loud, low bellow as it exhales. Now the whale inhales. Resounding in this vastness I hear a doleful sigh.

There is something inexpressibly beautiful in Deraniyagala’s description of remembering her dead family while listing to whales breathe: a moment both intimate and awesome. I felt a bit guilty for finding spots of beauty in an otherwise harrowing story, but perhaps that is what made Deraniyagala’s memoir so memorable. Perhaps the greatest shock of grief isn’t that human life is fragile, but that survivors are so resilient, and a cruel world is somehow so beautiful. Perhaps the greatest shock of grief isn’t that human bodies pass away but that love never dies.

 

Only I escaped to tell the tale

I’m currently reading Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir of losing her parents, husband, and sons in the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka . Wave is a slim book, and so far, the most horrifying thing isn’t so much that Deraniyagala’s family dies but that she doesn’t. Given the evidence of history, I can easily imagine a fiercely cruel God who annihilates entire families, villages, and cities: Pompeii buried, or Haiti shaken. History has shown us ample instances where a bloodthirsty God doles out death as if lives were cheap, but who can comprehend a God who would kill all but one member of a family: the only one who escapes to tell the tale?

As I’m reading Wave, I keep thinking of the Biblical story of Job, a man stricken by God. Job loses his material possessions, all ten of his children, and his own health, and at each stage of loss, he is informed by a servant who arrives with grim news: “Only I escaped to tell the tale.” The purpose of the book of Job, presumably, is to help readers grapple with theodicy: the thorny question of how a just and loving God can allow terrible things to happen. The answer Job receives when he hammers the heavens with the question “why” is more troubling than comforting, however. Confronted with the question of why suffering exists, God responds by basically saying “Because I Am.” God grandly reminds Job that He created the heavens and the earth, and Job has done no such thing. God is great, Job is humble, and the humble have no right to question ways they can’t possibly understand.

The line that always slays in me in Job is the repeated refrain each courier utters when they arrive with message after message of bad news: “Only I escaped to tell the tale.” (In its King James phrasing, “I only escaped alone to tell thee,” this is also the line that Ishmael utters at the end of Moby-Dick, after the great white whale has drowned Ahab and an entire ship of souls.) “Only I escaped to tell the tale”: what depths of horror and survivor’s guilt does that innocuous line express, knowing you were (by some freak of chance or fate) the only one to escape a deadly disaster?

This line keeps echoing in my head while I’m reading Wave. It would have been enough for God to snuff out an entire family in an instant…but wasn’t it a step beyond cruel to spare one alone to bear witness to God’s terrifying power? Deraniyagala herself doesn’t grapple with theodicy; so far in her memoir, in fact, Deraniyagala doesn’t mention God at all. Given the raw immediacy of loss, it seems easier—more humane—to focus solely on suffering rather than trying to reconcile that suffering with something as inconceivable as a loving God who allows such horrors to happen. When you’re clinging to some shred of sanity after inconceivable loss, the question “why did this happen” isn’t nearly as important as the question “how will I continue to face it?”

One thing that has always troubled me about the book of Job is how cavalier the ending is, when God casually replaces Job’s children as if people were interchangeable and God himself were the overseer of a warehouse stocked with replacement parts. Yes, God can snuff out an entire family and then reward the survivor with new kin…but do we really want to worship a God who behaves this way?

Compared to Deraniyagala, I think Job got off easy because he wasn’t there to witness his family’s destruction, being notified of his losses by various messengers who themselves experienced the traumatic events first hand. “Only I escaped to tell the tale,” each of these messengers says in turn, and that is the horror: Job is spared the trial of witnessing his children’s deaths, God choosing to traumatize some random servant instead.

Deraniyagala doesn’t directly witness her family’s death—one minute they were crammed together in the the back of a Jeep, trying to escape, and the next minute, everything was wave. Deraniyagala didn’t see her husband and children plucked from beside her, nor does she see her parents, who were back at their hotel, washed out to sea. But instead of witnessing her family’s deaths, Deraniyagala experiences the dizzying sensation of having her world turned into water as she churned through tsunami debris and came aground muddied, bloodied, and bruised. Is it better to see your family plucked from your grasp, or is it better to be blinded by a whirlwind of water and a surge of shock? It seems absurd to even ask this question.

Unlike Job, Deraniyagala felt in her own body the brute force that killed her kin: she wasn’t safely elsewhere when the bad news came. Instead, Deraniyagala herself was the messenger who bore bad news, having to call her family with her own version of those ominous words, “Only I have escaped to tell the tale.” Why, though, the need for a messenger? Do we need to be reminded that death and devastation happen on a daily basis? Do we need to hear a litany of gory details? When the bodies of Deraniyagala’s husband and one of her sons were finally identified, for instance, she visited the site of the mass grave where their bodies had been exhumed and identified by DNA. Neighboring children who had witnessed both the burial and exhumation told her the details of both even though Deraniyagala herself did not dare ask for such information. Why would Deraniyagala want the image of tangled, naked bodies–including those of her husband and son–dumped into a hole by tractors and bulldozers? The neighboring children tell her not for her sake, but for their own, as if retelling a nightmare were enough to eradicate it.

We talk because we want to unburden ourselves of the past—we talk, in other words, in search of catharsis—but talking also commemorates a past that might otherwise slip away, forgotten. The more we tell a tale, the less we can forget it, each retelling etching it deeper in our psyche. So why would God require a witness to his devastating ways: why laden an innocent survivor with a lifelong obligation to tell and re-tell a traumatic tale like an ancient mariner waylaying hapless wedding guests? Let it be known: Job had it easy, and the dead have it easier still. The fate that is worse than death is not simply to outlive your parents, your husband, and your children, but to find yourself swirled in the very water that sucked them away, and then to bear ongoing witness to this tragedy. Only I escaped to tell the tale: this is truly the saddest sentence ever uttered.

At one part of her memoir, Deraniyagala struggles with whether to share her story with strangers: for instance, a woman on a plane who asks if she’s married and has children.

I steer clear of telling. I can’t come out with it. The outlandish truth of me. How can I reveal this to someone innocent and unsuspecting? With those who know “my story,” I talk freely about us, Steve, our children, my parents, about the wave. But with others I keep it hidden, the truth. I keep it under wraps because I don’t want to shock or make anyone distressed.

Deraniyagala understands (as only a survivor can) that once you tell people the full extent of the tragedy that has befallen you, you’re forever branded in their eyes, and they’ll never act normally around you. (In A Grief Observed, for instance, C.S. Lewis described the look he got from married couples when they found out he was widowed: it was a look of fear and dread as each partner wondered, “Which one of us will outlive the other and have to be alone?”)

We all suffer—we all know our lives will end in death after lives studded with sorrow—but we ostracize the individuals who remind us of this fact. The fate of a person who has faced sorrow and survived—a widow, orphan, or parent who has outlived children—is unthinkable, for empathizing with such sorrow requires an admission that we, too, could be similarly bereft at any moment. If death and unspeakable disasters are simply a matter of chance, then none of us is immune, and individuals such as Job remind us of this uncomfortable face. Sonali Deraniyagala’s story isn’t horrifying because it is statistically unlikely—what are the odds, we might wonder, that our entire family could be annihilated in a single afternoon—but because its basic storyline is so common. Parents, spouses, and children die every day, but we tell ourselves they don’t. To admit otherwise would sink us like a stone.

The images illustrating today’s post come from a set of photos I shot at the Museum of Fine Arts in August, 2009. Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave is a devastatingly clear-eyed memoir, and I solemnly recommend it.

 

Rinsing out the residue

Earlier today, I submitted two batches of end-term grades, and the rest of today and tomorrow, I’ll continue commenting on essay drafts from my FSU students. We’ve reached the point in the semester when I feel word-weary, too full of other people’s ideas, other people’s opinions, other people’s words. If there were a way to crack open my head and rinse out the residue of other people’s prose, I’d do it. Instead, I sit here and try to purify my brain by pumping in prose of my own.

Tonight I go to the Zen Center to lead Tuesday night long sitting. I always feel a surge of adrenaline before leading practice: as the head Dharma teacher, you’re responsible for making newcomers comfortable as well as making sure things go smoothly in the Dharma room. If the head Dharma teacher does her job, everyone else can meditate without wondering who is watching the clock, who is keeping track of interviews, or who will indicate when to walk, when to sit, or when to bow and chant at the end of the evening: all done. If the head Dharma teacher does her job, Tuesday night long sitting is a calm and quiet time, but if the head Dharma teacher doesn’t mind the details, an atmosphere of confusion rather than calm prevails.

The last time I led Tuesday night long sitting, a bunch of things went wrong. Although I arrived at the Zen Center early, I was late bringing tea to the teacher giving interviews…and since I’d made the wrong kind of tea, I had to bustle back to the kitchen to brew a second pot before finally arriving (late) to the meditation session I was supposed to be leading. While I was bustling around brewing tea, the order of people in the Dharma room waiting for interviews got screwed up, with everyone looking around nervously when the interview room bell rang: “Who’s next?”

What was wonderful, though, was how quickly even these tempests in a (late) teapot subsided. Having fretted before practice that Something Would Go Wrong, I did indeed drop a few proverbial balls…and in the end, everything was fine. When I brought the second pot of tea, the teacher giving interviews was genuinely grateful I’d taken the extra effort, and when the bell rang, people figured out who had the next interview. By the end of the night’s regular routine of sitting, walking, and sitting, everyone (myself included) had settled down and settled in. This seems to be the recurring pattern behind my Zen Center practice: beforehand, I worry myself with what-ifs, then once I’m there, everything works out fine. Even when things don’t go entirely according to plan, everyone is flexible and forgiving, and the ruffled waters quickly return to calm.

One of the things I tell newcomers at the Zen Center is that there’s no mistake you can possibly make that someone else (probably me) hasn’t made countless times before you…and every time, both the mistake-maker and the Zen Center itself has survived. I’ve yet to encounter someone who has died of embarrassment after making a mistake at the Zen Center, and as of yet, I’ve never died of embarrassment there, either.

In my tenure at the Zen Center, I have brewed the wrong tea, sung the wrong chants, eaten from the wrong bowl, bowed at the wrong time, sat in the wrong seat, walked the wrong way, fallen asleep, fallen down, farted, snored, cried, and said any number of wrong, idiotic, and inappropriate things. In response, I’ve been gently corrected, nudged, hugged, laughed at, and laughed. Never, though, have I self-destructed, and never have I (yet) managed to destroy the place. In grandma-gentle style, the folks at the Zen Center always seem to respond to mistakes with placid compassion: “Another mistake? No problem!”

So tonight, I’ll go to the Zen Center to rinse out the residue of other people’s (and my own) ideas, other people’s (and my own) opinions, and other people’s (and my own) words. Tonight at the Zen Center, I’ll probably make a mistake or two, but I won’t die of embarrassment. Instead, I’ll follow my breath, watch the clock, and keep track of the order of people waiting to have interviews with a teacher who rings a bell and drinks tea in the next room. That tea might come late, and it might take several pots before I brew the right kind. But the only way to make a second pot of tea is to completely pour out the first, rinsing out even the residue of “wrong.”

I illustrated today’s post with images from the graffiti-covered Wall at Central Square, which I shot last December.

 

Sheltering in place

I’ll admit it. In the aftermath of any mass shooting—particularly ones that happen on college campuses—I find myself harboring an occasional unsettling thought: could today be the day it happens here? On any given day when I’m driving to campus, making last minute plans for whatever I’m planning to do in class, I’ll occasionally wonder whether today is (as the Sioux battle cry goes) a good day to die.

When this thought arises, I’m usually en route to a campus where I teach and work: a campus, in other words, where I “need” to be, a campus where I know my way around, and a campus where I feel a responsibility to protect “my” students. When I’m wandering a campus that isn’t mine, on the other hand—a campus where I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know anyone, and I honestly have little business being—I’m not wondering whether today might be my last day on earth. Although being shot at work is senseless, at least there is an entirely sensible reason for being at work on an unlucky day. When you’re on your way to a writing retreat at a campus where you’ve been only one time before, however, you’re not wondering whether today might be the day when you’ll be at the wrong place at the right time. Being shot at work is senseless, but being shot at a place where didn’t truly have to be seems even more senseless.

Today is the BRAWN writing retreat at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. BRAWN is the Boston Rhetoric and Writing Network—a group of Boston-based college writing instructors—and I went to their summer writing retreat last August, when we basically spent the day in a boring classroom at MIT working on nothing other than our own writing: a kind of creative peer pressure where you make a shared vow to write rather than endlessly checking email, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader. Today is the BRAWN writing retreat at MIT, and it’s also the day a person with a rifle and body armor was allegedly spotted nearby, sending the campus into a lockdown.

It turns out there was no such person…or if there was, he was just passing through. But before Cambridge police announced the “all clear,” my fellow retreatants and I did what any sane person would do: we retreated from campus to set up shop in a nearby café, where we spent the morning “sheltering in place” over croissants, hot beverages, and our writing projects.

“Sheltering in place” is an interesting term. It suggests that the safest place to be is right here, right now: given a vague report of a possible threat, the best thing to do is basically nothing: stay where you are, keep a low profile, and wait for the danger to pass. Many prey species instinctively shelter in place when something scares them: when one of our backyard blue jays cries “hawk,” for instance, the feeder birds automatically hunker down and the squirrels freeze in the trees. Whereas the natural human reaction in the face of danger is to turn tail and run, many prey species rely on stealth and camouflage to protect them: by remaining completely still, they play the odds that a threatening predator either won’t notice them or will choose to strike someone else.

There is, I suppose, an eerie similarity between spending a day on a retreat and spending a day sheltering in place. Both activities involve hunkering down where you are, anchoring yourself to your present location as a safe haven against possible threats. I think of Ulysses and his men lashing themselves to the mast of their ship: come what may, we won’t be moved. When you sit a meditation retreat, you emulate the Buddha’s decision to sit and stay under the Bodhi tree until he’d answered the question of why we’re born only to grow old, get sick, and die; when you participate in a writing retreat, you promise to remain glued to your seat until the day (or your writing) is done.

When you shelter in place, you trust that whatever threat is “Out There” can’t broach the borders of “In Here.” At today’s retreat, the three of us who had managed to arrive at our boring classroom before the full nature of the threat had been announced quickly decided to move off campus, sending an email to those who hadn’t yet arrived, telling them to meet us elsewhere. As we walked across one of MIT’s grassy quads, one of my fellow retreatants remarked, “I keep scanning the rooftops,” and at that moment I realized that something as simple as walking across campus becomes a bold move when you think there might be a gunman lurking somewhere, watching. As Annie Dillard remarks in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, quoting the medievalist Dorothy Dunnett, “There is no reply, in clear terrain, to an archer in cover.”

Call me morbid, but this isn’t the first time I’ve wondered what it would be like to be shot by a stranger. I first started meditating in the aftermath of the 1991 shooting in which six Thai Buddhist monks, a nun, and two other victims were killed in a temple in Arizona. We think of senseless mass shooting as being a recent phenomenon, and perhaps they have indeed increased in frequency and subsequent news coverage. But when I first started meditating at the Zen Buddhist temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, I often experienced a moment of panic when I vividly visualized a silent gunman creeping into the Buddha hall and methodically shooting each one of us in the back as we meditated, quietly (and quite helplessly) facing a wall.

The first time I went camping, I had a similar moment of panic, wondering what could stop a homicidal gunman from walking up to our tent and shooting straight at it, his bullet piercing both tent nylon and layers of sleeping bag before hitting the warm, vulnerable bodies therein. Again, this might sound like a morbid thought, but it’s not an entirely unrealistic one: in his book A Walk in the Woods, for instance, Bill Bryson recounts several murders that have happened on the Appalachian Trail, including the 1988 murder of Rebecca Wight, who was shot along with her partner while hiking in Pennsylvania.

The practice of sheltering in place rests on the assumption that the world out there is more dangerous than the world in here; sitting a meditation retreat might lead you to question that assumption as you explore the layers of your own delusions. But when you’re pondering the possibility you’re on a campus with a gunman, you can solace yourself with odds and likelihoods, and one relevant statistic still remains: mortality always has the last word. A sniper’s bullet, a sudden heart attack, a prolonged illness: in the end, does it matter what hit you? When you’re shot by an arrow, the Buddha famously argued, it doesn’t matter who made the arrow out of what material or for what purpose: you’re dead all the same.

Yesterday I almost got run over by a delivery truck while crossing a particularly tricky intersection by Symphony Hall. A group of pedestrians was crossing, and I was the laggard, walking in dress boots. Had I been hit by a truck that didn’t stop but instead thundered past just as I hurriedly stepped onto the curb, I would have been like a dawdling antelope snagged by a lurking lion: the rest of the herd would have continued on, either oblivious to my demise or secretly relieved it hadn’t befallen them.

After yesterday’s near miss, I looked at the photo I had taken seconds before stepping into that intersection near Symphony Hall and realized it could have been my last. Today at MIT, I took a handful of photos on my way to the BRAWN retreat, and fortunately it turns out that today at MIT was neither a good day nor a good place for me to die. Had today’s story turned out differently, however, this would have been my last shot before being shot.