The Art of Letting Go

"The Art of Losing" > "The Art of Letting Go"

When I was asked to provide a title for this talk, I proposed
calling it "The Art of Losing: On Writing, Dying, and Mom," which
refers to a line from a beautiful poem by Elizabeth Bishop, called "One
Art."

I have to admit, I was kind of proud of my title. I thought it was .
. . you know . . . subtle and deep and kind of enigmatic. Not too
flashy.

And "One Art" is a favorite poem of mine, so I thought I could start
the talk by reading that poem to you, because, as a writer who is also
Buddhist, and a woman, and a student of Norman Fischer's, I think it's
nice to start a talk by paying tribute to my women ancestors.

But, then the Zen Hospice folks came back to me with a counter-proposal for the title: "The Art of Letting Go."

Losing. Letting Go. It's interesting right? The difference in
nuance? Actually, I thought it was kind of funny. "Losing" does sound
awfully negative, and even as Buddhists, we don't want to be losers,
right?

And certainly no one here should feel like a loser tonight. On the
contrary. This dinner is a tribute, a way of saying thank you to all
the people who, through their generous gifts, make the work of the Zen
Hospice Project possible. This kind of giving is certainly not about
losing.

It is, on the other hand, all about (amply, generously, and joyously) letting go.

So the Hospice folks knew better, and I agreed. But, I still think
it would be nice to share Elizabeth Bishop's poem with you, because
when I came across it again in a new volume of her poetry that's been
posthumously published, I was again so moved by it, and it also
directly pertains to the topic at hand.

So here it is. . . One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop.

ONE ART
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster. 
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master. 
Then practice losing farther, losing faster;
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master. 
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. 
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. 

Buddhism

Norman Fischer, who, like Elizabeth Bishop, is a poet, is also fond
of noting that the world is a disaster. Of course, he tempers this by
pointing out that the world is simultaneously magnificent.

I bring up Norman because he's the one responsible for me being here
today. I've been studying with him for a while now, and since this is
the Zen Hospice Project dinner, I wanted to tell you about my
introduction to Zen, since it ties into writing, dying and to my Mom,
and also because it's kind of funny.

My very first memory as a little human being was of my grandparents
sitting zazen. I was very little, maybe three years old, and my
Japanese grandparents—my Mom's parents—had come to visit us in New
Haven, Connecticut, which is where I grew up. We lived in a small house
with no spare bedroom, so my grandparents were going to sleep in my
parents' room. I remember being very excited about these two strange
people in the house. I remember their clothes smelled funny—not bad,
probably like incense, now that I think of it.

That first morning was filled with suspense. My mother was in the
kitchen, cooking, and she sent me to call them for breakfast. I
remember approaching the closed bedroom door with enormous trepidation.
Perhaps I knocked, or maybe I didn't. It was perfectly silent on the
other side. I imagine I must have felt a grave sense of
responsibility—I had been given a duty to discharge, and Asian people,
even very little ones, are nothing if not dutiful. So perhaps it was
this sense of duty that compelled me to turn the knob, and open the
door.

Nothing in my three years of living prepared me for what I saw. My
grandmother and grandfather were sitting on the floor, on either side
of the bed, with their legs crossed, and their eyes half-closed,
rocking gently back and forth.

Now, you have to remember, this was New Haven, Connecticut, in the
1950's. People didn't sit on the floor, cross-legged, with their eyes
half-closed, rocking back and forth. This was not San Francisco.

Seated on the floor like that, they were my height, exactly. We were
at eye level, only their eyes were half shut. Mine, on the other hand,
were wide open. I stood there for a moment, then backed out of the
room, and ran full tilt back into the kitchen, where I told my mother
what I had seen.

And here's the funny part. My mom must have tried to explain to me
that they were meditating, which of course meant nothing to a
three-year-old. So when I didn't understand, she went and got my Daruma
doll. Do you know the Japanese Daruma dolls? Daruma is, of course,
Bodhidharma, the monk who founded the Zen lineage in China. The
Japanese Daruma dolls are these round dolls with no legs or arms, and
big blank white circles where their eyes should be. I remember my doll
looked kind of like a red snowman, and it rocked, and the idea was that
even if you tried to push it over, it would always regain its balance.

So my mom set my Daruma rocking back and forth, and she explained
that this was meditating. Then she said that Daruma was a really,
really good meditator. In fact, he was such a good meditator, and he
had meditated for so long, that his arms and legs had fallen off. And
the reason he had no eyes was that he had gotten sleepy while he was
meditating and so he had cut off his eyelids.

So, this was my introduction to Zen, and thanks to Mom, I developed
an association in my mind between Zen meditation and blindness and
grave bodily disfigurement. For the rest of my grandparents' visit, I
kept fearing I'd walk in and find them, sightless and limbless, rocking
gently back and forth.

Whatever the trauma Mom's explanation might have caused, in time I
got over it. Much later on, when I started sitting zazen myself, Mom
was mystified. She called the posture "squatting on the floor." She
never understood why I would choose to squat on the floor and stare at
a wall for days on end, when I could be reading a good book. She saw me
as the Buddhist equivalent of a Born-Again Christian.

Like many second generation Japanese kids growing up in America, my
mom had been sent to Christian church, while her parents practiced
Buddhism. When WWII broke out, she was separated from her parents, and
became further estranged from her Japanese roots. After the war, my
grandparents moved back to Japan, and my mom stayed in Connecticut, so
by then, she saw her parents very rarely. And when her mother died, at
the age of 93, in an old age home outside of Tokyo, Mom hadn't seen her
for many years.

I remember when she called me in New York to give me the news of my
grandmother's death, she told me that she didn't want to go to Japan to
the funeral. It would be a Buddhist ceremony, and she had a bad leg—it
must have been arthritis or something—and she didn't want to squat on
the floor during the service. She was afraid that she would have to use
a chair, and that she would embarrass the family. So she asked me if I
would go, instead.

So I went to Tokyo, to my aunt Noriko's house. My grandmother had
already been cremated by the time I got there, but I was in time for
her funeral ceremony at the family temple, and her interment in the
family cemetery plot. But before we left for the temple, my aunt took
me into the parlor where she was keeping my grandmother's remains. She
showed me the urn, which I dutifully admired, then she went to the
kitchen and brought back a small Tupperware container and a pair of
those disposable wooden chopsticks that you get with take-out sushi.
She lined the container with one of my grandmother's fancy
handkerchiefs, and she opened the urn and started taking out bits of my
grandmother's bones and placing them in the Tupperware.

As you can imagine, I was… surprised…for several reasons: First
to see that the cremains were bones and not ashes. Second to see my
aunt packing them in Tupperware. And third, to hear her naming each
bone as she did so. "This is a piece of your grandmother's skull. This
is a bit of her rib." When she had transferred three bones, she closed
up the container and handed it to me, telling me that I should take it
home and give it to my mother.

I didn't realize it at the time, but this is a custom, called honewake,
or dividing the bones, and it's often practiced when a person's family
has spread out and lives in different places, and it's also often
practiced when a women dies, so that her parents' family can have some
of her remains, as a consolation, while the majority are buried with
her husband.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I came back from Japan with the
bones and a large box of my grandmother's belongings, but with one
thing and another, I just didn't get around to bringing them home to my
mom. She and I had grown apart over the years, too. I was busy with my
career, and talking about death is never easy. She knew I had the
bones, and I kept hoping she'd ask me about them, but she never did.
And I didn't really want to bring up the subject. So I just kept moving
them around with me—I think I moved three or four times, and in every
new apartment, I would put the bones on a shelf in the closet and close
the door. I mean, talk about a skeleton in the closet! This went on for
about five years.

At the time, I was working in the television business, and was
trying to get away from commercial production. I was interested in
exploring my Japanese heritage, and I had started writing down little
snippits of family history, stuff that I'd heard from my mom and from
my grandmother. I started making lists of questions I had, and I
realized how much I didn't know. I felt a deep sense of loss and regret
that I could no longer ask my grandparents because they were dead. But
at the same time, I felt an increasing compulsion to make something out
of what remained.

I had my grandfather's photographs, and I had my grandmother's
bones. I had myself, and I had my mom. I had a duty to discharge, given
to me by my aunt—and as we've established, I am nothing if not dutiful.
But more powerful than that, I had a mandate from the dead.

This
might seem strange, but that's what it felt like. Like I had a mandate
from my dead Japanese grandparents to engage with the world creatively.
My grandfather had been a haiku poet and a photographer. He was the
first official park photographer for Volcano National Park on the Big
Island of Hawaii, and I grew up surrounded by his images and his words:
His black and white photographs of the Hawaiian landscape,
painstakingly hand-colored by my grandmother; his book of his poems;
and their beautifully calligraphed paintings and scrolls.

When I was little and just starting to write poems and take pictures
myself, my mother used to say that I was just like my grandfather. She
use to shake her head, ruefully, and marvel at how her father's talent
and love of the arts had skipped a generation, bypassing her, only to
end up in me. It made me feel very proud whenever she said this, and
she said it often, as though to make sure I would remember. I had only
met my grandfather once, when I was three, but somehow I felt a
transmission had occurred. And my grandmother, by bequeathing me her
bones, had completed the process. Those bones were the seal to the
mandate.

What came out of all this was the film that Anne mentioned, called
"Halving the Bones." It was the first creative effort I put out into
the world, and it tells the story of my grandparents, and of my
grandmother's death, and of delivering her bones to my mother. I'd like
to show you a short clip from the film now, so you can meet my Mom.

Halving the Bones (transcript)
MOM:	The famous bones that we've been talking about. . .
Ruth takes a bundle wrapped in plastic from the orange

backpack.  She unwraps it and hands it to Mom.
RUTH	These are the bones.  Well, these, these are only a
few of them.  They just cremate it to the bone.
MOM:	Isn't that a beautiful container!
RUTH:	Yeah, this is the cloth that's, um, that they use
for death...
MOM:	And then where'd you get this container?
RUTH:	It's a tea can. . .
MOM:	It's beautiful!
RUTH	It's just a regular tea can.  You know when Noriko
gave me the bones, she gave it to me actually in a
Tupperware container,  a little plastic Tupperware container
that...
MOM:	(laughing) No...!
RUTH:	So, as soon as I could I found something a little
more dignified.  But even so, I mean, a tea can is still,
you know....
MOM:	No, but it's lovely, this container, it's a very
nice....and it's so appropriate, I mean you know...You mean
all of this is her bone?
RUTH:	There's just,  look there's three pieces, there's
three little pieces. They're very beautiful.
Mom opens the can and looks inside.
MOM:	Oh, my... aren't they beau....they're colored!
They're colored!  Oh I hate to touch them because....Isn't
that pretty!  It's as if they were painted. Oh....isn't that
interesting.  My mother's bones....Huh.
RUTH:	Noriko was able to identify, she was able to
identify which bone came from what part of the body.  So she
said, "this is part of a skull, this is part of a spine...."
I can't remember, but....
MOM:	But, but was there part of her brains in here, too?
Mom peers into can.
RUTH:	I think there was definitely part of the skull, but
I'm not sure.  I'm not sure which part it is.
Mom takes out a bone with a hole in it and turns it

around. She peeks through the hole.
MOM:	...Isn't that interesting.  And it's such odd
shapes.... My gosh....
She puts the cover back on the can and pats it. Then

addresses her mother, softly.
Well, we're talking about you.  We're talking about you.....
MOM:	(patting the tea can) This is nice!  This is nice. 
I like this.  I like this.
RUTH	So the thing is, Mom, when.... I have this memory,
that Grandma  wanted her bones brought back to Hawaii. She
said ... I have this memory she didn't want to, um, be
buried in Japan.  She wanted her bones brought back to
Hawaii and thrown into the ocean.  And, so what I was
thinking was that you and I could go back to Hawaii, and do
this.....
(Long pause. . . )

MOM:	When?

Fade up on Ruth's P.O.V.,  driving away from. Mom is

standing in front of doorway of her house, waving her arms

goodbye, and getting smaller and smaller.
RUTH (VO):	Well, as it turned out, Mom really didn't want
to go anywhere. She'd found her place in the world... in
Connecticut... and nothing was going to convince her to
leave.   Mom lives entirely in the present, and  I  have to
respect that. Still, I was satisfied with what she and I had
done.  Unpacking Grandma's things and taking care of her
remains gave us something we could do together.  It made our
relationship important again, and we found a closeness that
we never lost. Mom lives in the present, but I don't.   I
spend a lot of time poking around in the past or imagining
the future.  Before I left that day, Mom gave me some very
specific instructions regarding the bones.
This is what she said. 

And I will tell you what she said
in a moment, but first I want to talk a bit about what happened next.

Writing, Dying, and Mom

Making the film helped me reconnect
with my mother. It gave me the excuse to spend time with her, and get
to know her, and learn to talk to her again. It was like our relationship
was somehow re-knit from the bones of my grandmother. Ultimately, when
my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1997, and then my father
died in 1998, I decided to take care of her myself. I think that decision
was possible because of the closeness we'd found, and also because,
during the making of the film, I'd spent so much time thinking about
the ways that we lose people. I didn't want to be half a world away
from her when she died.

There is a powerful link between creativity
and death. I suspect that by engaging creatively with the world, by
telling stories through novels and poems and films, I am also engaging
with death—I imagine it, I try it on, I struggle to make sense of it
or to hold it at bay. When I sat down to write this talk, I realized
that, in the end, all my work has been in some way about dying. And
I know I'm not alone. Writing is a kind of imaginative journey into
the land of the dead. We learn things there, and then return what we
learn to the living. It is a journey undertaken by anyone who has ever
told stories, from Homer, to Dante, to Elizabeth Bishop. To write is
to practice of the art of losing.

It wasn't always easy to care for
my Mom. It became clear pretty quickly that she couldn't live on her
own, but my mother, like most mothers, had a serious stubborn streak.
You saw how adamant she was about not leaving Connecticut? I was prepared
for the worst, but I'm happy to say that, although I never could get
her to agree to go back to Hawaii with me, in 1999, she packed a tiny
suitcase with a toothbrush, two bathing suits and a pair of pajamas,
and declared herself ready to come home with me and my husband to British
Columbia. She lived there with us there, in a little house next to ours,
pretty much until she died, just over a year ago.

And I'd like to share just a little
of what I wrote during that time, which was part of my practice of losing.
This is from my weblog.

Sunday, August 17, 2003 

So, my mother said to me, the other day, "When I die, are

you going to start renting out this house to other people?"

She is staying in a little house down the driveway from

ours.

"I haven't thought about it," I replied, hedging. Obviously

I don't like it when she talks about dying.

"Well, you should take the washer dryer up to your house

before you rent it to anyone."

"The washing machine. . . ?"

"Yes," she said. "I don't know why you put it in this house.

You have to come all the way down here every time you want

to do your laundry."

"We put it down here so we could all share...." We put it

down here so we'd have another excuse to hang out with you.

We put it down here because we are afraid you'll become

bedridden and incontinent.

"Well," she said, "that's very nice of you, but after I die

I don't want to have to worry about you not having a washer

dryer."

"Mom," I told her. "Please." She's had Alzheimer's since the

mid 1990's, she's just been diagnosed with what looks like

jaw cancer, and she's eighty-nine years old. She has enough

on her mind without worrying about our laundry.

"So you'll take it back up to your house?"

"Mom, when you die, I'm burying the washer dryer with you."

"Don't be silly."

"I don't want to have to worry about your dirty clothes when

you're in heaven." (I don't really believe in heaven, and

neither does she, but I know she will humor me.)

"Clothes don't get dirty in heaven," she said, staring at a

tall Douglas fir outside the window. "Clothes are always

clean in heaven."

"They are?"

"Yes. They have angels there who do all the laundry. Now,

isn't that a lovely tree? What kind of tree is that?"

May 25, 2004
A lot has happened. My mother turned 90 last month and we
had a little birthday party for her.
"How old am I?" she asked me.
"You're ninety, mom."
Her eyes widened. "I am! That's unbelievable! How can I be
ninety? I don't feel ninety."
"How old do you feel?"
"Forty."
She was perfectly serious.
I laughed. "You can't be forty. Even I'm older than forty."
"You are?" she exclaimed. "That's terrible!"

"Gee, thanks."

She shook her head. "You know, I must be getting old. I just

can't remember anything, anymore." She looked up at me and

blinked. "How old am I?"

Later on, I asked her, "How does it feel?"

"What?"

"When you can't remember things. Does it frighten you? Do

you feel sad?"

"Well, not really. I have this condition, you see. It's

called osteo... "

"You mean Alzheimer's?" I said, helping her out.

She looked astonished. "Yes! How on earth did you know

that?"

"Just a guess..."

"I can never remember the name," she explained.

"Of course not."

"It affects my memory..."

"...And that's why you can't remember."

She frowned and shook her head. "Remember what?"

"There's not a single thing I can do about it," she told me,

when I reminded her. "If there was something I could do and

I wasn't doing it, then I could feel sad or depressed. But

as it is...." She shrugged.

"So you're okay with it?"

She looked at me, patiently. "I don't have much choice," she

explained, "so I may as well be happy."

December 8, 2005
Dear Norman,
Thank you for asking me to write this.
As you know, my mom died one month ago, today. She had three
terminal conditions: Alzheimer's, cancer of the jaw, and
ninety years of living. Her death should have come as no
surprise, but of course when she died in my arms, I was
astonished.
How can this life, which has persisted here on this earth
for over ninety years, be over? Just like that? This strange
new state of momlessness is inconceivable to me. It is new
and foreign, a condition I've never experienced in my own
forty-eight years of living.
I've been taking care of my mom for the last ten years, so
my grieving is minute and quotidian. When I go to the
grocery store, I find myself searching for things that are
soft and sweet (she loved chocolate and she had no teeth),
or beautiful bright things (she loved flowers, but her sight
was failing). Then I remember that she isn't here anymore,
and I'll never see her face light up when I come into her
room, or hear her exclaim over the color of a leaf or a
petal or the sky. For the first couple of weeks, I just
stood in the ice cream aisle, stunned and weeping.
When I think about her death from her perspective, mostly I
just feel relief. She was beginning to suffer a lot of pain
and confusion, and I believe she was ready to go. But when I
think about it from my point of view, it breaks my heart.
Maybe that's selfish. I don't know. All I know is that I
miss her like crazy.
I miss her thin little fingers. I miss holding her hand. I
miss twirling her wedding ring around so the tiny chip of a
diamond sits back on top.
I've tried so hard to be strong for her. When she was
diagnosed with Alzheimer's ten years ago, our roles began to
switch. I took over caring for her, and slowly she became
dependent on me. In the end, I was feeding her and changing
her, and she was calling me mom. Alzheimer's is an achingly
long way to say goodbye, but I had to be strong, I thought.
It would only confuse and upset her to see me cry.
Then a few months ago, I had to take a trip and leave her
for a couple of weeks. I went to tell her, knowing that she
might die while I was gone, and as I sat on the bed next to
her, the tears just came and there was no stopping them. I
tried not to let her see, but of course she noticed. She's
my mom, after all--it's her job to notice these things. She
put her arm around me, put her head on my shoulder, and
although she'd pretty much stopped using language by then,
she made these sweet, singing, mom-like noises meant to
comfort me. And it worked, and I felt better, and when I
left, we were both laughing. So that was good. My grieving
gave her something that she could do well, something she
could succeed at, and that made her happy. It let her be the
strong one for a change.
They say every death is different, and I think every
occasion of grief is different, too.
When my dad died, I was angry because he was angry and
despairing. He did not want to die. He wasn't ready; and I
was in charge of his health care; and neither of us could do
a damn thing to prevent or forestall this utterly
unthinkable and unacceptably terminal outcome. I was mad at
him for his lack of readiness, and I was furious at myself
for my impotence and lack of compassion. After he died, I
couldn't think of him without a lot of pain and anger and
confusion and despair and sense of having failed him. I
couldn't look at his picture without feeling my insides
twist. I wanted to look away. And I did. I remember I drank
a lot, too, in order to get through it. I took his death
very personally.
It was different with my mom. We'd had lots of time
together, and we were both as ready as we could ever be. And
I wasn't drinking. I quit two months before she died. I'd
done the drunken death-and-grieving thing once, and it was
lousy. I didn't want to do it again. I wanted to keep my
wits about me. I didn't want to run away.
The last thing I promised my dad was to take care of my mom.
He knew she had Alzheimer's, and he was tortured at having
to leave her behind. So for ten years now, I've been
fulfilling my promise to him. And this has been good, too.

His request gave me something that I could do well,

something I could succeed at, and this has made me happy.

So I'm grateful to my parents for dying in my presence, and

for teaching me their two different ways of how it can be

done. It is hard work, dying, but after watching my mom and

dad, I realize that we're built to do it.

Grieving is hard work, too, but again, I guess we're built

to do it. We come equipped with hearts to break, and eyes to

cry with. We have brains to hold the memories and stories,

and voices to tell them with. We have the capacity to love

and heal.

Now, a month after my mom's death, I'm not crying in the

grocery store so often anymore. Instead, when I think of my

mom, I buy a sweet and offer it to her, and then I eat it

(she hated wasting perfectly good food). I bring home

flowers and admire them through her eyes. I take walks for

her by the ocean and look at the sky.

So that's a little bit of what it's been like. Thanks again,

Norman, for asking me to write this. It helps to have a

place to put the feelings.

with love,

Ruth 

Negotiating with the Dead

I said earlier that through writing we try to make sense of
suffering and death, but I think actually the impulse is even more
fundamental than that.

Writing derives from the foreknowledge, and the fear, of death. If
we were not able to foresee our own termination, then why would we
bother to write things down? If we could not envision the world without
us, then why would we feel the need to leave bits of ourselves behind?
And if we were not compelled to hold on to our dead, then why would we
mourn, or grieve, or commemorate them? Why would we feel the need to
speak to them, or for them? Why would we need history at all?

You could argue, and others have, that all stories are about dying.
The act of telling a story is an act of negotiating with the dead, to
use Margaret Atwood's phrase.

Storytelling is about the ticking of the clock. It's about "Once
upon a time." Stories have unique qualities that set them apart from
arts like music, performance, or pictorial representation. Unlike
painting, stories are time-based—they unfold through time. Unlike
performance, they persist—they stick around. And unlike music, they are
literal.

Stories literally re-enact time passing. They are born, they live,
and then they die, and every time you participate in the act of writing
or reading a story, you are performing a cycle of living and dying.
Pretending. Practicing. Rehearsing, if you will.

Stories are messages from the nether land, the land of the dead, and writers are the future dead, calling back to the living.

In the publishing business, there's a saying, "The only good author
is a dead author." For those of us still living, this sentiment is a
bit discouraging, but at least we can take consolation in knowing that
the best may still lie ahead. And to be fair, you can see their point.
Authors are, hands down, the most problematic link in the production
chain. They are moody, and unreliable. They can be preening prima
donnas, or stubbornly reclusive, puffed up or crippled by doubt. Often
they have bad habits, like drinking or philandering or bad hygiene.
Generally, these are not people you want in key roles in your
production team.

But really, when you think about it, the saying is quite true. The
majority of the books and stories that we read—the good ones, anyway,
the ones that linger—are written by dead authors. Language, itself, the
very medium of story, is an inheritance bequeathed to us by the dead,
and when we practice the art of telling stories, we do so in the
tongues of the dead, calling them back to life.

Art of Letting Go

Which brings us back to Elizabeth Bishop's poem, One Art. The
art that Bishop refers to in the poem is the art of losing, which, like
any art, must be practiced, and in fact will be practiced whether we
like it or not.

But in the final stanza, she intrudes upon her very last line with a
private, parenthetical command, which suggests there is yet another art
that is equally imperative:

 
. . . It's evident 
the art of losing's not too hard to master 
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. 

"Write it!" she commands herself. Write it! Write
your loss, because for a poet, this disaster that we call life—and it
truly is a disaster, when you think about it—can only be transformed
into magnificence through the practice of this One Art. It is through
poetry that Bishop practices the art of losing, and transforms each
loss into a poem, which is a kind of liberation, a letting go. And
through the poem she leaves behind, post-mortem, she shows us all how
to make the journey and to effect this transformation, too.

I spent ten years losing my Mom, little by little, to Alzheimer's.
But during those years, I wrote two books, and countless letters and
weblog postings and stories and journal entries and poems. This past
week, while I was writing this talk, I realized that by following a
dead poet's injunction, by practicing this art of losing, I had been
turning loss into letting go.

Now this, of course, is precisely what the Zen Hospice folks, in their wisdom, had known from the start.

It seems to me that Zen Hospice Project is really about living and
teaching this very practice: Of turning losing into letting go, loss
into liberation, and disaster back into the magnificence of life.

So I'd like to thank the folks at ZHP for teaching this practice—and also for helping me find the title of my talk today.

And on behalf of the ZHP, I would like to thank all of you for your
generosity—for generously and joyously letting go—and thereby helping
so many people to do the same.

If Mom were here, she'd thank you, too.

—Oh, and I promised to tell you what Mom said. She told me to take
her bones, and my grandmother's bones, back to Hawaii and throw them
both in the ocean. I confess, I haven't done that yet. I'm not quite
ready to let go.