The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [50]
on the bells of the snow drops.
Sap rises in the almonds to
the first of bloom,
the blossoms open one and two and three
like stars at evening.
In the hospice he was still sorting his life.
“You know I really loved Alison, I really loved her, but you know how you sit down with someone and you get some paper and draw the lines and make squares. And then you move the squares around together till they connect. No matter how I tried to line them up, it didn’t work. No matter how hard I tried.”
There wasn’t any blame in this—he was trying to make out the pattern in his relationship with my dead mother. And it was true that you could work things through with him, but she didn’t do that. Sitting with him in the hospice, it was clear that the deep passages of the mind were not alien to him after all. Sorting took other forms, too.
“The flight lieutenant said to me, ‘You are a strange, intelligent bird, Tarrant, what should we do with you?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Well, we’ll find things for you to do.’
They got me to run an anti-aircraft battery. They were fifty-caliber machine guns. We weren’t meant to shoot anything down, just to keep the Japanese bombers honest and force them up to a height at which the ack-ack could come into play.”
He told me about another moment of seeing through the forms of things.
“Some of those Japanese pilots could speak English, you know. We shot one down and had him in the cells. I had a bad feeling that night, so I dropped in for a visit. The guard was knocking the pilot around. Oh, he was a nasty piece of work. Withers was his name. I told him, ‘You can stop that right now and clear out.’ He wasn’t happy about it at all, didn’t want to go. The pilot spoke English because he had grown up in Hawaii, you see. Quite good English—a polite feller.”
“What did you do, though?”
“Oh, Withers. I put my rifle on him, and told him I’d shoot him on the spot. I had him transferred the next day.”
A couple of things stand out for me in this story. One is that he remembered the process by which he made the decision—he had a bad feeling and listened to it. The other is that, at the most intense moments, objectivity and clarity appear in the form of empathy. Max was a teenager then; that clarity must be a natural possibility in consciousness, something available to us at any time.
“What are you thinking about today?”
“I’m wondering about my attitude . . . well, not my attitude to the butcher, but my attitude to my attitude.”
He thought that dying was difficult sometimes and matter-of-fact at other times, but then what did he think about what he thought about? Here was afternoon sunlight and conversation and the great palaces of memory that seem to fling their doors open at the end of life. Even though everyone says that you review your life, you actually do review your life. And the bare act of noticing is harder than it looks. This attempt to look at your attitude—what you are feeling and thinking and the frame that holds it, and then your attitude to your attitude, is one of the routes to freedom.
I had always assessed my father in various ways, and I had hoped to change my assessment in a positive direction. Lots of psychology hopes for such results, but it takes effort, and I have no talent for it. What was valuable was to stop assessing each other—that was the intimate thing. We could meet there and be happy.
In a dream nine months after his death, I bought licorice with my dad at a shop down the hill from our house in Launceston. I bought other sweets as well, and felt a bit ashamed at how many. We walked back slowly, his feet splayed out for balance like Charlie Chaplin’s, patiently lifting and extending and placing themselves down as we walked up the hill toward my childhood home. He seemed older. Death had not stopped that process.
If we had decided that Max’s dying would hurt unbearably, that would have been all right. But we didn’t decide anything; we decided to step into an open paddock together. Something more interesting than hurting happened.
I mentioned that