David Schneider - Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey

My legacy

What will it be?

Flowers in spring,

The cuckoo in summer,

And the crimson maples

Of autumn

RYOKAN

It was my first date with Chodo, the gorgeous man who would later become my beloved husband and with whom Ive now been together for eighteen years. It was a Sunday afternoon in November 2001. We sat for hours on a bench in Father Demo Square in the West Village, New York City, drinking espressos and talking about Pedro Almdovar movies, past relationships, and his growing up in England and me in Syracuse, New York. What different lives we had on the surface; the first obvious connection was our love of Zen practice. He asked me what I was currently reading. Street Zen, I responded. No kidding! Me too, he said. Together on that bench we discovered something else we had in common: our dream to be of service to the aging, the sick, and the dying.

Both of us had experiences at the beginning of the AIDS crisisChodo as an activist with Act Up and manning a suicide hotline, and me helping my mother as she tended to friends who had become sick with the virus. She taught me how to simply be present to their illness and to the fear these men were living with. The AIDS crisis affected Chodo personally, as he contracted the virus in 1983. Thirty-six years later, he is still thriving.

Imagine, then, the two of us learning of this amazing man, Issan Dorsey, who, during the height of the AIDS pandemic, provided housing and care to men living with HIV/AIDS in San Francisco. He gave the dying a precious gift of respect and dignity in a time of overwhelming fear. We marveled at the beauty of him simply showing up and doing what was needed. Here was a man who could be both outrageous and imperfect while also being of service selflessly and without judgement. It is hard to convey how exciting it was to be talking together about the life of the first out gay Zen teacher. To this day, there are only a handful of us.

Sometime after Chodo and I had committed to being together, my Hungarian Jewish grandmother Mimi was moved into hospice. I had been one of her primary caretakers for the previous five years of her life. While she was in hospice, friends from the Zen community shared the responsibility of caregiving with mevisiting, bringing her favorite food, listening to her stories, giving her mani-pedis, and simply keeping her company. Mimi was eighty-seven, and most of her life, in Brooklyn, had taken place in an era when people usually died at home. The world has changed in so many ways, she would say. She was amazed that she had a gay grandson taking care of her with his partner. She used to make little comments like: Its so unusual. Its so wonderful. Im so lucky.

Until her last day in hospice, I slept in her room. One night she shouted at me to wake up. She was crying. I was bewildered. Im so sorry, she said, Im so sorry. I asked her, Why? I didnt know until this moment what it meant to love all of you. Still crying, she went on to explain that she never totally understood why I had become a Zen Buddhist monk, and she had questioned how it fit my Jewish identity. She said, I am so sorry that I did not love you fully. That Zen part of you scared me, and a little bit of my heart contracted from you. Now I understand to love someone is to love everything about themeven the parts that you dont understand. I learned what it is to be truly loved from Grandma Mimi that night. I learned what it means to truly love others.

It was Mimi who suggested that Chodo and I create what is now the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which we did in 2007, twenty years after Issan opened Maitri Hospice. Our Zen center offers daily Zen practice, accredited training for chaplains, and education in contemplative care to medical professionals and laypeople. The core expression of what we do is provide an additional layer of support for people experiencing serious diagnoses and various illnesses, and during the active stages of dying. After the death we continue to support their loved ones as they move through the grieving process.