YOUR KORA

If there was anything I knew about you—it’s that you’d make a great ghost. Our fascination with death was a secret between us and I signed all my letters to you, “with love from this life to the next.” Our shared obsession all fine and well before they discovered the tumor in your brain. 

The "death" we loved—before we knew you were dying—wasn’t death as those around us knew or claimed it. The death we loved was the tunnel of darkness between one life and the next. A darkness where the dakinis you studied in your Ph.D. research frolicked behind rocks in a cavernous hall. 

ḍākinī: Sacred beings. The masculine form of the word is ḍāka. Generally of volatile temperament. Acts somewhat as spiritual muse. The Tibetan term means "skygoer." 

Maybe the dakinis were less of your research than your muse. Or maybe you knew the dakinis because you uncovered one behind a rock in a hermitage of Lake Namtso. Namtso, with its floor of craggy shale and a winter coastline of frozen waves sitting seventy miles northwest of Lhasa, at 15,500 feet in the air. Namtso’s cave hermitages have for centuries been the destination of Tibetan pilgrims and if I scratch at my memory, I remember you once left me a note in one of those caves. Behind a rock. You told me so in an email. That you left the note “to the care of dakinis.” A note 7,467 miles from me today, in Colorado—and what feels like 7,467 miles from the day I met you. 

I met you in the back of a ten-person van on its way from the Los Angeles airport to a campsite on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas of California. It would become an annual pilgrimage. An annual reunion held in the arms of the White Mountains’ high alpine pines and wrapped in blankets of night sky. On our inaugural trip—in the back of that van—what we shared in common was brown paper bags full of trail mix and pretzels, matching swells of anxiety, and laminated name tags claiming us as “experiential educators.” The anxiety was due to our insecurities amongst the crew of a hundred teachers gathering for the training. Educators from all over the world and, between which, more than thirty languages were spoken and the minimum degree was an MA. In reflection, I’m not sure why you felt anxious. At least you spoke Tibetan and already had a master's degree in South Asian Studies. Still, you put on your muffler headphones and stared out the window, looking as petrified as the chips of wood scattered amongst the Sierran hills out the window. You sought solace in the comfort zone of your music. In those headphones, I now know what you were listening to. It was the world of funk and soul in which you quietly reined:

From Soulstrut.com: Aaron Anderson aka Breakself was renowned in the soul 45 circles as a man of knowledge and one with deep crates… especially when it came to his native Detroit area. Breakself was active in Soul Strut circles and was known to all as generous and chill. Unfortunately, he lost his battle with brain cancer, but his spirit lives on in a series of quality, deep mixes. No beat juggling or blends here, just the presentation of raer.

I don’t know what raer is, but maybe that’s what I disturbed when I tapped your shoulder in the back of the van. You took off your headphones and that’s when it started. The music of us. Which always began with one of your wry observations, followed by my echoing laugh, closed by your chuckle of success. This was the sound of us that began in Los Angeles and ended in the seventh hour of that drive when you told me the secret that tattooed your existence. I’m not sure why you disclosed it. Except maybe you thought it so visible it required explanation. So you pushed up your sleeves and confessed: Your older sister was a celebrity. A big one with a cult following. You told me this as you rotated my water bottle between your two hands, picking at the gray duct tape lapped around it. There was a pause after your confession. In that pause, I grabbed a sharpie from the top pocket of my day pack. I handed you the black marker and said, “Please.” 

You took the pen. “Please what?”

  “Please sign my water bottle.” 

You looked at me like I was lost.

I finished, “Because YOU are the famous Anderson in my life.”

And something melted. Maybe everything melted. You took the sharpie and there are not many things in my life I am more proud of than the grin that spread across your face as you autographed the blue plastic of my Nalgene. 

I wish I still had that water bottle. It disappeared from my life with all the other things full of BPA. But I have other bits of you. The bit of you I have in my hand right now terrifies me. It weighs so much for a tiny piece of plastic. Your little sister mailed the thumb drive to me. 3,186 days from the day you died. The red plastic of the thumb drive is transparent. Beautiful, now that I look closely. The metal dots on the black computer circuit line up not unlike constellations. Or like a tiny cityscape under a transparent red sky. And, in fact, it is a city. The last skyscrapers of what was left of your brain before it was clouded by the black fog of cancer in your MRIs. A city of your research. Research you furrowed your brows over in your room at Stanford for the Ph.D. you would not live to finish. 

The little red thumb drive sits on my desk. I don’t want to plug it in. But I take a deep breath and fumble to insert it in the side dock of my laptop. And then, with the little drive still in my hand, I sit back in my chair. Because there is no USB port on my laptop. 

“Fuck…” I whisper. 

And I hear you snickering. 

I shake my head left and right, laughing. "Well fuck you too!" 

Because if there was anything I ever knew about you—it’s that pranks would be your ghostly jam. 

I didn’t go to your funeral. 

I couldn’t. 

Not with you floating in the forty days of Tibetan bardo as my son floated in my womb. My arms, already swarming my swelling belly, crossed and declared no. My arms, they said: Life here is too new. This babe, his ears are only forming. His first sound will not be the choking of his mother’s throat on loss. He will not set his heart in rhythm to the beat of hers in grief.

  I could not give anything your funeral would have asked of me, so I did not go. But I did send a poem. I would have forgotten the poem had I not just found it in your obituary online. An obituary I’ve never seen. In the 2011 archives of the Grand Rapids Press, the first line reads: 

Late Thursday evening, Aaron Daniel Anderson, 30, broke into the great beyond, ending a three-year encounter with brain cancer.

Were you really only twenty-seven when I looked up the word glioblastoma? You were deep in your PhD path, so when I heard you were “holed up” in your room and that’s the reason you had stopped answering the phone, well—that seemed appropriate. I didn’t know you had barricaded the door to stop the outside from coming in. That your professors had not registered your attendance on class rosters for months. That you—who were known to rummage through Chicago basements for funk records and to initiate breakdancing spars in purple suits of spandex—could not reach for the door to your room. I did not know, because you did not know. That a tumor had grown in your brain, to what, thumb-sized? Big enough—the doctors would explain—to push the stop button in your brain on your sense of volition. 

I had to look up the word. 

Vo·li·tion /vōˈliSH(ə)n/ noun: the faculty or power of using one's will.

What happened in those months, in the cave of your room, we don’t know. You don’t know. A friend found you. Escorted you to a psych ward. The row of specialists behind the table, they said: Well you don’t belong here. They sent you to another panel of white coats. And those specialists, they looked down when they called it Stage 4. 

The rest is buried in the rubble of shock. 

Resurrected in the poem I sent to your funeral in my place. 

A black cat leads us in kora

We follow in dumb curiosity

Underestimating the confidence of that stride,

The intention of that tail.

Not until three rotations does it dawn on us,

We have been taken for a ride.

That black cat was a reincarnation of a Rinpoche. The honorific term for a highly respected teacher or “precious one.” You told me the story in a whisper held in hushed confidence by the Pinyon trees that surrounded the two cool rocks upon which we sat that summer in the Sierras. The black cat had led you in three rotations around a stupa in rural Tibet. Three sacred clockwise rotations. A perfect circumambulation as practiced in Buddhism to purify negative karma and further one’s path of evolution toward enlightenment. At the conclusion of those three perfect revolutions—also known as koras—around the sacred temple, the black cat had lept, perched upon the foot of the high stupa, and turned to make direct eye contact with you. 

You looked into the Pinyon trees as you told this story. 

You knew my jaw would fall. 

That together we’d sit in stone awe. 

I didn’t go to your funeral but I tried to say goodbye. 

It was on our seventh reunion at the annual camp, in that same clearing of woods upon those same two rocks, encircled by Pinyon trees. I have re-visited that clearing every year since you died. I sit down on my rock, and I see you on yours. You with the binoculars around your neck. Why is birding always a hobby of the dying? 

The day I tried to say goodbye, we sat on those cold stones together and I dared myself to ask you what it felt like. To be so close to the darkness we thought we loved. But you would not have it. You raised a hand to my stuttering attempts.

 “Did you hear that?” Your eyes searched, narrowed. 

You pointed. “There. A Spotted Towhee, rare for this season... ”  

So we stayed. Unfocused on over-thinking. Distracted from dying. Perched on the jagged rocks of just being. 

Later that day, I drove you away from camp, to town. We were looking for the dispensary that would issue the prescribed marijuana that would calm your nausea. You made jokes. I laughed. You made jokes. I laughed. You threw up. 

The temozolomide had given you two extra years, but the tumor was—again—pressing. What you must have summoned to say to me: I think we should go to the hospital. 

On the gurney, you looked tired—relieved. 

You turned on your side. Away from me. 

What it took for me to pull the young doctor in his white coat into a closed room and tell him what the best neurologists at Stanford already knew. The young doctor’s shoulders slumped. He looked at his shoes for so long, I wondered where he went. When he finally looked up, he said: “It’s time to get him home.”

There were a hundred of us at camp that evening after the doctor released you from the hospital. Half of the people at camp knew you, the rest knew of you. Because you—your work guiding students in rural Tibet, your research, your elbow spin on the dirt dance floor, the “deep crates” you brought to the DJ stand—were the stuff of legends. So when your mother and little sister arrived to pick you up, this is what we did. We led you into the center of camp. We instructed you to close your eyes. We laid you down in the dirt. We crossed your arms over your chest. And we left you alone for only a minute. 

Then we tiptoed out of the forest, whispering your name, until the hundred bodies reached yours—200 hands, 1000 fingers—touching you, lifting you up, over our heads, into the high alpine blue. Raising your name like a mantra, until it lost all form and meaning. 

Skygoer 

Before the beginning of your dying, I signed my emails to you, “with love from this life till the last.” I like to think—to hope—that a funeral is a small thing. Just a bend in the kora. That you’ll rotate back. But I feel you raising a hand to hush me. You won’t have it. You whisper: Maybe an Oriole. Or a Black Headed Grosbeak. If I come back, it’s not without wings. 

You hated your PhD research. Called it a bore. Said there were more important things to discuss as you beckoned me to my rock. Your sister sent me your red thumb drive because she worried your research would “otherwise slip into the ether.” But I now reckon you urged her to send me the thumb drive because you knew I had no USB port. Because that’s your kind of prank. The kind of ether you loved and from which you would have wanted us to know you could still pull a leg. Maybe I’m onto you, Aaron. Maybe the thumb drive isn’t the point. The little red city less important than what flutters across the blue between Pinyon trees. Less important than the note you left decomposing behind the rock at Namtso. Less important than all the unsolved mysteries that keep us in rotation. 

It was time. To get you home. 

At the bottom of your obituary is the last line from the poem I sent to your funeral: 

Of kora-ing cats and whispering dakinis, you will always be. 

Aaron, you are more mysterious and I am more human than I thought. Because I miss you. Not just between lives. Or from the next one. But in this life. 

I’m sorry 

I didn’t go

to your funeral.

But I know the jet-black throat, white belly, rusted flanks, and starred wings of a Spotted Towhee when she lands upon my Blue Spruce out of season. Your big sister has recently riled up her cult following and I am the only fan who cries at all the wrong times—when I catch a flash of your temple in a closeup of hers. From an old CD autographed “AA Mix” by your own hand in red sharpie, a song has somehow migrated to one of my smartphone’s alarms. Last week, in the first meeting of a circle of resident artists, the opening downbeat and guttural “ugh!” from King Floyd’s “Groove Me” turned ten faces toward me and the phone vibrating on the couch next to my leg. One resident nodded, turned, and said, “Hum. Well, don’t we know something now about you.” And I laughed because I heard you laughing. You are, so much, something-about-me. 

I still keep the little red thumb drive in the top drawer of my writing desk. It shuffles into view every time I look for my pen; your little red city from which I’m barred entry. I could, of course, buy a USB adapter, but I like the incompatibility. The way the continued rotation of the world mocks us both. The same way you mocked, when you signed off in your last letter to me, “Love and all that crap.” If this haunting is your friendly retribution, I’ll take it. Of kora-ing cats and whispering dakinis, the world will be. May I find you in all the unsolvable mysteries of this life between deaths, and keep hearing from our beloved bardo, the echo of your hushed laugh.

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