by Mina Rhoden
Novato, Calif.
I overheard them from the bathtub, arguing in the living room—my mother and her friends. Once, I heard my name, and then “her father.”
When they’d left, my mother called me down. She had something to tell me, she said. And through tears she did: My father was not the man who’d raised me and my three older siblings. My father was a man named Charles Washington.
I waited for her to go on. She didn’t. I waited for it to sink in. It did. And then I thought, Is that it?
Neither horrible nor particularly momentous, I accepted my true parentage with an emotional shrug. As far as I was concerned, my dad was the man who’d raised me, and that man was six years deceased, shot in the chest taking lunch in his car. A two-tour veteran and sharpshooter, he was nonetheless helpless against three hooligans, arrested but never tried in court—released on bail, they simply skipped town, never to be heard from again.
When my middle brother died nearly the same death in 1976, just three years later—shot by a man in a fit of road rage—I internalized a message: Life is unjust, tragic and absurd. That message settled into a feeling of anger, sadness and apathy.
At the time that my mother called me to the living room, I’d been practicing Buddhism a little over a year, having begun soon after my brother died. Buddhism had always been in the home, my mother having begun the practice in the months leading up to my birth, following the shock of discovering she was pregnant—a shock because she hadn’t seen her husband in years. Deployed to Germany in 1961, John Rhoden sent home not a dime to my mother, not a word until his return in ’64. Raising three kids on a minimum wage, my mother met Charles “Chuck” Washington, who fell in love with her and the kids, who wanted marriage. My mother refused him in the end, choosing her husband, who did eventually come home, to a slightly larger family than the one he remembered.
I, too, began practicing Buddhism in a state of shock. All I knew, really, was that I did not want to live in abject poverty, nor die a tragic death.
Every Friday, I attended a meeting, listening, mostly, at first. That was just as well. The core message: Dream big.
My father had worked until his death as a postman and security guard. My mother stitched clothes in a factory. And yet, as I chanted, I realized there was, indeed, something I wanted to do, something outlandish for someone like me. After much encouragement, I managed to put to paper my heart’s desire: Study abroad in Paris.
Five years later, I was there on a full scholarship, in my junior year of college.
It was in college that I began reading The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin. I found that I was moved, as much by Nichiren’s words as the circumstances he wrote them in. Exiled to a shoddy hut on a desolate island, exposed to bitter winds and snow, Nichiren smashed his frozen ink in winter so he could write with it. In these conditions, he declared himself “the richest man in all of present-day Japan” (“The Opening of the Eyes,” The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, vol. 1, p. 268). He believed there would come a day when his teaching would spread, not only throughout his country, but the world.
And I remember thinking that he’d been right. Across an ocean of time, translated into a language he’d never known, his message had made its way into my hands, the hands of a young Black woman in Boston, Massachusetts. There is something, I decided, to this Buddhism.
Steadily over the years, I transformed one thing after another: my relationship with money, with anger, with family and friends. Most importantly, I became a person who knew how to hope, even when hope seemed laughable.
One matter remained unresolved, however. As early as college, I’d begun to ask how I might find someone with only their name and year of birth. In the ’90s, I published an ad in a veterans paper with a wide readership. I heard nothing. In 2000, I tried again, this time searching a veterans database, which presented tens of thousands of matches.
As I overcame all else, this one desire appeared increasingly distant. Where my biological father was concerned, I swung between a familiar range of feelings: sadness, anger, apathy and defeat.
In 2017, I began working with a private investigator, who, having so few data points, nearly called off the search. Later that year, I was given the opportunity to take on region leadership in my local SGI community, a greater level of responsibility than I’d ever taken before. I accepted, deciding to use the opportunity to demonstrate why we practice Buddhism—not to do merely what is probable, but to do what seems impossible.
A few months later, the investigator I’d hired attended a conference where he met a DNA specialist. Within months, this specialist identified my father, an extraordinary feat, and also a heartbreaking one. He had died just three years earlier. I’d just missed him. Again, old feelings took hold.
He was survived by his siblings. One, his brother, was aware of my existence. With a little work, I connected with him and peppered him with questions about my father, all of which he answered. We made plans to meet in person that August and then… the unthinkable happened. He died of a heart attack in June. It felt like losing my father for the third time.
Chanting to the Gohonzon, I asked myself what I would do with this grief. What was the point of these long years of prayer and struggle? It did not take me long to decide.
Before he died, my uncle had introduced me to one other member of the family—his sister, my aunt, Patricia. She urged me to attend the funeral. Resolving to introduce everyone to Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, I went.
I must say, I did not expect to arrive a stranger. It was a distinct experience, being led around and introduced as “Chuck’s daughter” to one quizzical face after another. Each time, however, uncertainty gave way to recognition (apparently, I look a lot like him) and I was warmly embraced again and again.
Today, my family has more than doubled in size. Every year, it seems, I meet someone new—a cousin, a nephew, an uncle, an aunt. I don’t surprise them anymore; they expect me by now. In fact, it’s me who gets surprised—by a family that grows a little larger by the day.
In the distant past, (to my mother’s shock), I made a vow to be born, into hardship, into struggle. All of it, I chose, promising to show that Nam-myoho-renge-kyo makes the impossible possible. I never forgot my promise, only the size of my family, rather larger than the one I remember making that promise to. And its never to late to make good on a promise.
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