Dying Doesn't Cause Suffereing; Final Paper, Part 2

******

When I was eighteen my parents finally admitted that the events at camp had been disrupting their marriage and after five years they were ready to leave. In retrospect I am glad that they recognized what was happening and were able to make things work. I think that’s one of that factors that helped me overcome the loss of camp. In a book by Terry Tempest Williams, she states that "Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering." Later she concludes the chapter with: "Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does." My resistance to the move caused me unbearable suffering that stopped when I recognized that I needed to move on in life.

After graduating high school I changed my mind about never going to college and applied to Unity College, about forty five minutes up the road from the A frame. After a full two years of seclusion the independence of living on my own with no parents was super exciting. I set up my dorm room and became friends with my roommate. I went to classes, and worked and ate in the cafeteria. I was responsible and mature. I got decent grades and discovered the wealth and hurt of relationships. Soon I forgot about camp and the A frame. I stopped going home on weekends and started to hang out with my peers instead. I found who I truly was and was happy.

The summer of 2009 I went back to camp. It had been three years since the move and I had not been back to visit since. While I was there I visited with friends and family and went back to that spot in the woods where Gunner had saved my life. Looking down the same embankment years later I realized that if I had let go of the tree I only would have suffered a few broken bones, unless I had gotten lucky and snapped my neck on a tree trunk. I walked down the path a little ways and found the same tree I had cried against. I touched the bark and softly whispered a thank you to whoever might have been listening, whether it was a forest spirit or God.

When I wasn’t visiting with people or working in the camp kitchen, I secluded myself in the room I was staying in. I watched some movies I had brought with me and dreamed about how I could stay there for the rest of the season at least, though I knew I couldn’t because I had to pack for school. The last day of camp meeting I left for Maine. I cried for most of the six hour trip knowing that by the time I got home there would be no sign of my suffering. As I sobbed loudly sloppy tears rolled down my cheeks, and spit hit my steering wheel as I tried to focus on the road. By the time I got to the Maine border my breathing was normal and I was able to think clearly. I constantly repeated the mantra that “my life is in Maine now”. Over the next year I grew farther from my desire to go back to camp, but in January of 2010 I was offered a job in the camp kitchen again. I promised I would go back.

******

The six hour drive to CT is a stressful one, especially when you are doing it alone. I had only my music and thoughts to keep me company on the road. As I drove something came over me that seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. It suffocated me and caused my breaths to come in short gasps. Tears began to flow down my cheeks and I knew I needed to talk to someone fast. My hands began to sweat as they gripped the steering wheel, and my body shivered with goose bumps as it was attacked by waves of heat and cold. I dialed a close friend and told him I needed his help. I explained the situation as best I could, that I was supposed to be at camp to work in the kitchen again and that I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to make the drive to Connecticut to work for gas and toll money back. I had been miserable there during my last visit and didn’t want to be again. I also didn’t want my happy memories of camp to be replaced with horrible ones. My friend gave me excellent advice saying simply that if “you don’t want to do it. Don’t.”

So I called my grandmother who had been at camp for a couple weeks at that point. I told her I was having car troubles and that I needed my boss to call me as soon as possible because I didn’t have his number. She told me she would go find him and give him the message and my cell phone number.

After hanging up I took several long breaths. The next phone call was the most difficult. I dialed my mother and told her everything. I assured her that I already knew that it wasn’t professional or responsible to give such short notice to my boss; to back out last minute on a promise. My mother felt it necessary to remind me of all this in a patronizing tone, and tears spilled down my cheeks again. I told her that maybe I was having car problems. She was stubborn, offering to meet me someplace on the highway and give me her car for the trip. I said no I would be fine and told her I would call her from Connecticut.

After we hung up, my phone rang and I answered to my boss’s voice. I told him I was having car trouble and asked if he would be able to find somebody else to work. He assured me that he could find someone and that if I could not make it that was fine. I apologized profusely and we said goodbye. As soon as I hung up the phone I realized that I had burned a bridge in one of my work relationships. That was ok though; I never wanted to go back to camp to work again.

I got off the next exit and pulled into a commuter parking lot in Kennebunkport. I called my fiancé, telling him I was coming home. I got back on the highway heading north and cried loud, wet tears that soaked my face. However, they had different meaning than the tears I had cried a year ago; it seemed as if a dull throb went away, leaving my head lighter, and quite literally, I felt something heavy leave my shoulders. I was able to sit up straighter and felt no physical weight.

Ten minutes later my phone rang again. I looked at the caller I.D. “Home”. Mom must have found out already. “Your grandfather just called me. He is not pleased with your actions.” I told her I already knew that. But I hadn’t. I had completely forgotten about my grandfather and his feelings. I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone or cut any ties with family and friends, I was simply making a decision that should have happened long ago.

I'm not happy that it all happened, but it did, and a lot of good came from it all. As I drove home, I thought back on the short three hour trip I had taken. I had had no idea that I had been carrying a weight so heavy it had been weighing me down for four years. Had all of the decisions I had made over the past four years reflected indirectly on my attachment to camp? Had I been sitting at home, not going to far from it, just waiting for my chance to go back? Why had I stayed so attached to something that I knew I couldn’t have? By the time I pulled into my driveway, I knew that I had discovered something about myself; I was now able to make decisions that I felt were right, and I had matured considerably in both my professional and personal attributes. Camp Bethel hasn't actually died, it's still thriving every summer and I still have my memories. I'm jealous of what people get to experience when I am not there, but I think I know the next time I am there even more fantastic memories will be made. I bear no more suffering because I allowed myself to stop resisting. I am simply excited for the next time I am able to go to camp, be it tomorrow or fifty years from now. Like Buddha says, "Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does."

Dying Doesn't Cause Suffereing; Final Paper, Part 1

Over thanksgiving break I visited Camp Bethel. It had been about a year and a half since I had last been there and I wanted to share my former home with my fiancé. The past four years had been a learning adventure, just as life should be, and I felt it necessary to share the causes of my growth as a person. I had already told my fiancé a lot about camp; now he could see it with his own eyes.

An Advent Christian Camp ground since 1872, Camp Bethel is where family and friends gather every summer for ten days to make new friends, visit with old ones and family, and to learn about and praise God. Today there are about 138 members at camp who joined either when they turned eighteen or older. Once a member, one can receive the bi-annual Bethel Bulletin, and is allowed to own a cottage on the grounds. A key to the front gate (for the winter months) and the pool is also given to each member. Being its own community, camp also has a president and a set of rules which are abided by even as outdated as they are. There are also several committees made up of camp members such as the Helping Hand Committee, of which I am a member, the financial committee, a missionary committee and the YPI (Young People’s Institute) committee. All of these committees help camp function successfully as a community and invite members to participate with advice and suggestions to succeed.

One of the voluntary responsibilities of the camp members is to volunteer to be caretaker of the camp. Some of the duties of the caretaker is to perform building maintenance, security, and completing tasks that allow for the camp to open in the spring and close for the winter. When the latest care taker at camp in 2001 decided they had fulfilled their time, my parents were called and offered the job. As a member of camp, my mother was eligible to be caretaker by herself, but since she had a daughter, husband and a dog, we were allowed to tag along too. In return for being the caretaker, we got to live at the camp for free. Our cottage was built for all four seasons, unlike the other cottages on the grounds, and we lived there for five years. While I lived there with my parents I acted as the “Junior Assistant Caretaker”, and learned the inner workings of camp while helping with the tasks of the caretaker. During this time I entered my teenage years and really matured into a competent young adult.

*******

As my fiancé and I walked around camp, I laughed and smiled as I told him what buildings were and their significance to me and the camp ground. I giggled over memories I spoke of as we walked up the eighty six stairs from the beach by the Connecticut River. When we reached the top of the stairs a voice greeted us. Kimberly Allen, a Camp Bethel member and friend of the family gave me a hug after she recognized me. I grew up playing with her three kids; kayaking, playing tag and attending the YPI during the summer. I told my fiancé about the members who attended and their relation to me; if only friends, or a first or fifth cousin.

The way camp works, everybody watches everyone else grow up and is involved in everyone else’s’ business. The founding fathers of camp were the first generation, and now, I am the fifth generation of "Bethelites" in my family. There were about ten of us who varied in age but did everything together, attending bible studies and getting into trouble with our elders as we matured and learned from our mistakes. Family and friends surrounded us at camp and prepared us for the world outside the Camp Bethel gates. Of course, in my naiveté, I didn’t think I would ever leave camp.

When I was sixteen my mother turned fifty. She had what is known in urban legends as a midlife crisis. She packed my father’s and my things in about 600 boxes and moved us in three fifty-two foot U-Hauls to Maine. A lot of smaller carloads were incorporated into a storage unit in the area where my father had found a job and we were house hunting. Walking though the ruins the realtor called prime farmhouses we saw caved in chimneys, crumbling staircases and mouse droppings the size of deer scat. My father teased me that everything in Maine was bigger. I was always quiet. Growing up next to a river with dense forest for most of my life I was used to having a readily available water source and woodland to utilize for recreation. Most of the places we looked at stood alone in the middle of fields on top of miniature mountains and had no bodies of water.

During the time we looked at houses, we left a mature rottweiler in the care of family. Gunner was getting old and had lost some of youthful attitude and mobility. He was about fifteen and we wondered if he would be able to make the move with us. He was the unofficial mascot of camp and everybody loved him. We had been lucky enough to have Gunner for eight years, during which he became my best friend. He played dress up with me and was always a great bride. We wrestled over tennis balls stuffed in socks, and explored in the woods together. We also swam in the river, Gunner splashing as he attempted to swim and drink the river dry at the same time.

One day in May of 2006 I came home from hanging out with friends and discovered my mother and father huddled around the kitchen table on their hands and knees. Gunner was lying underneath, unable to stand as his hips had given out. We left him there for the night hoping he would be able to get up on his own. None of us wanted to admit the truth to each other. The next day our pastor came over and helped my father slide Gunner onto a blanket and out from under the table. They lifted him into our station wagon and drove him to the vet’s office. I ran out of the house and after the car as they drove away. When I ran out of air and could run no farther I ran down the stairs to the river. When they came back Gunner wasn’t with them.

Two months later in June, we finally found a house. My father was busy with work so my mother and I looked at the house with the realtor. The family living there was moving west within eight weeks, so the house was on the market. We were pleasantly surprised. It was an A frame with wooden siding, a red metal roof that allowed for the softest falling snowflakes to be heard, six acres of land and deer antlers for door handles. Even I liked the house, as it had an aura of Christmas surrounding it. My mother commented that she felt like Snow White living with the seven dwarfs. When my father was able to see it he fell in love with the stout wooden beams and the concept of a wood stove for heat in the winter. During the winters I was there I learned how to stack even the crappiest cut of wood and enjoyed those times when the hard labor was equal to a jig saw puzzle.

The nights there were hard though. I sat on my bed with the door shut and cried as I looked at the picture of Gunner sitting on the grass at camp that I kept tacked to my wall. I would scream inside my head “why me?” over and over again. The tears streamed down my face as I silently sat in my own hell consisting of goose bumps and a loud throbbing in my head. I thought I would go insane enough to be taken to a crazy asylum. No such luck. I still had to check my eyes in the mirror for redness and sticky lashes before going downstairs for dinner or desert. My parents never knew which was fine by me. Looking back now I see a spoiled brat who just wanted to go back to the plush life in Connecticut where she didn’t have to haul wood, wear Chippewa boots, or listen to chickens suffer as they procreated breakfast.

While my friends three hundred miles away were hanging out in the high school, I was suffering through three hours each day of home school. My dad always worked and my mother was too busy being proud. She wouldn’t let me help her unpack or organize, she insisted on doing it herself. The one good thing that my parents had done for me after the move was allow me to get a puppy. So I had to be content with attempting to train my new puppy and sitting on the couch familiarizing myself with black and white movies from the local library. I read a ton of dime store novels and even started to write my own. I became a pro at Pharaoh, the only computer game I owned, and taught myself about the inner workings of the windows computer system.

Whenever my mother was having trouble with life she would turn to her faith. Somehow she still managed to find time to be religious even with all the unpacking, cooking, puppy messes and job as town tax collector. Her unshakable faith buoyed her through frustrating times and she always tried to teach me the written word. I had learned a lot of it at camp, but now I wanted none of it. The way I saw it, God had abandoned me when I had pleaded for him to change my parent’s minds about the move. I had become a secluded badass. I tested the waters in the covert crevice that was my bedroom listening to death metal and rap on the radio. When I talked to myself I would swear in good humor practicing for the time I might have to tell my parents off about something. Wouldn’t they be surprised that their little girl was so worldly for not having left the house of her own accord?

******

It’s a good thing that during those two years I spent sequestered in the A frame no event like that ever came up. I still went to church with my parents just so that I could get out of the house once a week. I even started going to the local Curves with my mother trying to get rid of the pent up energy that wouldn’t allow me to sleep at night. As the puppy got bigger I was able to take him for long walks in the woods during which I would swear in my conversations with the trees and squirrels. The puppy didn’t pay any attention, he just kept his nose to the ground in the event a good smell might appear. During these walks a sad memory always replayed in my head.

The memory always started with a picture of me and Gunner walking into the woods from one of the dirt roads on camp. As we walked into the woods I decided that life sucked. My parents were fighting some of the time, and I was constantly scared that they would get a divorce and that I would have to choose one of them to live with. I could never make that choice! What would I do? Which parent would stay at camp and which would move elsewhere? Who would be my permanent guardian and who would I visit on weekends? Who would keep Gunner? All these questions replayed in my head and at fourteen I couldn’t figure out the answers. Looking down the embankment at the river I thought how easy it would be to let go of the tree I was holding onto and simply fall. At that age the drop looked severe, with trees and prickly bushes creating a dense ground cover. The railroad tracks rested at the bottom with the river just beyond. I could roll all the way down and bounce across the tracks to the water if I didn’t get hung up on tree. A broken neck seemed appealing to me instead of having to decide which parent to live with. I looked back at Gunner.

He sat staring at me; his large brown eyes met my smaller insecure ones. The confidence in his eyes told me that he believed in me and would support whatever decision I made. The secure faith and trust in those eyes told me that I had more to live for; my life wasn’t worth wasting on a whimsical suicide wish because it would eliminate me from the picture. His one look seemed to tell me that my thoughts regarding my death, so that my parents wouldn’t have a burden anymore and might stay married and happy, were ridiculous. He got up and walked away, the turning of his back to me signaling that the drama of the moment was over; he had portrayed what he wanted to and was positive that I would make the right choice. I did. I stepped away from the tree I had been holding onto and followed him. I ran crying down the trail for a ways and then fell exhausted against a tree like Pocahontas clinging to John Smith. I hugged the tree for all my worth and cried until I was out of breath. Eventually, I calmed down and looked back at the trail. Gunner sat calmly watching the woods like a protective sibling as he let me recover from the self made trauma. After awhile we walked home and never mentioned the incident again.