Book Peek: Those Calls That Come in the Night

A draft chapter of my book-in-progress, The New Middle Way: A Buddhist Path Between Secular and Ossified

Although everything about a book-in-progress is tentative, the plan I’m working on involves a first section with eleven chapters on Buddhism and a second section with five about my spiritual journey and advice for readers on theirs. As I thought through the book, I realized how much my spiritual life has been influenced by life events outside of the strictly religious domain.

Today’s post is the draft of a chapter on the unusual number of unexpected traumatic and often violent losses I’ve experienced.

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My Journey—Trauma

The call comes in the night, a hand fumbles for the light.

That line is from a song called Bridges by my good friend, the singer-songwriter Andrew McKnight. He wrote it in collaboration with musician Jon Carroll as he considered the impending birth of his first child. In his wisdom and compassion, he identified with parents of the past, present, and future who hear the phone as they sleep with no way of knowing whether the call will bring joy or tears.

The line gives me the chills because my life has had a hefty dose of literal and figurative calls in the night.

None of us can compare our suffering with that of others. I can’t say I’ve suffered more or less than you. I can say I’m an expert in living through sudden, unexpected, and violent losses. Each of those experiences has been a vivid teacher of impermanence and an opportunity to grow in wisdom.

Prajñā is the Sanskrit word for wisdom that comes through experience. By reading some of the details of my journey through traumas, maybe you’ll gain prajñā without having to live through the first-person pain.

I’ll start with a literal call in the night.

***

It came on the last Saturday night of October 1983, around midnight, after I had turned the clocks back an hour and gone to bed in my New York City high-rise apartment. I groggily answered the call from my brother Ginger.

I have some terrible news. Uncle Eddie and Aunt Margaret are dead.

What? Both of them? How could that happen?

They were shot to death.

Suffering is the mud out of which the lotus of compassion grows. –Thich Nhat Hanh

I couldn’t clear my head. They were a retired couple living a quiet life in Lafayette Hills, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where my mother—Eddie’s sister—still lived. Just three months earlier, we had spent a day together celebrating Eddie’s 70^th birthday. Margaret was staying busy taking classes and volunteering in a school for the blind. She had learned how to transcribe into braille and was working on textbooks. His religion was important to Eddie. Among other volunteer activities, he traveled to prisons to lead sabbath services for Jewish inmates.

My mind was a round hole I couldn’t fit this square peg into.

Who would kill Eddie and Margeret?

[Long pause.]

Four hundred dollars in cash was found in a dresser drawer, so it wasn’t a robbery.

My brother sounded as though those words were supposed to mean something to me, but they didn’t. After another long pause, he added:

It could have been Barry.

Did those five words make sense? It turned out they did, and that was the most painful lesson I would ever learn. At least I hope I’ll never experience anything else that emotionally painful.

Barry was Eddie and Margaret’s youngest son and my first cousin. Because our grandmother, bubbe, lived with my nuclear family, her other four children, including Eddie, often visited. Since I was a late child, most cousins were much older than me. Barry was the closest to my age—just a year and a half older.

So Barry and I were frequent playmates at my home, at his, and at family celebrations like weddings and bar-mitzvahs. He was kind and accepting toward his younger cousin, and I admired him. He was handsome, with auburn hair, socially poised, smart, and artistic. I envied him, too, since his parents had made it more than my parents had in the New Country. My mother’s brother, Uncle Eddie was a manufacturer’s representative for RCA Victor products when record players, radios, and TVs sold like OLED TVs and virtual reality goggles do today. Margaret was fashionable and artistic.

That's Barry with my sister's hand on his shoulder. I'm the one with glasses and a silly grin.

Barry and I went to the same high school and even dated the same girl at different times. He won a scholarship to the Philadelphia College of Art. When we were both college age, our paths had similarities and marked differences. We both joined the Philadelphia counterculture and dropped out of college. We hung around Powelton Village, Philadelphia’s center for tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. But my passion was antiwar protests and community organizing in the ghetto; his was drugs.

We both knew Ira Einhorn—who later became “the Unicorn Killer”—but I crossed the street when I saw him coming, and Barry became a disciple.

I grew up to be me, and he grew up with paranoid schizophrenia. That disease often appears at around that age—20 or so—in people who have had normal childhoods, so the drugs may or may not have played a role. They may have been symptoms rather than cause, but nonetheless, drugs and alcohol played a big part in Barry’s life.

Now, had the boy I loved grown into a man who killed his mother and father—my uncle and aunt? After Ginger’s phone call (yes, that's the name he went by), I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night, so I rented a car and drove to Philadelphia, where I parked on the street where my mother still lived in the rowhouse where I grew up. As my mother slept alone inside the house, I listened to the all-news radio station. As soon as the news broke, I would enter the house and tell her so she’d hear it first from a loved one. At 7 A.M., I heard:

This just in, the bodies of an elderly couple…