My father, a young American pilot, disappeared into thin air in Korea when I was only 2. We never knew what had happened to him—had he really died? And if so, under what circumstances? This uncertainty saturated the atmosphere of family life for my mother, my older sister, and me, holding us in a state of limbo.
In second grade, I started catechism classes to prepare for my First Holy Communion. I was excited to go up to the altar and receive the “host,” a wafer that would become the body of Christ, on my tongue. I was instructed to not bite down—that would be a sacrilege.
My teacher asked the class, “Who made you?”
“God made me,” I answered.
“Who is God?”
“God is all things. God is everywhere.”
Even as I said the words, I wondered: Does God know where my daddy is?
That night, I shared my question with my sister, Sheila, and she said, “Let’s write to God and our father together, because we know that God must know where our father is, even if Daddy can’t hear us.”
We took out our crayons and carefully drew pictures on our notes. I drew red hearts with black jagged lines through their centers. One heart was completely black. I wrote:
Dear God and Daddy,
Please come home. Mummie’s name won’t be O’Brien if you don’t come home soon.
Bonnie
We crept past our mother’s room when we knew she was asleep. “The attic stairs are closest to heaven. Let’s leave our notes here where God can’t miss them,” my sister said.
The next morning, when we woke up, they weren’t there. Our mother didn’t say a word about the letters, and to us that could mean only one thing: God had found them! He would tell my father, wherever he was—I just knew it. Of course, there was so much that our mother didn’t say. In our family, there was a huge reservoir of words that were never spoken, and that filled the air with their absence.
As a child, I imagined that my father was alive in Red China, where he had another family. I pictured little girls whom he loved, and who had straight black hair that was so different from my own light brown. His fellow pilots had reported that he had parachuted out of his plane when it was struck, and they had seen him wave. That wave kept our hope alive—which meant that there was never any closure for us but rather the unending question: Is he dead or alive? Up in the air, suspended, and never grounded, I lived my childhood stuffing grief and uncertainty inside my young body and waiting. From the very beginning, my life revolved around the polarities of life and death, presence and absence, silence and intense emotion that longed for expression.
Eleven years after my father went missing, my mother decided to move us across the country, away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of her relatives. We were Catholic, and according to the Church, if no body had been found, there was no death. My mother’s family had told her they would disown her if she ever remarried, consigning her to a life without a partner. For fear of hurting her, my sister and I rarely asked about our father. But now we asked our mother, “If Daddy came home, how would the government know where we are?”
We settled in California, and gradually I stopped wondering if my father would ever find us. Without consciously realizing it, however, I was always looking for him: through connection to the fathers of my friends, and, as I grew older, through one failed romance after another.
This pattern of always looking without finding continued until, at the age of 43—after marrying, raising two children, divorcing, and marrying again—I discovered Buddhism. I attended a retreat at Spirit Rock, near my home in Marin County, where I was introduced to the tradition of insight meditation. Sitting on my cushion in the double-wide trailer that served as the meditation hall, and surrounded by other meditators, I learned to count each inhalation of my breath. Almost immediately, I recognized that this was the practice that I was meant to follow, and I felt as though I’d come home.
Who was my father? What is a father? For the first time ever, I let myself feel that I had missed out on his love—not just in an abstract sense but in all its tangible manifestations.
Very quickly, I could feel the practice beginning to pierce the armor I had relied on for so long. Two years later I attended my second retreat. On the third day, as I walked slowly across the terraced hill behind the retreat center, I started to cry. I put one foot down after the other, moving forward as the primal pain of my absent father took hold of me. The wound opened and felt as big as a cave. Everything in my body hurt. Shocked and totally disoriented, I felt on the brink of extreme nausea, yet somehow I managed to continue slow-walking. Seemingly out of nowhere, I remembered that I had once told my husband, “Fathers are redundant. My mother was both mother and father to me.” Now I realized that my feelings had been so deeply buried, I had not even known how much I still hurt.
Gradually, as I walked, my mind emptied of its usual distractions, and I felt my body: My stomach was tight, and my breath was shallow and uneasy. My heart felt on fire as I continued to cry. I don’t even remember my father. For the first time I fully grasped the magnitude of what I had missed—even though I could know it only through absence. With each step I felt the loss inside me open up, and my inhalations became shallow. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t take a deep breath. Since childhood I’d had a fear of suffocating, and now it felt like a real possibility. I felt desperate for oxygen and famished for connection with a father who had vanished.
Who was my father? What is a father? For the first time ever, I let myself feel that I had missed out on his love—not just in an abstract sense but in all its tangible manifestations. From the few stories I’d heard about him, I now understood that he had been the joy in our house. The night before he left for Korea, he took all the pots and pans out of the kitchen cupboard and marched Sheila and me around the kitchen while we pounded our drums like an imaginary marching band. I shared my father’s genes but had lost out on his kindness, laughter, love, and protection. Over the next few days, as the stuffed emotions and hidden pain rushed out of the closed box inside me, my heart began to break.
In the months of heartbreak that followed, I came upon the book A Year to Live by Stephen Levine. Just as when I’d first encountered Buddhism, a voice within me said, “This is my path!” It’s no wonder, really: I had lived for so long with the giant question mark of my father’s death, a death that had been the defining event of my life yet for which I’d been powerless to prepare. On this new path, I was given a very specific sequence of steps to help prepare for my own eventual transition from life to death. Moving through such practices as life review, forgiveness, and writing my own eulogy, I learned to open to the whole of my life, even to the experiences that had brought me the greatest pain.
Gradually, maranasati, mindfulness of death, became my life’s work. Not long after completing my own first “year to live,” I formed six more groups. Over the next sixteen years, I went on to lead hundreds of people on the same journey that had proved so powerfully heart-opening for me.
Through some mysterious synchronicity, it was not long after I formed my first Year to Live group that, for the first time, my sister and I learned new details of what had happened to our father. Forty-five years after our father had gone missing, we attended the first POW/MIA meeting for families of men missing from the Korean War. As I looked around the conference room at the other families, I could feel an immense rawness of emotion, as if the soldiers had just died. Decades of unresolved grief suddenly came flooding to the surface.
After lunch, an officer introduced himself and gave my sister and me a report that had been uncovered through Russian archives twelve days before. He asked, “Have you seen this report?”
We looked, and answered, “No, it’s new.”
I felt shaky as I read these descriptions of my father: “Captain O’Brien had a scar on his third left finger and had short, wide feet—size 7E.”
The final paragraph said, “New evidence from Podolsk (Russian archives) dated eleven days ago: Russian ground troops described finding an F-86, a gun with the serial number matching that of O’Brien’s.”
My heart raced, and I thought I’d be sick. Stunned, I read: “The pilot’s body found.” I touched Sheila’s arm and asked, “Did you read this?”
Having spent so many years trying to fill the great hole of sorrow inside me, I found that I didn’t want to hide from anything in my heart.
As I continued to read the specifics, I understood that everything I had for so long imagined about my father was wrong. He was never missing; he had died on September 9, 1952. All my childhood, I had waited for him to come home, and he had been dead all that time. He hadn’t disappeared. He wasn’t a prisoner. He didn’t have another family in China. He didn’t choose to stay away from me.
I saw that all of us in that room had been living in the same box, the same stuck place of never knowing where our missing men were. Were they dead or alive? With no bodies to touch and mourn, we lived in a confused state of ambivalence, frozen in time and place, suspended between shock and hope. We grieved with no closure, the grief process interrupted and drawn out indefinitely and shoved inside us. There was no possibility for resolution.
The night after we returned from the gathering, we shared the news with our mother. Though she usually maintained a composed exterior, I knew that she was fragile inside, and my whole life I had tried to protect her. For the first time, I saw her cry. As hard as the new information had been for my sister and me, I could see that it was exponentially more so for our mother. Tears poured from her eyes, and I felt her pain like a hot iron across my chest.
In the aftermath of this life-altering experience, as I continued the Year to Live practice, it came to feel more and more like a form of connection to my father. After all, though he had been absent for most of my life, he had also been the catalyst in my spiritual quest. It had begun with intense longing for a magic moment in the future. For years, I had imagined this magic as the moment he walked in our door. Then, when I first discovered meditation, I imagined it as a great experience of illumination that I would one day attain. But, over time, I had learned to breathe in and out in the present moment. From the box where I had stuffed them, I had learned to let painful feelings arise and then simply acknowledge them, without letting them overwhelm me. Having spent so many years trying to fill the great hole of sorrow inside me, I found that I didn’t want to hide from anything in my heart. And simultaneously, I learned that healing isn’t about closure. It is about openness. It is about a profound vulnerability that releases us from the need to hide from anything, and that ultimately leads us to freedom.
Sadly, my mother never recovered from learning about my father’s fate. She had kept the lid on her emotions for so long that this belated news—which might once have led, through undiluted grief, to new possibilities—only added more pain. She lived quietly, retreating into herself and her family. Years later, on the night my mother died, as I was going through her file box labeled “important papers,” I came across the notes that my sister and I had written to God and to our father. Seeing our carefully drawn pictures and our wobbly handwriting, I felt an immense sadness, suffused with tenderness, which is no doubt what my mother felt when she came upon our letters at the top of the stairway.
Grief stronger than the rawness of her death filled the “Ohh” from my mouth as I breathed in with shock. My mother had kept those notes for almost fifty years and never mentioned a word about them. Now I saw how precious they had been to her. My heart broke, knowing that she had died with her box of pain sealed up inside of her.
My mother’s bedroom mirror caught my eye, and I glimpsed my image. I look just as I did in a photo from when I was a kid. I stopped and stared, as my heart opened for all the joys and sorrows that still awaited me. Breathing in and out, I felt the ground under my feet rise up to support me, and I knew that I was ready to be present for wherever my path would lead.