Bruce Wagner - Memorial

Plan Ahead, Know your rights, Shop around, Avoid a big-ticket urn and columbarium, Create your own memorial, Donate to Science, Saying goodbye

God bless! The 800 dollar funeral, why not? — she was saving everything for the kid, the Lionelhearted boy, and knew he would want the very same—

now he was at the door, he’d crawled to it, a blond man on the other side said, “Sir? Sir? Are you there? Are you in there?” Through thin curtains, Ray saw the group in uniform, huddling amongst themselves with fish and tackle boxes, peering in. He vomited. “He’s there! On the floor!” the door broke and they rushed him with all kinds of gear and IV wetbags and needles and thread: he thought of that day when he first met Ghulpa at pier’s end: water stretching out, infinitesimal expanse, fishing rods buckets and smell of bait.

They put a spike in him, so kind and methodical, the blond bent over and said

No engulfment. No tearing asunder. What you feared would come like an explosion is a whisper. Have you seen that episode too? Ray asked.

relax. Relax oldtimer. You’re gonna be fine. Clean him up. Clean his chin. Can you breathe? Got a good airway. Nothing in there. OK oldtimer Clean him up All around there were holes in the ceiling of the tenement with light pouring in

because there is no sin. The guru said we suffer needlessly from shame and guilt that stem from bad actions but we also suffer pride and arrogance from good actions. Likewise, what happens to us is not personal, but the result of Cosmic Law. We are as sandcastles, elaborately carved yet destroyed by children at the end of a summer’s day — swallowed up whence we came.

The root of guru was Sanskrit: Gu meant darkness, Ru meant light. Pain being from the Latin poena: punishment.

The more he listened, the more Chess felt at ease. Ramesh said events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer of the deed. These are the words of the Buddha. Enlightenment is nothing but the removal of suffering, not of pain — we live in a world of pain and pleasure. We live in a world of duality but must not rest in dualism. To be enlightened is like climbing a ladder or racing up the spiral staircase to get to these rooms: until one reached the final step, one was not there, one did not know how much longer it would take, or what the rooms would look like once one arrived. The strange thing is that enlightenment looks much the same; the only change is perception.

They ended satsang with a prayer.

Give me only one boon, my Lord: May I never forget that Your will alone prevails. I will joyfully sing of Your glorious deeds. Give me the association of people who have total trust in You. I don’t care for Liberation, fame, or fortune. Tukaram says: If you don’t want Enlightenment to happen in this body, let it not happen, my Lord — I don’t care.

THEY stayed with Ramesh for 10 days.

They ate boondi laddoos and coconut burfi to celebrate Lord Ganesha and his sister Laxmi, washing down pumpkin-colored jalebi with cups of chai.

Laxmi (the mortal one) wanted to remain in Bombay, she didn’t know for how long, and Chess was fine with that but said he was going to move on. He gave her some money. 90 % of the settlement was in a bank in the States. When he had a little more energy, he was determined to remove the entire sum and open an account here in India, if legally possible; he hadn’t looked into it yet. He should have done that before they left but it was too much of a megillah. Maybe he would open an account in Canada or the UK or Frankfurt or Switzerland. Anywhere but the States. (Plus, he didn’t like the idea of being traced through financial records.) America was dead to him. America was a country where people went on eBay to buy vintage Hot Wheels for a hundred-thousand dollars, and performed cunnilingus on 7 month old babies in private, peer-to-peer file-sharing chatrooms. America was a place that spent $35,000,000,000 a year to lock up one out of every 138 citizens. The guru’s concepts and words made him less paranoid but there still existed a part of him that worried his friend might awaken and snitch him off. He would then be sought after by authorities, and the IRS would garnish his accounts, whether related to the student loan, Maurie Levin, or some other specious investigation/prosecution. Maybe he’d renounce his citizenship, but Chess needed to make certain such an act wouldn’t send up any flags. He would have to get his money out of there first. (Renouncing was probably a little dramatic.) For now, he considered himself retired. Gone fishin. The Scout is out!

Laxmi wasn’t ready to visit her father in Pune yet anyhow, and Chess wasn’t surprised. All good, he said. Truth being, he wanted to be alone, travel alone, the guru had bestowed the gift of propulsion and velocity, he wanted to set out by himself — like a proper man. The man he’d never had the chance to become. As had the itinerant mystic-poets, he would visit Ramana Maharshi’s 7-storied mountain (itself said to be a great guru), and go to Benares, 35-hundred year old nexus of death and rebirth. Hadn’t he come as a pilgrim? He even thought of acquiring a begging bowl. Chess knew he might not have come up with the idea if it weren’t for the security his settlement provided (plus he still had a hundred Oxy and 200 1-mg Klonopin; he was still too kultur-shocked to feel the FNF -induced pain full-bore. He heard you could get morphine tabs in Calcutta, which meant probably anywhere, and that Indian smack was rad. Opium was legal but supposedly hard to get your hands on, whatever with that, but the farmers were fucking licensed. Opium was the opium of the masses. Ha ha, who said that ) but chose not to judge himself or his real/imagined cowardice, he had made a career out of that, he was casting off, on a new journey, look at him, look where he was, look where he’d been a few months ago, weeks ago, money probably wasn’t required, not in the end, wouldn’t be in the end, maybe the settlement would be abandoned, dormant in his account until turned over to some State Comptroller, maybe he would become a beggar, and that was what his teacher Time and Her daughter Space had wished for him all along.

Laxmi wanted to take the motorboat Elephanta Island (not far from her guru’s) but Chess thought it too touristy, he didn’t say as much, who was he to judge or throw cold water — let her go see the cave temples dedicated to Siva, he didn’t need to, hadn’t he already been privileged to serve as waterboy to the imperial army? Mascot to the gods! He had run with them like that boy in the Kipling story his father used to read to him at bedtime — clung in terrified ecstasy to hairy leathered backs while charging dark wet jungle Mysterium…

No, he’d hit the ashram of Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast instead, where lay the grave of a woman called the Mother. A caffeine-swilling seeker mentioned having recently been, it came up in conversation during morning tea shared before satsang, a Down Under girl said something about “the Mother,” and Chester thought of his own. He wanted to honor Marj, she who brought him into this world, she to whom he’d never said a real goodbye, she whose sand was now being roughed up and returned to the Source — he wanted to honor Marjorie that way — a kind and right thing, an auspicious way to begin his real travels. She gave him a birthday card last year that said, “You don’t remember, but I’ll never forget the 1st time I saw you.” Though the ashram was in Tamil Nadu, the Tsunami hadn’t affected the city; an old seawall spared it. The Australian said that water buffalo roamed the streets. You could eat cheap and stay in an amazing 19th century sanitorium for $6 a night, rooms overlooking the Bay of Bengal, snakebirds and drongos circling overhead, and at temple the trilingual elephants (responding to English, Hindi, and Malayalam commands) blessed you with their trunks. I have already been blessed. Though I must take care to be unprideful — I must not suffer from that sin of sins. Still, it is true I have heard their sacred song, their supernatural call to battle. I have already been dusted by the earth that shakes from the stomping of columnar legs. I have had satsang and sadhana with All Who Matters: She Who Is So Righteously Guarded whispered to me there is No-Thing to guard. And yet, because, because She shared this, I must not swell with pride. For I am no sadhu…