Lapcat Meditation

Like so many people, I have felt a current of sadness braiding through my day about the death of Robin Williams, which may have been suicide.  We've probably all known someone who committed suicide. The true saying is, It's a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Despair does lift eventually, if you stick around.

Scott [Robinson] Columbus 

Tonight my mind went to a friend who did not kill himself, but died of a massive heart attack at age 49 at a moment when he was in love and loving life.  Just like that.

Scott was in meditation groups with me about ten or twelve years ago.  Like many people with difficult moodswings, he searched for a spiritual practice.  He called me once to talk about his difficulty with sitting meditation. Sitting meditation can be the wrong thing for someone with major depression.  Today I would suggest listening to, becoming, and making music, letting it move your body, being music, but I didn't know that then.  Scott loved his cat, Bartholowmeow.  So I suggested lapcat meditation.  He knew immediately what I meant.

I found myself doing it tonight with Tashi.  I don't hold her on my lap as much as I'd like to because I'm dreadfully allergic to her.  But once in a while she requests it by tentatively coming up on the table or my lap and putting a paw on my shoulder.  She is always polite, looks to see what I think.  I usually let her come up, and then get her down from shoulder to lap.  Later I will take off the clothes she touched and put them in the dryer on air for half an hour, or just wash them.  Also wash face and hands, and do a nasal rinse.  Love is complicated.

We had a very pleasant sit tonight, her on my lap with one hand supporting her underneath and the other stroking her.  The kitchen was getting dim in the twilight, no TV or radio on, the windows closed, only the sound of a train at the Cooke Road crossing.  After a bit I realized I could feel the rise and fall of her breathing in my hands. When I paid closer attention I detected the pulse of her heart as it took the oxygen from her lungs and infused it into her blood, then sent that blood out to the body.

Once during our thirteen years with Sherlock he happened to lie against me in such a way that I felt vividly the entire action of his little heart, all that fast, muscular pumping. It had the effect of filling me with awe at the intricacy of this living thing. So did his death, years later, also on my lap. Rest in peace, loved ones.

Sherlock

Life and Death is the Great Matter

It's been almost a week since I posted.  I had a post almost ready to go out last Sunday, but when I got to  church Ray came over and told me Scott Robinson died Saturday night of a massive heart attack.  He was 47 and not known to have heart disease. 

Scott was a special friend to us for many years, used to meditate with us, was often in our house for gatherings.  He was bipolar, and it was basically disabling.  One of my first thoughts was that I was glad it wasn't suicide, that I couldn't have stood that. I think you always feel at a death, even a natural death, that you could have, should have, done more for that person. I don't think Scott knew how much he meant to me.  I should have told him he was like a kid to me, that I cared deeply for him.

Scott and Ray

There's another kind of thing that swept in on me with tsunami force Sunday, which was a down day for me anyway, so I was vulnerable:  an intimate understanding of my own fragility.  It comes back to me as I write.  When I close my eyes I can see my stomach, pancreas, all my soft internal organs, my fragile ribs, my aging colon, my swiss-cheese spine.  One fall, one cough from someone with a deadly antibiotic-resistant bug, one kid opens up with a gun in the theater and you're dead.  Gone.  Forever.  You didn't get to plan or say goodbye.  And you will very soon be forgotten by all but a very few.  If you want to know, Buddhism is not consoling me about this.  Obviously I am not enlightened.

Scott's cover photo on Facebook

Because of this intimate sense of fragility, I wore a protective mask yesterday in the crowded waiting room at the James for my long-scheduled appointment with a dermatologist.  She specializes in us transplant people, who are much more likely than you to get aggressive skin cancer.  We are supposed to be inspected top to toes (literally) every year, but she wants me to come every six months because my brother died of melanoma.  I did not have the disassociation I was afraid I might have during all this, sometimes do have with medical exams.  This wasn't sexually invasive like a cystoscopy or colonoscopy.  I was engaged during the long, tedious affair of the nurse and her telling me what I already knew about prevention; but I wasn't emotionally engaged; I was thinking.

Scott and BartholomeOw

What I kept thinking was the spectacular amounts of time, money and trouble spent on keeping me alive these last few years.  A friend underwent major surgery to give me one of her kidneys.  Well over $200,000 was spent on that surgery, most of it by insurance, including Medicare, and it costs thousands of dollars every month for the horrible immune-suppressive drugs that inflame my stomach but keep me from rejecting the kidney and lay me open to all these kinds of cancer.  You can get cancer in the whites of your eyes, in your mouth and throat or genitals. I'm supposed to schedule a Pap smear, too.  That's a different doctor.  This doctor cut off a pink thing on my arm that I thought was recent scar tissue and is having it biopsied. It stings.

I want to convey the weirdness of understanding that all this money is spent on me while people die or go blind or are crippled for want of inexpensive medical care.  It is not fair or right.  It's an accident of karma that I was born into a thrifty family in white middle-class in America in a time when you earned pensions as you worked, and ended up with terrific health insurance.

But weirder that I don't deserve it, and still worse that I bitch about all the stuff I have to do just to stay alive.  Taking care of myself takes all my time!  At this very moment I should have already done my chi gong and meditated and should be eating Cream of Wheat and taking the rest of my morning pills, and I resent that schedule calling me.  I work on not resenting how my bipolar disorder took on new life after the surgery, how I am depressed every other day now, sometimes immobilized by it and given to drifting suicidal fantasies, and nobody can come up with a medication that's any help.  It's bad.  I feel guilty that I'm not suffused with joy.  I think I should be happy all the time for every extra day I've been given. 

And I feel guilty because I haven't accomplished anything much, either.  I ask, What can I possibly do to make it worth while that Laurie Brown gave me one of her kidneys?  That I am here and Scott is dead.   My central gift is seeing, feeling, expressing my experience.  Maybe that's all I have to give, and I have this blog, which is the easy way to give it.  So here it is.  And here is something Scott posted once.

Sheba and the Great Matter

You might say Sheba is just a cat. Go a little further and say she's a tiger cat. Look closer and she's a calico overlaid with black stripes, and a very detailed face with, for instance, black kohl around her eyes, then white eyeliner, and that's just the eyes. But - you know where this is going - she is much more than just beautiful. She is magic.

Time and again I look at her and think, She looks like a stuffed animal that has miraculously come to life. I really do see that. Eyes that see, that focus and blink. A delicate paw that spreads and retracts, treading a little whenever she feels loved, or whatever that is that she feels when she is petted. She does feel. She is responsive, real and alive, more satisfying than any stuffed animal can be.

My sense of Sheba's aliveness was perhaps sharpened by experiencing the mystery of Sherlock's death. One moment he was alive, lying on the leather couch beside me, and the next minute he was dead. Nothing had happened to mark the moment when the paralytic medicine stopped everything. Not a convulsion or a sound or a relaxing. He was no longer breathing, that's all. I was alarmed. I asked the Vet, "Is that it?"

"Yes," he assured me. "He's dead." How could that difference be so small?

So now I know that what keeps Sheba from being just a stuffed animal is her breath. She breathes in and out, like I do. I don't know why she breathes or when her breathing will stop. This breathing is a mystery; it is life itself. We take in air and other nourishment, but air is the one you need every moment. We use what we can and exhale the rest. In sitting Zen we are sometimes told to focus on exhaling completely. Suzuki says that thus we die every moment.

Sheba is a lady of a certain age, as the British say, meaning on the upper edge of middle age. We know her kidney functions are very bad, and we know intimately what that means, because that is what killed Sherlock. Right now Sheba eats well and drinks water and continues to process it all. She is alive.

I expect to outlive her (in which I may be quite wrong). If so, I may someday be there when she has stopped breathing, and just like that, Sheba will be no longer alive. Like Sherlock, she is here temporarily. So it is natural to cherish her. And I believe it is natural for that appreciation to fan out to my loved ones, my friends, the squirrel in the Zen garden and the chickadee in the back yard, to every living creature and thing, every breath, every breath I myself get to take.