by Brigid Perry
Boston
After years spent as a nomad, living in his car and working odd jobs around the country, my brother returned home to Massachusetts.
He’d lost weight—a lot of it—trying to address a health issue with a particular diet, to which he was intensely devoted. Disturbed by his state of health, my sisters, mom and I held an emergency meeting, in which each proposed a solution. Silently, I cringed. The youngest of five, I worried that this whole thing might affect me, somehow. Meg, too, was quiet, for other reasons. Not long ago, she had been the subject of many such panicked family roundtables. The frantic talk subsided when she let out a long breath. She suggested that we chant for Dan’s health and happiness.
Eight years earlier, Meg had begun practicing SGI Nichiren Buddhism while struggling with her own health issues. In the years that followed, the women of the family had taken up the practice. Now, we united in prayer around my brother.
Still, I tended to complain about my family, to feel embarrassed by yet another odd fruit born of the Perry tree.
“A cherry blossom can never become a peach blossom,” I read aloud at my district meeting a few weeks later. “It would be perfectly miserable if it [tried]. … What matters is that you become the kind of person who can cherish, praise and feel content with your own precious, irreplaceable life” (The Wisdom for Creating Happiness and Peace, part 1, revised edition, p. 207). These were Ikeda Sensei’s words—we were studying the concept of “cherry, plum, peach and damson,” which holds that differences are beautiful and cause for celebration.
“That’s right,” my district women’s leader chimed in. “Cherries, peaches, plums and damsons. And among them, now and again, a nut tree!” She was suggesting, in her lighthearted way, that while my concern for my brother’s health was noble, I needn’t be so concerned with social norms.
I can’t say exactly how it happened, only that it happened swiftly—within weeks, Dan secured Massachusetts state insurance and a doctor’s appointment.
The following year, my boyfriend and I broke up. In tears, I attended the young women’s conference at the Florida Nature and Culture Center that spring, feeling betrayed and alone.
“Sensei,” one leader assured me, “is always in your heart.” While there, I chanted with total honesty: Sensei, I don’t deserve to be unhappy. For the first time, I felt Sensei responding in my heart, chiding and enthusiastic at once: You deserve to be happy! Please live a wonderful life!
My brother was living at my mom’s at the time, where the situation had grown tense, as it had in my apartment a few miles away. Otto, the dog I’d shared with my ex, was mine now. Otto had been deeply affected by the breakup—it had given him chronic stomach issues. I’m a nurse and could not leave him alone during my night shifts. Overwhelmed, I was struck by an idea while chanting. I called my brother Dan, not because he needed my help, but because I needed his.
Two, sometimes three times a week, he began coming by to dog sit. Even when my schedule changed last minute, he was there. At a time when my trust had been broken, he became the most dependable person in my life, proving, to my surprise, to be kind and patient, strong in a way I’d never recognized—his own.
We began watching Modern Family and reality TV, and walking Otto on the beach. It was while cooking together that I realized he really did know an astounding amount about nutrition. I began asking questions and he would answer while happily eating leftover food I’d made—foods he’d once considered unhealthy. He was relaxing, growing stronger. We began chanting together, and our conversations became more open. “I just wish mom accepted me for who I am,” he said one evening, and I realized how difficult it had been for him, to be expected to be someone else.
Even with Dan there, I continued to swing between catastrophizing and fantasizing about my prospects of starting a family. Chanting beside Dan one day, however, a rather obvious thought occurred to me: I have a family. I began to consider my relationship with each member of my family and realized I had room to grow in each.
In the spring of 2023, I visited my mom after wrapping up a Byakuren shift at the SGI-USA New England Buddhist Center. Historically, in conversation with her, I’ve tended to nitpick, to jump at the chance to prove a point. Not this time. I asked myself, as I did on every Byakuren shift, What do others need right now? And I realized that what my mom needed was for her daughter to listen. At the end, she let out a long breath. “Thank you, for listening to all that.”
I noticed, when Dan came over later that week that he seemed to have relaxed, too. He’d be leaving soon, he informed me, for a forestry job he’d found in South Dakota. He’d gained 40 pounds by then and was clearly strong enough to do it.
Soon after he left, my eldest sister, Katie, visited with her husband and two boys. We’d planned to meet at a beach house just south of Boston. Normally, my sister and I would take a separate trip, a long one, to visit my father on the Cape—he can’t drive; an eye disease robbed him of his sight a few years before he and my mother divorced. Chanting as the weekend approached, I was overcome by an excitement I’d never felt before and, struck by another rather obvious thought, I picked up the phone and called my dad. I offered to drive him to the beach house—something I’d have once considered a chore. Not now, though. On the way there, he surprised me by asking if my mom would be joining. “No,” I said, flustered. It had been 10 years since they’d last seen one another. “Why, would you like her to?” “That would be nice,” he said, smiling.
We spent the day on the beach, laughing with my nephews, sister, dad and mom. We video called Dan, who couldn’t believe his eyes. I have a family, I thought to myself, a wonderful family, and I wouldn’t have them any other way.
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