Joe Isuzu's Daily Slander

Greg's Memorial--I Got Your Back

Greg’s memorial in San Jose at the SGI community center went well. Everyone there testified to what seem to me to be a commonality: Greg was a man of the community. There were several communities that showed up; family, friends, co-workers, Buddhists, drum corps, and martial artists. The place was packed. Everyone who spoke did so well.

Everyone who wished to do so recited the sutra and chanted while offering incense.

When that was finished Greg's friend Pete Armstrong read a message from SGI-USA General Director Danny Nagashima.

Then came a Buddhist perspective by FWP’s own Michael McCormick.

Remembrances:
Chris Dilley-brother
Glenda Jackson-mother
Elizabeth Dilley-sister-in-law
Danna Fruetel-childhood friend
Dennis Mancini-drum corps friend
Jason Roybal-martial arts student/friend
Michael McCormick-friend
Mrs. Kim Hunter-SGI member and friend
Cliff Sawyer-SGI-USA Vice General Director

Final words by Steve Cervelli

The following is what I had written. But I only delivered what I felt appropriate and edited myself on the fly. My job as MC was to augment, not pontificate. But I would now like to share it with you all.

Good afternoon. My name is David Leisure and I was asked by Greg’s wife Nancy and his brother Chris to sort of MC here today. I’m an actor and most people know me by the characters I’ve played, one being Joe Isuzu, the lying, smarmy car salesman, and one being Charlie, the obnoxious, mooching next-door neighbor. Considering whom we are here to celebrate, Greg Dilley, Chris and Nancy felt that those qualities, lying, smarmy, obnoxious, and mooching are exactly what is needed. And I received strict instructions to be humorous, so I hope that I am appropriately inappropriate at the appropriate time.

It isn’t easy to write a eulogy. Since I’m much more adept at being glib than sincere, there is a very good possibility that I may fumble, I may stumble, I may just slip into a coma. So here is what one writer writes:

“They don’t give you much time. A few days at most before you have to drop your pen and stand and deliver. Meanwhile, you’re in a state of shock, grief-stricken, haunted by dark thoughts. Far from ideal writing conditions. So you cast about for something, anything, to get your pen moving. How about a quote? Everyone loves a quote, especially if it’s a pithy observation on the fragility of life. You search and discover that every human who’s ever lived has uttered at least two or three pithy observations on the fragility of life. Faced with the prospect of squandering the rest of your life sifting through piles of pithy observations on the fragility of life, you choose the first mildly appropriate quote.”

But I don’t have a quote. I had one, but Greg’s wife Nancy beat me to it on the program, “A sword is useless in the hands of a coward”. I had never met Greg. But after looking at his picture I swear he's who I would have picked out of a line up.

{EDITED OUT}
BACK IN 2000 I re-engaged myself to practicing Buddhism with the rest of humanity and specifically SGI after taking a relatively short break of about twenty years during which time not once had I any contact with anyone about this practice. A lot of people after hearing this say to me “Oh, so you stopped practicing” and I usually respond sarcastically “No, I didn’t stop practicing. I just stopped practicing with you.”

But I think of my re-engagement as a sublime act of appreciation to Buddhism, the people and the organization that introduced me to it. And I have come to think of those who stay engaged as heroes in the same manor as Mr. Gandhi stayed engaged, Ms. Ebadi stayed engaged, or Mr. King stayed engaged. And staying engaged is an act of courage just as brave as anything Ulysses, Spiderman, or Princess Leia ever did. And Greg Dilley was my hero because his actions were those of a hero, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

During this time I also started surfing the World Wide Web, and like Bambi I discovered that I wasn’t the only deer in the forest. There were a lot of people out there just like me. And, in looking to engage myself in dialogues about the Buddhist issues that perplexed me, I found a plethora of internet-chat rooms, all of them seemingly trying to walk a thin line by challenging the sacred cow Buddhist notions of the past without creating new ones. Suffice it to say there are a lot of disgruntled people, myself included, venting on the Internet, which is okay to start with as long as you grow towards something more profound. But something was still missing for me. It seemed to me that everybody was just so damn serious about everything. There was little wit or humor.

Then one day, as I was surfing around, I stumbled upon a web page that had a very unusual name for a Buddhist site: Fraught With Peril. “Fraught With Peril? Fraught With Peril? Fraught With Peril!?” I repeated over and over again to myself. The phrase itself was imbued with irony: FWP; with sarcasm: FWP; with expectant humor: FWP! How wonderfully simplistic and yet full of intention: FWP, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” it’s FWP, “Call me Ishmael,” I’m FWP, “Shut up. You had me at hello,” I’ve found the Frankenstein’s Monster of Nichiren Buddhism and it’s alive, it’s alive! It’s Fraught with Peril!

What did that mean, The Frankenstein’s Monster Of Nichiren Buddhism? Well, looking at the people writing on it, it was obvious. I knew all these people from other web pages and they all had a different stance about Buddhism; SGI, Nichiren Shu, Hokekyo, Ex-SGIers and ex-NSAers, reform movement people, independents, and they all had there own opinions and observations that they promulgated. Yet here they were all writing on the same site, stitched together into one big monster of Buddhist dialogue. WOW!

I asked myself, who pulled this off? Turns out that it is was this guy who irreverently called himself Rev. Greg, a Ninja Nichiren Buddhist. I found out later he was all three. And he didn’t have one of those indicatively saccharin pictures like I had seen on the other sites at the top of his blog: no pictures of sunsets, kittens, Lotus flowers, waterfalls, or reclining Buddhas. No, no, not this iconoclast! He had a picture of a Japanese man that had been ravaged by the vicissitudes of life, bent over his cane while caring his entire world upon his back, and every crag on his time worn face seemed to say, “It’s not the fish your smelling, pal! It’s life! And life's Fraught With Peril!”

So I started reading and it turns out that the writer I could relate to the most, whose ideas and questions seemed to echo mine, was this Rev. Greg. And after a time I too joined in the discussions and there I found my own voice. And we became friends.
{END EDIT}

But I didn’t realize how deeply we had bonded until I was playing golf one day and turned on my phone. I joked to my playing partner, “I got thirteen emails, that can’t be good!” It wasn’t. They were mostly from the people on the blog letting everyone know that Greg had had an accident and died. I excused myself from the rest of the round and told my partners that I’d meet them in the bar when they’d finished. But even before I’d gotten to the parking lot I found myself pretending to be on the phone while I avoided eye contact with anyone I might know. I was about to lose it. Crying is fine by me except I wasn’t sure how to explain this unexpected reaction over someone I’ve never actually met. And I sure wasn’t in any condition to explain the ramifications of confessing “My Internet friend died.”

I was completely caught unawares and at the same time made aware of what an impact this man, a man I never met, had had on my life. I will forever be grateful for being able to share what we did. It’s impossible to sum up a persons life in into a few sentences. {EDITED OUT} But if I had to sum up how I feel about this man it would be to ape Nichiren in The Three Kinds Of Treasure: “If you should fall into hell for some grave offense, no matter how Shakyamuni might urge me to become a Buddha, I would refuse; I would rather go to hell with you. For if you and I should fall into hell together, we would find the lotus Sutra there.” Being a movie metaphor guy, I always envisioned this as Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, back-to-back, in a saloon, dooking it out together as a team, in Boom Town. {END EDIT} So in my own words it turns into this: In the bar fight of life, he’s the guy I want watching my back.