The Saint of the Suburbs.

I met P. for the first time when he was sixteen or seventeen. He was looking over my shoulder, at art school, when I tried to draw a stuffed animal. Two years younger than myself he had the nerve to criticize my drawing. Then I looked up to the most radiant smile I ever saw from a man. Tall, handsome, a young man to win the hearts of all the girls, he stood behind me, and we began to talk. That was the beginning of a deep friendship for some of the most important years of our lives. Together we discovered whatever would move our hearts in literature, in philosophy, in music, in long walks through the woods. An ex-student of the Steiner school he told me about Anthroposophy. I shared my first readings about Buddhism with him.

Some years passed, we both got married, he soon went away to live in Sydney, and to work there as an architect. That distance in space became a distance in the first true friendship of two young men.

Almost thirty years later he called me on the phone. He was back again, to visit his old friends in Switzerland. We met. He had a sad story to tell: He had cancer, a bad form of it, and had just survived a major surgery. How can you tie up again the thread of those long talks between friends from the youth, under these conditions? We tried. Our hearts were full, but our time together was limited. He left with a sad hug at the airport, and with a shadow of his radiant smile from so many years ago. He came back, a few years later, after another treatment of his cancer in the United States. The irradiation had left terrible traces on his face. But still, he took me for a long hike over the mountains. What would have killed most of us, had woken up an unbelievable strength in P. Thin, aged for more years than had passed since his last visit, he still was full of projects, full of life. – Then, with another sad hug at the airport he went back to Sydney. I thought I would never see him again. I was too terrified to ever call him on the phone after he had left. I didn’t want to hear that my old friend was deadly ill, or even dead. Nobody can understand this, I know.

A few months ago it was him who called me again. He had difficulties to speak, after another big surgery, on his brain this time. He urged me to come to Sydney. He offered to pay for my ticket. He wanted me to come, and I took a plane, a few weeks later, to Sydney. How would I find my old friend, what would be his condition of life after those 20 years of sufferance?

He picked me up at the airport. Even thinner this time. Much older than his age. One side of his face practically dead from the irradiations, his skull deformed from the brain surgery. But still with a hint of his beautiful smile, for the occasion. He drove me to the city first, to show me the harbor, and then to his home. P. had designed his own house himself, as the talented architect he is. That house, a symmetric cubicle in steel and glass, suspended high above the bush on twelve steel pillars, this house got my home for the next two weeks. And, finally, the two of us had time for each other again. He took me on little hikes through his beloved bush. He explained each little plant to me. He brought me to the rock where he used to sit in meditation. He is a Buddhist now, had even founded a Buddhist community in the suburbs.

And then he told me about his brain surgery: Six doctors had refused to do it. They told him to give in to his fate. He refused. Then one doctor accepted to try, but told him that his chances were to wake up blind, or deaf, or paralyzed, or all together, if at all. P. didn’t want to die as a mental cripple, if there was the slightest chance to avoid it. Our reason to live, if not life itself, dwells in our mind. P. braced himself, for the huge challenge of an almost hopeless treatment, in meditation. Sitting for hours on his rock in the bush he tried to get One with nature. With this beauty around him, with Rico, the dog, leaning on his back, with the twittering and the songs of the birds, in the middle of this living universe of plants and animals, with all of this in his mind, and with nothing else, no emotion, no thought: that’s how he wanted to fall asleep for the surgery. And that’s how he wanted to wake up after. He insisted that there would be no preoperative injection. He wanted to pass the door to the oblivion of the anesthesia in full conscience. And that he did, despite the warnings of the doctors.

The first one to see him after the surgery was his wife. He greeted her with a faint smile when he woke up. He just came, he told me, from his meditation in the bush, as he had wanted it to be. The doctor couldn’t believe the fact that P. welcomed him with an absolutely clear mind. Weak, yes, but totally clear. And yes: blind and deaf on one side. But still able to stand up after a while, to go for his walks in the bush, to go back to his meditation rock. And to live a life much closer to normality than anybody would have expected, above all the doctors.

Amongst his friends and neighbors P. got to be something like a Saint. A Saint with a difficult character, because he is extremely demanding, not only to himself. But, as the wife of the owner of the post office told me, when we passed to send off a parcel: “P. is just wonderful. We all admire him so much. And he listens to everybody’s worries, despite his own. And he has an encouragement for everybody”.