Jikan Leonard Cohen Memorial Service

We are home from a wonderful memorial service for Jikan Leonard Cohen at the Rinzai-ji Zen Center.

Though Leonard and I belonged to the same Zen center and the same synagogue in Los Angeles for many years, lived in the same neighborhood in eastern LA, and both of us hailed from the same Canadian city (Montreal) and the same university (McGill), we never really connected.

I saw him often, but when I did, it was because we were in the same place to medicate, study and pray. It never seemed like quite the right time to approach him.

I did tell him once that his music is always rattling around in the back of my head. And it still is.

Once I shouted out to him from the audience at one of  his many concerts that we attended about his high school in Montreal and he was kind enough to shout a joke back.

The Zen service was gentle, full of traditional Sanskrit chants, his music and personal stories of his humility, generosity, grace, and friendship.

He was at once ordinary and extraordinary.

His final gift was his graceful exit from this realm. In a letter to a friend read at the service, he shares that even with his horrible pain and his medications and his pending death, he had never been happier.

Always teaching to the last moment.

I will miss him as I remain greedy to hear more, to learn more from this wise fellow seeker. 

Rest in peace, dear Leonard. You have given me and so many so much.

Getting smaller all the time

The nodes are shrinking. My energy is good. And the weather is perfect here in Toronto.

The service for my father was full of love and warm memories. It couldn't have gone better.

Family rushed in from all over to pay respects and remember. His widow arrived with two sisters from the west.

A dear friend who introduced Patty and me almost 39 years ago was there.

The sad part, the elephant not in my room, was my dad. He's the one I wanted to call and talk to about the memorial. He's the one with whom I want to share the details.

I miss him.

The world is a smaller place without him.

Today we are off to the cemetery.

Preparing for Death

I hate to be so bleak, but this issue comes up not because I am anticipating my imminent demise, but because I am still around while others are not, and I must deal with the pain.

It is the natural course for a child to bury a parent. While painful, the other way around is unimaginably sadder. My dad is doing better since his recent stroke and its complications, but 83 is a fragile age, especially when you smoked for about 65 of those years. I will visit him again next week.

I must be prepared. So I am turning to my root, reading on Kaddish and sitting Shiva.

To my Christian friends this is a time of renewal and resurrection through faith in a power much greater than any that exists only on this earthly plane. To my Jewish readers, a time of passing over, dodging the angel of death by knowing the right signs and keeping the covenant. To all my friends on this side of the equator, this is the season of rebirth and daffodils and promise.

With my dad's recent close call, with Ron's funeral, with too many fellow CLLers who must first swing closer to death with dangerous treatment options, to ultimately slingshot past it, I need some shelter in this storm.

I will construct my edifice out of my tradition, but will it be strong intellectually, but a flimsy fortress against the stabbing emotional winds?

Like how I approach immunotherapy or DLIs, I will be hitting the books starting with

The Mystery of the Kaddish: Its Profound Influence on Judaism [Hardcover] By: Leon Charney

Guess you can tell I am an Amazon fan. Bibliotherapy.

Will it be enough? I doubt it. I must walk the walk, not just read the read, but this will give me a direction.

As a doctor, I spent much of my life helping people with this issues. Now it is time for this physician to heal and comfort himself.

I have not lost sight of the here and now joy that springs from the coldly wonderful fact that I am on this side of the dilemma, dealing with handling the losses and the unanswerable questions and the pain, and not being the source of them.

I also have not lost touch with the responsibilities, the mitzvahs this engenders.

Doing this work will help me. It always has.

Memorial Service

I am just back from the memorial service for a friend 10 years younger than me, diagnosed with CLL two years after me, who had his transplant two months before mine. This is a rotten disease that doesn't play nice.

I wish I had the faith to believe that it all evens out in some incomprehensible eternity.

My only cold comfort is to paraphrase the words of G-d to Job and Jesus to his followers who seemed to say: "I am G-d and you're not." I guess that it is a better toehold in a world worth living in than to say that it is all meaningless. What I do believe is that the conversation doesn't end with the grave. The holy principle of parsimony begs that a person lives on with clear and tangible influences on this world likes Patrick Swayze's Ghost, but that does not mean there is more to this world than meets the eye.

I will live as this is all there is, and will cling with considered desperation to this earthly plane. I'm sad, but I am also OK. For now, that gestalt will see me through these present storms and those to come. It imbues my life with meaning and mitzvah so that in the distant future when my influence is only what remains of my work and my memory, it will be a force for good and strength.

My friend achieved that through his exemplary life and faith. His wife's, at time joyful, too often painful recounting of the ups and downs, and downs and downs and downs of his struggle has helped so many, known and unknown, in understanding their choices in the battles with their personal dragons. Thank you for writing and posting when it must of been so hard.

Later I will share what I have gleaned, medically and psychologically, from this tragic tale as the greatest lessons are learned from our fumbles and failures. But at what a price! What a price! Did I mention that is is a rotten disease?

A fellow member of our CLL support group reflected that we had lost our first member. That surely is the truth, but it implies that a second and third will be following. That too is surely true, but not for another 40 years or so, please.

I may be no St. George, and my friend may not have killed his dragon, but may all our exploits be as mythical. The dragon slaying rhetoric favored in the CLL community hits the right tones of bravery, faith, and daring-do, but for me, I need something more concrete to image.

Heaven or no heaven, dragon-slaying or no dragon-slaying, faith or no faith, we all, in our own ways, are doing our gritty best in trying circumstances to make good choices and make sense of a world full of pain.

Looking at Death

Francois De La Rochefoucauld was so right when he said, “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.” (Thank you Ed K for sharing this)

Maybe that's good? 

Forces us to avert our gaze from the abyss and stare back, wide eyed, into the living moment. 

Forces us to remember the finite nature of the time we have in an infinite world and the need not to waste a moment of it.

I promise to be more upbeat in my next posting. This memorial service and the closing of a 40 year old loop is a heavier anchor than I realized.