In the last few months old hands at the Maenllwyd have lost two much loved retreat companions. Don Ball and Jane Turner had been coming to the Maenllwyd ever since we started retreats there. They both knew the days when accommodation consisted of a barn with a much holed roof through which snow might drift or an owl come in to share the shelter. They both knew the crowded retreats we used to have in the Buddha Room and the early morning runs in rain up the hill. Both worked hard at their life koans and loved to return again and again to Western Zen Retreats. Don indeed never tried anything else at Maenllwyd but Jane "graduated" to Chan Retreats and Shifu from whom she learnt much.
I was very fond of Jane, we shared bird watching interests and the love of countryside. Although often troubled by tensions and anxieties her inner life gradually became more peaceful so that during her last years she discovered a truly spiritual stance in life which brought her much joy and peace. I was very happy for her and our last interviews were as much an inspiration for me as they were helpful to her. Jane, I shall miss you and feel your spirit still with us in the quiet moments of retreat. Her daughter Sue has written the article that follows.
Don too was a tireless explorer. He loved the koans of Western Zen Retreats and stuck doggedly to them, often finding a resolution some days after ending a retreat and writing to me about it. As the years passed he emerged from struggle into light and was often an inspiration to his many friends. Again some of the interviews I had with him in his last years were as insightful to me as to him - maybe more so. Once he was working on "Who is God?" Near the end of the retreat we sat together in Interview and I asked him his question. "I am your friend!" said Don.
His exemplary death, described in the obituary to follow, showed how his training had moved him to a point where he could accept the last journey with an equanimity that has moved all who knew him. I am grateful to his son, Veda Ball, for the details of his early life. Don's spirit too floats in the zendo as we sit together. "There is no time. What is memory?" Don would have given a sprightly answer to that.
Don and Jane continued coming to retreats into great age. Neither was ever troubled by the tough rules and hours yet both suffered as much as anyone on the first days. They knew their value. Youngsters who want an easy time take note!
Enjoying Dying
Don Ball 1914-1995
Don Ball, a great supporter of the Maenllwyd and a personal friend for many years died, peacefully on December 14th 1995 in a way that fulfilled with a quiet heroism his many years of spiritual quest. His was an unorthodox Zen training that went all the way to the end.
Don was born on March 25th 1914 in Hampstead, London, the oldest child of four, a brother Keith, who was later my team doctor on a research expedition to Ladakh, and sisters Jeanette and Heather. His parents were Leonard and Eileen who followed the Baptist Christian faith. Don and Keith both trained as doctors at the Middlesex Hospital in London. Called up in World War II, Don sailed in a convoy for Burma but his ship was diverted to Bombay when Burma fell to the Japanese. He spent the war in India and loved it, later bequeathing that love to his whole family. He worked as a medical officer rising to the rank of major in the RAMC. He saw service at the key military bases in Poona, Deolali, Madras and North India. Don married Margaret Reid on July 29th 1941 in England. Margaret stayed behind in the UK for the duration of the war and the eldest boy, Luke, did not meet his Dad till he was four. When the war ended Don, joined now by his wife, stayed on for three years teaching medicine at Vellore Christian Medical College where his second son, Veda, was born in 1948. Later there was a daughter, Neera. At this time Don's spiritual interests were quite orthodox middle class Christian.
After 1950 Don returned to England by ship and remained one year before taking up an appointment at Makerere College, the University of Uganda, where he taught medicine and wrote a thesis on chest disease which was to become his speciality. On his return to the UK in 1955 he took a consultancy at the Miner's Chest Diseases Treatment Centre in Cardiff and established a beautiful home in Dinas Powys.
Luke also trained as a doctor and while at medical school met the woman he was to marry. As so often happens, when the original family begins to expand to include newcomers a difficult period of transition occurs. During this time Don and Margaret went through several years of reassessment of their lives and values. This was to become the first step on a path of personal growth that continued ever since.
Don's interest in Quakerism led to an involvement in "T" Groups which he came to know through the Anglican Franciscans of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield. T groups gave him access to the whole range of the Humanistic Psychology movement then burgeoning in Britain. In a deep and what was to become a prolonged search for spiritual values Don became interested in the ideas concerning human potential coming from Esalen, California and especially in the many forms of encounter group available at the training centre in London, Quaesitor. He experimented with LSD therapy, worked with Frank Lake and also took part in the People not Psychiatry movement led by Michael Barnett and experimented with communal living. Margaret also participated in these explorations with an approach more private and with a more cautious understanding than Don's adventurousness was to allow. These contrasts were to lead to their eventual separation. Their children, growing up in the hippy atmosphere of the time joined in these activities becoming ardent also in their quest.
When the encounter movement started taking an interest in Indian and eastern spirituality, Don's experiences in India stood him in good stead. He heard of Bhagvan Shri Rajneesh in 1971, well before this teacher was known by this title and attended his camps in India before the founding of the institution in Poona. For a time, indeed, he functioned as Bhagvan's personal physician. His children were to follow him to Poona but Don did not at first take the sanyas (vows) that Bhagvan gave his followers. That came later, but Don was perhaps never totally submerged in the Rajneesh movement although he contributed much to it both personally and financially. He visited Rajneeshpuram in Oregon before the troubles started there and was impressed by the enormous dedication of the whole movement before wealth, corruption and Bhagvan's failure either to control developments or perhaps to understand America led to the ultimate catastrophe. Don was saddened but not distraught. By that time he had deepened his understanding to the degree that he was able to use the positive side of his Rajneesh experiences and let go the rest. He began coming regularly to the Maenllwyd and, elsewhere, led some group experiences himself.
I had first met Don when I was training in Encounter, Gestalt therapy and Sensitivity Group methods at Quaesitor. We kept bumping into one another at groups and especially on the Enlightenment Intensives created by Charles Berner and brought to Britain by Jeff Love. In the heady atmosphere of the time these intensives were magical experiences. There was little doubt or pessimism in the air, anything seemed possible and on those retreats it seemed to happen. Perhaps it did.
When the charismatic founder of Quaesitor, Paul Lowe, and Michael Barnett both went off to India to become two of Bhagvan's most influential early followers, Don moved his focus there too. I also was attracted by the Rajneesh movement and later visited Poona where I was amazed and delighted by the extraordinary energy of the place, for it seemed as if human potentials were at last being fully expressed and explored. Yet I also noted that no one seemed to have a mind of his or her own. Every conversation began with "Bhagvan says..." The hypnotic influence of that man seemed total. I was too bloody-minded a loner and wary of psychological invasion to be convinced.
Having attended groups in California and at Quaesitor I had founded the Bristol Encounter Centre together with Ken Waldie and Hazel Russell. In the early 70's we offered a wide range of groups and intensives to become briefly the third largest such organisation in the country. Jeff Love taught me how to run Enlightenment Intensives and approved my plan to draw these nearer to their origin by creating the Western Zen Retreat which places Berner's communication exercises within the framework of an explicitly Zen retreat.
Work with the communication exercise focuses on the question "Who am I?" and related themes. It can lead to an experience of authentic being in which the games of life are set aside giving rise to a renewed confidence and sense of self worth with accompanying openness to others. People work through and beyond words to a direct experience of self perhaps, in a few cases, identical to that known as Kensho or Satori in Japanese Zen. Don's work with these questions was characteristic. He remorselessly ploughed though the story of his life, complete with long anecdotal digressions, journeys down cul de sacs and vague intellectuality commonly without focus. I often despaired of him as he seemed lost in the complexities of his own mind. But his process often worked its way through to a conclusion that brought him much peace and happiness. He had the knack of allowing his thinking to become increasingly lateral so that he surprised himself with new insights again and again. I believe it was this capacity for inventive insight that allowed him so much success with his admittedly rather heady approach.
Once Don came on retreat following a severe heart attack and a period in hospital. He arrived wan, tired and worryingly unfit for the intense work entailed on the retreat. He told me,
"I shall work on the question "What is death?"
And he set to work, exhausting himself until I became concerned for him. Then quite suddenly he broke thorugh. The way he expressed it was to say,
"Death is Now".
The question fell away from him and with a profound sense of the interdependence of all things and times, he drove off rosy and full of renewed health.
In his last years Don suffered from Parkinsons disease, the shaking sickness, which must have troubled him greatly. But he did not allow it to get to him: practicing his Zen attitude with characteristic fortitude he set up a joyous eightieth birthday celebration just over a year ago. A short time before Christmas 1995 I was rung by friends to tell me Don was terminally ill. So I went to visit him.
Don's condition had reached a point where he could no longer swallow. He had the choice either of being put on a drip as his life slowly and speechlessly failed him over a number of weeks or months, or simply ceasing to take nourishment and pass into a final coma of his own volition. He chose the latter course saying that it was better to go that way with all senses alert than by the alternative. He decided to let his own life come to its natural conclusion.
When I reached his room the frail old man was in a chair attended by his son Veda and Veda's wife who had come over from Boulder, Colorado, where Veda is a therapist. They showed me a paper to which Don had given his signature to his decision. Don could hardly speak but through Veda, who could read his lips and sounds, conversation was possible and I soon learnt to understand him. I asked Don if he remembered the retreat on which he had worked on.
"What is death?".
Don's eyes took on more life. Yes, he did.
"Do you remember the answer?" I asked him.
Don said, "On what one cannot speak on that one should remain silent".
Bowled over by this quotation, the last lines of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I remarked, quite unnecessarily, that the German verb for "remain silent" (schweigen) could have the very strong sense of "Shut up!"
Dons eyes sparkled "Why don't you shut up then?" he smiled. We held hands together allowing the stillness of the room to grow upon us.
"Don," I asked, inquisitive as usual," Do you remember the words you used at that retreat when you dropped that question?" "Yes," said Don, "Now!"
Later that afternoon, Don's last, he remarked to Veda,
"You know I am enjoying dying!"
"I will tell your friends that"
"They will never believe you!"
"Coming from you - they might."
Don had achieved dominion over his own death and went out fully aware and joyous in his self determination. Such deaths are rare. We read of them here and there in the lives of lamas and masters. Most of us lack such a focused understanding of the appropriate and the timely. Many of us do not have the good fortune to be able to make the choice. When it is possible and comes about where then has death a victory?
John Crook
Final Journey
Jane Turner
Sue Pringle
30/09/1996
In the Hospice she had a room to herself with windows looking over a garden full of birds, plants, trees and other wildlife. She had slept peacefully the night before and with the dawn she awoke and decided it was time. It was her decision - she was ready.
Two of us sat with her through the day. I was aware of her in some sort of way, but the feeling was just one of peace. The windows were open; the room was full of fresh cut flowers; the geese arriving a few days earlier had signalled the change of season; the sun was warm but Autumn was here. The two of us sat either in meditation or quiet contemplation. It was a beautiful time. As we sat the body on the bed slowly cooled and became less person, more empty shell. At 5.30 the sun shafted into the room lighting up the flowers. We read aloud, we said good-bye.
Although she had been losing weight for a while it was only five weeks before that she had been taken ill with acute stomach pains. From a brief visit to the doctor it was straight to the local NHS hospital. The diagnosis of melanoma was accompanied by strong pain killers with equally strong side effects. These, together with a malfunctioning liver which affects brain power, made a very distressed patient. Scans confirmed diagnoses, she was moved to a back ward, one marked for renovation years ago but still waiting. Unglamorous surroundings, cared for by superb but totally over- stretched nurses. A change in drugs brought considerable relief and spells of communication became once more possible. Letters from friends and family, news and some conversation. A bed then became available in the hospice and so we took her there. What a difference. Colour, pleasant surroundings, staff levels, food, attitude, everything. A few days of enjoyment and then a further necessary drug change meant that Mum became less available to us. Selected communication still possible but physically weakening. And after ten days there, she died.
When Mum took ill I took leave from work and was able to spend a great deal of time with her. She was however always a very private person; I have learned much about her while watching her dying and even since her death. People ask whether it brought us closer - the answer is no. But I understand something more of what she was than I did before and respect her for it. I am not a Buddhist, more to the Quaker end of the Christianity spectrum. She would never have given me the authority to speak for her, so any observations have necessarily to be those of the involved and far from unbiased observer.
Mum was used to going on journeys. She knew exactly how to pack, read up on the culture and language of the destination, and just as important, how to leave behind an ordered house. People talk of death as a journey but it shook me to realise how much of Mum's recent life was an active part of the same journey. She had long since disposed of all her surplus possessions, the contents of her house were designed for use or for enjoyment. Everything was consciously arranged. She painted with water-colours - which she had done for many years - but also learned to explore new dimensions with vibrant fast oils which she found difficult but rewarding. Her biggest canvas though was her garden. Not only did she grow all her own vegetables and have cut flowers all year round but the small area was filled to intensity with colour and power. When she died it was at its best. She was a genuine lover of the natural world and all in it. And on the spiritual side, her Buddhism, strengthened by her visits to Maenllwyd, I know she worked on continuously.
I do not know at what point in her illness she realised there was no cure. The human spirit lives on hope against illogical odds. The initial drug doses meant that she was not always receptive to information. On the other hand no one was going to say directly. To begin with she hoped they would operate on the cancer and all would be well. Simultaneously she knew cancer of the liver is fatal. She reacted when she found an operation was impossible. She took new hope from the fact that the Hospice has drug expertise.
When she realised at a different level they could not cure her she became very restless. She was still physically mobile and it took the uninitiated a while to realise she was seeking her meditation routine. From then on, as long as physically possible with nurses helping, she would get into her meditation position for varying lengths of time - she always seemed much calmer afterwards.
I tried reading excerpts from "The Snow Leopard." She seemed to find that helpful but needed something more. She lay one day and muttered, "What must I do?" A local Maenllwyd regular came to my rescue and we talked together across the bed about many things - Buddhism, Maenllwyd experiences of faith, love of nature and much more. She could obviously hear us and afterwards was much more peaceful. I do not know whether it was what we said or just the knowledge of minds and kindred spirits. The Buddhist way is in many ways a lonely one. He left me various readings which would have been familiar to her and I used them when needed. A few days later she seemed to have made her peace and a few days after that she died.
What a change from the person who I saw at one stage in the hospital. She had been suffering from drug side effects making her very withdrawn. At one point she became very agitated and treated all comers as enemies. Only when given some solitude did she calm down. My understanding of this was that Mum lived alone and she was used to spending hours, even days completely on her own. She was not used to physical contact having had little for years. We recently had a conversation on the Samye Ling students who spend three years in retreat and for the first three months are not permitted to wash. Now I would challenge anyone of those students to be suddenly transported, as Mum was, from personal control to a situation where one's space is being invaded, one is being constantly handled, one is expected to make verbal response to even the most trivial of questions and one is never given more than 20 minutes between human interactions. I think they would find it far harder than not washing.
The contrast between the hospital and the Hospice was not just one of cash but of culture. According to Florence Nightingale the purpose of a nurse is to remove from the patient anything which may distract them from the important business of getting well - or dying. Thus physical conditions, environment, the patient's mental and spiritual well being should be looked after in such a way that the patient is unaware it is ever being done. That is what Strathcarron Hospice did for Mum. In addition, they realised she wished to stay in complete control and used medication that enabled her to be. Nothing was too much trouble for them, and the surroundings all added to the gift they gave to her and us.
And it was a gift. I will doubtless miss Mum for a thousand small reasons. I haven't had time to reach that stage yet. But the overall experience of the last few weeks was full rather than sad - and yes, we gave her a good send off at the funeral. She would have approved.
