Nam mô A Di Đà Phật

chanting for my grandmother, and the beginnings of an essay for my book

Today is the anniversary of my grandmother’s death. She died in 2017. She came over from Vietnam when I was five and raised me alongside my mother. She loved gardening, and feeding us, and listening to Vietnamese monks give dharma talks and wondering if the violence and sex she saw on TV was real even though I spent my entire adolescence telling her it wasn’t.

Today on the East Coast my mom and a few of her siblings have gathered for ritual and feast.

Does your mom take photos at this angle too?

I’m on the west coast and have lit incense and prayed to and for Bà Ngoại.

I’ve been working on a couple essays about her for my forthcoming book. The song “How Could I,” from Temple is about being on tour and missing her last few days of life, racing back to the hospice center so I could gather with my family and at least say goodbye to her body before they took her away. What I’ve been trying to capture in prose and not song is the moment I will remember as long as my memory works- rushing into the hospice center, and being directed toward her room, hearing so many of our family and friends before I could see them- chanting Nam mô A Di Đà Phật around her deathbed. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. It is the only thing I’ve ever powerfully, simultaneously regretted and not regretted recording.

Very very much a draft/ sketch of part of the essay, but to help set the scene for you:

I canceled shows in the South and Midwest to come home and see her. She was in the hospital for days. I brought my banjo into Fairfax INOVA and played for her. No particular reason it was the banjo, just that it traveled more lightly. I think she heard me. They moved her to hospice. They said open-ended and non-committal things, which I do not blame them for. Doctors and end-of life counselors said she could have weeks left.

I had two more shows on the East Coast which I wanted to cancel, just to stay and be sure I was around. My mom and my aunts told me to go work, play these shows, it would be just a few days. My mom was adamant that I not cancel. She insisted that I go to New York and Philadelphia, and then come back.

They all said she will be fine, she’s getting better, she just started eating again.

I was very uneasy about going, but going seemed to help us all believe she had time.

I was on stage in Philadelphia when it enveloped me, a deep certainty that I had made a terrible mistake. I remember turning my back to the crowd and saying oh no.

I was already planning on heading back to Virginia the next morning. Around 7 a.m., as I was packing in my hotel room, my mom called. Her voice was low and thin. She said your grandmother died around four this morning. We are all here, they’ll keep her body here for a few more hours, can you make it in time?

My tour manager Phil raced us to the hospice center in Arlington. As I walked toward her room, I heard them before I saw them. Fifteen family members and friends of the family, around her bed, chanting Nam mô A Di Đà Phật over her body. Some had driven down from Pennsylvania, others had flown in from Switzerland and Vietnam. I took her prayer beads from around my neck, wrapped them loosely around my right hand, and joined them. I moved the beads forward with my thumb and forefinger, one bead per repetition— circling, circling. We chanted for as long as they would let us before they had to take her away. They took her and we followed, processing out of her room, down the long corridor, the beautifully human hospice staff lined on either side, helping us honor her in life and death. One of my uncles—her eldest son— led us, carrying a framed photograph of her. We would bring that portrait back to my mother’s house and place it on the altar so my grandmother’s spirit would know where home was, where she would go first, to prepare for where she would go next.

This morning as I was placing water and and citrus on her altar I realized I needed to chant and to pray, and that I wanted to sonically sketch what I heard that day—not recreate it, as that would be impossible— but just to create a soundscape of many voices (albeit they are all mine) as part of my ritual and remembrance. There’s no way I will ever hear those same voices in those same configurations and cadences again, but it felt vital to recall them - how some fell off to catch a breath and others joined, and in rejoining changed the cadence and timing, how everyone adjusted to each other for stretches of synchronicity, and then how we fell out, and how each of our voices broke at different times but never stopped chanting for her.

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