Loss and Memory

For a while it seemed that people were dying all around me, but we’ve had a break from funerals this year. Jishu is still an anomaly for me. I’m coming up on the anniversary of Jishu’s passing – it will be twenty-eight years – and she stands alone.

For a long time, funerals were things that happened to older people, grandparents originally, although in high school, the mothers of two girlfriends died. I went to the funerals, but I had no idea what to say. Then in college, two friends died, one in the famous, two-plane crash over Brooklyn – we were both freshman that year and he was on his way home from the University of Wisconsin for our first Christmas break – and the other – she was a year older than me, the first “older woman” in my life and she would have been the best social worker of our generation – of unknown causes, although I’ve always worried that she’d suicided.

Then, for years, no one my age died, no one close to me. I’d hear occasionally that people I’d known in college had gone on to the great beyond, but it scarcely caused a ripple. Until Jishu. Jishu stands alone on a hill in my life. My peers wouldn’t start dying for another twenty years.

I was 55 – Morri would be born that summer – when Jishu passed suddenly in March. She was only two years older than me. She was my teacher. I’d ordained to serve as her first shuso – a critical detail to the Japanese Soto Zen authorities – and was swept up in it. I imagined that I might become her first Dharma successor. Jishu died during my three-month shuso period. I raked her ashes from the crematorium. It fell to me, I imagined, to keep her memory alive. I did what I could. An urn with her ashes sits on my dresser.

And then, a couple of years ago, I began to wonder: In keeping her memory alive, was I making too big a deal. She was important to me, but even I talk so much more often about my other teachers. Yes, there are important lessons that I learned from Jishu, sometimes from her very brief comments. But are they enough for anyone other than me to remember her? Am I just being sentimental? Was Jishu really that important? Even to me?

I had about reached the point of concluding that I was making too much of her memory. When I’m gone, no one will keep her ashes. But when I found myself sharing the Ox Program, Bernie’s introduction to Zen practice, the importance of Jishu became clear. I had taken the three Ox courses with Jishu, the courses on the Skandhas, the Precepts, and the Paramitas. As I shared them, I realized how profoundly these courses impacted my life. Without question, they were the most important teachings.

Bernie, of course, gets some credit, maybe most of it. The Ox Program was his design, but it was the experience of the course which enabled me to use it, which transformed me. Jishu gets the credit for that. Strange to realize that Jishu just may have been, short as her life was, my most important teacher. She stands alone on that hill, just one tree, in the wind.