The morning before my stepfather’s surgery, I found him pacing the kitchen.  I pulled a gallon of milk from the fridge, watched white liquid dip into my black mug of coffee and then swirl up to the surface like clouds.

“Clouds in my coffee,” I sang. “Clouds in my coff-ee and…”  I looked at my stepfather.  His shoulders were up around his ears. His brow was furrowed.  “What are you nervous about?” I said.  “It’s only cancer.”

That was my joke.  He didn’t chuckle.  But this was my thinking—put the word only before anything, and watch the stakes fall.  Only life.  Only death.  No attachments.  These things are like clay balls to hold and mold gently, to merge with other clay balls, to lose. In just a few more weeks, I’d take my first Buddhism 101 class with the leading scholar of eastern religion at my university.  I was preparing.  No pain.  No suffering.        

But when the surgeon, Dr. Moses, split my stepfather open that afternoon, the doctor gasped.  The fist of cancer was gripping a million little nerves.  Holding tight.  Can’t take it out.  Not without destroying his arm.  The man’s a chiropractor, the surgeon thought.  He’d never work again. 

My stepfather came home shirtless with a tube attached to his body where the blood drained into a plastic, translucent container.  He sat in his chair at the kitchen table and smoked Salems with his other hand.  I watched him ash his cigarette into the old, rusting, silver tray that he’d brought into this house years ago.

“Oh, Heath,” he said, and then we sat in silence.

*

The next month, he hauled all my books and clothes and shoes and even a mini-fridge into my new dorm room, and he did it with almost his usual gusto. But in three weeks, when I returned home to visit, he could barely lift my pillow-sized bag of laundry. The house had become a cancer battleground.

School was a welcome reprieve. I took dutiful notes on the Buddhist concepts of samsara, karma, and bodhisattvas.

On the day of the no-self lesson, I raised my hand warily. “So… the Buddhists believe that there’s nothing inherently me about me?” This sounded terrifying. “There’s no essence to my nature?”

Up until this point, I’d “gotten” Buddhism. Or at least the Mahayana version my professor was teaching. See that mountain up there, the Buddhists said. That’s a mountain.

Okay, got it.

Now see that same mountain? That’s not really a mountain. That’s only a mountain because you perceive it to be a mountain. Just as the chair you’re sitting on is only a chair because you’re using it for its chairness. Pick it up and hurl it at something, and now you’re working with a weapon, not a chair. The chair loses its chairness and takes on weaponness.

So the “suchness,” as my professor said, of an object is dependent on conditions and perceptions, which means there is no essential, permanent chairness of a chair. And there is no essential, permanent mountainness of the mountain. So there is a mountain, but there’s also not a mountain. Got that?

Yes, I’d gotten that too. The point: nothing is fixed. Nothing is permanent.

The philosophy had the bonus of extending to other nouns in my life. Cancer, for instance. There’s cancer. But then there’s also not cancer. I liked that.

But with the self, shit just got personal. There’s no essential me? No little glowing diamond bit inside my chest? The bit I’d thought maybe glimmered long before my first post-birth scream? And the one that I thought would survive long after I’d taken my last breath?

Which means there’s no essential stepfather? Because everything is just water (and not water) and running right through my fingers?

“That’s right,” the professor said, in response to my first question. “In Buddhist philosophy, there’s nothing essentially you about you.”

I gulped, tried to imagine this “no-selfness.” What was it? A void? A nothingness? A black hole in my chest where once I’d thought that little light beamed?

A small part of me wanted to say, “No, of course there’s something inherently me about me! Isn’t there? Something vital and permanent!” But I didn’t because in Buddhism 101, you didn’t argue the principles, not unless you were one of those fundamentalist Christians hell-bent on proving your Sunday school lessons because if you didn’t, it would mean your worldview would crash down around your Jesus-T-Shirt-wearing shoulders.

You think you’re solid, the Buddhists said. But your self is just an illusion made up of things like your physical body. Your thoughts. Your feelings. Tomorrow you wake up with another layer of skin cells sloshed off, a different attitude about your boyfriend, a slightly different chemical make-up given your hormonal fluctuations, and on and on. There’s no solid you. I took rapid notes and reveled in the wonder.

Wasn’t it death and loss that made cancer so terrible? The notion that this fixed person would be gone? Once solid, then vanished? What if I could see the whole universe as fluid? As liquid? Maybe death wouldn’t hurt so much.

Looking back fourteen years later, I wish I could tell my knuckle-head self: Heather, you can’t will your way into that mind frame.

But I believed that if I could just let go of my insistence on the solidness of myself, if I could just see each thing as fluid and interconnected, if I could tap into the eternal clarity of this, in the gleaming northern star above the Bodhi tree, in the stillness between my stream of inhalations and exhalations, I could know bliss. I could never know pain.

*

On the weekends, I drove an hour north up I-95, past leaves the colors of saffron and rust, to hang around my stepfather’s bed. To stare at a face that was once round and jolly and caught poolside sun but was now pale and gaunt. To watch him sleep. The notion of life’s impermanence never felt more palpable. The need to end all suffering never felt more urgent. My stepfather was dying.

Sometimes when I came home, I found him staring at a blank spot on the wall, or staring up at the ceiling. The television was mute. This troubled me. I wanted him to be watching television. I wanted him to be amused while he was dying. I wanted him to escape the pain.

*

Buddhism 101—or my crude misunderstanding of it—offered a blueprint for escaping my own pain. I just had to accept that the contract with this life was simple: all things go. I just had to loosen the white knuckles around my love and everything else, and release.

Just let go, Heather. Just let it go.

This was, I now realize, an oversimplification of real Buddhism. Desire is human. In the Buddhism I’ve continued to study, desire isn’t something to annihilate but to work with. Destroying it would be like blowing out the flame that could start a fire that can cook your food. Of course, it can also burn your whole house down. 

*

I hugged him on a Monday, went back to school, went to classes, got drunk alone on a Wednesday, got the call on Thursday.

I arrived home just as orderlies were wheeling an empty hospital bed out of the living room.

*

In any given class, I could weep without meaning to. Without the usual wind-up of sorrow, without the contorted oh-don’t-cry-now face. Water would just leak out of my eyes. I gave myself two weeks off from school, and it had been enough time, but in a certain way, no time would be enough. Grief was a roommate in my solar plexus. It was a gaping hole. It ached.

In October, the world had been lush orange and red and still golden with sun. Now it was November. The trees were black brush strokes. The sky was stone. The world was gray and freezing over. In October he lived and in November he did not live, and all of this, this life, this world, these maples losing their leaves and this ground of grass and this sun and this body and this mother and this sister and anyone else I’d ever love. All of it was temporary. All of it would vanish.

It seemed a cruel contract we made with the world. The most beautiful thing would always be pregnant with the most pain. Unless you could keep yourself from clinging. Unless you could let it all go.

*

If my grief hole was heart-sized and hung out in my solar plexus, my mother’s was house-sized and swallowed her whole.

Now, I have more compassion for my newly widowed mother. She lost her husband, her best friend, and her coworker all in one sweep. The arrows of her life all pointed to him, and now they pointed nowhere but inward, to the sorrow, to the heavy gravity of nothing, and so she stayed home.

And back then, I was compassionate, but I was also frustrated. She had to get over this. She had to move on. To let go. She couldn’t throw in the towel of life.

If I stopped and felt enough what lay beneath my urgency, if I really practiced Buddhism, if I’d found, for instance, Pema Chodron’s books like When Things Fall Apart, I would have encouraged myself to feel my own grief. I would have seen my desire to push both hers and mine away.

Instead, all the photos and the full closet of his clothes and that full ashtray and even the saved bottles of painkillers from his cancer, they were infringing on my Buddhist practice of not suffering.

Besides, there was no self. There was no stepfather and there was no mother and there was no me. It was all an illusion, and maybe if my mother saw that, she’d wipe her tears and go outside to smell the fallen leaves.

I tried to counsel her. She had to let go.

She couldn’t. She cried and said she just couldn’t.

She couldn’t stay attached, I told her. It was attachment that was causing her pain. She had to get over this.

“What’s there to mourn anyway,” I told her. “There is no self. There is nothing essentially him about him. He’s gone. It’s over.”

To this, she burst into tears. Did I really believe there was nothing essentially him about him? The question was asked in panic, as though I were a renowned scientist telling her that odds were good a meteor headed straight for her house this minute.

“Yes,” I told her. “That’s what the Buddhists believe.”

She sobbed. She couldn’t believe that.

Her face was gaunt. Her collarbones visible. It was like, in her grief, she was shrinking into less and less.

She had to believe there was something left of him, she said. She had to believe she’d see him again. In heaven. She cried and cried and said no, she couldn’t accept that there was no self.

I looked away. I, who had cried maybe daily since he’d died, who’d cried without wind-up or warning, who’d cried in class and in the shower and repeatedly in my sleep, I just sat at the kitchen table numb. Believing with all my might that I could push the grief away like some unwanted, feral cat. That it would be as illusory as the chair my grieving ass sat on, the chair I could turn into a weapon by hurling it across the room. I would watch it smash into splintered pieces against the wall, hoping that maybe, just maybe such a gesture would bring him, the illusory him, the ethereal, fluid, no-self him, back to me.