The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [48]
I don’t know if that was what was happening with Max, but that was how it was for me to be with him. I sat with him, and nothing much else was needed or possible. I had no impulse to read or chat. He was clearly glad of the company. And now and then we would talk.
A hint of openings to come had appeared on a previous visit, more than a year earlier, when he had said, “I’d like you to give me something.”
He just bought a car, I’d thought, I wonder what he wants? “I’d be happy to,” I said. “What would you like?”
“Just something you use every day, like that traveler’s clock you have. Something that’s yours, so I can put it on my chest of drawers and think of you when I look at it in the morning.”
Now, in the hospice, he was wandering in the dark at first, but his mind cleared when the pain meds changed. When he was clear, Max’s stories gave shape to his life. In his generation there were men who talked about the war incessantly and paraded in uniform, and others who rarely mentioned war or medals and never paraded. He was of the second type. The war stories he did tell were in two categories. They were stories either about life and sensibility in the Jane Austen mode, slightly poignant, or of the clash between ability and circumstances. Either: “I was kicked out of the Army because they found out I had lied about my age—too young—and that’s how I ended up in the Air Force.” Or: “I sat in the back of the math classes for the officers, though not being an officer I couldn’t get credit. ‘It’s a pity you are not an officer,’ the instructor said, ‘you would be top of the class.’”
He also told antiheroic stories about how he kept getting sent to the wrong place an hour before the Japanese Army took Amban (or, another time, Lae). The CO swore at him to make him feel better about leaving and told him to get his bloody useless men back on that bloody DC3 and go the hell back where they damn well came from, and that’s how he escaped from being finally and completely dead at that time. In another antiheroic story, he told about shooting down a plane that was firing at him; it turned out to be an American Wildcat—the pilot was trying to draw attention to himself because he was disabled and being chased. “I had to buy the pilot a case of beer. He was decent about it.” These stories, like other comedies, were about how lucky it is to be alive.
In hospice, he began an experiment in discovery and improvisation. Each morning, I asked, “How are you?” Apart from dying, I meant. One morning he gave me the force of his predicament:
“I have a problem. I want to get home, but I can’t work out any way to do that. I can’t work out how to solve the problem. I really, really want to go home, but I just can’t work it out.”
“Yes.”
I was struck by the thought that this is the way you take on koans. The situation is insoluble and you hang around with it and something shifts to another level. At its simplest, the problem was that he needed more care than he could get at my sister’s home. At other levels, in which having a body is a metaphor as well as a shape to breathe in, I wasn’t sure: he seemed to be free sometimes as we talked through the long afternoon. And he was at ease with the contradictions of being human, the way characters in Shakespeare are. A predicament automatically thrusts you into wild places. Sometimes he was moved to make a small speech.
“You know what little presence there has been of you in my life—what little presence, no one’s fault, of course—I’ve enjoyed.”
“Indeed. And I have enjoyed our meetings too.”
My father and I had separated when I was seventeen and hadn’t reconnected until I was living on the far side of the world.
Max had an easy, catlike quality and had taught unarmed combat during the war. His litheness was enjoyable to be around