I sat up all night in my mother’s hospital room as she awaited morning surgery for the cancer that would soon take her life. We talked and laughed, and I played my guitar and sang to her.

My mother was active in the Jewish community, but she was a militant skeptic who had no time for comforting superstitions about God or an afterlife. Usually I knew better than to talk much about my own spiritual studies with her, but that night I felt the need to say something comforting.

“You know,” I began, “the Buddhists say that everything, even our very nature, is an illusion —”

“What do you know?” she snapped. “You’re thirty-nine years old. You’re going to live forever.”

A favored son, I’d rarely been the target of her withering scorn, but this time I’d been asking for it. She was comforted by my presence, but she wasn’t about to exchange a lifetime of skepticism for pop Buddhism just because she was dying.

Nathaniel Borenstein
Greenbush, Michigan