Maitri Hospice Ken Ireland & Morgan Zo Callahan Morgan Zo Callahan I met Ken
Ireland in 2002 after sitting in a Zen meditation group
he led at the YMCA in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. He
invited me to visit Maitri (Sanskrit for “compassionate
friendship”), a hospice for people with AIDS in San
Francisco. (Maitri
Hospice San Francisco). In 1987 Maitri was founded in
San Francisco’s Castro district by Issan
Dorsey, a Zen priest, and several friends, among them
Steve Allen and David Sunseri. “The Castro was a place
for the gay revolution with its arts, its parties, its style
and its joie de vivre, and Issan was part of these
happenings. Then, in the early 1980s, AIDS started to appear
and, at first, no one knew what to make of it.” (John
Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros, p.77) Issan Dorsey had
been ordained a Zen priest in 1975. By 1980, he was part of
an informal group of gay Buddhists, and was invited to
become the head teacher at the Hartford Street Zen Center in
the Castro. Issan was appointed abbot in 1989, and his
teacher, Richard Baker Roshi, named him a lineage holder: he
became Issan Roshi. In 1987 Issan invited a homeless student
dying of AIDS into the Zen center, and Maitri was born.
Issan himself died from AIDS in 1990. (Cf. Street Zen: The
Life and Work of Issan Dorsey by David Schneider) I was impressed that Maitri was a warm, “at
home” environment where both caregiver and patient
deeply listened to each other. The ample kitchen had a
signed, framed photo of Elizabeth Taylor who had visited and
encouraged the residents. Golden light danced on the fresh
green plants in the hallways and communal areas. I was
reminded of Camus: “The great courage is still to gaze
squarely at the light as it is at death.” Maitri is the
first Buddhist residential hospice in the U.S. Over more
than 20 years Maitri has been the final home for more than
900 people with AIDS. “We strive to provide the type of
care that each of us would like to receive at the end of our
lives—care that is dignified, non-judgmental, and
unconditional. We hold dear the principle that each resident
has the right to determine the degree of choice and
awareness with which to experience life and death.”
(Maitri’s Mission Statement) Issan and his friends, Ken among them, didn’t set
out to found a Buddhist Hospice. Rather he was creating a
way to respond to the deadly epidemic that was ravaging his
community. He was also creating a place to practice with his
own death fast approaching. The result was Maitri. ******** Ken Ireland has practiced Buddhism for more than four
decades, first with Master C.M. Chen, then Issan Dorsey
Roshi and Philip Zenshin Whalen at HSZC. In 1994 he began
koan practice with Robert Aitken, and continued with John
Tarrant and David Weinstein. Ken was Maitri’s executive
director from 1989 through 1993. He and his partner
currently spend half the year in northern India with the
community gathered around H.H. the Dalai Lama. I first interviewed Ken more than 20 years ago. I have
allowed him to let his words reflect how that experience has
remained with him and changed him over the years. This
interview appears in A Thousand Hands, A Guidebook to Caring
for your Buddhist Community, edited by Nathan Jishin Michon
& Daniel Clarkson Fisher. Morgan Zo Callahan: Wonderful talking with you.
Ken, how do you relate with someone who’s dying? Ken Ireland: The short answer is “as normally
as possible.” But right away as soon as I began to live
with people who had a grave diagnosis and who were very
close to death, I noticed that their world, and by extension
mine, was quite different. It is both slower and much more
immediate. I saw theorizing fall away–intellectual
considerations like “What’s going to happen after
death? Am I going to be around?” Conversations got real
and something else came forward. I heard requests such as
“I want to have my relationship with my family
straightened out before I die. I want to make peace with my
ex before I die. I want to die on my own terms.”
Somehow, even when they seemed impossible, all of us who
were part of Maitri tried to fulfill those requests. What we
crafted was far from perfect, but life and living life to
the end changed on its own accord. MZC: Apart from the interpersonal relationships,
how do you respond to the inevitable natural laws of the
process of dying? How do you stay focused and mindful
without expectations about how it is all supposed to be? KI: As hard as we, in cahoots with our medical
professionals, try to fight nature and stave off death,
nature always wins. All I can do is try to stay present with
that process. The body begins to shut down in its own way;
physiological, mental, and psychological changes move into
place and take over. We’re also at the mercy of those
processes. We may try to defend ourselves. We experience a
variety of natural human reactions in the face of
uncertainty, fear, grief, anxiety, but we have no real
control. We will eventually have to give up that kind of
control whether we want to or not. What I’ve seen over and over is that our normal
reaction to postpone the inevitable proves useless.
There’s no way out. There’s no tomorrow. I can
only take care of my own mental state–an iffy job at
best–but I just say to myself, okay, I’m with this
particular person at this very moment. I’ve decided to be
here. I’ve committed myself to be of service, to alleviate
the pain, to ease the transition. MZC: In what ways is your work a natural
expression of your Buddhist practice? KI: I can’t lie and pretend that it was all
hunky dory. Living through the AIDS epidemic, being with so
many people, mostly gay men who were my age or younger, was
extremely painful. From the point of view of my own
cherished ideas about how things should be, it was an
impossible task. But on the other hand, in terms of
training, in terms of deepening my own meditation, and in
terms of personal rewards, it was, and is, great
practice. MZC: How were your teachers helpful in preparing
you to engage hospice work? KI: When I met Yogi Chen in Berkeley in the early
70’s, he introduced me to the meditation on
impermanence and the suffering arising from clinging. In
Tibet he’d lived for three years in the charnel grounds
where dead bodies were brought to have vultures strip the
flesh from their bones before they were gathered up. Very
specially, highly trained practitioners undertook this
practice. When I first became involved at Maitri, partially
I’m sure to assure myself that I was not entirely
crazy, I tried to tell myself that we were trying to adapt
this practice for our times. (There’s always a need for
practice manuals I suppose, both as a record of the
experience of our ancestors and a kind of reassurance that
we’re on the right track.) But in time I gave that up,
and realized that we were just responding to the
circumstances of our lives in a way that made sense and
arose from our own practice. I learned from Issan Dorsey and
the many people we took care of. They taught me to relate to
humans in any circumstance with respect and love, getting
out of the way as much as possible. Over the years I’ve
noticed that the experience changed something in me in terms
of my relationship to people, my own life, my growing older,
the physical breakdowns of my body. It’s not just
acceptance, and certainly not resignation. It’s more
like a transformation, a noticeable change in the air we
breathe. MZC: So meditations on impermanence and encounters
in hospice have changed the way you live your life? KI: Of course. I am definitely not the same man
who moved into Maitri and cared for more than 80 people who
died. I have the same questions that I had when I was a
Jesuit: What are our lives about? What do we want to make
our lives about? What do we want to do with our lives in the
time that we have? How can I do something that’s of value?
But for me this is where my Buddhist practice comes in: I’m
going to do something that aims to benefit all beings
because I’m not alone in the universe. If I consider how I
can really take care of a person in the way in which he or
she would like while at the same time taking care of myself,
the world becomes different. At least that was my
experience. When the point is to be of service to somebody
when they’re at the end of their lives, then the question
becomes something like, instead of avoiding the end of life,
how does life become full and complete from beginning to
end? The whole process is alive and well; it breathes and
pulsates, as we breathe from beginning to end. MZC: One night I received a call at one
o’clock in the morning; it was from a member of our
school board who very desperately related to me that a
Japanese gentleman, a devoted Buddhist, was dying; the
family wanted to take the man off life support. I was asked
to call the Rosemead Buddhist Monastery and come with a monk
to the hospital. I said, my gosh, it’s one o’clock in
the morning. But I said I’d do it. So I called the
monastery; the monks were very upset at first. But it ended
up that three monks happily went to the bedside, and
chanted. “We transfer the effects of the good that
we’ve done in our lives for whatever journey this dying
person is going on.” KI: That’s what we do. The monks got out of bed to
be of service to the family and dying person. They sat with
them, and chanted, performing the rituals of the end of
life. They were present with him when all this was going on.
It’s a profound matter.
