Healing Lazarus: A Buddhist's Journey from Near Death to New Life

by Lewis Richmond

Overview

Lazarus lies in his bed, helpless to move. But he sees now that he is not alone. His beloved wife is with him, all of his relatives and closest friends. They mop his brow; they change his clothes and linen. They stroke his limbs and speak soothing words into his ear. For so many years Lazarus had been the master, the authority, the one who made decisions and told others what to do. And now, for the first time, the roles were reversed, and he found his heart filled with such gratitude, even over the simplest things -- the light streaming in from the window, the warmth of the fire in the fireplace. How wonderful it was to be alive.
For Lewis Richmond, overcoming a swift and devastating brain injury -- one that left him unable to sit up or speak -- was only the beginning of a journey to recovery. As the 52-year-old Buddhist teacher soon discovered, regaining his health would be the most difficult thing he could ever imagine. But love, courage, and the Buddhist teachings that sustained him throughout his adult life would help guide him not only back to wellness, but to rebirth and transformation.
Richmond's timely, compassionate memoir can help anyone on the road back to health -- be it from illness, life crisis, or other catastrophe. In sharing this experience, as well as many others, Richmond offers insightful information about the struggles, setbacks, and frustrations of getting well -- and tells of the lessons learned and rewards gained.
Illuminating from the first page to the last, Healing Lazarus is one man's affirmation of life, as well as a steadfast companion for those who may face days that are physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743424165
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	04/04/2002
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	312 KB

About the Author

Lewis Richmond is an ordained disciple of Buddhist master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and a lineage holder in that tradition. He is the author of the acclaimed books Healing Lazarus and Work as a Spiritual Practice. In addition to leading the Vimala Sangha, a Buddhist group based in Mill Valley, California, he is a software entrepreneur and musician/composer. His website is www.lewisrichmond.com.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One: Struck by Lightning

Lazarus, esteemed elder and learned scholar, walks down the central street of his hometown, scrolls under his arm, his robe pristine white, on his way to a study session with his students. As he passes, the town's inhabitants greet him by touching their hands to their foreheads in a sign of respect.

Suddenly, without warning, Lazarus stumbles, falls, and collapses senseless in the street. Immediately a crowd of people runs to his aid, and soon the news electrifies the entire town. Lazarus, the elder, has been struck down, as though by lightning, and even now is being borne to his home, while the town physician is urgently summoned.

What misfortune! What woe! the townspeople exclaim. What are we to do?

In Mill Valley, the suburb of San Francisco where I live, summer days are often cool and fog-shrouded. But July 1999 began with a heat wave. My family — my wife Amy and grown son Ivan — were looking forward to the July 4 weekend, a traditional time for us to barbecue hot dogs and corn on the cob, and later perhaps watch the fireworks at the local county fair.

After a busy week in my software business, I was not feeling well. On the day of the holiday, I was running a bit of a fever. But I felt well enough to participate in the festivities; I assumed I had a touch of the flu, or a summer cold.

Over the next week, however, the fever worsened. I was also beginning to feel a sharp pain between my eyes. I suspected a sinus infection, a chronic problem for me, and scheduled an appointment to see the nurse practitioner who assisted my regular family doctor. "Yes," she confirmed, after a quick examination, "looks like a sinus infection to me." She prescribed a sulfa drug and sent me home, certain that I would be well in a day or two.

I took the medicine, but the fever continued to climb. When it hit 103, I moved to the downstairs bedroom, where it was cooler, and began spending the whole day in bed. From then on my memory of events becomes vague. Amy tells me I spent three days in that bedroom, each day sicker than the last, taking powerful pain pills for my headache and sleeping much of each day. Finally, one evening I telephoned my physician's on-call doctor to report that I was beginning to have difficulty balancing, and had a roaring in my ears.

"Can you touch your chin to your neck?" he asked.

I could, but just barely.

"You'd better get down to the emergency room," he said. "Those are fairly striking symptoms. It could be meningitis."

"Go there now?" I said. It was already 9:00 P.M.

"Now," he said firmly.

I don't remember the trip. Amy told me later that I was so dizzy that the only way I could negotiate the outside stairs leading down to the garage was to sit down and slide backward, one step at a time. At the bottom I vomited. I do have a hazy memory of sitting in the car in the parking lot of the emergency room, my vertigo so severe I couldn't get out. When an aide had to lift me into a wheelchair, I cried out in pain.

I also remember the name of the emergency room doctor — Teufel, which I knew means "devil" in German.

"Teufel! The devil! I am in the hands of the devil!" I thought as they wheeled me into a stall on a gurney.

I have only a few further fragmentary memories of that evening before I lost consciousness — the voice and face of the kindly Doctor Teufel — in real life an angel, not devil — the roaring of the hospital fans, and Amy, hovering over me with loving concern. I also recall her face sometime later that evening, wrapped in a mask of metal foil. And I thought, "The devil's got her too!"

But there was a reason for the mask. Who knew what contagious horror I might be carrying? At this point the doctors could not be too careful.

I soon lost consciousness entirely.

For the next two weeks I would be a patient, not a person. It would be two weeks before I would emerge from deep coma and be lucid enough to understand what had happened — that I had been struck down by an acute and life-threatening case of viral encephalitis, a rare disease with various causes. Sometimes, as in the case of the West Nile virus that made headlines that same summer in New York, it is carried by mosquitoes, but this was not so in my case. The doctors suspected herpes zoster, the same virus that causes cold sores, but they could not prove it. In spite of the diligent efforts of several infectious disease specialists (they even sent a sample of my blood and spinal fluid to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta), no one was ever able to determine how one person in a suburb of San Francisco could come down with a disease more usually seen in Africa or Southeast Asia. My chances of getting it were probably about the same as being struck by lightning.

We read about random tragedies every day in the paper: a car full of joyous teenagers crashes, a kindly old woman is brutally murdered, a high school principal falls off a ladder while changing a lightbulb in his house and becomes a quadraplegic. We know these things happen all around us. They are a part of life, and yet most of us manage to avoid thinking about the possibility that they could be a part of our lives. Yet even today, nearly two years after the event, Amy and I still shake our heads in amazement at the shock, the suddenness and injustice of it all. Why did it have to happen to me? To us? Our lives had been going so well. I had recently published my first book, Work as a Spiritual Practice, which drew on my fifteen years as a Buddhist meditation teacher and another fifteen as a business entrepreneur. The business I founded was doing well; Amy had recently decided to leave her demanding job as a school principal for some well-deserved time off. I had just fulfilled a lifelong dream by releasing a commercial recording of original self-performed piano pieces. We were on top of the world. And then this!

In previous centuries life was not always so pleasant or secure. Then the lightning of personal tragedy struck regularly. Wars, famine, disease, poverty, all took their toll. Everyday life was an uncertain proposition. Ancient cultures sacrificed and prayed to their gods to spare them such suffering, and when it occurred, attributed it to the wrath of some offended deity.

And there were also ancient sages like the Buddha, who taught not of vengeful gods but of reason and wisdom. The study of Buddhism was my first career and occupied the first fifteen years of my adult life. As an ordained Zen Buddhist priest and meditation teacher, I taught classes and lectured, expounding the Buddha's ancient wisdom that life's woes were not the random whims of angry gods but the fundamental condition of human existence. "All human existence is characterized by Regardless of the place, regardless of how advanced and modern a civilization we have become, or how healthy and affluent, the tragic, unpredictable, and grievous lightning of suffering can strike at any time.

I had been a Buddhist for thirty years, and had the ordination certificates and teaching credentials to prove it, but I now feel that my true baptism into the Buddhist faith occurred on July 13, 1999, when the lightning of dukkha struck me down and my familiar, predictable, wonderful life of fifty-two years fell completely, disastrously, apart.

Copyright © 2002 by Lewis Richmond

Table of Contents

Contest

Acknowledgments

Introduction

One Struck by Lightning

Two Fear and Fight

Three Surrender

Four Grief

Five Gratitude and Compassion

Six Determination

Seven The Curse of Time

Eight Lightning Strikes Twice

Nine Despair

Ten Thanksgiving

Eleven Patience

Twelve Coming Home

Editorial Reviews

Richmond had it all: loving wife, great address in the San Francisco Bay area and a successful multifaceted career as software designer, Buddhist teacher, musician and author. He'd even beaten cancer once. Then viral encephalitis a rare disease attacked his brain and sent him into a coma for 10 days. While recovering, he experienced an acute neuropsychiatric complication from a therapeutic drug that posed a second life-threatening challenge. This page-turning account of his slow and spotty recovery is a vivid, affecting and painfully honest Buddhist dharma (teaching) story. This overachieving California-style corporate executive and former Buddhist priest whose previous book was Work as a Spiritual Practice: A Practical Buddhist Approach to Inner Growth and Satisfaction on the Job here learns that the central Buddhist teaching of life as suffering and impermanence has literal as well as spiritual meaning. Providing additional depth to his archetypal story of near-death and recovery, the author portrays the deeply rooted fears and anxieties that became his companions on the healing journey. The book may make a more valuable contribution to the literature about brain injury than to the well-stocked shelf of Buddhist titles; little non-technical or narrative writing is available on the medical frontier of brain trauma and the light it sheds on the relationship between body and mind. Richmond made a descent to the inner underworld, and returned a sadder, wiser man. His psychic excavations will enrich all who read this gripping account. (Apr. 2) Forecast: Richmond will be touring New York, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco to promote this title, which should cross over easily between the markets for Buddhist, New Age and illness books. The initial print run is 30,000 copies. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A Buddhist teacher, software entrepreneur, and author of the best-selling Work as a Spiritual Practice, Richmond here writes about his near-fatal bout with viral encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and subsequent lengthy recuperation. Inspired by the biblical character Lazarus, who died and was brought back to life, the book is divided into chapters dedicated to aspects of the healing process (e.g., fear and gratitude). Richmond is most compelling when detailing his struggles with the mental and emotional effects of the disease, such as distorted perception, hypersensitivity, and confusion. His story's strength lies in the depiction of the arduousness and pain of recovery; the Buddhist elements of the book feel like an overlay and are not explored in depth. Richmond seems to have been especially fortunate in his medical care because he does not include a single unpleasant encounter with a medical institution or caregiver something often depicted in other healing memoirs. For public libraries. Stephen Joseph, Butler Cty. Community Coll., PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Newsday [A] stunningly open account.

Jack Kornfield author of A Path with Heart A gripping and illuminating map of the inner landscape of grave illness, and an ultimately inspiring and tender-hearted return.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) [A] vivid, affecting, and painfully honest Buddhist dharma (teacher) story....His psychic excavations will enrich all who read this gripping account.

From the Publisher