In 1994, less than a month after he was sworn in as chief justice, Zimmerman's wife died of cancer. Lynne Zimmerman was a vibrant woman who once served as press secretary for then-Mayor Palmer DePaulis. In remarks at his swearing-in ceremony, his voice breaking, Zimmerman said, "Whatever good I achieve during my tenure as chief justice will be largely attributable to what I have learned from Lynne."

In the weeks following her death, Zimmerman would rise before dawn and sit on the front porch of their Federal Heights home. As his three young daughters slept inside, he would try to make his mind go blank, focusing on each breath, in and out. He was new to meditation, but he kept at it.

Later that year, one of his colleagues told him he ought to meet the new state courts' Alternative Dispute Resolution director— a woman named Diane Hamilton, who was both a mediator and a meditator, a former rodeo queen and a Buddhist. So Zimmerman wandered over one day and introduced himself. Hamilton was a tall woman with smiling eyes and a picture of the Dalai Lama on her wall.

Eventually, Hamilton began suggesting books Zimmerman might want to read and would e-mail him Buddhist quotes, which he would tape to his office wall. Later she gave him a recording of the Buddhist teachings of Genpo Roshi, abbot of the Kanzeon Zen Center International in Salt Lake City, and eventually, a couple of years after Lynne's death, Zimmerman showed up one evening at an introductory Zen class.

Hamilton likes to tell the story: The teacher that night, Hamilton says, was a Polish monk, a woman with a flair for the dramatic. "She comes in and she looks around and she says, 'In Buddhism, there is no hope.' And Mike said he went, 'Oh, thank God.' "

One might think that a man who had lost a wife and was raising three daughters would be drawn to hope. But Zimmerman says it was a relief to think of life as simply the present moment. Everything is impermanent, the Buddha said, and suffering — as opposed to simple, pure pain or sadness — comes from wishing that things were different from what they actually are. From being attached to an outcome.

Hamilton offers this example: the birth of her son Willie, from her first marriage to Salt Lake artist Tony Smith. Hamilton had practiced Buddhism intensively for six years — first at the Naropa Institute, later in India and Nepal — by the time Willie was born with Down syndrome in 1989. Hamilton grieved, she says, but was also able to examine her grief in a detached sort of way.