For several years Robin had been urging me to read his favorite recent novel, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full. I finally got hold of a copy to read on the plane when I flew out to visit him in Milwaukee on July 19. It's an odd book, about a good old Southern boy with large appetites and great dreams, a man whose life is descending into chaos until he is miraculously rescued by the stoic philosophy of Epictetus. It's also 787 pages long, with larger themes dealing with race relations in modern Atlanta, and I didn't get to the last page until my plane touched down in Vermont a week later. Which means that I was finishing it just as Robin Kornman, our own dearly beloved good old Southern boy of robust appetites and soaring dreams, collapsed with the last words "I can't breathe."
When word came of Robin's cancer in March 2005 he and I had fallen a bit out of touch, but that news thrust us back into frequent wonderful conversations. Though always in pain and often seized by fear, he seemed sweeter and happier than ever, gently clothed in mortality. I promised that I would visit soon, a promise that was periodically renewed but not fulfilled until this year, when I spent a week with him early in April. This visit proved so successful and fulfilling for both of us that we vowed to repeat it frequently, and I made two more visits with another scheduled for early September. During those three weeks I spent virtually every waking hour with Robin, and there was hardly a moment when I wished to be anywhere else. Before sharing some memories of this time, I want to tell about a pivotal period of Robin's life which seems not to be widely known: his two years of teaching at St. John's College.
In Boulder around 1985 Robin set out to become a professor of comparative literature. He got an MA from the University of Colorado and went to Princeton for a Ph. D., writing his thesis on the Gesar epic. From Princeton he moved to a teaching position at St. John's College in Annapolis. It seemed an excellent fit. St. John's was a citadel of non-specialization: all students took the same courses and faculty taught all courses, from Greek to biology and history to calculus. And Robin was both a true Renaissance generalist and a superb teacher. But there was one big problem. The St. John's curriculum was based on the "great books" and was deeply Eurocentric. India and China were but sideshows—the real action took place in Greece and Rome.
Robin found this emphasis disturbing in an institution that pretended to universality, to be studying "world history." He tried to keep his unhappiness under wraps, but it tended to emerge through his sense of humor. When I visited him he was rather dejected about his prospects because of a recent conversation with his dean, who had asked how he liked teaching at St. John's. Casting about for something positive, Robin blurted out, "It's great, it's the first time that I've ever had mental and dental." The dean, who took the curriculum very seriously, was not amused, and Robin's fear that he would not be kept beyond the two-year probationary period went up another notch. He was indeed terminated and began a fruitless search for another long-term position, a search that yielded only the three-year non-renewable appointment at University of Wisconsin which left him in Milwaukee. Robin gradually let go of his dreams of being a professor and threw himself into the role of dharma teacher, scholar and translator, living frugally but grandly and slowly sliding into debt.
If Robin had been kept with tenure at St. John's he'd probably still be there, for he loved the role and would have been a superb professor. I think it is safe to say that St. John's loss was our gain. Yet Robin—scholar, teacher, translator and devoted Shambhalian—was never made an acharya within Shambhala. When asked about it, he sometimes told the story of a talk with Sakyong Mipham. I think it happened when the Sakyong visited him after the diagnosis of cancer.
Robin: Some of my students have asked if I can give them refuge. What do you think?
Sakyong: I can't just do it. There's a process.
And that was the end of that. It left Robin free to explore teaching more independently of Shambhala, a topic on which we often shared notes.
The St. John's experience gave Robin another project. He wanted to show how St. John's would be improved by a wider vision, to demonstrate that Greek thought is better understood when Greece is considered as one part of a wider world that includes India and China. He was delighted when I read him the following from Peter Kingsley's In the Dark Places of Wisdom.
As cancers go mesothelioma has its plusses and minuses. It's a killer; when it was first diagnosed Robin's life expectancy was given as a couple of years at most. But while most cancers also eat up your life savings, mesothelioma, which is always a result of asbestos exposure, can make you rich; you can sue if you know when you were exposed and you have a good lawyer. Robin knew that the exposure happened during summer vacations from high school, when his father had insisted that Robin work for his construction company, hoping to make a man of his bookish and spiritually inclined son. There he spent most of his time sweeping up sheet rock dust, which in those days contained asbestos. But because the big asbestos companies have all been sued into bankruptcy, only a skilled lawyer can find firms that can be sued who still have deep pockets.
During Robin's first series of chemo one of his students introduced him to John Cabaniss, a tort lawyer with a national reputation and experience in suits over asbestos. It took a considerable time for John to develop the paper trail that might connect a sheet-rock company with sales of tainted goods in New Orleans during the years in question. But eventually the cases were made and the money began to flow in. For the rest of his life Robin had more than he could spend, try as he might.
Robin and his lawyer bonded very strongly. John thinks of himself as one who takes from the rich and gives to the poor. When he was a young lawyer he had "Robin Hood" discretely tattooed on his shoulder. Now it happens that, before his birth, Robin's mother had been reading tales of the outlaw of Sherwood Forest, whence his name. (And I have to mention here that Robin's birth came ten years and two days after mine, so that I have preceded him through the decades in near lockstep.)
When I returned in late May another round of chemo had started, but there were as yet no significant side-effects. We spent a merry Memorial Day at the home of lawyer John and his family on the Milwaukee River. Robin was unable to join an excursion on their party-boat because of the long walk across the lawn to the riverbank. It would have hurt his feet and challenged his balance too much.
There was a lot of buying activity. Robin was trying to heed the advice to "spend it while you can." Packages from Amazon and from dealers in rare books arrived daily as he added to his scholarly library and to his collections of classical music and DVDs of the pop culture that he loved. Our TV tastes often diverged, but Robin did introduce me to two shows I thoroughly enjoyed: the marvelous Canadian series Slings and Arrows and Judging Amy.
One day we arrived back with Diane, Robin's care coordinator, to find the door barricaded by packages. Robin usually left the door unlocked, and deliverers had instructions to place packages inside. These packages had fallen over and wedged themselves in the small entrance hall, blocking the door quite tightly. The back door was locked and all keys were inside. It was somehow poignant to be locked out by the flood of newly arrived goods. Eventually Diane and I forced the door wide enough to pry something loose and she squeezed in.
With his new prosperity Robin was upgrading his wardrobe. He was a regular customer at Harley's, the finest men's store in Milwaukee, where he had a white linen suit custom-made. The suit was beautiful, but I felt sad because it didn't quite work. The suit called for a dancer, and Robin had once danced and walked with grace and humor. But the peripheral neuropathy left no feeling in his feet, eroding Robin's connection with the earth. No longer the dancer, his feet rested awkwardly, painfully on the ground and the suit somehow emphasized this disconnect.
The next to last day of my visit was to be spent in the infusion room for a round of chemo. Robin had been there many times and was a dearly beloved celebrity who rather lit the place up. At noon I went out to Einstein's for bagels and lox, several visitors came by and it had the air of a party. In mid-afternoon Robin interrupted me to ask if the room was hot. I looked and saw sweat pouring down his face. In a moment more he was having difficulty breathing and the nurses came running. It looked to me like he was dying, but the calm of the nurses was reassuring as they quickly replaced the chemo with steroids and anti-histamines. Gradually he stopped sweating and breathed easier. In an hour he looked normal, in another hour I took him home, and two hours later he taught his Tuesday night dharma class, holding forth on Milarepa with his usual grace and wit.
The next day we went back to the infusion room where the chemo was repeated at a much slower pace so as to avoid the allergic reaction of the day before. In the afternoon two of his senior students came by for a special class on problems in translating the Gesar epic. When I left the following day, Robin was feeling quite optimistic. He felt that he was getting used to the chemo and that this time the side effects were not going to be so bad.
Part 3. The Last Week
But when I came back in July the side effects had gotten bad indeed. After spending the night in Cleveland (the usual airline horror story) I arrived in time for breakfast and found Robin very changed. His whole head was puffy and the florid color of his cheeks alarmed me. The swelling was pronounced under his jaw and seemed to be responsible for the difficulty he was having breathing. If he held his head carefully he could breathe, but when he shifted in sleep he would wake up in a panic, gasping for breath. His eyes had a look of almost desperate fatigue, and while we spoke he was continually falling asleep. But his spirits were still high, in part because they seemed naturally to rise above his physical situation, but also because he had received good news: the tumors that had triggered the new round of chemo seemed to be shrinking.
We talked about plans for the week and then went off to Robin's weekly checkup in the infusion room. There his wonderful nurse had a long questionnaire to fill out and the routine interview threatened to last forever as Robin fell asleep in the middle of almost every question. She would touch his knee ever so gently and he would start awake, often to ask that the question be repeated. Around noon he began to get anxious because he had a one o'clock appointment to attend to his hair and nails, an appointment already postponed several times. Eventually the last questions were asked. A junior oncologist arrived but had had little to offer on breathing, suggesting only more use of the oxygen supply. The breathing specialist was unavailable. We were dismissed and rushed off to the salon.
Robin sat down in the barber chair and immediately began to nod out. The stylist coped with his wobbling head and the haircut was only slightly choppy. Then it was time for the manicure and pedicure, events that so delighted Robin that he woke up for the rest of the day. His good spirits were infectious and the whole salon was soon engaged with the question of the best color for his toenails, which turned out to be pale green. This replaced the remnants of a red-white-blue motif that he had gotten for Memorial Day.
We did some shopping and returned home for Robin's piano lesson. His teacher was insisting that he go back to very basic simple things and learn to do them right. Robin appreciated the strategy but wondered if it was working and found the lesson frustrating. He loved music and really wanted to be able to play fluently for his own enjoyment and that of others.
After the lesson we watched some television on the huge HD flat screen, grilled steaks for dinner, watched some more TV, and then Robin suggested that we make banana splits. At first I thought this was an amusing fantasy but Robin was quite serious about it. He went to Wikipedia for a recipe and then we did it right, even up to the maraschino cherries. The splits were mammoth and Robin consumed all of his with great gusto. I came to understand that the chemo had made his mouth so sore that only cold sweet things tasted really good.
The weekend was cheered by news from Boulder. The arrangements that Robin had helped to make for the teachings by Wangdor Rinpoche had worked splendidly. It had been necessary to find an alternative venue because of the collision between Lama Wangdor's groundrules and the policies of Shambhala. In Michael Sullivan's words, the groundrules were "anyone who showed up was allowed to attend the teachings, regardless of their level of experience, and we could not charge for the teachings!" while Shambhala restricts pointing-out to tantrikas. And Robin was delighted to discover that Lama Wangdor was a main teacher of Lama Pegyal, the husband of Lady Kunchok.
Despite his deteriorating condition Robin had continued to teach three classes a week, two on translation and one on dharma. This time he lacked the energy to prepare for the dharma class and I volunteered to teach it. He was delighted when I chose to teach on the Prayer Song to Machig Labdrön by Karma Chagmé, whose books A Spacious Path to Freedom and Naked Awareness on the union of mahamudra and dzogchen had been Robin's main dharma texts of late.
Each day the swelling under his jaw seemed to increase and breathing became more difficult, even as he used more and more oxygen. The Taoist practice that we had started for his feet seemed to help his breathing, perhaps just by relaxing him, and we did it every night before he retired. At one point I ventured to make a suggestion that perhaps a healthier diet was in order. For the only time during the three visits an old sour look appeared and he said: "Newcomb, if you're going to be my friend, you'll have to realize how much I hate it when people say things that remind me how fat I am." I left it there. He'd made his choice.
Robin's relationship with his body was complex. When he thought of how he looked he felt ashamed of his fat. But on another level he was very comfortable in his flesh. As Jane Hawes so beautifully put it in her tribute, "His great body unabashedly extended itself to the food, wealth, music, gardens, literature, and depth and breadth of the phenomenal world." His bedroom was a public space and Robin often received visitors while sitting on his bed, untroubled by his state of opulent dishabille.
He awakened on Tuesday with an asthma attack, and panic rose as he felt unable to breathe. By the time that I arrived his caregiver Lisa had come down from the upstairs flat and had already talked him through the worst of it, but he was shaken, gripped by fear of asphyxiation, of the moment realizing that you had breathed your last. I remained concerned about his color, and that afternoon we took him to the ER, where, after a bunch of tests, he was sent for the night to the ICU.
The next day I found Robin in the ICU, looking better and being ignored by the staff. He just didn't appear sick enough to warrant their attention. He had brought two books to the hospital, the new Harry Potter and The Princess, a long dramatic poem by Tennyson. Robin had started on Harry but after 100 pages switched to poetry. Then I picked up The Princess and started reading aloud. I fell in love with Tennyson's rich, elegant language and subtle feminist message, and read on for several hours to Robin and others who came by. Eventually a doctor showed up and took 20 seconds to tell Robin he could go home.
So Robin came home, for my last night in Milwaukee, and, as it turned out, for his last night. We returned, oh so gingerly, to the subject of health and diet. It was suspected by the medics that he was having an allergic reaction to a blood pressure medication. It was the third such drug he had used and he'd had trouble with all of them. We talked our way to the idea that instead of trying a fourth med he might go on a low salt diet. I heard later that he had told Diane, his care coordinator, of this intention. She had responded with enthusiasm and also with some suggestions of further dietary improvements. Robin's response was emphatic: "Who said anything about sugar? I'm talking about salt."
Two days earlier he had asked if I could prolong my visit and I had explained the upcoming family events that demanded my presence in Vermont. Although I didn't stay, I was concerned that somebody be with Robin at all times and helped to organize a rota for the coming weekend, when Lisa and most of his close students would be out of town and Diane would be working at Art Asia. Lisa was leaving at 5:30 for an early flight so I arrived before then and found Robin wandering in a sort of daze, struggling with his breath, with loud Gregorian Chant playing. We sat down and I held his hand and breathed with him for two hours until it began to come more easily. Other folks dropped by, including Dr. David, who was pleased that the swelling seemed to be subsiding. I went out for lattes and we cooked a good Southern breakfast of bacon, eggs and grits. When I left for the airport at 10:30 the mood was rather upbeat.
That afternoon, as others have reported, Robin received a call from Lama Wangdor and took notes as he was given instructions on dying. Then he practiced piano until his teacher arrived. The lesson was totally different from the previous one. The teacher later said that Robin had "come into his own musicality." One of Robin's oldest students was also there and was deeply moved by his playing. Then Robin stood up, took several steps, said "I can't breathe" and collapsed.
Breathing had always been an issue for Robin. He had bad asthma as a child and though it eased it never fully left. Then in later years he suffered from sleep apnea and slept with a CPAP breathing apparatus. He believed that cancer had cured the sleep apnea, but I suspect that it was the loss of weight which had effected the change, and that with the weight regained the sleep apnea may have returned but not been explicitly noticed.
While Robin's last words were of his breath, the immediate cause of that sensation of asphyxiation seems to have been a large blood clot that had no direct connection with the cancer. There is a paradoxical aspect of the diagnosis of cancer. By sentencing you to a slow, lingering demise it helps you to forget that death can come without warning. Robin and those around him tended to assume that he would die the death of the cancer patient, possibly very painful but definitely gradual. Because he was so sure that he had more time, Robin left no will. A man in full, he was full of plans for the future. Let me end with some of the plans that he shared with me, in no particular order.
* * *
Part 4. Robin's Plans
After years of resigned celibacy, Robin planned to revive his love life.
Robin planned to have insurance cover all future medical bills. He had researched the subject thoroughly and came up with an economical combination of three insurance plans that would cover every eventuality. Yet he was troubled that, hindered by mental effects of morphine and chemo, he might have misunderstood.
Robin's home was already a comfortable and enlivening space, frequented by a large variety of folks. He planned to turn it into an elegant Shambhala palace, a center of enriching presence. He was searching and buying on many fronts, but immediate attention was focused on finding the perfect replacement for the sagging couch in the living-room, and visitors often found themselves considering possibilities in catalogs and websites. A problem more severe than replacing the sagging couch was having a support system that would care for Robin and also put in order the chaos that he left in his wake. Having Lisa live upstairs had already made a big dent in the chaos and the system just needed a few tweeks. And then there was the problem of where to put the flood of incoming books.
For Robin had plans to expand his already vast library. The large unfinished attic was going to be turned into a library annex and he was working on a system for shelving systematically with sections for music, poetry, dharma, French, Hermetics, etc. He really needed a librarian.
Robin was eager to get beyond page 100 of the new Harry Potter book and to see the recent movie.
Robin and I planned to watch the rest of Slings and Arrows when I returned in September.
Robin planned to finish editing the Gesar translation and see it through to publication. This was a vast project and he had felt keenly his inability, with mind clouded by morphine and chemo, to attend to it properly. Some chaos had crept into his Gesar files and I was working with him to restore order. He recognized that he might not live to see this through, and he was training the students in his translation classes to take it on. And it is heartening to read in Sangye Khandro's tribute that she and Lama Chonam intend to get involved.
Robin had plans to meet the responsibility of having received a vast trove of teachings from the Vidyadhara, some given only to him. He had begun a long project which I jokingly referred to as "the complete teachings of Chögyam Trungpa channeled through Robin Kornman." These would not be written but would appear in DVD or on line, with the number 25 used as an indication of scope. The first installment, Creating Enlightened Society, was recently released by Robert Walker through Great Path Tapes and Books. In the Tuesday night dharma class Robin was preparing for the next installment by teaching on the Kagyu lineage, relying largely on early teachings of the Vidyadhara on lineage and devotion.
Finally, Robin and I were planning to join forces again. It would have been our third collaboration, since in the 70s we worked together on curriculum development for Vajradhatu, and later Robin joined with me, Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch in coordinating the cognitive science summer program at Naropa. This new project never took a clear shape, but it arose from Robin's experience of Eurocentrism at St. John's and my own longstanding interest in Pythagoras. We had decided to start by reading together the great poem of Parmenides, with Robin using the Greek that he learned while teaching at St. John's to work with the original. We intended to critique the controversial translation and interpretation of the poem given recently by Peter Kingsley. But we barely got started, for Robin was too sick. And now we never will.
Oh Robin, man in full to the very end, what fortunate wind blew me to Milwaukee for those last days. I love you.
Newcomb Greenleaf
Saint Johnsbury, Vermont
August 19, 2007
* * *
Addendum
I have learned that during his last months Robin was practicing the short dzogchen text Heart Advice written by Nyakla Jangchub Dorje, who was a principal teacher of Lama Wangdor. Here is how it concludes, in the fine translation of Steven Goodman:
death time comes &
your material and vital forces break down
and your elemental energies transmute
into blessings
of rainbow remains
never changing
it's now dissolved
back into
the primal state
awareness settles back
into space
Dharmakaya—the primordial
and it activates
all tangible dimensions
releasing enlightened activities
bringing benefit
to all who live
wide as space itself
this is how it is.
now bountiful benefits
will flow
BE HAPPY! GEY-O!
Wangdor Rinpoche with the students at his retreat in
Milwaukee (taken by Robin).
© 2007 Newcomb Greenleaf.
