It isn’t easy to offer spiritual comfort to a dying man when you can’t stop thinking about yourself. As Shozan Jack Haubner learned, sometimes you just have to fake it, and in that faking, something real can emerge. This is a story of vulnerability, imperfection, and the surprising depth of connection found in the face of death.
The afternoon I was scheduled to meet the dying man, my digital life imploded. My laptop was stolen. It felt invasive, a violation more personal than mere theft. Imagine a burglar slipping into your room and stealing not just an object, but a part of your identity. That’s how it felt. In the parking lot of Ralph’s, where the break-in occurred during a quick flower run, a few tears escaped. Backup? Yes, thankfully. But in a stroke of pure, self-inflicted irony, the thumb drive was in the same bag as the stolen Mac. Gone too.
Seriously, who does that? Keep the backup in the same place as the original? What kind of Zen priest makes such a rookie mistake?
The California heat was relentless, pushing past a hundred degrees. It felt like a physical pressure, a vise tightening around my skull. Quitting cigarettes had me mainlining nicotine lozenges and muttering to myself like a street corner philosopher. And now this: years of work, half a book, journals, novel drafts, essays, stories – a digital Everest of nearly half a million words, vanished. As I mentally shifted gears to visit the dying man, a strange parallel emerged. Losing that laptop felt like a small death itself, a piece of me irretrievable.
With a chunk of my identity wiped clean, a desperate need to affirm my existence flared up. Peaceful Zen contemplation? Not a chance. Waiting at the police station to report the theft felt like an eternity. My iPhone became a digital pacifier. Email, Facebook, Amazon book ranking – refresh, repeat. Thumbs hammering the screen, a frantic digital drum solo.
Is this what a Zen priest looks like in the digital age? So self-absorbed, so easily distracted. Maybe meditation had heightened my self-awareness to a painful degree, spotlighting my flaws without offering a quick fix. Was this practice making my life more stressful? It felt sacrilegious to blame Zen, but grief and anger had hijacked my better judgment. Instead of breathing, accepting, and letting go, I chased fleeting digital validation, a poor substitute for inner peace.
The handsome police officer delivered the news with practiced sympathy: my laptop was likely gone for good, filed alongside Jimmy Hoffa in the annals of the missing. Then, headache pounding from heat and nicotine, I navigated towards the medical center. In my mind, the dying man was patiently waiting, postponing his final breath for a spiritual consultation. Traffic snarled on the 10 freeway. Lost, flustered, I thumb-typed directions while simultaneously braking and accelerating. Spiritual guidance app needed, I thought wryly. If I couldn’t let go of a laptop, how could I possibly guide someone to let go of life?
The radio offered no solace, only agitation. Psyching myself up for spiritual serenity was clearly backfiring. Nobody wants a hyper-priest grinning down at their deathbed like a motivational speaker. Scanning stations, I landed on The Bee Gees. “How Deep Is Your Love” filled the car. Suddenly, a fantasy sequence: slow motion hospital entrance, robes flowing, a roomful of Taiwanese family members. A touch to the grieving wife’s shoulder, my smile magically erasing sadness. Hugs for the grandmother. “You white, but okay!” she exclaims, laughter erupting. Even the dying man cracks a smile. His wife’s lip trembles. “He…he hasn’t moved in days. But your presence…it moved him. Literally!”
Reality snapped back as I parked at the medical center. Golfers swung clubs across the street, an orange grove shimmered in the valley below, fruit like jewels in the green expanse. Tears welled, fueled by the Bee Gees still echoing in my system, How deep is your love, how deep is your love, I really need to learn…
Head on the steering wheel, I admitted it: I was profoundly unprepared for this.
Years ago, at the monastery, a workshop for recovering alcoholics brought a wise, “beastly fat and very angry” nurse into my orbit. To her, I confessed my monk-hate. She countered with her own life-hate. Then came her revelation: “I am not obliged to enjoy this life. No reason needed to keep going. No heroics required. Just suit up and show up.”
Laypeople, often unwittingly, dispense diamond-hard wisdom. They offer these insights as casual observations, things “everyone knows.” I’d nod sagely, pretending comprehension, already planning to steal their brilliance.
Suit up and show up. This mantra pulsed as my fingers, clumsy with nerves, knotted my priest’s belt over the koromo robe. The sterile hospital bathroom became a backstage dressing room, prepping for a role I hadn’t rehearsed. The mirror confirmed the monk’s outward appearance. But a prolonged stare revealed a flicker of fear beneath the surface, a glimpse of the fraud within the frock.
Sandy, the aforementioned angry nurse, confessed her own performance of compassion. “Death’s everywhere in the hospital, but it’s always the wrong people dying. The real jerks cling to life,” she’d observed. “People think nurses are wired for caring. Truth is, sometimes resisting the urge to smother a particularly awful patient is actual work.”
“Sounds like being a monk,” I’d replied. “Fake it till you make it.”
“No,” she corrected, eyebrow a sharp blue line. “You fake it till you’re not faking it anymore. It’s called trying.”
Stepping into the hospital room, bald, robed in black – a bizarre sight, I’m sure. Four Taiwanese faces turned towards me. Three were curious, one was fading. The air was thick with the gravity of impending death. I sensed I was the main event. But then I noticed the opening act, a woman who seemed to covet my role. Tall, mid-fifties, her expression fixed, as if permanently puzzled by a joke she didn’t get. Clutching a Bible, naturally.
Her shorter husband stood behind, radiating suspicion, likely hoping for Buddhist black magic to whisk me away in a puff of smoke. He held her hand, which held the hand of a shockingly young woman, flushed and vital, who in turn held the unresponsive hand of the dying man. He was a shadowy figure in the corner bed, still out of focus. The Bible-wielding woman needed something from me, her hostess role at death’s door preventing a handshake.
My robes, my shaved head – they triggered a flurry of rapid-fire Taiwanese. Eyes closed, opened, prayers concluded, tired smiles, hugs, goodbyes. Meaning lost in translation, but deathbed conversations are universal. Mundane details – hospital food, evening plans – whispered with war-room intensity. Exhaustion and vitality intertwined. Death, the great life-enhancer.
Then, just the wife, the dying man, and me. “Sorry about that. We were Christian. Converted to Buddhism five years ago,” she explained, eye-roll included. If intense Christianity is good for anything, it’s creating instant bonds between non-Christian strangers.
From my backpack, I produced a mokugyo drum and mallet. A chant book for the wife. The nurse’s request: prayer and blessing. “Zen monks don’t really do those,” I’d tried to clarify. Chanting was my prayer-adjacent offering. The blessing? Still figuring that out.
The wife sank into her chair, a posture of weary resignation, then began to sob. Instinct urged a comforting hug, but it felt inappropriate, a potential husband-poaching move in front of the dying man. A shameful thought, perhaps, but in moments of intense emotion, love and less-pure impulses can blur.
The young wife sat ramrod straight, hands folded over fashionable black pants, tears perfectly calibrated, each drop tracing a path down her face and throat, staining her white collar gray. She chanted with surprising strength. We navigated the Heart Sutra, the Dharani of Compassion, the sleep-inducing Lotus Sutra excerpt. Both facing the bed, but still, I hadn’t truly looked at him. Chanting finished with a flourish. The wife stood, refreshed, like the sky after a quick rain.
“I will introduce you to my husband.”
Finally, I saw him. The phrase “My heart goes out to you” became visceral. He had the face of a child. His young body contorted, spine arched, as if his shoulder blades were trying to pierce the mattress. A week-old baseball bat injury, frozen in that initial spasm of pain. His eyes were wide, clear, untouched by drugs. Everything else seemed medicated, but not those eyes.
Once, cornered a wood rat in a bathroom. Bending with a bucket, intending toilet-flushing oblivion, I met its gaze. It stared back. Tiny shoulders trembling, frantic, and in its eyes, pure, raw terror at life’s imminent snatching.
That same animal terror mirrored in this man’s eyes.
Blessing time. The wife’s request. Action needed. I took his hand from under the blanket. Limp, lukewarm, life draining away. I spoke his name, placed my hand on his chest. Locked onto his eyes, searching for purchase, but found only bottomless suffering.
His wife wept openly now. Something profound was unfolding. The realization hit: I was performing last rites. No backup priest waiting. I was the designated spiritual guide.
Me. Still humming “How Deep Is Your Love” internally.
“Fake it till you’re not faking it anymore.”
So, I held his hand. Lowered my head. Closed my eyes. Mentally collapsed the distance between us – as best as my flawed self could manage. Wished his broken soul well. Yes, a prayer escaped my lips, directed out into the universe, channeled through our joined hands. And yes, a part of me wanted it over, ashamed of potential missteps, self-conscious under the wife’s watchful gaze, judging my sincerity. But I held his hand tighter, for both of us. Looked into his dying eyes, and saw myself reflected back.
Somehow, we became equals. A point of connection found, held.
Eyes closed, then opened, my face felt raw, exposed, a crumpled mask. Nothing to hide. Tears, unexpected, but unstoppable. Something shifted in that desperate, intimate space. We held hands, and in a way, let go together.
The wife seemed content, finished with me in a good way. Reincarnation small talk in the hallway. A small gold envelope slipped into my hand. Parking lot sunset, orange orchard panorama. Inside: a hundred-dollar bill. Dinner: large, meat-centric, chased with nicotine lozenges.
Driving home, memory surfaced: Dr. Haley, my Zen teacher’s friend, dead six months prior. The desert funeral home, brand new, stark against the scorching landscape, Mars-like real estate.
The mortician, suitably somber, directed us to a dimly lit side room. Waiting room, I assumed, pre-body viewing. Bathroom excuse planned, followed by a much-needed cigarette in a non-windy outdoor corner. But pushing my teacher’s wheelchair into the small, bare room, shock: a dead body in a black box. Dr. Haley-ish, but not him. The candlelit figure was death incarnate.
Living Dr. Haley: towering presence. Dead Dr. Haley: shrunk, three feet shorter. Fluid drainage, I reasoned. Sixty percent water, after all. Stiff white hair askew, like a neglected doll’s plastic wig. Steel post, not pillow, propping up his skull. Awkward impostor, except for his face.
Wheeled my teacher to the casket’s edge, Grand Canyon style. Assistant produced a tiny mokugyo, lit incense. Heart Sutra chanted. Reverence for a natural wonder, comet streaking, animal birthing. Unlike any living face, nothing “wrong” with this one. Living faces, endless variations of suffering, discontent. Dr. Haley’s face, unchanging, serene.
Silence. Profound silence.
Teacher’s attendant whispered, “He looks so peaceful.”
“He’s done running,” I replied, understanding unspoken.
Dark, silent mountain monastery on return. Mist veiling footpaths black. Wireless rock, nicotine lozenge, iPhone, attention addiction fed. Looking into the screen, waiting for pages to load, waiting for something – like staring into the dying man’s eyes. Bright, bottomless void.
Vast night sky above, silent, self-assured. Familiar, yet endlessly interesting. Later, restless sleep, compulsive searching, this time inwards. Something non-fleeting, imperishable, graspable, even in dreams.
But you cannot Google your own soul.
Hmm, good line. Tweet it. Now.
Why? Genuine sharing? Or ego-stroking, permanence-seeking against a cosmos that steals everything – words, deeds, all? Laptop loss, minor tremor compared to the dying man’s earthquake, the universal loss awaiting us all.
Yet, laptop obsession persisted. Thief’s face, stomach churning, mind recoiling. He had my words. What was he doing with them? Perhaps death wasn’t the core fear, but dying unmarked, unaccomplished, as if never existing. And now, this digital bandit was erasing my phantom legacy!
But if it can be stolen, was it ever truly yours? The harder the search for permanence, the more ephemeral, disposable the finds. The more we become simply searchers, movers for movement’s sake.
A culture running from death.
Maybe death, the ultimate untakeable possession, truly ours. Holding the dying man’s hand, eyes closed, disappearing into his diminishing warmth, a fleeting sense of shared ownership of mortality. He was blessing me as much as I him. Not the fantasy of eyes-popping-open life, but hand-in-hand dying-together, resembling Dr. Haley, done searching. His peaceful face, fathomless as the night sky, peace as deep as the dying man’s suffering.
How deep is your love, how deep is your love – the Bee Gees still echoing, now demanding an answer. Not so deep, inner Barry Gibb, not so deep. Immortality craver, attached to stolen laptops, lost words, nicotine fiend. But “faking it till I’m not faking it anymore,” I thought, drifting into bottomless sleep, awakening while the dying man would not.
Keep trying.
Shozan Jack Haubner
Shozan Jack Haubner is a Buddhist monk in the Rinzai tradition and author of Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk (Shambhala). He writes under a pseudonym.
