Remembering loved ones: Part of the fabric of life

When someone dies, where do they go?

Someone I know is grieving for a loved one and the burden weighs deep, more so as it’s a reminder that the very nature of life itself is not only fleeting, but cheating.

We love others and what happens? They die. There’s no way around it.

At times like these I am reminded of the classic 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. This “philosophical novel” might have ended up as just another one of those 1970s “new age” books, but the ideas in this one unfold in the form of a true story, which only concludes in a tragic death after the book was published.

What is “good”?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an account of a 17-day motorcycle trip Pirsig took with his 11-year-old son Chris. Pirsig was a professor of English and had studied philosophy at the University of Chicago. So he did a lot of thinking — maybe too much thinking.

Condensing it all down into just a few words, the book describes the author’s struggle with an inability to answer one simple question: What is good?

Is the quality of goodness objective — a “truth” that can be somehow verified and measured? Or is it subjective — an “in the moment” feeling of some kind? Is your motorcycle (a metaphor for your life) in tune because it meets some preset mechanical specifications or because deep down inside you just know it?

He explores these issues during his trip with Chris. Along the way we learn that a few years earlier, when Chris was a little boy, Pirsig got so entangled in this philosophical quagmire that he was hospitalized in a mental institution. He was declared clinically insane by a court and received weeks of electro-convulsive therapy to give him a “new personality.” (This was in the early 1960s.)

As the book and motorcycle trip nears its end, Pirsig’s “old personality” emerges again, but with a soundness of mind that resolves his conflict with clarity. That’s when Chris bonds with his father more deeply and now clearly understands that his dad was not insane. (“I knew it!” Chris says again and again and again).

The last line of the book is certainly uplifting:

We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.

I’ll admit I’ve done a great disservice trying to sum up this book in just a few paragraphs, but there’s a deeper story here. An epilogue in a later edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells another story Pirsig could never have envisioned when his book was first published.

Ten years later: “Where did he go?”

Pirsig’s afterword to the 1984 tenth anniversary edition includes his reflections on how the book had been turned down by more than 100 publishers, yet ended up becoming a best seller. Then he reveals this:

… this past ten years has a very dark side: Chris is dead.

Recounting how Chris had been killed in a robbery at the age of 23, Pirsig begins thinking and rethinking in some all-too familiar ways:

I tend to be taken with philosophical questions, going over them and over them and over them again in loops that go round and round and round until they either produce an answer or become so repetitively locked on they become psychiatrically dangerous, and now the questions became obsessive: “Where did he go?”

Indeed, do real people disappear? No, nothing “real” disappears if the laws of physics hold true.

Well, if Chris wasn’t real, was he somehow imaginary — existing only in other people’s minds? Pirsig just can’t accept that his son, who actually walked on this planet, could in any way be “unreal.”

Then Pirsig realizes that “where did Chris go?” isn’t at all the question he should really be asking:

Before it could be asked “Where did he go?” it must be asked “What is the ‘he’ that is gone?” There is an old cultural habit of thinking of people as primarily something material, as flesh and blood. As long as this idea held, there was no solution. The oxides of Chris’s flesh and blood did, of course, go up the stack at the crematorium.

But they weren’t Chris.

What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of.

Yes, Chris is gone in a “real” sort of way, but as a part of a larger “pattern,” he is still with us. Pirsig says that you could call this pattern one’s soul, one’s spirit, or by many other names across many other cultures throughout human history. True, death may rip a huge hole from the center of the pattern, but its tapestry remains.

Does any of this bring any comfort at all? To Pirsig it does. As he writes at the very end of the epilogue in this revised edition:

Although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on.

In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand.

We HAVE won it. Things ARE better now. You can sort of tell these things.

Making “good time”

In the very early pages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig described what he wanted from that infamous motorcycle trip taken so long ago:

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on “good” rather than on “time.”

I honestly can’t say I understand all the nuances of Robert Pirsig’s ideas. But if this little essay brings even a tiny bit of comfort to my friend, writing it was time well spent — it was “good” time.

Yeah, you can sort of tell these things.