Dan Gilmore is dying.
And he wants to do it right.
The Tucson author and poet’s latest book, “My Dharma Box,” is one of his attempts to do that.
The book of 50 short poetic prose pieces opens with the one Gilmore wrote shortly after he was diagnosed with ALS late last year.
“I got the news in one of those square little rooms with an exam table, a sink, two steel chairs, and a computer,” it begins. A rather stark, empty setting in which to learn you have a terminal disease.
But this isn’t a book about death. It’s about moments in life. It’s stories about love, marriage, a hen who thinks she’s a cock, and Vietnamese soup. Gilmore’s had much to think about since that diagnosis, and writing the stories in this book helped him clarify his thoughts and figure out how to handle the terror.
Dan Gilmore, an 81-year-old Tucson author and poet, has written a book, “My Dharma Box,” about love and life, though he says it has much to say about life, death, and dying consciously.
“I was trying, basically, to do therapy on myself,” says the 81-year-old, who has a Ph.D. in psychology and spent 20 years in academia and another 20 as a consultant. He began writing when he retired, about 20 years ago.
Did the therapy work?
“I think so,” he says. “I still have moments, maybe hours, in the early mornings, of terror and ‘poor me.’ But for the most part, I feel like it really helped.”
Gilmore didn’t intend to write a book. As he finished a story or poem, he would send it off to his editor/publisher, Clare MacQueen with KYSO Flash Press. It was MacQueen who saw a book evolve from story to story.
“She said, ‘I think you have a book here,’” Gilmore recalls her saying.
When he finished the book, he wrote MacQueen.
“Writing this book has been like chasing butterflies,” Gilmore said in a February email to her.
“End-of-life is loaded with new discoveries, some scary but most, delightful. My dog, Molly, and a crippled cricket have become amazing teachers. Tomatoes are patient. I miss ice fishing in Minnesota although I have never been fishing anywhere. And all of it goes into my dharma box.”
Traditionally, a dharma box holds precious items that will be key to what you want to happen after you die. It could include a will, funeral instructions, prayers you want read — any number of items.
But Gilmore’s dharma box is for now. It’s full of observations, revelations, fantasies, great love, some loss, all told with eloquence. It has helped him accept and be wholly mindful of the journey he is on. He also hopes it will ease the discomfort others feel around those with a terminal disease.
“Writing this book has been like chasing butterflies,” observed Tucson author and poet Dan Gilmore, 81, who has been diagnosed with ALS. He hopes it will ease the discomfort others feel around those with a terminal disease.
“People come up to you when you are ill and say ‘Oh, if there is anything I can do, please call me.’ And then they walk away.”
Often, many don’t know what to say to a person with such a devastating diagnosis as ALS.
“So with the dharma box, you just pick a ribbon out of it, or a photo or a story and say, ‘oh, here’s something to talk about.’”
The book is behind him, but Gilmore continues to write short pieces. “As my life gets shorter,” he says with a hearty laugh, “I prefer shorter forms.”
And he continues to teach poetry and poetry discussion through the University of Arizona’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
“I love it,” he says of teaching. “That’s probably the last thing I’ll let go of. Great students, great discussions. They are motivated, interested. I feel like I’m turning out a poet a day there. They are falling in love with poetry. I can’t do enough of it, it’s just addictive.”
Gilmore, who gets around now with the help of a walker, wallows in life but has his eye on what is in store for him.
He doesn’t want any extreme measures taken. And though he’s thought of assisted suicide, it’s not the road he’s planning to take.
“A book I read, ‘Final Gifts,’ talks about the process of dying and I am convinced it is a developmental phase, like infancy, adolescence, adulthood. It’s short, but it’s there. And I thought ‘I need that.’ There are things you learn in that phase which are really important to completing your life. At least, I think so. So right now, I’m going to do hospice. I want to get it right.”
Gilmore has had a full, rich life. That is especially apparent in “Revised Obituary,” the final story in “My Dharma Box.”
“For me,” he writes, “what counts is the bucket that each of us carries from birth to death trying to fill it up, one grain at a time, and each grain is a piece of love. So, here’s my revised obituary: His bucket is full.”
Dan Gilmore suffered from ALS. His book “My Dharma Box” was written in part to deal with his impending death.