Sitting with Louis | Dave's Place

Notes During a Pandemic

We came to stay at our Asheville cabin during the pandemic in order to take care of my wife’s brother Louis, who has a house on the same property.[1] He’s 68 years old and autistic, diagnosed just a few years ago. His job was bringing in shopping carts at the local supermarket, and at first my wife thought she could teach him to do that safely, but as the parameters of the pandemic became clear she realized he couldn’t work anymore, though he enjoyed his job and the supermarket loved having him. He was a tireless worker and a model employee. But he was in the bad age group.

That left the question of how he would spend his time. His tendency in the past has been to stay in his pajamas all day, rarely bathe or brush his teeth, watch television for hours at a time or sit in a chair snoozing. Helping him resist that tendency has been a major project in our lives in the ten years since his father died. His sister—my wife—has been the primary motivator (she got him the job at the supermarket, for instance. She begged them for that job). I’ve done what I could.

We couldn’t let him turn into a blob during the pandemic.

So we gave him a schedule. He would report to our house every day at 11:00 just as if he were showing up at the supermarket. He would begin by doing some walking, because he did a great deal of walking at work and that was his only exercise. After that he would show up at the house, and we would figure out chores for him to do. That was the idea. Actually, he was already doing chores on a regular schedule at his house. There aren’t many spare chores at our place. And we prefer to do them ourselves.

“Maybe you could teach him to meditate,” my wife said.

Louis has a complicated relationship with religion. Ever since his father died and he’s been living on his own, we’ve had a habit of family prayers, whenever we were in transition or there was some kind of crisis. We would stand in a circle of three, hold hands, and pray together. At first his sister did all the talking (I, a longtime Buddhist, was not a great verbal prayer). But over time Louis has spoken up more and more, talking about his concerns and his fears, praying for his sister and me as we go off somewhere. In the early days of the pandemic, when we prayed every day, he often stunned us with his eloquence. He prayed for exactly what we wanted, what the whole world wanted. There was nothing left to say.

He wasn’t entirely happy with the Catholic faith he grew up in. He flunked a couple of early grades at Catholic School—people had no idea he was autistic—and has bad memories of the place. His sister had developed some family mantras that we repeated in times of crisis, ever since his father died—“Always together,” “Everything is workable,” “The body dies but the spirit never dies”—but he didn’t seem entirely convinced. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought about such matters. He may have thought about them too much.

One day, a few days into our pandemic stay, he had started his walk up and down our road and didn’t seem to be coming back. We were keeping an eye out, couldn’t imagine what had happened. Finally I went out and found him halfway up the driveway, staring at the trees. I asked what was the matter.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just can’t go on.”

“Are you worried about something?” I said.

“Well. Yes.”

“You’re worried about the virus?”

“Yes.”

“Are you worried about what will happen if Alma and I get the virus and die?” I figured that might be the case because I’d been worried about it myself.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s make a plan. Let’s figure out what you’re going to do.”

We went back to the house and created a long list of people he should call if that should happen. We’ve taken care of him in our will, and told him all about that. We had told him about that before. But he forgets things, and had more immediate concerns. The dead bodies in the cabin. Things like that.

Once we had written out that list, he was able to walk again.

Every day after he had walked for forty-five minutes or so—and would walk another thirty minutes later—he came into my little study, and we closed the door, and talked for a while, and meditated.

I’ve been meditating for thirty years, ever since my wife was in Divinity School at Harvard and dragged me off to the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center because she wanted us to have a spiritual practice in common. I’ve meditated in all three of the Buddhist meditative traditions—Vipassana, Tibetan, and Zen—and have been practicing Zen since 1995. The practice of sitting has been transformative, and I see it as the core of my life.

I had no idea what Louis would think of it.

Back when his father died, we got Louis a meditation cushion and I showed him various ways of sitting. He settled on the kneeling posture, and was quite comfortable in it. I gave him a book that had been hugely influential for me, Shambhala, the Sacred Path of the Warrior[2], and though he didn’t read it—I’ve never known him to read any books[3]–he was grateful to have it, as a kind of talisman. I didn’t expect him to practice meditation, and he didn’t. But he was glad to have the cushion and the book.

Through the years he had gotten less limber—who hasn’t?—and can no longer get in the kneeling posture. But I have a sitting bench that I got from Carolina Morning and use at my desk, and it seemed good for him, basically comfortable but not entirely so. Perfect for meditation.

Among the many things Louis had watched on television were shows on the history channel, and he once saw a show which mentioned that, as the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, he eventually got to a state where he was one with everything. That sounded good to Louis. He also like to listen to the music on Soundscapes, which was accompanied by sayings from famous people. One of his favorites was by the Buddha.

“I gained nothing when I achieved unsurpassed perfect enlightenment. That is why it was unsurpassed perfect enlightenment.”

He didn’t entirely understand that, but it impressed him.

I gave him basic sitting instruction—something I’ve done on a regular basis at my Zen Center—and we began slowly, ten minutes per day. I actually thought Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior would be a good fundamental text for us, and I read him a section every day. He didn’t understand how a “warrior” could be a warrior of compassion—Louis is nothing if not literal—but he listened raptly to what I read.

One thing I noticed almost immediately was that when we were checking in—I asked him how he slept, what he’d watched on TV the night before, a question that often led to a long disquisition on Japanese anime or the history of cartoons[4]—Louis did that autistic thing of avoiding eye contact and staring away from me, talking quite fast (like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man), but as soon as we started to talk about Buddhism, he looked straight at me. He made eye contact. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him do that before.

After a sitting I might say, “How was that?” and he’d say, “Great. I only fell asleep twice.” Other times he’d say, “I really needed that. I fell asleep.” He has a longtime habit of taking catnaps while sitting in a chair, and the sittings were starting to resemble those naps, even though he wasn’t in an easy chair. But I made a decision not to say anything about that. People have been telling Louis all his life that he does everything wrong. I didn’t want to turn sitting into one more of those things.

We gradually worked up to twenty minutes, and Louis continued to be fascinated by the daily readings, but when we got to Trungpa’s chapter on magic (basically, he says that being present in the moment brings magic into your life), Louis got all confused, because he has a long term interest in magic, and it is featured in many of his favorite artworks, including Japanese anime and the Harry Potter movies. I felt that our discussions were getting more and more fanciful and speculative, way off the topic of Buddhism. So I said we should stop reading for a while, just check in and talk, then sit. Often we talked for fifteen or twenty minutes.[5]

One of the big revelations of Louis’ practice was that he could be angry or grouchy inside but not act it out. When I mentioned that to him it was like a Copernican revolution. He had been verbally abused and belittled by his father (a lifer in the military who suffered from PTSD) for many years, and though he was basically a sweet person, he was full of anger. Anger was his default mode. I told him that in Buddhism we didn’t try to get rid of what we felt. We went ahead and felt it as fully as we could. But we didn’t act it out. We just felt it. We took a vow to treat people with respect.

Often he was angry at television, also depressed about it. One day when he said he was depressed I asked why, and it was because he could never again see the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, the original black and white. Another day he felt terrible because he couldn’t watch the original Adventures of Tinkerbell. Talk about a statement that baffled me.[6] I eventually realized that these longings for the television shows of yesteryear were just nostalgia for the past, an imagined time when he believed he was happy. I don’t think he was, and I don’t think these television shows would bring that happiness back. In many measurable ways, his life right now is better than it’s ever been. He has the problems of being 68, but otherwise things are good.[7]

Eventually we settled on a period of talking and fifteen minutes of sitting. His sister suggested that because he might be less likely to fall asleep. I really don’t notice how he’s doing, don’t ask anymore how the sitting went. I often find the talks interesting. I’m not deeply interested in the intricacies of Japanese anime, but somewhat interested.

After a couple of months Louis expressed the usual beginner’s problem that he couldn’t stop thinking. I explained that the purpose of meditation isn’t to do that, but to see that we are thinking, get some separation from our thoughts, and also not attach to them, see that we don’t have to act them out. That can be enormously freeing.

Louis would listen patiently as I said all that, then say, “Yes, I know, but my problem is that I can’t stop my thoughts.”

On to the next subject.

Things changed a few weeks ago when a television channel called Comet showed a retrospective of Godzilla movies. Louis went on and on about that—this disquisition was dizzying—and mentioned his favorite among the movies. Later that day I was watching a YouTube of the American Zen teacher Brad Warner, and not only did he mention that he’d been watching the Godzilla movies, he actually said his favorite was the same as Louis’, though most Godzilla fans didn’t like it at all.

I’d already told Louis about this teacher who had a major interest in monster movies and had worked for a Japanese production company for a number of years, but I took this occasion to play the YouTube for Louis, which was actually on the subject that our mind is not our own, our body is not our own. Louis beamed when Brad mentioned Godzilla. Brad was also wearing an Ancient Aliens t-shirt, another favorite for Louis. I suddenly had a major Brad Warner fan on my hands. Any friend of Godzilla and Ancient Aliens was a friend of his.

We watched that YouTube twice. Louis didn’t understand how his mind could not be his own. He had always thought his mind was completely his own (though he admitted he sometimes found himself doing things and didn’t understand why he was doing them. It was as if some other intelligence—some robot[8], for instance—were controlling his actions). We discussed the mind for a while, and Louis admitted that the thoughts in his mind did not always seem to be his. Sometimes they seemed to come out of the blue. And they didn’t always express who he really was. (Not that there is such a thing, but that’s a different topic.)

I got in touch with Brad (who is an e-mail friend; we’d met once, when he came to the Chapel Hill Zen Center to give a talk), who was delighted to hear that his reference to Godzilla sparked interest in a viewer. I sent him a photo of Louis and me sitting, and continued to tell him of Louis’ reactions to YouTubes. The subjects Brad was discussing weren’t easy by any means, and often left Louis puzzled, but I told him our only recourse was to keep sitting. That was how Brad had learned things.

I realized Louis might like to watch Zen in the West from Tricycle’s Buddhafest, a movie I’d been a bit sarcastic about the first time I saw it, though I eventually changed my mind. Brad’s YouTube videos would stay around, but Buddhafest ended August 16^th. So we began watching snippets of that movie, twelve or fifteen minutes at a time (there are many scenes in Japan, and Louis is obsessed with that country and its anime; he sits forward in his chair when the Japanese teacher is talking). The first snippet ended when teacher Henry Shukman said that we can never find happiness by seeking something outside ourselves. He then says he’s not sure he wants to say why that is, and Louis got a chuckle out of that. A couple of other people speak, and Shukman comes back. The problem with trying to find happiness from things outside, he said, isn’t just that we already have those things. It’s that we already are those things. We are the things that we think will make us happy.

“Play that again,” Louis said.

I did.

“I don’t see how that could be,” he said.

I reminded him that, early in the movie, Shukman talked about a moment when he was a young man and was looking at moonlight playing on a dark ocean. Suddenly it seemed that the ocean was in him and he was in the ocean. There was no separation. It was difficult to talk about. But it was a vivid experience.

Louis did remember that—he remembers everything he sees on a screen—but said he was still puzzled.

“Of course, Jesus said a lot of things I don’t understand too,” he said.

“That’s right. Like the Kingdom of God is within you.”

“Yes. Hey. That’s kind of the same thing.”

Just as with Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, I had seen the movie a couple of times, but hadn’t thought through how Louis might react to things. There’s a huge emphasis in the Sanbo lineage on the experience of kensho. Person after person mentioned it. Everybody was having enlightenment experiences.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be enlightened,” Louis said at the end of the second segment.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just sit there thinking. I can’t quiet my thoughts. I’m just not that good at it.”

“I’m not either.”

“The Buddha was already smart. He was smarter than I am to start off with.”

“It took him seven years. We’ve only been at it a few months.”

“I just don’t think it’s going to work out.”

Louis has had a lifetime of not being able to do things.

“I’m the same way,” I said. “I’ve been at this for thirty years and haven’t become enlightened. I don’t really expect to. But you’ve changed a huge amount in the past four months. Your whole demeanor is different. You don’t come over here all grouchy.”

“I am grouchy. I just don’t show it.”

“But that’s a huge change. Your whole life is different. It’s changing bit by bit. In my brand of Buddhism we say enlightenment doesn’t happen all it once. It’s like going out for a walk on a misty morning. You come back soaking wet but don’t know when it happened.”

“I don’t know about that.”
“You’re different than you used to be.”

“I don’t feel different.”

“Just ask your sister.”

We went out to the living room and did that. She was better at expressing it than I.

[1] As it turns out, this is a perfect place to socially isolate. Our cabin is much smaller than our Durham house, which means we’re all over each other, but we’re up on the side of a mountain, we have two large supermarkets to shop at, both of which have senior hours, we’re otherwise quite self-sufficient, and it’s beautiful. It’s been wonderful to watch spring become full summer.

I should mention also at the outset that I’ve told Louis about the piece I’ve written, and he’s fine with my publishing it.

[2] Years ago, before we moved to Cambridge and I began meditating, I was talking to a woman in a bus on my first trip to Mexico, explaining that I’d just read The Way of Zen and had been struck by it, but wasn’t sure what to do next. The woman, who until then had looked sleepy and mildly hungover, fixed her eyes on me and spoke with authority. “There are two books you should read,” she said. One was Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. The other was Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. I thought to myself, my God, there is no way in hell I’m ever going to read a book with a goofy title like that. But once I began meditating I did read it. I’m sure I’ve read it at least ten times.

[3] I’ve often wondered if Louis has a problem with reading as an activity, but he’s told me that years ago he read some science fiction, especially anthologies of short stories. He also told me that, when his sister gave him her car, he read the owner’s manual. I thought, my God, if you can read that you can read anything.

[4] One fact of Louis’ life, I would say, is that no one ever listened to him. He grew up in a house with four sisters, and his father brushed off everything he said with a shrug. My wife told me that, when I started to talk to Louis after his father died, I was the first friend he’d ever had. Levi was the second.

[5] Sometimes I was taking the role of a father, one my wife definitely wanted me to play. Louis hadn’t really had a role model who would take him seriously and tell him how to do things. I mentioned casually one day, for instance, that I do some stretching when I wake up, and Louis immediately started to do that. I often talked to him about table manners, a constant source of aggravation for his sister (we’re eating with him seven nights a week for the foreseeable future, and things do begin to wear on you). I also talked to him about his compulsive overeating, something he’s done much better with since his father died, but which he relapses into from time to time. I share that problem with him, though I caught onto it earlier in life. Louis weighed 240 pounds right after his father died. He now weighs 170.

[6] I know that some people reading this probably know how to access both of these things somewhere online. That was my immediate reaction too. But I began to realize that the specific shows weren’t really the point. He had a long period when he was depressed because he couldn’t see the original Star Trek, but when we finally got a streaming service that had the full series, he didn’t watch it. He just wanted to be able to watch it. In theory.

[7] I can only feel so much sympathy. I’m 71.

[8] Or an alien. God help us all.