Lessons from Yangzom

When our first baby, Anna, was 6 months old, we kept losing our beloved artistic part-time sitters as they inevitably moved on to other jobs, like being the script prompter for Vanessa Redgrave. I looked in vain for someone to babysit while I was in rehearsals. One day, a friend called and said there was an ad in an online Brooklyn parenting forum for a sitter, and it seemed of a different tone altogether from that of the usual. It was positively glowing, and came from a mother who, like me, wrote from home. I was ambivalent about having a full-time sitter. I didn’t have one growing up, and I thought I could cobble together enough babysitting with part-time help, enough time to write a little bit here and there, or to go to auditions here and there when I had a production.

But I was about to be in rehearsals for a new play, The Clean House, at Lincoln Center Theater, that would involve, during previews, eight-hour days of rehearsing, watching the play in front of an audience, and then rewriting into the wee hours. I realized I was being naive about how much babysitting I needed. I had to suck it up, burn Dr. Sears’s guide to attachment parenting, and admit that I needed more help. I called the number from the ad, and I made an appointment to meet with Yangzom. She walked into our apartment, and she made an instant connection with Anna. She had a grounded luminosity, kindness, and calm, and we hired her on the spot.

Yangzom’s family originally came from Tibet. They were an early refugee family to come to New York City from Nepal. Yangzom’s husband did political work for the Tibetan government in exile. Yangzom had a particular gift and an easy way with babies. But as I came to observe her, she seemed to have an easy way with everyone, including me.

Yangzom and I talked a great deal when I was avoiding my writing by making tea. She told me how she carried her baby on her back through the mountains of Tibet, one week after giving birth, to get to Nepal, where she and her family would have political asylum. She told me that her brother was forced to pick flies off excrement as a child in a Chinese labor camp to show that everyone, even children, had to work. Picking flies off excrement caused a cousin in her family to go blind.

Yangzom told me all kinds of stories as we both waited for the tea to boil. At a point, I realized that she was actually giving me dharma in the form of stories. Here is one of her stories:

A man once had four wives. His first wife loved him very much, but he paid no attention to her. The second wife was younger and prettier, and he was always chasing after her, fearful she would find another man. He tried to keep her. The third wife was a very practical woman and gave the husband good advice; he relied on her. The fourth was the youngest, and he loved to pamper her.

When the man was on his deathbed, he asked, “So which one of you will come with me to my death?” He turned to his fourth wife.

She said, “No, I will not, I will find another man after you die.”

So he asked the third wife, the practical one. “Will you go with me to death?”

“No, no one can go with you to death,” she said.

So he asked his second wife, the pretty one, and she said, “No, I’m busy, find someone else.”

Finally, he asked his first wife, his loyal wife, and she said: “I will go with you.” His wives are: fourth wife, his body; third wife, his family; second wife, his possessions. But his first wife is what you might call his soul. Only his soul can come with him after death.

I loved this story and memorized it. There is, perhaps, a certain natural reserve that comes when someone is working for your family. But when you have twins, and must work together to keep two babies healthy, much of that reserve disappears. I would often breastfeed one baby while Yangzom bottle-fed the other. She would hold William up to the nebulizer to help him breathe (his lungs weren’t quite developed enough in the first few months of his life) while I would breastfeed Hope. And then we’d switch. In this switching of a baby from breast to bottle and back again, and during the long talks about Buddhism, Yangzom became family.

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Y
angzom knew how to make food out of seemingly nothing—a little water and flour, and poof, there was delicious bread. If there was nothing in the cupboard but a little rice, she could concoct a delicious soup. She knew how to stretch resources, turn one thing into another thing, a kind of alchemy. I remember watching one time as she saved a card for a perfume ad that was inserted in a glossy magazine; she and her friends put on the perfume from the card when they were dressing up for a teaching with the Dalai Lama. I watched as she, her sister, and friends dressed in their traditional chupas to go hear His Holiness teach at Radio City Music Hall. Their excitement was palpable. I decided I had better buy a ticket to go see His Holiness the Dalai Lama too. I took little Anna with me when she was a toddler, because, well, I had no babysitter—Yangzom was already there. Anna ran up and down the fancy stairs at Radio City Music Hall, and we heard the Dalai Lama dispense wisdom to his countrymen and -women in exile, and to the rest of us, who hoped to learn about compassion.

Yangzom told me all kinds of stories as we both waited for the tea to boil.

I watched Yangzom’s kindnesses extended not only to me and my family but also to others. When her oldest friend became clinically depressed, Yangzom asked if it would be OK if she brought her friend to work. I said sure. Yangzom said it wasn’t good for her friend to be alone, that her friend needed to exercise and be with other people all day. I observed how, under Yangzom’s watchful eye, her friend became better and better. Every weekend, I knew that Yangzom spent time helping settle other Tibetan refugees who were moving to New York City.

Before I first met Yangzom (now over a decade ago) the idea of reincarnation seemed like a distant dream, a fairy tale, to me. I was a lapsed Catholic with immense spiritual hunger. But when a former student who became a dear friend—Max Ritvo—died, it was Yangzom I went to for help. I needed a specific ritual for Max, and I wasn’t going to find it in my childhood Catholic church—nor would Max have appreciated holy water from that particular dispensary. I didn’t know enough about Buddhism yet to know the mourning traditions. Yangzom helped arrange for monks to come to our house to chant for Max. She taught me how to pour water into bowls, how and when to light the candles and the incense, how to pray for a good rebirth.

We came to know Yangzom’s extended family, and she came to know ours. Yangzom’s daughter happened to live in Chicago, as does my sister, and she helped when my sister’s C-section wound was infected with MRSA, which can be fatal. My sister helped Yangzom’s daughter when she had trouble with her immigration status. Yangzom was there when my mother-in-law died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles. We were there when her mother died of pancreatic cancer in Queens.

Yangzom’s mother prayed constantly. She’d had a life of hard work and wanted to spend her last days praying and preparing for death. She had many lines on her face from being outdoors on high mountaintops with thin air, and from knowing a life of physical labor. Yangzom felt terrible that her mother was going to die in New York City rather than Nepal, where she wanted to die.

Her mother said, “I want to die where the taste of tea is familiar.”

Yangzom made her mother’s last days in Queens as much like Tibet as she could manage. Monks were present when her mother died. The funeral in Astoria was packed with people. It felt like a small village. I sat next to Yangzom. When family and friends brought white cloths (or khata) up to cover her mother’s body, it was the only time I have ever seen Yangzom cry.

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In certain schools of Tibetan Buddhism, you visualize and thank the person who taught you the Tibetan alphabet in your meditation because whoever taught you the alphabet allowed you into the teachings for the first time. That could be a monk, an uncle, a mother. A teacher. Yangzom taught my children the Tibetan alphabet.

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My husband’s father was Thai my father-in-law may have practiced the outer trappings of Thai Buddhism culturally, but he would not have described himself as religious. In my father-in-law’s house were many Thai Buddhist relics, and he gave my husband, Tony, two or three statues, which lived in our apartment. When we moved out of our apartment during a renovation, we gave Yangzom the Buddha statues so they wouldn’t get harmed.

When we got back to our apartment, postrenovation, Yangzom said the Buddha statues weren’t ready to come back yet. I didn’t understand.

She said, “Sarah, those Buddhas were empty on the inside. You have to take them to a temple to put mantra inside, and then seal them back up again.” Later that month, she brought the Buddhas back, now full of prayers, their faces painted gold.

Buddhism is a cultural inheritance for some, a philosophical position for others, and for still others, a faith that comes later in life. It somehow made all the sense in the world to me that, as a metaphor, our Buddhist practice (and statues) had been empty—for me, an insufficient Westerner’s attempt. Tony had much more Buddhist context growing up than I did. When his grandfather died, he went to the funeral in Thailand. In Thailand, which practices Theravada Buddhism, mourners can become monks for a day, to grieve the dead. So Tony shaved his head, put on monk’s robes, and grieved for a man he barely knew. But for Tony, that statue of a Buddha from his father was a spiritual inheritance that did not come with any instructions. Tony’s father encouraged American assimilation rather than learning about the Thai language or culture or faith.

Once, I came back from a teaching on Tibetan Buddhism with a beautiful thangka (painted scroll). And I was about to hang the scroll in the front hall.

“Won’t it look beautiful here?” I asked Yangzom.

“No, Sarah,” she said. “It would not look beautiful there. Thangkas aren’t meant to be in the front hall, they are meant to be inside. In a prayer room. They aren’t decorations.”

Yangzom, as it turned out, was my teacher.

I was in the kitchen making tea, and while the water was boiling, she told me a story about a distant acquaintance that astonished me. Yangzom knew of a couple, devout Buddhists from Nepal, with a restaurant in Boston. One day high lamas appeared at their restaurant and identified their son as a reincarnation of a Tibetan master. In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, when a revered teacher dies, the student looks for the reincarnation of his teacher in a child and then becomes that child’s teacher. The teacher must search far and wide for this child. And so these monks wanted to take the child, then 3 years old, back to the monastery in Nepal to be educated as a monk.

“What did they do?” I asked, thinking it must be an agonizing choice for a parent to make.

“They sent the child to the monastery,” she said, matter-of-factly.

I kept dreaming of this story and eventually wrote a play about it, called The Oldest Boy.

While doing research for the play, I read book after book about Tibetan Buddhism and reincarnation. A suitcase of books! So many books! But I had no meditation teacher. Then I read a book by a teacher named Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, one of the first Western women to do a traditional meditation for twelve years in a cave in the Himalayas. I loved her clear explanations of metaphysics, as well as the dramatic story of her life. Once, she almost got snowed in while living in a remote cave by herself; she dug herself out. A week after my 40th birthday, I heard that Jetsunma was giving a teaching in New York City, so I decided to go. I went thinking I would just hear her speak, but at the end of the talk, she asked if anyone would like to take refuge, and I found myself raising my hand. Taking refuge in Buddhism means agreeing to five basic precepts and then having a little lock of your hair cut by a teacher.

Most of my path to that moment was inspired by the daily interactions I had with a Tibetan Buddhist who had no intention of converting me. Over the years, while observing Yangzom’s preternatural calm and kindness, I decided that whatever spiritual water Yangzom was drinking, I wanted to drink too.

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo asked me, “Are you happy for me to cut a lock of your hair?”

I said yes, and she cut a lock of my hair.

After she cut a lock of my hair, I repeated my vows, and then the Buddhist nun snapped her fingers, making it so.

♦

From Lessons from My Teachers: From Preschool to the Present copyright © 2025 Sarah Ruhl. Reproduced by permission of Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.