In May of 2009 my ten-year old
friend Seamus Morrison was diagnosed with a medulla blastoma on his cerebellum.
They are a poorly differentiated malignant neoplasm composed of tightly packed
cells of spongioblastic and neuroblastic lineage. Or to put it another way:
they are not good.
To be clear, I’m really a friend of
Seamus’ father James Morrison. An
actor and yogi, neither of which are terms I toss around lightly, James called
me after Seamus’ diagnosis and into the world of pain, surgery, chemo and
prayer we went.
Seamus had complained of blurry
vision, which resulted in a visit to an ophthalmologist. Upon noting the pressure on his optic
nerve Seamus was sent to a neurologist.
Before his parents had him home they received a call in their car that
Seamus had cancer and would require surgery the next day.
“Pack a bag,” the doctor said. “And get back here tomorrow morning.”
Perhaps you have friends that have
endured this journey of steep learning curves and hairpin turns requiring
decisions about surgery and treatment that result in the end of one era and the
beginning of another. After one
visit to Seamus’ hospital bed when the worst had passed and Seamus was on the
road to recovery I noted James’ fatigue and said something to him about
it.
He replied, “We’re mourning the
loss of our son. Because even if
he survives he’s not the kid we had when we came in here a few weeks ago.”
If you don’t have friends who have
been through this it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine their waves of grief
pounding against your door on a daily basis.
James and his wife, Riad went
through hell witnessing Seamus’ pain after surgery. It manifested in a flood of screams until painkillers
subdued them complicated by their son’s inability to speak, walk or even see
clearly. They lived in his
hospital room for almost two months, going home only to shower and change
clothes.
There’s a Zen koan that goes, “What
do you when a wagon full of demons comes at you from hell?”
Koans are meditations. They are not riddles, not to be solved
and not for the faint of heart. To
experience the koan one must live it.
The Morrisons were doing just that.
Aside from stopping by the
hospital, bringing over Pinkberry desserts and finding ways to make Seamus
laugh (his favorite was my impersonation of physicist Stephen Hawking
commenting on cancer) there was little else I could do but pray.
Each of us, or those of us who
pray, do it in our own way.
Praying that Seamus would get better or that his pain would subside is
one way to go about it. How could
you not wish for that? But prayer
is not a wish. And in Zen we do
not pray to God. For the Zen
practitioner there is nothing outside of us, no one to pray to, and Seamus and
I are just different sides of one being.
Yet, Seamus was the one unable to speak and looking for relief. He was the one who had to learn to walk
and talk. (After speech therapy
one of my favorite responses Seamus delivered to a nurse when asked if he was
in school or on vacation was, “Hello! I’m in a hospital recovering from cancer
surgery.”)
When Suzuki Roshi, founder of the
San Francisco Zen Center contracted cancer from which he died, Tai Shimano
visited him.
"How are you feeling these
days?"
Suzuki replied, "They have a
new name for me: Cancer!"
Further, Suzuki Roshi had this to
say, “I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe
in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no
color - something which exists before all forms and colors appear. This
is a very important point. No matter what god or doctrine you believe in,
if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a
self-centered idea... In constantly seeking to actualize your ideal, you
will have no time for composure. But if you are always prepared for
accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing... then at that
moment you will have perfect composure.”
My prayer for Seamus and his
parents was for composure. I never
asked anyone or any being to grant it to them. They arrived at this on their own with or without the aid of my
prayer. Now that I think of it, I
was granted composure in the face of Seamus’ cancer by their composure. And by just being with each other we
were composing prayers.
Seamus is chugging along through
treatment and recovery. His
parents and I played the Beatles Rock Band with him the other night. Seamus nailed every line of, “Let it
Be.”
