Learning to tend to the needs of others
BY LORRAINE ASH
Buddha nursed other monks. Once, the story goes, he found a sick monk whose robe stuck to his body with the pus oozing from his sores. Repulsed, his fellow monks had abandoned him.
But Buddha washed the sick man in warm water, dressed him in clean robes and kept him company with talk of the dharma, or teachings. A kind nurse, he told the other monks, is not put off by saliva, phlegm, urine, stools or sores, and a good nurse never neglects the patient’s mind.
Though the body may ail and fail, he said, it is important for the mind to be healthy.
Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, lived in north India between the sixth and fourth centuries before the Common Era. His teachings have traveled through time and across the world.
And so it has come to be that 55-year-old John Oddo, a devotee of the dharma, spent the summer tending to his 90-year-old father at St. Francis Residential Community in Denville and most recently at Saint Clare’s Health System in Dover. His dad, Alfonse Oddo, suffers with bladder cancer.
Both men have found peace, and a way to connect with one another, in discussing the dharma and, specifically, the teachings of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Their last wish for Alfonse Oddo is that he will be strong and well enough to meet His Holiness at a special pre-reception when the Tibetan leader comes to the Rutgers University campus in Piscataway Sept. 25.
Somehow, for these two, that event will be a culmination of their closeness, a blessing they would never have expected even as recently as five years ago.
But even if Alfonse Oddo does not meet the Dalai Lama face to face, he and his son realize it is the dharma that matters most to them. The dharma taught them how to let go of past family patterns and behaviors and love each other in the present.
“We went out to dinner over the weekend and your legs gave out. Right, Dad?” John Oddo asked as he pushed his father’s wheelchair through the hallway of the Dover hospital and out into the courtyard. An August breeze cooled the gardened area. He stopped the wheelchair at one of the tables and sat beside his father.
“It’s a good thing those two guys were there to help you,” replied Alfonse Oddo, dressed in a crisp green and tan shirt. He was clean-shaven and smiling on this brilliant afternoon. Between his left leg and the side of wheelchair were the two books he prizes most. One is about Alphonsus Liguori, a Catholic saint who died in 1787. The other is “An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life” by the Dalai Lama and Nicholas Vreeland.
Another favorite is in his room on his nightstand –“Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings” by Marcus Borg. That one really helped bridge the spiritual world of his son with the Catholic world in which the old man has been so comfortable so long.
“I’d like to meet the Dalai Lama, to meet such a man who would spend every day of his life going around talking about what he believes in, and not giving up,” Alfonse Oddo said. “This is something St. Alphonsus did all his life — help people till he was old, half blind and couldn’t hear. I would consider St. Alphonsus on a par with the Dalai Lama.”
They did not always talk so easily. There were decades of old patterns and problems for them to release and transcend.
In his youth, Alfonse Oddo raised a family of four and worked 40 years as a supervisor at a ladies’ pocketbook factory. His wife, Sara, a devout Catholic to whom he was married 61 years, died four years ago. Without her, father and son had to carve a new relationship.
In the courtyard, John Oddo spoke. “After Mom died, there were some tense times, and it took awhile to establish a new kind of relationship without having another person there,” he said. “A lot of old stuff was coming up, but the teachings helped us not to make our emotions so solid and not to think so much as having permanent self.”
The point, according to Buddhism, is that everything changes, even us. Nothing is permanent. The self, too, is not static. It is fluid and as we age, we change.
“To my wife and my son, I was always wrong about everything,” Alfonse Oddo said. “So she passed away and John kept on the same way, and I said, ‘Look, this has got to stop.’ Every Saturday we used to go out to eat, John and I, and if it was a nice day we would stay out for a couple of hours.”
“Like ‘Tuesdays With Morrie,'” John said. “This was Saturdays with Al.”
“But around 6 o’clock at night, the battle started about this and that — all the garbage in life,” Alfonse Oddo said.
“We tend to hold onto all the dramas of our lives,” said John Oddo, a licensed clinical social worker with a doctorate from New York University who works in the New York City school system. “There are so many dramas and they all hold emotions, but emotions are superficial and they come and they float away like clouds. But the real underpinning is the respect and compassion and joy of being with another person.”
In order to get to a peaceful place with each other, father and son stayed together — through resurfaced memories, through arguments, through old static patterns. The dharma was right, they discovered. The old stuff floated away and they were left together, just the two of them, a father and a son, two people in the world.
“We came to see how much nonsense was involved and eventually we would say, ‘I love you,’ and be quiet,” John Oddo said. “We did that enough and the longer we went on, the more silent we became, because the old issues floated away.”
Before Alfonse Oddo’s condition necessitated his move to the strength unit at the Dover campus of Saint Clare’s, the two found the perfect place to be together — on the roof of the St. Francis Residential Community in Denville. It was quiet there, and they sat together enjoying a breeze, watching passersby stroll on the grounds, listening to the traffic go by on Diamond Spring Road.
In the sunlight on the terrace, their anger faded and, after a long silence, if they did talk, it was about the present, not the past. Fresh conversations began, and the two rediscovered each other. They agree that staying the course and being present got them where they are.
“It’s part of the teaching to not disappear from a relationship and to let the emotions melt away,” John Oddo said. “I dread relationships based on the same comments, the same conversations from years ago. When you’re close to someone and you’re doing that and it’s on an emotional level, and you stay at it, what usually happens is rifts in families. People go away. They revert or they attack or they freeze, so a lot of people disappear.
“But if you stay present and you give it time, what happens is you see the repetition of what you’re saying, and then you start laughing when you realize you’re having the same conversation from three years ago. Then you realize the relationship is based on frozen information and past absurdities, and you get into the present more.” He looked at his father. “Right, Dad?”
Alfonse Oddo looked up and laughed into the open sky: “That’s right, young man.”
Years ago, Alfonse Oddo said, John would take his parents out to lunch and then for a ride, usually on roads new to them, just to have an adventure. But Sara was not inclined to such excursions and usually would ask when they’d go home so she could return to her books. She loved to read.
“My wife would say, ‘Why are we going here for? What are we seeing here? This is just an old country road.’ She was a beautiful woman and how I loved her,”he said, his eyes welling. “But she didn’t have that thing that John and I have of exploring.”
One of those winding open roads led John and Alfonse to the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center in Washington Township (Warren County) in the dead of winter. Tibetan monks have lived there from time to time, and the couple who run it, Joshua and Diana Cutler, often are hard at work caring for the place, running programs, translating texts and looking after the monks.
That was a good experience, another dimension to their spiritual exploration, and they returned.
All their roads, inner and outward, have led them to a place of peace. A relationship is a relationship is a relationship, they say, no matter what happens.
“I always promised you I’d never leave you, desert you. Right, Dad?” The old man smiled. “And when it’s time to go, you just keep your mind focused on all the good things –compassion and love and stuff like that.”
Quiet togetherness is good preparation for death, John Oddo believes. Before his mother died, both of them had nothing left to say, and they sat together, absorbing each other’s presence and love. After she died, it felt to John as if she were still sitting next to him. She felt then as she feels now — present.
“I’m realistic about Dad’s age,” John Oddo said, “and we talk about life and death now. He could be gone. I could be gone. We know that and the relationship continues. Right, Dad?” He ran his hand over his father’s bald head.
Alfonse Oddo smiled widely at his son. “Que sera sera,” he said.
And so the teaching lives.
