Urban Dharma Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Journey

2. Dead and Live Bodies: The Police Chaplain Years

3. Lockdown, Contraband, and Springtime: The Prison Years

4. Kids, Fire, and Food Poisoning: The LA Juvenile Hall Years

5. Sickness, Rats, Cats, and Cancer: The Hospital Chaplaincy Years

Epilogue

A Bit of the Book

Please Note: Any struck content is represented by ellipses (. . .).

Excerpt Background: Kusala volunteered as a ride-along police chaplain for the Garden Grove Police Department for over seven years. The pretraining included target practice, coursework, meetings, bulletproof vest fittings, and security clearances. Additionally, it required a field trip to the county coroner’s office, which is where this excerpt picks up. It takes place in the early 2000s.

Excerpt from “Dead and Live Bodies: The Police Chaplain Years”

Of course, the Garden Grove coroner’s office had a ton of parking, and it’s probably the only place in LA County that does. There was an undeniable feeling of death hanging outside but no suffering alongside it. It reminded me that only the living churn about in suffering so professionally.

Inside, I expected a waiting room. I imagined a few magazines strew about trying to sell you on the advantages of embalming or cremation. But there wasn’t. In fact, the likelihood of finding a lobby in a coroner's office is low because they aren’t usually open to the public.

Here, it’s all about the science of life and death, while the mortuary handles all the emotions around it. Loved ones would never want to see what we saw that day. It would be too disturbing. The bodies cut open, hanging in completely unnatural states. Being closed to the public was a good idea.

As I walked down the hallway toward an empty desk, the only sign of life was an abandoned cup of steaming ramen soup. I looked around, but nobody. The room had that certain governmental feel, formal and taught.

I walked down a small hall toward two wooden doors. “Just sign in,” a voice said. I turned back around to find the deputy coroner stirring the noodles. “The Catholic and Baptist are already here. We’re just waiting on a few more.”

“Thanks,” I said, picking up the clipboard.

There were ten police chaplains in our training class: a Muslim, a rabbi, a priest, about six Christians, and me, the Buddhist guy. The group struck me as odd, and the only things we had in common were sensible shoes and mostly good posture. Other than that, our ideas on death, dying, and life were wildly divergent.

So there we stood, religious people, congregated around the sign-in desk, watching his noodle soup go down in silence. It was a welcomed icebreaker when Steve LaFond, from the community relations office, appeared with his usual enthusiasm.

“Hi, everyone. Hope the traffic wasn't too bad.” We all shook our heads only the way LA people can when it comes to traffic.

Steve led our group through the big wooden doors and down a short hallway into an empty, vault-like room. It felt barren in an unusual way, vacant and uncomfortable. The carpet was that sort of utilitarian short pile “City and County” carpet, and it didn’t smell like anything, not even air. The only thing in the room was one large, long, navy blue curtain that hung halfway down a wall. It was covering something, and the whole affair was just plain eerie. “Well,” Steve said while looking at a clipboard, “six bodies came in last night”; he sounded like an inventory manager at the Gap.

The assistant coroner pulled the navy drape to the side, revealing a large, thick glass window. We peered through it as if looking into a giant fish tank. But instead of glinting tropical fish, pale-fleshed, naked bodies were lying on stainless steel tables. Three of them had washcloth-sized towels covering their faces. It was surreal. The Muslim in our group stepped back from the window just as I stepped forward, and we clumsily bumped like some poorly staged sitcom. I was used to being awkward; I’m six foot two, but he seemed a little flustered.

The closest body was right below the window. Two doctors, wearing hazmat suits, stood over an Asian woman and pointed into her chest cavity. She lay cut open from the stomach to the neck, and her breasts hung awkwardly to either side, like half-filled water balloons slung over a clothesline. One of the doctors was spinning a large-handled crank that reminded me of a woodworking clamp. We watched as he slowly cranked her rib cage open, twisting the clamp’s handle like a can opener. The other doctor carefully reached inside and felt around. It reminded me of the kid’s board game Operation, which made a zapping noise if you touched the sides of the body as you reached inside.

Most lab instruments were surprisingly basic and had the feel of the 1950s. A small ball-nosed hammer, large loop-handled scissors, basic saws, and clamps lay neatly on caster-legged tables. I found it fitting that examining death, one of the oldest natural processes, only required the most basic instruments.

A tech grabbed some long-handled scissors that looked like hedge trimmers my father owned in the ’70s, only she didn’t have a cigarette hanging from her mouth. She pushed the handles together and cut deep into the rib cage, the bone springing open like a tree branch freed from a tangle of kite string.

On the far side of the examining room, two males huddled over some paperwork. The whole thing felt like peering through a hole in a shoe box; inside was a well-lit, dead-body diorama.

“On scene, the smell can get pretty bad, depending on a bunch of stuff. Some officers smoke cigars to counter the smell, but bring essential oils if you’d like,” Steve advised. The word “essential” had finally earned its place on those tiny brown bottles.

“Do not bring vaporub,” he continued with the first stroke of seriousness. “All it does is open your passages, so you and everyone around you will smell everything more.”

I looked back at the Asian woman’s body. She was in her early thirties and had long, thick hair. With her midsection hanging open, every organ and sinew of tissue stared up at us.

“She died of an overdose. The neighbor’s dog found her on the side of their house in the grass. They think she stumbled away from a party, walked across the street, and then passed out on the side of the house. She choked on her vomit.” I thought of Jimi Hendrix.

The group stood motionless, face-to-face with our inevitable. A thick silence filled the room. In our line of work, talking about death came easily, but staring it down and standing in the wordless areas around it didn’t.

What was evident was that the woman lying before us hadn’t planned to die that night. Her hair was a bit tousled yet held the styled hairdo from the night before. Her brows were well-groomed arches. A bit of lipstick still sat at the corners of her mouth. And what looked most out of place were her freshly painted, pearl-white fingernails. They shined electric next to her dark skin. And her organs were sculptural; the twists and turns perfectly housed like peas in a pod; everything shaped in tandem with whatever neighbored it; all things interconnected, all things interdependent. The whole thing looked like a Salvador Dali painting.

“What’s that bright yellow stuff?” I asked, pointing at a yellow string that weaved through her abdomen.

“That’s cholesterol,” Steve said.

“Kinda makes ya think twice the next time you want fast food,” said the priest. I was the only one who laughed.

“She came in about four a.m. They’re putting T.O.D. about two,” said the deputy.

“So, would we be called to a scene like this?” asked the Muslim.

“Absolutely, you’re on whatever scene the officer you’re riding with gets called to. It could be a cat in a tree or something like this. Your job’s to serve in whatever capacity helps the officer or the community.” Steve turned and squared up to us. “It’s not only about what you do. It’s also about what you represent,” he said.

We all stared blankly. The Christian woman asked, “What do we represent?”

“Kindness, you represent the voice of kindness in situations that need it. You’re the compassionate activity of the police department,” Steve said. “Often, the officers are so busy at the scene they have very little time to interact with the family and friends of the victim. That’s where you come in.”

I liked that. Our purpose made sense now.

We looked back into the exam room. The two female technicians continued pushing over various bodies, each having a different story. One man was discovered dead in his lazy boy chair, clutching the neck of a vodka bottle. His hand was frozen in rigor mortis as if his bottle was still there. Next to his body lay his liver on a tray; it was the size of a small brown throw pillow.

There was also a 14-year-old boy who came in as suicide. He’d hung himself because he didn’t get the grades he’d wanted. His younger sister found him dangling from an extension cord in the garage.

“If you’re called to a messy scene, like a shooting, most of the time there’ll be hazmat cleaning services there, taking care of fluids.” He said.

“What a job to have,” the Priest mumbled.

“When there’s a lot of blood, it can coagulate into this Jell-O-like consistency in only a few hours; sometimes they just shovel it into bags, but brain matter that’s hard. Once it dries, it’s like cement. If the putty knives can’t scrape it off, they bring in a steam injection machine to melt it off. “ he said.

Fitting, I thought. Even when we’re dead, the mind still clings to stuff.

I took another once over at the bodies; they looked like parade balloons that had lost half their helium. I tried to imagine my body lying there, someone looking at me through the glass, but I didn’t want to go there right then. I’d save that for later on the meditation cushion.

In some Buddhist schools, there’s a practice called the “cemetery meditation,” in which you contemplate the decomposition of a body. The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives another way to practice dying using sleep cycles. It’s a way to prepare for the moment of passing. The practice is supposed to help develop a familiarity with the dying process and what’s experienced before what the Buddhist call the bardo. It’s believed to be a tunnel or state of being between this life and the next; it’s not just for Buddhists though; it’s believed to be part of the rebirth process for all living things.

Nirvana is freedom from going through that tunnel again, bypassing rebirth into the next cycle of existence. It’s not that we never die again; we’re never reborn to die again. Well, the same thing in some circles, I guess.

One of the doctors rolled the table with the suicide boy right under our window. The room’s gravity doubled. It’s disturbing to see a dead child. I surveyed. The Muslim was standing quietly, frozen. One of the Priests stood shifting uneasily from side to side. The poker-faced Rabbi had looked away and fidgeted with a pen in his shirt pocket. A self-inflicted death of a 14-year-old was a special kind of disturbing. Maybe the deepest type of suffering. I’m guessing that sort of suffering is tied to…[KUSALA TO FILL]

The Coroner broke the silence,” We’ve got a storage cooler on the side of the building where the deceased are kept. We just spent a pretty good chunk of change upgrading the security out there. We’ve caught a few kids trying to break in for a look.”

Human have such a fascination with death, yet we’re so ill-equipped to contemplate our own.

One of the techs picked up a scalpel and set to work on the alcoholic’s head. She skillfully sliced him from ear to ear and gracefully peeled the skin forward, letting the excess drape over his face like a plastic Halloween mask.

“It’s bad enough he’s dead, but now he can’t even see,” the Baptist joked. Nobody laughed; this was all too real.

The doctor spooled up a drill that I swear I’d seen in home depot the week before. She made a small precise hole through the skull like a pro, then took some brain matter and checked it under a microscope.

“Once we had a serial killer’s body, and there was,” he paused, searching for words, “heaviness isn’t the right word…” he stammered, “evil isn't the right word, but it’s not the wrong one either. It’s hard to describe, it was fear I guess, I felt fear being around that body.” Later, Steve revealed he was a born-again Christian, and that working at the morgue helped him reconnect with his faith.

Our field trip to the coroner’s concluded with a presentation not unlike the kind you get in driver’s ed. They sat us in a small classroom for the screening of a bizarre film that could have been called “Gruesome On-Scene Deaths by David Lynch. ”

One man was hit by a train. His head was torn off. Another had died while removing a tree from his yard; It had fallen in the wrong direction and landed on him, crushing him into the hole he’d dug. We also were shown a victim of kinky, erotic asphyxiation. The man was found hanging dead, wearing women’s makeup and a bra with his pants down around his ankles.

After the film, I felt a little overwhelmed. Queasy. Ready to leave. Steve gave us the contact information for getting our bulletproof vests. As we all gathered our things, one of the Christian chaplains pulled a box of lemon muffins from his bag. “I brought a snack if anyone wants some?”

What a way to end the dead body field trip. Muffins. It harkened back to grade school as everyone chewed and sipped water from their little paper water cooler cups. The surrealness swept through me, the words of conversations dropped into only sound, and I could somehow see our group in a strange, interconnected moment. We humans appeared like animals now; our shared genus and behaviors had so much in common. There was a visible undercurrent of shared anima. Starting at death had somehow abstracted our human ways; our bodies, sounds, and gestures seemed foreign yet also recognizable. This was possibly how cats might see us.

“There’s one left, Kusala. You want this?” someone asked, jarring me from the experience. I looked down at the Catholic's outstretched arm, the zip lock bag with a small muffing dangling from its end.

“Ah . . . no, but thank you,” I said.

“Sure?” he pushed.

“I never take the last of anything,” I said, gathering my things. “But thanks.”

As I stepped out into the afternoon, the urgency of life now simmered in the air between the trees. I could die. Now. Today. That lemon muffin could have been my last bite of food. We worry so much about tomorrow with the confidence that tomorrow will come.

At the stoplight, my motorcycle idled with that perfect hum. As irony would have it, the morgue was right across from South Coast Plaza Mall, one of the largest, most exclusive shopping experiences in Southern California. The parking lot was packed. A BMW trolled for a spot, and a woman on foot zigzagged between cars in her perfected stiletto gait. The mall valets sprinted about, and now I could imagine their internal organs jostling as they jogged, bouncing inside their bellies like snuggly packed luggage.

We focus most of our lives on accruing wealth and push ourselves to the brink of insanity with worry over losing it. No wonder people come to me asking how to get rid of their anxiety.

Accepting life’s groundlessness and impermanence is a through-line in Buddhist teachings. Clinging to circumstance, belongings, relationships, and our identity is futile, like trying to stop the stars from shining. We repeatedly suffer over it. When we die, what matters? Not our jobs, our belongings, or even our families. Death is a solo affair; no carry-on baggage allowed. We’re muscled into saying goodbye to what we relentlessly lived to acquire. We repeatedly hear this cliché, but we all still literally buy into it.

As I pulled onto the 405 freeway, I felt alive and focused on staying that way. It was a scorching LA summer day, but I didn’t mind.

Excerpt Two

Excerpt Background: Kusala volunteered as a hospital chaplain for the UCLA Care Committee for 10 years. The role included visiting people who were sick, often close to death, and also publicly addressing medical professionals in a formal setting, teaching them about the end-of-life priorities of the Buddhist patients.

In this excerpt, Karen is near death and waiting for a liver to come through on the transplant list. She’d privately requested Kusala to lead her memorial service, and he’d agreed. She’s asked him to bring some ideas for the service on his next visit. None of her family knows about her request. This is early 2000.

Excerpt from “Sickness, Rats, Cats, and Cancer: The Hospital Chaplaincy Years”

A few days later, I arrived back at Karen’s hospital room with a pen and paper to discuss memorial plans, only to find she’d been moved to hospice. Jack (her husband) made it clear that it was only for insurance reasons. “Once she gets that liver, she’ll get moved back into the main wing,” he said, trying to stay positive.

Jack went home for a nap, and I took a seat, enjoying the quiet while Karen slept. “Kusala,” she said, waking up. Karen didn’t look good. Her eyes weren’t moving normally. When people die slowly, it’s like a Nordic tide surrounds them and then inches out, a little at a time, until the boat sits beached and quiet. She was still afloat but only in the shallowest of waters.

I sat with her. We said very little. It was springtime, and it didn’t seem right to have so much budding life just outside her window.

When Kim, Karen’s sister, arrived, she walked into the hospital room and dropped the two large paper grocery bags on the counter, as if it were her kitchen. She beelined straight to the bathroom. Kim didn’t look anything like Karen, but then again, I didn’t know what Karen looked like with a healthy liver.

Kim yelled to us from the bathroom, “I thought I’d explode; I’ve been holding it since Hollywood!” . . .

She emerged far more relaxed and began to wipe Karen’s lips with a wet paper towel. “You hungry?” she asked. Karen shook her head no.

“They didn’t have any potato salad,” Kim said matter-of-factly, pulling up a chair and biting into a pumpernickel sandwich.

“Who are you?” she asked me.

“Karen and I are friends. We met awhile back,” I said.

Kim shrugged off the fact that I was a monastic in brown robes and asked me about local restaurants in the area. I had a meeting back at the center, so I said my goodbyes and left. . . . The next day Kim put a PayPal link up on Facebook where people could donate money to help with medical costs. It’s strange to think that somewhere in the transplant patient paperwork, there’s a line item that says “liver” with a price next to it. I wondered if they taxed that sort of thing.

Facebook funding drives can be helpful. The emotionality of going through life-threatening health issues is bad enough, but bankruptcy on top of it is all too common.

If Karen didn’t get a liver soon, her family wanted to have her transported back home to Milwaukee, where there was a shorter donor list.

I came to find out that Karen was a singer and, although she’d never gotten a Grammy, she’d been nominated several times. She was really good, a blend of blues and gospel.

Toward the end of the week, Karen still had no liver. She was starting to fade quickly, and I saw her giving up. She didn’t want to be moved back to Milwaukee and said the trip would kill her.

“Come on, if you go back to Milwaukee, you could be near the studio,” her sister kept saying. “You’ve got the next record half done. You can write the rest while you're recuperating.” She encouraged.

Jack and I and Karen were silent.

The following day her sister called me on the phone. “Hi,” she said. The pause made her sound like she was on the verge of tears.

“Everything OK?” I asked.

“Ya know we really love Karen,” she said.

“I can tell. You two seem close.”

“Well, that’s what we . . . I mean, I . . . speaking on behalf of our family, wanted to talk to you about,” she said.

I kicked off my slippers and sat back in my desk chair with a feeling of nervousness.

“Somewhere, Karen got the idea that going to Milwaukee wasn’t a good idea,” she said.

I paused, recalling there was no manual for this circumstance. “Yes, I’d heard she’s opted to stay in LA,” I said.

“Well, Kusala, she’s gonna die if she stays. We’re all wondering how she got the idea.”

I didn’t know what to say, but I felt a finger pointing into my chest through the phone.

“It must be a hard thing to decide,” I said. “She’d expressed concern about the trip to me, and asked me what I thought, but all I said was that it was a medical question, not a religious one, so there was nothing I could offer in the form of an opinion.”

“She also somehow seems to think that doing her will and prebuying her funeral services is a good idea,” said Kim.

I ran my hand down the back of Rain, the cat, who lay curled in my lap.

“Karen isn’t ready to die,” Kim said.

“I’m not sure anyone is.”

In the call's background, I heard a door open and close, and Kim became more abrupt, “Listen, we love her, and we think the drugs have made her depressed. We need everyone to help her rally.”

“Yes, OK,” I said.

“Are you the one who brought her the Buddha statue?” Kim asked.

“She requested it,” I said.

“She’s obsessed with that thing! She’s had me move him from here to there, all over the hospital room.”

I sat silent. There was nothing I could say that would be right.

“Can you tell her to just go to Milwaukee?” she said point-blank.

“That is up to her. I don’t have any advice for this sort of thing. I don’t tell people what to do, I just encourage people to think about things in a variety of ways, and none of them are ultimately right. There’s no right answer.”

There was a pause, a huge one.

“Why can’t you just tell her to go to Milwaukee?!” she suddenly screamed.

I was quiet, and Kim broke into a crying jag. Her pain sliced through the telephone and into my chest. I was filled with sadness for her, and Karen too.

“There’s no right answer,” I said, trying to soothe her.

“If you can’t help us, could you at least just not come for a while? We’d love to surround her with supportive people,” she said.

It was a bind. Karen had asked me to come, Kim was asking me not to. I paused.

“I’m a chaplain, it’s my job to honor her wishes.”

“She’s sick. She has no idea what she wants,” Kim sobbed.

“I can’t go in with an agenda; all I can do is go and help her in whatever way she asks.”

“It’s easy for you to say, you’ve only known her ten minutes!”

“You’re right,” I paused. “I think that’s part of why she asked me to come.” There was only silence. And more of it.

“I try to avoid opinions and just give her my fullest attention,” I reiterated.

“Give me a break on that mindfulness shit. What good is it to be here now, with this? I don’t want this! I want it to all go away. Have this just be a bad dream,” she said between sobs.

Kim hung up, and that was that.

Last week Karen had requested that I bring some quotes for her memorial service to discuss. As I walked down the hospital hall toward her room, I stopped at the nurses' station.

The nurse took a breath and looked at me, “Kusala, I’m sorry,” she stammered. “They’ve taken you off the list . . . the visitors’ list.” She stared at me.

I felt strange, like someone had taken something dear from me. “Oh,” I said, looking down at the paperwork in my hand.

“Karen wanted these,” I said.

This nurse knew me well. Her eyes said no to the paperwork. I exhaled.

“I’m sorry, Kusala, Karen . . . she requested you on the list too.”

This was confusing, I’d been asked to come and now unasked. Monk or not, rejection isn’t easy.

I gave the nurse a nod and went into the volunteers’ lounge. One of the Catholic chaplains stood picking over the snacks. He always seemed to be in here, lots of Catholics die it seems. “How’s it going, Kusala?” he said, a cookie in hand.

“Lots of suffering,” I said, shaking my head.

“Me too,” crumbs dropped on his robe as he chewed.

“I just got booted out of a room,” I said.

“Wow, what happened?” He pulled up a chair.

We sat and talked about it, he reminded me that sick people are sick, and families can’t be counted on for rational behavior.

The lounge door pushed open again, and the nurse from the hallway poked her head in.

“You OK?” she asked me.

“So he’s really blacklisted?” the Catholic blurted.

“If it means anything, Karen’s husband wasn’t supportive of this move, Kusala.”

“It’s OK,” I said, collecting my things.

I was surprised to get a call from Jack a few months later. Karen had gotten a liver. However, there were complications and she passed away. He wanted me to know that she’d died with the Buddha statue on her bedside table and the chant box* I’d given her taped to her Bible.

“She covered all the bases, Christian and Buddhist,” he said. “We had to replace the battery in the chant box once a week. She slept with it on; it was playing when she passed.”

I never asked about the end-of-life paperwork, and they never asked me to perform the service that Karen had requested. I just gave her prayers for forty-nine days, put her picture on the memorial altar, and included her on the roster at IBMC’s annual Ullambana** ceremony.

*The chant box is a small, battery-powered trinket that plays various Buddhist prayers.

**The Ullambana ceremony is held to say prayers for those who recently passed or those who are trapped between rebirths so that they have an auspicious next life.