Pilgrimage

This morning I am on a plane to San Francisco. This was not a planned trip, but rather was an anticipated trip that I knew would come sooner or later and may well not be the last of these trips in the near future. You see, I’m going to visit a long-time friend who is not well. I don’t use the term pilgrimage lightly just to refer to a casual trip to visit a friend. A pilgrimage is a journey to a place or for a purpose which is considered sacred or spiritually significant, undertaken for religious devotion, penance, gratitude, or personal transformation. This is all of the above in one way or another. The key elements of a pilgrimage involve purpose and are therefore often religious or spiritual, seeking blessing, healing, forgiveness, or deeper connection with faith. This trip has a “religious” context because it is taken with great reverence for both the person I go to visit and the circle of life the circumstances warrant. The destination is also important to the context of this reverence. It’s less a site tied to religious meaning. It’s not a shrine, temple, holy city, or place linked to a saint, prophet, or sacred event, but San Francisco is the vortex of both the high-tech world that defines modern life and for both the California lifestyle I have adopted as my own and the private equity revolution which has driven much of my work for thirty years. My friend is linked to all three of those contexts. The journey itself is less important than the destination or the purpose. There is a bit of travel hardship and reflection along the way that are part of the practice of pilgrimage. There is also a certain amount of ritual to it all, which may involve some specific customs at the site not unlike prayer, offerings, circumambulation, or other rites. I will spend today and all of tomorrow in the presence of my friend, trying as best I can to soak up as much of his essence and wisdom as I can because I have declining confidence that it will not be lost to mankind forever if it is not captured. If that isn’t spiritual and a form of prayer, I can’t image what would be more so.

Well-known examples of pilgrimage like the Hajj to Mecca in Islam, the Camino de Santiago in Christianity, the Kumbh Mela in Hinduism, and pilgrimages to Jerusalem, sacred to multiple faiths, are not necessarily more sacred. I’m not Muslim, but have been in Medina and Jeddah, so very close to Mecca, close enough to encounter many pilgrims. I am Christian and I have ridden the length of the Camino de Santiago by motorcycle, encountering many pilgrims of St. George along the “Way”. I’ve both been in India and on the Ganges while Kumbh Mela was underway and have written about the ritual and the spiritual Naga that lead the faithful. And I have been to Jerusalem and the other sites in the holy lands from Masada to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. I’ve walked up the Via Delarosa and through the tombs near the Wailing Wall, and kneeled on the stones of Temple Mount. I feel like I understand the importance of pilgrimage.

When my father died 33 years ago, as his oldest son, I took on the task of handling the arrangements. I took him to the Neptune Society for cremation, bought him a space for his ashes in the garden wall of the Mission of San Luis Rey near our current hilltop. I wrote and gave the elegy to bring closure to his somewhat detached and mysterious life. When my mother died at 100, nine years ago, I flew out to see her in hospice before she died. She was not conscious, but her presence still had meaning to me as she spent her final moments in her mortal coil. I made the pilgrimage with my oldest sister to her gravesite a month or so later as we entered her remains and spoke of her amazing and profound life. I even spent two months memorializing her life (and by minor extension, the life of my father as I knew of it) in a book I titled Mater Gladiatrix. So, I have made a few personal pilgrimages as well.

This pilgrimage I am on today is both different and similar to all of those various pilgrimages of note both personal and historical. Why is this friend so special to me? I have known him for 35 years, or half my life. I was at the bedside of his first wife when she died twenty-five years ago. I introduced him to his current wife and care-giver. I know all four of his children and all eight of his grandchildren. I once sold him an apartment I had lived in in Manhattan. I have skied with him many times and swum in the blue lagoon of Iceland with him. I’ve even walked the souks and Berber villages of Morocco with him. I have invested a good deal of money in an investment he has spearheaded and he has done likewise in one of mine (mine paid off handsomely for him, but alas his did not for me). I manage an investment for his grandchildren to this day. It’s fair to say our lives have been strongly connected for 35 years.

He is 15 years my senior, so closer to bring an older brother than a father figure to me. But he is also far and away the smartest man I’ve ever known. And even in his failing health he is both stronger and sharper than most men I’ve ever encountered. These are not gilded observations, but objective realities.

I last saw him four months ago and I was worried by his physical deterioration. I have now seen and spent my first of two days with him and am pleased to report that he looks and sounds considerably improved. I made this pilgrimage in fear that he might be fading and now find that he looks stronger than ever though not highly mobile. His strength of will is a force of nature that has a continuing agenda to fulfill.

I came to pay homage to the man and to wonder of life in its final, peaceful cycle, but find that my main takeaway is quite different from what I expected. The message of resilience and indomitability of the human spirit is hard to ignore. We all succumb to nature in the end, but as Dylan Thomas famously said, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” That was written for his dying father. The poem is an exhortation not to accept death passively, a call to fight fiercely against death even when the outcome is inevitable. Fury and resistance rather than peaceful surrender. Raw grief and anger, with control and chaos held in the same breath. Thomas argues that intensity in the face of the end isn’t just for one type of person; it’s a universal imperative. As should be the case, my pilgrimage for my friend ends up being more for me than anyone.