When my father was in the hospital, I visited a Buddhist Temple in Los Padres National Forest. Single-chapter completed story.
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The week prior, my father tried to leave for work when he fell. He must've known his health was tanking, because he called my grandmother. She arrived at our apartment infuriated; his daughter lived with him. So why hadn't I helped him?
"I had no idea," I tried to explain, but she brushed me off.
Barely able to breathe, my father still insisted not to call an ambulance.
I had 9-1-1 dialed on my phone, yet I hadn't clicked Send, not with my grandmother pressing, "He wants us to drive him."
At the emergency room, the nurse wasn't willing to take a look at my father before other patients. They had protocols, and he hadn't come in on a white van with blinking red lights.
But he was changing colors, so I asked, "Can you just check his vitals?"
His pneumonia—combined with smoking, and working in a refrigerated warehouse—was preventing him from exhaling fumes his body kept building up. He was suffocating.
Despite calling my grandmother when he fell, he signed me off as the person who made his medical decisions, at least while he was on Propofol.
I served this role diligently, and it left me nerve-wracked. For a week, I spent day and night in Kaiser Permanente, with the hospital lemon cleaner smell, the colored prints of flowers beaming from the walls, and the clacking of wheel chairs on grouted tile.
I needed to get away. I just didn't know how. I was supposed to stay at his side, wasn't I?
Then I passed by one of the churches in the halls. I slipped in there, thinking I'd pray. I was raised in Christian family, but faith never spoke to me. Even in this moment of crisis, I felt nothing.
A nurse suggested I go somewhere for the weekend, while they waited for test results. She insisted he was stable; it was just a matter of time before he woke up.
Feeling inspired by the hospital church, I decided to drive to a Buddhist temple to meditate. I didn't identify Buddhist, either—I didn't know what to identify—but I'd e-mailed the temple a few times in the last year, at the suggestion of a friend, seeking advice.
The temple welcomed me to visit. In an email, we scheduled a Saturday tour of the site.
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Pine Mountain Buddhist Temple is located in the heart of Los Padres National Forest, a vast woodland spanning across Southern California. Driving there felt like surrendering to the forest's darkness. I welcomed its shroud of unknowns. I already felt swathed in unknowing.
Even though the forest had experienced a recent fire, the temple grounds remained untouched; so for an hour, I drove through charred and headless, black and abandoned tree husks, with birds of shiny black feathers, and the occasional jay, only to enter the radius of a holy site where the pine and brush were fresh.
One of the beauties of Los Padres, charred or not, is the distinct desert scent that often carries on the wind. Here is a woodland that borders the hot and arid inland of Orange County and Los Angeles, sand and soil, sun and shade. It is not uncommon to find succulents and evergreens together. I rolled my window down and drove slowly, letting the wildflowers pull me in.
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I hadn't visited Los Padres National Forest before then. Growing up in Orange County, we were beachcombers, city dwellers, mall shoppers. My father would sometimes take us camping, just father and daughter, on Big Bear Mountain; then we'd stop in Lake Arrowhead to buy magnets, postcards, and key chains.
Los Padres was reserved for my solo trip to the Buddhist temple.
On the temple grounds, a couple of monks greeted me in simple robes, kind smiles. They gave me a tour of the outdoors, where Buddha statues offered mudras of support. They also asked what inspired me to email their temple, so I explained the suggestion from my friend; the Eastern Thoughts classes in college; and the experience I had in the hospital church. I hope I wasn't overbearing for them.
They were happy to offer me guidance in the face of my father's death. We prepared lunch together, the two monks and their three visitors. The other two visitors in attendance that day were also a couple, highlighting my loneliness.
After lunch, then chanting the names of monks past, we meditated on pillows while facing a wall. I spent a good part of meditation observing the crack that crawled the wall from the carpet to the ceiling, a hint of fault in infrastructure. Southern California is earthquake territory. My father's hospitalization had similarly cracked down the middle.
That night, driving home from the temple, the Los Padres National Forest held me in its needled arms. The charred stumps of the burn site reached from the earth, as Mother Nature's fingers rising, always fighting.
That's the true beauty of a forest, isn't it?—not the fairy tales we try to instill in it, or the ominous dark that tells us to get out; it's the strength, the long-term survival, the ancients that gather in their trunk-and-bark armies to weather out centuries together.
Fortunately, my father woke up from the Propofol, and he's yet to have another encounter with pneumonia. I've moved four hours north, yet I still drive through the woods, over the Tejon Pass, to visit him once a month.
His illness, and the Los Padres National Forest, gave me the courage to seek answers in the forest. I've yearned to return to the woods, to learn more from the trees. Everyone ought to visit the heart of a forest alone, contemplative, bare.
