Caregiving and the Art of Presence

In this tender, candid memoir looking back over the last seven years of her mother’s life, a Vietnamese American Zen teacher shares the deep challenges, unexpected gifts, and the pathways she found through the responsibilities of caregiving and the long-term aftermath of loss.

Ordaining as a Buddhist nun right after university, the young Sister Tuệ Nghiêm (Sister Insight) set out to study and practice mindfulness under the tutelage of the celebrated Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh, a war refugee and celebrated peace activist. When the health of her beloved mother begins to decline, she is confronted with the challenge of applying Zen teachings on impermanence to real life. Through caring for Má, a widow who had taken her five small children on a rickety boat onto the open seas to seek refuge from the war in Vietnam and raised them in America singlehandedly—the author discovers insights on self-care and healing in her own mind and body.
Zig-zagging in space and time between the United States, Vietnam, and France, Sister Tuệ Nghiêm reveals how developing the art of presence can be a key to resiliency, connection, clarity, and peace, even in the most difficult moments of caregiving and anticipatory grief. Drawing on her lifetime of mindfulness practice and the ancestral wisdom of Zen, she shares how taking a silent retreat ten years after her mother’s death helps her integrate her love for her mother into her love for all beings, and explores how a caregiver can remain grounded, compassionate, and free while navigating the emotional weight of a parent’s declining health.

As well as being a moving story of a woman’s love for her mother, the book includes a resource section with Zen teachings on presence for caregivers.