A Long-Resounding Harm

I beseech the wisdom of all enlightened beings, past and future. May the Four Immeasurable Minds (love, compassion, joy, and equanimity) grow in the hearts and minds of all beings. May peace and wisdom visit the home of our hearts, and may we know the true, clear light of liberation. OM MANI PADME HUM

--Prayer for Liberation of All Beings

I was given information recently that a person who greatly harmed me--as many of you know, an employee at my undergraduate college--died about a year and a half ago, after a lengthy and extremely difficult illness which destroyed both his body and his mind. He died in the same period of months as when I lost my friend Maude, my mother, my sister, and my friend and dance sister Ayperi.

I have little time to write today, as I am attacking a pile of grading at this end of the semester, but feel compelled to compose a few words about this incident, knowing that I do plan an essay about it in future. I once wrote an essay on this chapter of my life, but it was written far too early, long before I had enough consciousness and enough perspective to really address what happened to me and to speak clearly of the circumstances surrounding what I suppose I must call, for the purposes of this blog post, "a great harm." It was more than this, but for a blog post, that is what I call it.

This afternoon, after one stack of grading was done, I went out into the woods, to the dark and cold ribbon of creek that borders my house, to try and sort out this bit of news. I had been given information that the man tried to become a better person, basically despite himself, but remained a "lost soul" until the end of his days. This is a sorrowful tragedy, but I spent too many years being sorry for this man and with trying to figure out why he did what he did to me, to his children, to his wife and so many others. I am sure he did to others what he did to me, that I was not the only one.

I decided as I walked the autumn woods, that I think I can eventually come to the place where I will feel sad for the child he once was, who was put into foster care, torn from his mother and all he knew. I even feel I can no longer regress into saying, "Well, thousands of people have been in foster care and they don't abuse," because it is not my place to conjecture why this man chose to be destructive to himself and others; I have no idea what his reality really was for himself. It is only my task to sort out the rest of my life and understand why his harm has reverberated so strongly for me, and so deeply even into the lives of others. I believe there is still untold harm from this in ways I will never know. I also believe this behavior was enabled and by default encouraged via the heavily Catholic nature of the institution at which he taught, a time when those who abused their positions of trust and power seemed to be able to cause great damage and commit terrible acts with impunity.

I feel, personally, that he hated, and felt entitled to, my youth and my potential, even though he was only in his fifties at the time, his own life still able to reap much in the way of promise. I am fifty years old now, near the age he was when he harmed me, and I do not feel entitlement to the lives and youth of my students--rather, I feel like a steward and a protector. I am content and still looking forward to all the gifts in my own life and all my years, without feeling jealousy for the time these young people have. My students often feel, even in their youth, that they do not have endless time, either--it is the nature of the world we live in now, so different from those decades ago.

Returning to the man who hurt me, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the alcohol he consumed (and to which he was heavily addicted) hated me, fueled whatever thievery might have already been in his mind. What I do know is that his actions caused a long reverberation that remains in my life to this day, if only because I still live in Santa Cruz, to which I literally and figuratively ran away after graduation, a place where I sought refuge. In many ways, though I consider this place my home, I almost fear living anywhere else because Santa Cruz represents safety, freedom, and distancing from that time for me.

It took me twenty years after the incident to find the courage to apply for and enter my MFA program; between those years, though I taught in elementary and junior high, wrote poetry, and raised my family, I was like a zombie, going through the motions of a half-life. Another friend from that time, harmed in the same way by a priest at the same institution, described the effects as a sort of zombification in his life as well. It saddens and sickens me that students who paid hard-earned money and for whom the state of California paid much in scholarships to attend that university were denied the right to have a safe place to pursue their degrees.

It is a basic right to seek one's education in a place free from predation. And it is a non-negotiable right, even if the trustees of an institution decide to look the other way. It does not matter if anyone feels I should be "over it" by now. The fact of my profession alone speaks for itself and for the work I have done towards resolution, that I did not ultimately throw my career away. Still, the damage will resound on some level, albeit to small degrees, until I too finish my time on this earth. It was that destructive.

My path towards healing my life was to go into recovery and therapy, to complete graduate school, and now to teach at the university level. That was not all of it, but a great part and a large step forward. When I returned to teaching after a two-year hiatus after grad school, I was given an office that looks over the quad and Tower Hall, and every day before I leave, I stand at the window and look out at the view, and make sure to be consciously grateful for the chance to teach again, a chance that I nearly relinquished in the wake of an enormously destructive act.

A few nights before I was given the information of this man's death, I dreamed I was in the room where I had counseling at my high school many years ago. I felt in the dream a palpable sense of what had been accomplished in this room; there was a table and around it were many people, one of whom is my "guardian angel" that I dream of over and over, even though he was a fellow student at my high school and I am pretty sure he is still alive! The man who harmed me was standing by the door, looking both young and old, gazing directly at me, and the curious thing about him was that his eyes were all dark iris, with neither pupil nor white sclera, the color of polished dark brown stones. My "angel" stood behind me and indicated that the people seated at the table were also angels, and said to me, "Everything you have ever lost is found again."

Which of course, I think, is the point, on some strange and sorrowful, and perhaps indecipherable, and even life-affirming, level.