A Man of Root: Reflections by Patrick on Stuart’s Birthday

When I think about Stuart and everything we went through with him in his illness and death, what keeps coming up for me is the image of the lotus and the mud.

All our lives, we’re trained to look at the lotus in people—their greatness, their strength, their shining moments. We want to see them at their best, when they’re powerful or inspiring. We don’t want to look at the mud: the weakness, the decline, the suffering. We act like it diminishes the person.

But that’s not how the Bodhisattvas look. They go straight into the mud. And when they look at it, what they see is beauty—beauty greater than the flower itself.

With Stuart, we kept trying to find the lotus. Every doctor’s appointment, every treatment, we looked for signs of improvement, something to give us hope. Even though it was plain to see, we couldn’t bear to admit that his body was only getting worse. We needed to believe he could still rise up out of the mud.

There were moments when I even felt angry with him, like he wasn’t doing enough to fight, like maybe he had given up. But now I see that I was wrong. His true strength wasn’t in fighting the illness. His strength was in enduring it—with dignity, with humor, and with honesty. He let us glimpse the cracks just a little, like when he said to Suzanne, “Do you know how hard this is … I’m a man of root.”

That was the truth. His root was gone. His body was dying. It wasn’t weakness. It was the naturally-just-so.

And yet in that very place—in the mud—his spirit was stronger than I could see. Stronger than all those years when we watched him demonstrate Taijiquan with ease. Stronger than the master we wanted to keep remembering him as. He was never more beautiful than when everything else was failing, and his spirit lay buried but shining underneath.

We learned this together. We saw him in his worst suffering, and yet what we were really seeing was his greatest teaching. The mud itself is holy. And Stuart showed us that by living and dying in it with the deepest strength of all.

—Patrick Gross