Margaret Mackenzie-Hooson and Jennifer Kaufman

[00:05] MARGARET MACKENZIE HOOSON: My name is Margaret Mackenzie Hooson My age is 82. Today's date is April 26, 2023. The location is University of San Francisco. The name of my interview partner is Jennifer Kaufman, and my relationship to the partner is that 20 odd years ago, I supervised her master in fine arts thesis, and ever since, we've been very much in connection, both intellectually and personally.

[00:53] JENNIFER KAUFMAN: My name is Jennifer Kaufman. I am 53 years old. I am meeting with my interview partner, Kariadne named Margaret Mackenzie Husson. And I had the good fortune of being Kari Adnay's graduate student and wrote my graduate thesis under her supervision. And in many ways, Kariadne has been my study partner in religion, in poetry, in some of the deepest questions I continue to ask in my life since that time. So I made a list of a few occasions where religion was so present and useful to me. I think religion does a great job in helping. At least my faith of Judaism has been so helpful in allowing me to manage ambiguities in life, questions that may not be answered, but it's also been very practical, a great practical tool for me. And I made a list of a few things. The one I'll start off with is some years ago, I was walking down the street, and across from me, on the opposite side, was a couple walking together, holding coffee cups. And we were going in the opposite direction, and one of the men fell to the ground, and I yelled over, do you need help? And he sent me to go get CPR, find someone who knew it. And no one in any of the shops in this busy commercial area knew it. So I came back up. Someone called 911, and I just sat with him, this man who I thought was already dead. It turned out he didn't know the partner he was having coffee with for long. They just met a few hours before. And I sat down at the base of a lamppost next to where he had fallen, and I held his hand, and I very quietly recited the prayer for oneness in Judaism, which is called the shema, which essentially means, listen, strugglers with God, all is one. And it seemed to me to be a meaningful and hopefully the least offensive in case I didn't know this person's name. But I recited the shema very quietly with holding his hand until the ambulance came. And in that moment, I think my religious education was very helpful to me in being present in that moment with this stranger who was dying or had died.

[04:07] MARGARET MACKENZIE HOOSON: That's a wonderful story, and it's so credible that it could have a profound effect on you. And I know it has, because you've become one of the most important, accomplished innovators in care of the dying, from care of the miscarried babies who normally don't get space for grievance, for grieving. Sorry. And I know that you've got other important moments as well that were pivotal in your religious experience. So beyond the numerous hours you've sat with the dying and the people who've died, but the funeral home you were working at took them in if they were anonymous in the circuit of funeral homes that do that. But I know you've got other pivotal moments, and I'd love to hear them.

[05:18] JENNIFER KAUFMAN: Would you like to go next? I don't want to take up all the time.

[05:24] MARGARET MACKENZIE HOOSON: I can go next, but mine are rather different. But I'll give one which was I was born in New Zealand and at the age of five was sent to a convent boarding school. So my life became immersed in the practice of the roman catholic religion for the next twelve years. And it was very much rule governed, and it was rather austere because it was 1945, and the memory of the Second World War was very close, but still in Ireland itself, from which these nuns and my mother's family had migrated in the 19th century. The memory of the irish potatoes famine, it hung over us in a sort of minor way compared with the Holocaust in Judaism, but there was this memory of poverty and famine and death and migration and prejudice when they migrated. So that was my foundation. I'll talk about the pivotal moments some other time. Why don't you continue with yours?

[06:51] JENNIFER KAUFMAN: Well, it's true that I thought about becoming a rabbi. I had been interested in questions about death and dying my whole life, which most people didn't want to talk about. And I think even in a religious context, I didn't know how to talk about my concerns about that. And I think maybe that's one reason poetry has been so valuable to me and our friendship's been so valuable, because you were interested in reading poets that addressed these questions directly or indirectly. Eventually, I did get up the nerve to apply to work for a funeral home, and particularly a nonprofit jewish funeral home in San Francisco, because I knew I wasn't going to become a rabbi. My mother told me I was too thin skinned and that the experience would eat me alive. And she was right. She'd never discouraged me from becoming anything. But I found other ways to explore my concerns about these mysteries, and I think some of. And the work I've done there, mostly grief counseling, also at times included other jewish rituals. So I did spend some time as a showmare or a guard protecting. This is a very old tradition, which I'm sure is practiced all over the world. And most cultures are protecting the dead until they are cremated or buried. And it struck me that this act of doing almost nothing but sitting present with someone who may not even, I mean, for all I know, is not aware, because they're dead, that I'm there. But that that was perhaps the deepest of spiritual experience I've ever had. Perhaps parallel to giving birth, but wildly different scenarios. But I would say both of those experiences are about facing the unknown and not being in control of everything. And I think art making has been about that for me and just in our friendship. I feel that I've been so comforted simply by your willingness to sit next to me and not know how something's going to turn out, which is perhaps one of the hardest things that we have to do. Although I say that in a religious institution where perhaps other faiths feel quite differently or believe quite differently, I think.

[10:09] MARGARET MACKENZIE HOOSON: Segments of other faiths have a great deal of certainty. And in response to what you're saying, I, as an anthropologist, have had some experience in african american situations, and I notice how passionately the belief in Christianity is. And I think a lot of the way they cope with the terrible shootings that are unpredictable, and the poverty as well, but not always the poverty, and some highly educated, but they think that God created this, and somehow God has had some role in this and in being aware of it, and that this makes it endurable for them, the sufferings they often have to go through. And certainly the religion I grew up in, God had it all sewn up. But God for me was a bit intimidating and boring at the same time. And it was Christ, when I was younger, who was the focus of the compassion and the caring. However, in the early life, I didn't develop a great success in that because I was told not to apply to become a nun, just like your mother said about being a rabbi. I didn't know that because I wasn't obedient enough. What I understood later about I was delighted. I didn't really want to become a nun. I wanted to go to university. So it was liberation for me. But what I have understood since is that an idea of obedience, which is conformity and doing what you're told, it tends to dampen creativity. And my sense is I might have been a very good nun because I wasn't so obedient. So I would take risks in thinking. And my sense today, for instance, about the very bad press that extremism and catholicism is getting is that the need for renewal is desperate almost. What I want to say about what you just said, because we, there's a class that graduated in 1998, and they have kept meeting, and Jennifer is one of this graduating class once a month for the 20 plus years before COVID I would attend sometimes, but during COVID we got onto Zoom at Jennifer's help, and we've been meeting weekly for two and a half hours for three or four years. I will never forget what you spoke about sitting with the dying. And I want to say that you're talking about it to me spreads comprehension, understanding, recognition of presence and quietness. Because you spoke about how I knew the funeral homes took turns. I actually taught a course on death and dying in this institution a few years ago. But the funeral homes take turns when unidentified people are found dead. And the Golden Gate bridge didn't have the nets then, and people would commit suicide, and you would get the people unidentified in your turn at the funeral home. And my understanding is that Judaism has a tradition of never leaving a dead person alone for a certain amount of time. So all the staff at the home took turns, including you. Your account was seared into my consciousness of how you would sit there. You would get through the night by having poetry and reading to them. But you also spoke about how you felt their spirit slipping away. And you would say sometimes in the early morning, you felt that they had really gone. And I think of the parallel with the Tibetans who have the 49 days of sitting with the death, but, you know, is a person dead? When are they really dead? And the taking care of them was so profound. And then the next thing you were doing was getting deep compassion about the mothers who had lost babies that they wanted to with miscarriage, and also the ones who might have made a decision to have an abortion, but later, maybe 2030 years later, came to connect again with what might have been and that they had no place to go. And you are responsible for being one of the inaugurators of the design and the opening of that space, which nearly makes me cry to think of it. So do you want to talk more about your next pivotal experience?

[16:00] JENNIFER KAUFMAN: I will say, not to correct my own professor, but I can't take all the credit for all the things that you just said. But because time is short, maybe I won't. I don't know. I should say. You know, I. I can't even remember, but I don't think these particulars necessarily matter, although I can't take credit for having the brilliant idea to create a garden.

[16:27] MARGARET MACKENZIE HOOSON: Yes.

[16:27] JENNIFER KAUFMAN: Where two women in the jewish community had come to Sinai, this nonprofit funeral home, to ask that the community do more to support people going through IVF care or treatment in order to get pregnant, and asked if the organization would create a garden honoring perinatal losses. And it was, I think, the first garden of its kind in the world. I think other faith traditions have created spaces for these often invisible losses. I think, you know, one of the questions on the list is, when have you felt most alone? And one could read that two ways, at least. I think there's a sense of when one is alone and feels lonely and isolated, and then there's an alone. I think there's a rabbi, rabbi Nachman of Braslav, who was very open about his struggles with depression. And I think he created a blessing, giving thanks for being all one, a play on words of sorts, of alone, and how one might feel seamlessly connected in the world and in a complete way that isn't lonely, but that is solo or solitary. And I'm not quite sure how to connect all of this, but I think what's special about the garden, which is now open to anyone, and special about religious spaces, although I should say the garden makes no requirements or requests about belief. In fact, I think a lot of people come to religious spaces angry at a God they did believe in and now aren't so sure about, or don't want to or can't imagine how to be in relationship with that understanding of God, because bad things happen to good people and also spaces where people become even more connected to something bigger than themselves. And that garden is a place not part of the cemetery, and specifically, intentionally, without named lives or pregnancies or however one wants to determine what is, as you said earlier, what's dead? Well, what's life? Yes. And these are some of the deepest and also most taboo tapu questions. Maybe that's a good point to, gosh, so many. But about. Oh, I guess about loneliness. I think one of the questions was, when did you. When in life have you felt most alone? Or. And what was the happiest moment and the saddest moment? And I think in grief, I know I have felt very alone, even knowing that I'm not. There are things we have to do alone that can't be conveyed. Maybe that's a good thing, that empathy can go very far, sometimes too far. But we do have to do some of these things alone, without empathetic friends even. And I've always really struggled with this feeling of God knowing or caring or even, I don't know, any kind of awareness of me. And when you said that there was comfort in Christ, taught that that was a framework of understanding, I wanted to ask you, did you feel comforted at times?

[20:47] MARGARET MACKENZIE HOOSON: Of course. I mean, I talked about this, you know, you're too disobedient. But at the same time, I would say, when I was 14, 1516, still at the convent, I left when I was 17. I had years of deep peace, whatever the superficial school organization was, that we spent a lot of time in the chapel, and various people developed ways. We used to practice trying to faint because you could get out, but I never succeeded in fainting. And so all of this was going on at once. But I was deeply present to spirituality and deeply at peace with it at the same time as the shallower sides of it. And that was my foundational experience of it. And off I sailed to university with that deep ambivalence about God being a bit boring, and I was being very scientific and taking philosophy classes as well. And in the middle of one philosophy class, suddenly listening to this lecturer, who I knew happened to be a Catholic, though it was not a catholic university, suddenly he made it absolutely clear, talking about aristotelian ethics, which was the foundation going into Catholicism, that the immortality of the soul seemed absolutely insane and unprovable and ridiculous. And I would have thought that if I left Catholicism, it would have been because of, you know, sex, etcetera. But to my amazement, it was because it just completely went out the door. We'd done all these five proofs for the existence of God back in the convent, but they weren't entirely convincing. And I realized that to this day, I checked that I was catholic, but I haven't. Apart from taking my aging brother, who wanted to be taken to the church, I haven't been going to catholic services for 50 years, probably. But as an anthropologist, of course, I was exposed to so many different traditions, and I became convinced of what I thought was mystifying before that. The core of all the great religions is the same, and I remain convinced of that. And there are some religions, I will admit I don't put in the great religions, but I would sound terrible to somebody, being very precise about theology, you know, California vacuous sort of thing. But what I am convinced of is there is something beyond our regular consciousness even to look at. Spring daffodils, my cherry blossom is glorious, and the miracle even of a flower growing, you know, the spectacular splendour of the world and also the spectacular splendour that even the hardest boiled, exploitative person sometimes you can break through. And the human heartedness is there. And whatever labels I want to give those, those are things that really govern my life. I had some pivotal moments though, too, and one of them was I joined a year to live reading group. The book written by Stephen Levine turned out to be all women signed up for it, turned out to be a buddhist meta group, which I had no idea because the person who invited me didn't say that. We met once a month for a year, having read a chapter of this book. And Stephen Devine was a psychologist working in the health field who outraged. Outraged because. At the establishment in the hospital, because there was a man dying alone. And Stephen Levine climbed onto the bed and hugged him as he was dying. And that changed Stephen Levine's life. And he continued his psychological counseling in the hospital and eventually realized that he'd never thought about his own death. Took a year off, wrote this book, and this book is now widely read and it gets people to really engage all aspects of death and dying from going to the cemetery and cleaning up some of the graves, writing your own obituary, making plans with, have you got, you know, do not resuscitate directives, but also you meditate on the fact that you're dead in the book, you only have to do it for about 20 minutes. We found this practice so profound that the twelve of us, I think there were rented jointly a large house for a weekend out by a beach. And somebody organized it. I didn't do much. I was teaching a heavy load, but turned up and our idea was from Friday night till Sunday afternoon, meditated, that we were already dead in silence. And it was such an experience. My main one was actually that when you're dead, you leave behind your troubles as well. And it was quite lighthearted at the end. The fellow participants organizing it had us go down to this beautiful beach, Dillon beach in Tamales Bay, and we were sitting in a circle on the sand and each person had 15 minutes time to themselves to ask anything of the others. And the others agreed to do whatever we were asked. And I suddenly decided that I was going to change my name. This had had such an impact on me. And you used the name Kariadne, which was for me at the time I was doing a lot of radio programs, including the opera program on the local minuscule radio station of Point Reyes. And I just played Ariadne of Noxos. And anyway, I wasn't so convinced that Theseus, whom she rescued from the labyrinth with the gossamer of a spiderweb, deserved to be rescued. However, she did. And in my head, the spider web got connected. In what's a no no in conventional anthropology of the time, you're not allowed to mix and match your traditions. But I connected the spider web with spider Woman in Navajo and hopi tradition of the storyteller. And here I was still in mainstream anthropology and thinking about writing, and that somehow the name Ariadne meant for me a connection with my writing and a new infusion of energy. I went home and flounced into my husband, who was Welsh, and I said, call me Ariadne. And he said, kariadne. And Kariadne Welsh means beloved. So he was in the good books for quite a few years, actually, after that. And I love the name Kariadne though it's not legal. But that impact of ritual, and ritual looks like it takes up time, and you don't have time. But for me, ever more and more, turning 83 in a month, presence and listening have become the most profound comfort. And having this idea, I'm now completing my life. With any luck, ten more years of good. But for me, that's the essence of the spirituality. And I also find that ethics from the catholic religion, but from any religion, really are tremendously important. And I lament what trouble our society seems to be in. In April 2003, the world is aflame with violence. And I've come to believe that, for example, capitalism depends on having members who come to it with integrity and ethics in their background. And if most of us these days are not getting much spiritual or ethical direct education, that's why we're so vulnerable.

[31:09] JENNIFER KAUFMAN: That makes me think of a lot of different things, and I wish I had written them down. But it's interesting, as I was listening to you talk about pretending to be dead, I wrote my bat mitzvah speech. Gosh, when I was 13, I had a bat mitzvah, and I had to write a little talk. And Emily from our town showed up. She was a character in Thornton Wilder's play, and she had died in childbirth. And something about reading about this young woman standing by her grave, looking back on her life. It's not a religious book, but it has the most simple. It touches on the most simple principles of living an ethical present life that I think much of, at least my own religious background, seems concerned with. And I've thought about Emily, in a way, my whole life, imagining in some kind of, gosh, I think it's so hard to imagine being dead and living in earthquake country when we have earthquakes at night. I often sit up and I think, I really wish my faith in God were really strong right now because I'm afraid. And I think this practice of awareness of that time is limited, but is both maddening and very useful. Gosh. And I think maybe the most. Well, you talked about California and referenced places here, and it made me think that the religious stream that I grew up with here on the edge of the western hemisphere is very different than the religion I might have grown up in other parts of the world. And like, I think we spoke about this once where, like, studying another language allows you to know your own mother tongue better. I was exposed to Buddhism very early by my best friend's aunt who would take us to green Gulch meditation or green Gulch monastery, really down and farm in Mill Valley. Of course, half the people leading meditation and sitting there were jewish, but I took a deep dive into Zen Buddhism in the context of California, which then led me back to Judaism in a much deeper way. And I have so many thoughts about that. I'm very intrigued by how different faith backgrounds try to bring our attention to the present moment, as you so beautifully described with the daffodils in your garden. Seeing them this morning, and it reminded me of a practice I learned in doing hospice volunteer work, spiritual hospice, not medical, where rabbi, our teachers taught us a practice to wake up in the morning when we wake up to give thanks for another day. And I still try to do that. That was, I don't know, 25 or 30 years ago. And I remember actually, as I calculate the years, I was maybe 22 when I was doing that. And I remember my father, who taught me a lot about paying attention in the world, said to me, why are you doing this depressing thing? I just, I don't understand it. And I said, oh, well, being there with, in this context, thinking about death and dying and someone really dying makes me feel like I'm in love. And I don't think about love that much in my day to day life, but I think my religious life allows me to shine a light on that or encourages me to come from that place, whether it's because someone down the street just dropped dead in front of me and there's nothing else to do but provide love or. I don't know any number of scenarios, but I think, I'm not sure how I came to be talking about love, but it's not a bad place to end. Do you have other thoughts about anything you want to.

[37:14] MARGARET MACKENZIE HOOSON: Well, I have one thing, because you mentioned Buddhism, which is when I was about. No, I would have been about ten. I read seven years in Tibet because it was a permitted book in the library of the convent. It enchanted me. And this was the Dalai Lama. Many years later, I'd done another sort of course thing, practicing the IRA progov journaling, which is very much done in a meditative retreat state. And the very first journal workshop I went to lasted a week, and I found it deeply moving. And a week of silence was fabulous. And the final meditation, I was just doing the meditation and suddenly an image of vultures came up to me. And I knew about the vulture burials, where the vultures eat the corpse of the deceased person. And in this meditation, vultures were pecking my body. And the meaning that emerged in my head was they were removing the dead parts of my spirit as well as body, to make way for the living parts to be able to flourish again. It was deeply moving. So I went to more workshops, and at one, not too long afterwards, the imagery that appeared was I was being booted towards Lhasa, doing full prostrations on a road leading to Lhasa. I would have been at the time, that was about 87. I would have been 47 then, when I was turning 60, I had been landed with an outrageously well paid consultancy, with a big cement firm on cultural awareness, because they send cement people out all over the world, and they paid me so much money. And I decided that that money was going to be my 60th birthday present to myself and that I was going to go to Mount Kailash, which is the sacred mountain in Tibet. And this was another turning point in religion. This happened to be Tibetan Buddhism, but this commonality of the deep presence and awareness and compassion, and it needed it. It was very hot because the mountains are high and the sun beats straight down. And we walked. A very good friend of, also a CCAC graduate and then faculty member, California College of the Arts, Hedy Katerina Einste, who's Swiss. And I walked just in our toosome with some guides for 22 days to and from Mount Kailash, coming from Nepal up to 17,000ft it was, and walking past the area of Mount Kailash, where the vulture deaths are done, not letting tourists close by, of course. But since you mentioned Buddhism, I think for so many people in the US and actually around the world, Buddhism has been a pathway to reopening spirituality in adulthood. And then it's not being cordoned off of. Must be Tibetan Buddhist. In fact, the Dalai Lama says, don't give up your own religion. So that's just my response to your Buddhism experience, too.

[41:32] JENNIFER KAUFMAN: It's really this idea of not giving up one's religion is a very interesting charge. Particularly, I feel, living here in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's very unpopular to be religious, at least in my experience. And I feel like it's a great challenge. And had we been living in a different time or a different place or just. I mean, I'm very grateful to have this tradition, which I didn't really specify so much in how I grew up here, in what kind of jewish family or jewish background, but I almost feel I'm not such a rebellious person. But I think a lot of people reject their own religious faith before meeting it deeply and finding what might be very useful. I don't know, because Judaism has this thing about your lineage, and of course, one can convert to Judaism, but I've always felt that I'm a part of some chain or some long line of humanity, and maybe everyone feels that way. I don't know what other people feel, but I. And I don't know that it's exclusively a jewish line. It's really a line of. Of being alive. But anyway, I just. Sorry. So, so much to think about. We'll have to continue this conversation more elsewhere, perhaps looking over the ocean just beyond this building and contemplating the wonders and awe.

[43:29] MARGARET MACKENZIE HOOSON: Well, thank you very much. It's been lovely talking to you about it.

[43:34] JENNIFER KAUFMAN: Likewise. Thank you. This has been a real treat.