My husband’s Aunt Rose became our great Buddhist teacher.
Aunt Rose was 84 when I met her. She had never married, and lived in a studio apartment in New York City. When Ken’s mother died, Ken and his children became Aunt Rose’s only living relatives. We visited her several times a year until her death at age 95.
At our visits, we tried to make life more comfortable for her. We shopped, and took her out to eat, while she was still able to get around. Eventually her eyesight failed, her hearing decreased, and, as she put it, she had 17 different diseases. Her teeth rotted, so she got dentures which never fit comfortably. She needed special shoes because of a hammer toe. Her hand strength disappeared so that she was unable to use a manual canopener. And she became forgetful, and would let a pot of water on the stove boil away and ruin the pot. Thank goodness there was never a fire.
Rose was fiercely independent and didn’t want help, until she absolutely needed it. And then she only wanted certain kinds of help. Because we only saw her several times a year, we were unable to decipher exactly what help she wanted at any given time, nor what she would accept. And this is where she became our great Buddhist teacher.
We learned, under reasonable duress, to not expect anything from Rose. Sometimes she would thank us (“Thanks a million!”). Other times she would ignore us, or be angry with us.
The Process teaches us how to disconnect our hot buttons, and see what is truly there. With Rose, I realized that what we wanted was to be of help to her, and secondarily to be appreciated –or at least recognized- for our help. Ken’s and my job then was to disconnect those buttons, by letting go of our expectations. The way we did it was in the mantra “Non-attachment to outcome.” We did what we could for Rose, and dropped all expectations of how it would be taken, or how it might turn out. We had to remain true to ourselves, and be kind to Rose; we learned to simply offer her as much comfort as we could, without any attachment to the outcome.
This is how Aunt Rose inadvertently became our great Buddhist teacher. And we still miss her.