Tricycle | Awake in the World

In the last years of his life I visited Rick several times at the home he shared with his wife, Marcia, in Northern California. Often I would spend a week with them, tagging along to attend Buddhist teachings, eat lunches with friends, go to the hospital for chemo, or take long, slow walks through the redwoods—the day-to-day activities of an American Buddhist writer living with cancer. There was a sense of extraordinary openness in the way that he faced everything, from something as ordinary as eating breakfast to the most complicated aspects of life and death. To some extent I had always seen this openness, this simple but solid presence, in Rick; but in those final years when he was facing death so directly, it seemed to truly blossom.