I was in the monastery for close to nine years. While I was there I was revisiting the mindfulness of death meditation which is a very big practice for me. About halfway through my nine years in the monastery I decided to volunteer for the hospice caring project here in Santa Cruz. I began working with people who were terminally ill.

After doing that for a few years I was assigned the case of a young woman who was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. She lived about one mile from the monastery and she had two young boys who were perhaps ten and five at the time. Her husband had left her after her second brain surgery. She was living along with her boys and her mother would come from time to time to take care of her.

When I was assigned to her case, err prognosis was that she had less than six months to live. Her name was Daisy, and she just seemed a really special to me. She had a presence about her that was extraordinary. I started coming by a lot just helping out at the house. I started going by more and more because her situation was just so hard. Here was a young mom with two boys and she was dying of cancer. Her mother was for caregiver, and she was kind of falling apart. This was her second daughter and she had already lost another daughter from cancer. Here this was the second one!

I began to help out looking at different treatments and I started taking her up to the University of California, San Francisco, for experimental brain chemo. I actually talk to a physician in Italy. Here in the United States I worked with a doctor to start a one-person study to see if a particular medicine would be helpful with this type of cancer.

During this time I was working on my dissertation. One day I was writing up to Berkeley with a friend who was helping me to do some editing. On that trip I realize that I had fallen in love with this woman who was dying from a brain tumor. It was shocking to me.

I was still staying at the monastery but I was spending more and more time helping Daisy. I was praying for a miracle. She had what is called a pineal astrocytoma. This is a very rare tumor affecting the pineal gland. In the Kundalini system of Hinduism and yoga, the pineal gland is the gland of realization.

Daisy was not a spiritual person. She wasn’t into the things that I was into at all. She was a simple woman with a lot of kindness. But there was something in her vibe that was very unusual for me. She was so light even in the midst of such profound tragedy. There was something spiritually extraordinary about how she held herself.

So it was interesting that her cancer was in the pineal gland. There has been also research done by psychedelics researchers that the pineal gland using DMT and activation of the gland. There is a theory that the perennial gland secretes when one is dying and helps in the cross-over and the dying process. In modern science, no one really understands fully with the pineal gland does.

We got sidetracked, but Daisy had this incredible countenance and I felt drawn to being with her and being around her. We were working on all these types of treatments and hoping that she would get better and that we would get married. And if that doesn’t happen I promised to stay with her and tell her last breath. It turned out to be the latter.

During the last year and a half of her life I took care of her; I became her personal care giver. Her mother left because she had a nervous breakdown. I took care of the boys and took care of Daisy. Then Hospice got another volunteer to help support me…

Daisy opened up my heart to something I had never really felt before and that was love. I think I had been in lust quite a number of times, but I never knew what love was.

From a world the point of view people might look at Daisy and think: “well, she doesn’t look like some hot babe!”

She was all swollen with steroids and anti-seizure medicines. It made her very bloated. She had a craniotomy where they had to do a brain surgery and when they put back the top of her skull it later got infected and they had to remove it. She didn’t have a scroll on top of your head. She just had a flap of skin. She had no protection, just skin.

But to me she was the most incredible, beautiful woman I have ever met or have ever had the pleasure to be with. I ended up taking more and more care of her. As she got sicker I became her eyes and her hands and cleaned up after her toileting.

I’ll never forget her last night. She was in my arms and she was taking her last breaths. I knew she was dying and I was just talking with her telling her to connect with her heart. I told her that her kids would be taken care of.

Then, she died.

Unfortunately, the kids were in the other room and they really wanted to be with her when she died. But when she was actively dying I couldn’t get out of the bed to let the kids know. It was one of these oddly funny moments. I’ve always had some regret because I knew the kids wanted to be there with their mom, but I wasn’t able to pull it off.

When Daisy died I was devastated so I moved back to Boston to be with my family for a month.

One of the women that had been very actively supporting me while I worked with daisy was a woman named Jan. Jan had given me her number and I would even call her in the middle of the night saying: “Daisy’s symptoms are this… what should I do?”

Jan was just always there supporting me. After Daisy died and I got back from Boston I called up Jan. No one really knew what I had been through, but Jan was there. She knew. We went out for a walk and it was so easy to be with Jan. We were married four months later. That was eighteen years ago.

Daisy opened my heart to love. I never knew what love was. Daisy opened my heart to love for a woman. I had only known about lust. I feel so much gratefulness toward Daisy. That was her gift to me.

In the end, however, Daisy might not have been the right person for me. Jan and I have so much in common. She is a very spiritual person.

Daisy was so devastated when her husband left, abandoning her and her kids in the midst of the hardest time in her life. So I promised her that I would stay with her until her last breath, no matter what happened. So I helped heal that part of her. She trusted me.