Karen Derris - Storied Companions: Cancer, Trauma, and Discovering Guides for Living in Buddhist Narratives
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With my diagnosis of grade IV brain cancer, I no longer observe the truth of impermanence from a critical, analytical distance. I am crashing into it, or it into me.
Facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, Karen Derrisprofessor, mother, and Buddhist practitionerturned to books.
By reading ancient Buddhist stories with new questions and a new purposefinding a way to live with her dying bodyshe discovers new ways to make them immediate and real. For instance, reading with her terminal prognosis, she becomes one of the four omens (the four signs of impermanence and suffering) the young Siddhartha sees in his excursions from the palace. What would it mean for her to be in the crowd, straining to see the prince with her own sick and impermanent bodyto be pushed aside and out of sight by the palace minders, just as our society so often tries to brush aside anything uncomfortable, but to nonetheless be seen by the young bodhisattva? Or reading as a mother, maybe she shares something akin to what Queen Maya may have felt, knowing she was dying, giving her newborn son over to her sisters care? What will it mean for her own children to be motherless? She follows the knotted threads connecting Milarepas angry, vengeful mother to Karens own mother, who physically abused her throughout a traumatic childhood. By placing herself into these stories, she turns them from distant and static narratives into companions, and from companions into guides.
Storied Companions interweaves Karens memoir of her life of trauma and illness with stories from Buddhist literary traditions, sharing with the reader how she found ways to live with the reality that she wont live as long as she wants and needs to. Honest, powerful, and insightful, Storied Companions itself becomes an invaluable companion, guiding the reader to discover new ways of facing and experiencing life, death, and impermanence.
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In the right hands, Buddhist narratives can offer us abundant and consequential lessons about how to live and how to die. After reading this nuanced, layered, tender, and courageous book, we are left feeling profound gratitude. Because of Karen Derriss deep practice of reading and retelling Buddhist stories, we can clearly sense that she is looking over her shoulder, extending to us her hand, and encouraging us to orientate our lives by love rather than by fear. This is an amazing gift, one beyond measure. Jan Willis, author of Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist and Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra
Karen Derris writes of her journey through life, cancer, and facing death with such eloquence in Storied Companions . Often paired with Buddhist narratives, she tells how living with an open heart is possible even when living with a terminal illness. This is a touching and inspirational book. Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Change
This book holds an astonishing combination of hard reality with visionary light and love. Neither cancels out the other. The result is a gift to its readers, teaching us how to see our own reality, whatever that might be; teaching us how to place ourselves directly into stories of great profundity from Buddhist tradition; and teaching us how to read our own life stories through the lucid lens of honesty with which Derris tells us hers. This is a book of great compassion and clarity. Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, Harvard Divinity School
There are many miracles in Karen Derriss life. Not the least of which is this shimmering memoir. Reading the life story of this smart, compassionate scholar and writer, as intellectually bold as she is physically courageous, I learned how the great Buddhist stories reflect and intermingle with the most profound human experiences. This is a book about love in its infinite manifestations. In the face of daunting circumstances, Derriss voice is sweet and strong, an aria of benevolence. Reading Storied Companions made me want to be a better person. Leslie Brody, author of Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy
Wisdom Publications
199 Elm Street
Somerville, MA 02144 USA
wisdomexperience.org
2021 Karen Derris
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system or technologies now known or later developed, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Derris, Karen, author.
Title: Storied companions: cancer, trauma, and discovering guides for living in Buddhist narratives / Karen Derris; foreword by his holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa.
Description: First. | Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051300 (print) | LCCN 2020051301 (ebook) | ISBN 9781614295754 (paperback) | ISBN 9781614295990 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Suffering Religious aspects Buddhism. | Life Religious aspects Buddhism. | Death Religious aspects Buddhism. | Buddhist stories. | Tibetan Buddhism.
Classification: LCC BQ4235 .D47 2021 (print) | LCC BQ4235 (ebook) | DDC 204/.42 dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051300
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051301
ISBN 978-1-61429-575-4 ebook ISBN 978-1-61429-599-0
25 24 23 22 21
5 4 3 2 1
Cover design by David Henry Lantz. Interior design by Tony Lulek.
Set in Arno Pro 13/16.25.
Printed in the United States of America.
To my family: Ed, Ben, Rebekah
I have known Karen Derris for much of the time that she has been living with her diagnosis of terminal brain cancer and have been witness to her work to find a way to orient herself by love rather than fear. I am confident that this orientation, which also serves as the basis of this book, will be beneficial not only to her but also to others who are living with terminal cancer and other illnesses.
All cultures have their own ways of living with the universal reality of death. Buddhist traditions encourage looking death in the eye and reflecting deeply on what is seen there. In our modern world, many cultures increasingly shy away from such clear-eyed seeing. It is clear that Professor Derris does not. In this time when a pandemic has made its way all over the planet, I believe this book could offer comfort and help to many people looking for guides to living aware of the reality of death all around us. To do so takes courage and compassion, and this book both displays and teaches both qualities.
As a Buddhist laywoman, an academic scholar, and university teacher of Buddhist literature, Professor Derris has found in Buddhist narratives friends to keep her company as she learns to live with her disease, and at the same time to live fully with the certainty of her mortality and the uncertainty of the time of her death. Karen shows us how various Buddhist stories several of which she and I have discussed together when encountered with an open, vulnerable heart, can transform every life experience into a way to live in service of others.
Seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje
I nstinctually, I turn to books as my first uncertain step into living with my brain cancer diagnosis. However, I am warned away from reading about my disease as it will, Im told, throw me into states of terror and despair. Im not interested in knowing the details of my cancer. Instead, I am searching for guides to help me process new experiences and those experiences still to come; aside from searching for books to read, nothing else about this is instinctual. I read memoirs by people who live with cancer, undergo treatment, and move closer to death.
I search for companions as I enter into a lonely new experience. Lonely, even though I am surrounded by loving family and friends, near and far, whose offers of every kind of help make me feel far from alone. The acute experience of the impermanence of my formerly healthy body now controlled by a terminal illness, my days consumed with prolonged medical treatment it is impossible to fully share these things with those who havent experienced some part of it themselves. I hear many well-meaning but clichd truths: We all could die at any time; a person could die from COVID or have a massive heart attack.
This is true, and we all probably know someone who died from the latter, if not from the former. The thing that I am experiencing that is different, living with a terminal illness, one without a cure, is that I live with the known source of my death already inside of my body. It creates an experience of being temporarily alive.
Much that I read in those cancer memoirs resonates deeply. I carry snippets, sentences, and images from these books around with me. They pop up into my conscious thought at times that dont always instantly make sense to me, but they do help me feel less alone. I gravitate toward womens memoirs (but not exclusively) and especially (but not only) toward memoirs by people who, like me, have careers as academics. All of these people integrate their living experiences of cancer with ideas and concepts that shape their minds, outlooks, and emotions.
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