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| HOME CONTACT LARRY'S LETTERS TO THE COMMUNITY |
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It took a long time for me to figure out I had cancer. This is the story, complete with Larry Mermelstein’s announcements about it to the Community as the story went on.
Now that I look back over my history, I realize that I have been gradually acquiring this cancer most of my life. According to the doctors it is 95% certain that it was caused by asbestos.
This means that I got it when I was a junior or senior in high school working for my father on construction projects or a few years later when I worked on construction at Karmê Chöling
Buddhist Meditation Center putting up sheet rock and building Buddhist centers for the future.
Then it slowly grew in my gut across the years and slowly sapped my energies for three decades. We were very busy in those years and I can see now that the occasional deadly attacks of laziness were perhaps the cancer talking.
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In any case, when my guru died, I went back to school to get a profession. As long as he was alive I had devoted my time to being with him and working for him and taking whatever precious opportunity his walking on the earth and living in our human plane provided.
But towards the end of his life he spent more and more time in a state of spiritual ecstasy or out of his body traveling in his essence to realms where the Shambhalian gods lived. It became clear to us on the translation group that we were losing Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche as our daily guide in our personal life, in translation work, etc. We talked about this a long time and finally each of us made his or her own accomodations with the facts.
Larry Mermelstein, the head of the Nalanda Translation Group, decided to spend every precious second of his life yet vouchsafed to him with Rinpoche actually in Rinpoche’s presence. Larry dropped everything and became Rinpoche’s personal servant. I had already been Rinpoche’s servant for years and I felt that I had to prepare myself for having a new goal in my daily activities---a goal other than translating for Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. So I went back to school and studied Comparative Literature. First at the University of Colorado and then after Rinpoche actually died, at Princeton University where I would get my Phd. I spent a year between CU and PU in Nepal studying Madhyamika with Khenpo Tsultrim Gyatso.
Note to reader about technical terms: I have designed this website for practicing Buddhists, although I hope that beginners and strangers to the Dharma will visit it too. But I’m not going to spend my time explaining esoteric points that Buddhists all know, but the beginner may note. If you have questions on things I’ve said, send me a question. I’m a professional teacher. I’ll answer you. Just click here. There’s another thing that may help. You can look for the word you don’t know in the glossary I provide for the Gesar epic. I don’t mince words in my translation of the epic and provide explanatiaons for every tecnical term I notice myself using in the Glossary.You should find this glossary useful.
When I came back from India I started my career as a graduate student at Princeton. It was the same time Rinpoche died. All through this period the cancer was growing within me, gradually making me weaker, gradually transforming me from a vital academic into a permanent semi-invalid.
Last year I was sick all the time, but determined to finish polishing the translation and then get it to the publisher. I had eight hundred pages of text translated and ready to be smooth edited. I had also to write commentaries on the translation to make it truly useful to the public.
Weekend Programs on Gesar
At the same time, my decade of research on Gesar had come to a head and I realized I had much to say, many essays to write, about the practices that go with the epic. In particular, I wanted to explain to the public the relationship between the Gesar and the Shambhala teachings. I began giving weekends on this subject around America. The program was called The Cycle of the Black Ashe. I was trying to offer a general clarification for everybody of how their Shambhalian paths were supposed to work to gain complete and perfect enlightenment. I explained the connection beween the Shambhala practices and texts and Gesar, the Kalacakra Tantra, the Vajrakilaya Tantra, the Nyingthigs and a bunch of classical Chinese texts. Even, to tell the truth, Plato and Aristotle!
So I began traveling to teach this material, the relationship between the epic and everything else, in programs around the country, including in Australia.
In Australia
But I was getting sicker and sicker at this time. Traleg Rinpoche invited me to give a series of lectures at a Summer School he ran in Melbourne and Sidney Australia. When I got out there one of his students who was among those in charge of hosting me was a nurse and she was the first one who said I was really sick.
When Lyn Hutchison said she thought I might have cancer, I really listened to her, because all of my relatives on my father’s side of the family had died of cancer already. Nasty, ugly deaths. It turned out that at that very moment my sister had cancer too . So Lyn began getting me tests in Australia. I owe the students of Traleg Rinpoche a debt of gratitude. Their solicitude probably kept me alive all that time in January.
Back in America
But it was too subtle a cancer to be found out that easily. We continued the tests back in America in February and finally my wonderful doctors in Milwaukee, David Shapiro and Jane Hawes figured it out. David is the founder of the Shambhala center here and Jane is studying Tibetan, becoming a great translator. Anyway, they formed a group of doctors at Columbia hospital, reorganized my house and my life and under their protection - that’s when I began getting chemo treatments.
While I was in the hospital a group of people from New York, lead by Berkeley McKeever and George Woodward, came out to Milwaukee and helped set up my house so that I could be taken care of. Berkeley, Jane, David, and a local named Kathleen Carter, and Julie Brefcynski restructured my home to receive an invalid while I was at the hospital. They arranged for people to fly in and take care of me over the next months as I received chemo and suffered.
When I saw that people like this, like Berkeley and George and Jane and David and Donna Stevens and others from all over America were flying in to help me, I realized how much love the
Sangha had to give and that I was safe because of them. It’s one of the deepest realizations about my life. That my lifelong community cares about me enough to not let me suffer alone. To help and encourage me. My Sangha is real.
Then Larry Mermelstein, the head of the Nalanda Translation Group began sending out announcements to my old friends in the Sangha about my condition. That’s how everybody else
heard about it. Here are those letters. Let me just say that the response from those letters is what has been keeping me going ever since then: the magnificent love and the support the Sangha has sent my way. Without this I would have been dead by now. The gifts, gift cards, kind letters,
touching calls on the phone. And when I needed it, many of you have visited me here in Milwaukee and taken care of me through the hard part of my chemo. Your money has enabled
me to pay my doctors’ bills and my huge monthly insurance payment of more than $800 a month. I want to live and write a lot and help the Sangha back. Most of all, I want to finish this huge translation and train another generation of translators to carry on the work with the other volumes of the epic.
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