Ella May Damiani
Mother and Mystic (1924-2008)
by Christi Cox

Ella May Damiani, beloved mother and friend, died on January 7, 2008 at home in the care of friends, family, and Hospicare. A woman of extraordinary compassion and depth, Ella May was a lifetime Board member of Wisdom's Goldenrod Center for Philosophic Studies, a not-for-profit center founded by her husband, Anthony Damiani. Welcoming hundreds of Center visitors into her home, Ella May housed and fed all who arrived, at anytime of the day or night. She welcomed everyone, gracefully expressing a spirit of inclusion - one of the highest ideals of the philosophic path. One of the more illustrious visitors Ella May had the good fortune to greet was the Dalai Lama, who visited Wisdom's Goldenrod in 1979.  That connection proved providential, as Christi Cox describes below.
- The Damiani Family

And Ella May was deeply in need. A cancer operation had revealed massive and unexpected mergers throughout her body. The surgeon had been tempted to simply sew her back up and let her die, but then changed his mind and removed most of the elderly lady’s stomach and pancreas and stapled her back together. Why not? One could always hope for the best.

But the best didn’t happen. A few days later, just as her body began to adjust to the major reconstruction of its innards, Ella May had a heart attack. Not just a small cardiac event, but one so massive that her family was roused from their Brooklyn beds and drove hours through the night hoping to reach her in time to say goodbye.

“Barring a miracle, she probably won’t last through the night,” the doctor had said. “So much of her heart is damaged that she doesn’t have enough left to sustain life.”

At 77, Ella May had come a long way from the bread-and-wafer Christianity of her childhood. She’d been the kind of radiant girl who actually loves to attend mass and who feels a special devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus. In fact, she’d been the kind of girl who wants to be a nun. But she was saved from the cloister and the wimple by falling in love with someone wonderfully inappropriate. Tony Damiani. Italian, but still.

“Who would have thought I’d end up marrying a crazy bohemian,” Ella May said to me, raising a white eyebrow. Aah, Tony of the thick, dark hair and the substantial passion: for music, for philosophy, for a good Catholic girl. Tony who would go to church only so that he could walk Ella May home. Tony who came from a family that routinely and methodically cursed all the saints every morning before coffee. And while he didn’t quite go that far, his views on organized religion were less than kind. It was upsetting for Ella May, but God knows, she loved him. “I taught him character; he taught me philosophy,” she recalls. Later he was to become a highly respected spiritual teacher for a wide range of students. Deeply mystical and philosophically astute, he was obsessed with an intuition that the metaphysical core of every religion must surely be pointing at the same truth – and damn it, he was going to figure it out. He introduced her to the thought of Plato, Plotinus, and alchemy, and to the many abstruse schools of Hinduism and Buddhism. And eventually, to the Dalai Lama.

It must have been an extraordinary meeting. Years afterwards, the Dalai Lama still referred to Tony, the self-taught philosopher with the unrepentant Brooklyn accent, as his spiritual brother. And, when illness struck Ella May, like good family the Tibetan leader did his best to help.

That night, as Ella May fell slowly into the cavity of death, a friend sent a message to the office of the Dalai Lama in the Himalayan foothills. And almost immediately the reply came. “The Dalai Lama will personally pray for Ella May’s complete recovery,” it said on the crumpled sheet edging out slowly from an uncooperative fax machine.

When the dawn came the elderly lady was still alive. Barely. Three days later she was stronger. “She won’t live more than a few days,” the staff predicted. A week, two weeks passed.

How could this woman still be alive, her cardiologist wondered. Intrigued he sent her off to have an echocardiogram – and then a stress test – so that he could get a clear view of the functioning of her heart. “Can’t be,” he said, looking back and forth from the new printouts to the ones taken shortly after the heart attack. “Must be a mix-up.” What he was looking at, though he didn’t know it, was a certifiable case of divine intervention. The heart he was now examining was virtually one hundred percent normal. No plaques. No clots. No damage.

The staff began calling Ella May the miracle lady. And the nurses changed her bedpans and wiped her broad forehead with the tenderness that people feel at the edge of new life.

A few days later her surgeon stopped by to see his patient. He looked sweetly at her out of his exceptionally dark eyes (“he’s so good-looking,” she marveled later).

“We’ve come to the conclusion,” he said, pointing at the large photo of the Dalai Lama near her bed, “that you’ve had help from outside sources.” Ella May nodded. She knew. Even through the heart attack she’d felt held by a white light that entered through the crown of her head. She could feel it falling into her, healing every organ and cell of her body.

A month later the results of her blood work showed minimal cancer activity and the doctors sent Ella May home. On the kitchen table, among the potted plants and the stacks of bills, lay a letter, typed on a fine creamy paper with a crimson seal on the top. “Dear Ella May,” it read, “my prayers are with you for a speedy and complete recovery.” At the bottom of the page, in black ink was the complex and elegant signature of the Dalai Lama.

“So what do you think, Ella May?” I asked her a few days later. We were sitting together in her overstuffed living room. Piles of books balanced precariously at her feet. An old World War II movie was reaching its dramatic climax on the television.

“You mean, why did this healing happen to a dumb bitty thing like me?” she said. “Well, I’d emptied myself and the Lord came in and healed me.” She stopped and considered for a moment, the erratic halo of her white hair stirring around her face. “So many people were praying for me; the prayers were like a chorus coming up from the earth. And of course the Dalai Lama, being who he is, his prayers are so powerful.” And suddenly she smiled with an outrageous radiance. If I’d been the Dalai Lama I would have saved her too, she was so beautiful. On the screen across the room a tank exploded percussively.

“One time,” she murmured, ignoring it utterly and leaning back in her chair, “when the Dalai Lama was giving an initiation, I had an amazing experience.” I turned my back on the tank that now lay in technicolor array within the confines of the ancient TV, and pulled my chair a little closer.

Adjusting her nightgown, which had slipped off one shoulder, Ella May began her story. At the time, she said, she respected the Tibetan leader but didn’t know much about him.

Seated uncomfortably in a cavernous hall with several thousand people, she listened as the Dalai Lama spoke from an ornate dais. She wasn’t a Buddhist but still, she thought, it was good to be in the presence of a spiritual person. He had just told the crowd that it didn’t matter whether one was a Buddhist or not in order to benefit from the spiritual initiation he was about to give. As she looked at him across the rows of heads, she noticed with surprise that a golden line of light seemed to be etched around the silhouette of the Tibetan. An aura, a halo, what? But before she had time to figure that out, the maroon-robed figure of the Dalai Lama transformed spectacularly into a green female deity.

“It happened so fast – it was whirling like crazy,” she told me. “Fantastic energy was flowing from it.” Then the green figure transmuted into a white female deity; the energy quieted. “From great power to great stillness,” said Ella May. “I held my breath, it was so overwhelming.” It was only later that a Buddhist friend told her that the Dalai Lama was very specifically aligned with two female deities – the green and white forms of Tara, a goddess of compassion.

“I usually don’t have visionary experiences,” Ella May divulged, “but the Dalai Lama really socked it to me. The sense of that presence was with me a long time.”

I was impressed, but Ella May was matter-of-fact. “These experiences are there to help us realize that there’s more to this world than we see with our eyes,” she declared. She tugged at the other sleeve of her nightgown. “It’s a wonderful affirmation of the divine life. We get a touch of it here, a touch of it there. We can reach out for it or we can say, oh, that was just another crazy thing. But if we reach out for the divine it means that the soul truly wants to be home.”

This is how the world is, she seemed to be telling me. Replete enough with saints, healing, compassion, and the most ordinary and wonderful gestures of grace.

Christi Cox is an editor at Snow Lion Publications.