How to Grieve
First the stone. Let it settle
into the soil of your heart.
Then something worn—
turquoise set in gold—
that adorned her wrist,
square box of her bones.
Breathe your sorrow,
a bridge to what never dies,
its name the same as Spirit.
Let it test your mettle:
Let it fly.
I just merged my mom’s and dad’s ashes, putting them back together in this plane. I know they’re together on the other.
It’s been her wish since he died. It was deeply relieving and healing to do it, painstaking and requiring full presence. They’re sharing a lovely cigar humidor which has been my dad’s solo resting place for 32 years, and I put just a little of each into a small brass aftaba from India that my sister gave me, a symbol of the larger one that held my dad’s ashes in our mom’s house.
She takes up the lion’s share of the box they’re in, and it’s fitting in a way. She was here longer, and we had a more complex journey. It’s weighty now. Mom’s ballast mixing with Dad’s fine dust. Maybe this is how they’re mixed in me, too.
A few years ago, I had an Akashic Channeling from a lovely woman named Jen Eramith, and I asked about my relationship with my parents. The message rang deeply true for me and came at a time when I was undergoing some deep healing around my relationship with my mom. She said that the soul contract with my father was very brief. We were friends, peers, it was light and easy, and when he died, our work together was done.
My mother was another story. Ours was a long and complex relationship spanning many lifetimes, and we had a lot of work to do in this one. This came around the time that I moved 3000 miles away from my mother, to whom I had more or less promised that I would stay close throughout the end of her life. She was already fairly diminished at this time, but still, she was a far stronger presence than she was in the last year.
I remember going to see her and sitting on the floor at her feet. She had one of those automatic lounge chairs that lift up to help the sitter stand. It was where she spent most of her day–all of her day except for meals. I felt such a pain in my heart to tell her that I had been invited by my partner to join her in Washington State. It was something that she had dreaded and referenced frequently. But at this time, when I told her that I wanted to go, she said “Of course, I will miss you, but I understand that you need to go.”
Her blessing was important to me. I knew that I was leaving her as she was entering the last of her days. I continued to call her daily and visited twice a year. I had undergone a healing in our relationship, letting go of the story I had lived with in which my mother was somehow to blame for my discomfort in life. There’s a way, of course, that our stories are both true and untrue. We are born into families and social, economic and cultural situations that shape our experience. We may be a disappointment, an inconvenience, a challenge. And yet, in all but the most extreme circumstances, we are still loved.
My mother grew up under Hitler. She was born in 1929 in Bavaria. She came to consciousness under Hitler, and she embodied the German style of child-rearing that is so well dissected in Alice Miller’s book The Drama of the Gifted Child. She was not one for coddling, cuddling or compliments. It was not her nature.
She gave her love in very tangible ways; she was fierce and she was always working, both in the home and out, to provide for us the best that she could. And yet, the parts of me that needed to be seen through my own lens remained invisible to her, or at least unrecognized.
Longevity is a gift in so many ways. If we live long enough, we mature out of the various stages of our own development to a clarity and wisdom . In my fifties, I found my way onto the path of awakening through what was then called Waking Down in Mutuality. I fell deeply into the wounds of my childhood, which are the doorways to freedom. I fell into various circles of hell-fire experiencing and burning away my attachment to the shadow story of my life. I was a disappointment. I was a freak. I was an outsider. I was unloved.
I don’t remember my mother ever saying that she loved me. Once, early in my spiritual path, I confronted her about his (over the phone–not recommended), and she said “I love you but . . .” at which I cut her off. “There is no but after that mom.” She was stalwart: “I love you but you’re different.” Back and forth we went. It did not help either of us to feel closer.
As she aged, like me, the shells of her personality fell away. What was left in the last few years was a sweetness, a presence and relaxation with what was. Sometime in the last year, when I said, as I sometimes did at the end of our call, “I love you,” she said “I love you, too.” And once, only a few months ago, when I told her I was coming to see her before Easter, she said it unprompted. It was pure nectar.
In April of this year, at a workshop with Trillium Awakening teacher Rod Taylor on “The Personal, Interpersonal and Impersonal Dimensions of Love,” I spoke this truth from the core of my being: My mother has always only loved me.
What a great blessing and relief.
When it became clear that she was declining, I flew out to see her the week before Easter. She was already turning away from the world of the living. Two weeks later, we signed her up for hospice care. And two weeks after that, going on my intuition, I flew home to stay with her until her passing. My sister had told her just the day before that I was coming. Hours after I arrived, the facility called to say that she was laboring–shallow breath and apnea. Laboring is my word. The vigil we sat with her from 3:00 Saturday morning until her passing the following Monday at 8:30 am was so like a birth. The long slow waiting for revelation, for transition.
It was a gift and a blessing to be with her, to share those fifty hours with my sister and her. We slept in chairs with our heads on her bed, our hands and arms holding her the best we could. We ate our meals, checked our emails, told stories, talked to nurses and family visitors, cried, slept, watched, waited.
And then, as Yeats said in a different context “A terrible beauty was born.” Her breathing fell into troughs of stillness. It was only a touch to feel her pulse that would start her up again. Ten seconds, fifteen, twenty. Touch. Breath. Then she took one gasp, paused another half a minute, took another one, and that was the end.
I don’t know when I have felt such pure tenderness and compassion as in those fifty hours. I don’t know when I ever touched my mother so much or so lovingly, like a child, both her and me.
It took me sixty years to come to know the dimensions of her love, which are the dimensions of all Love. It is all encompassing, multi-faceted, sometimes painful and sometimes blissful. It is the nature of God, the absolute. There is nothing that is not part of it.
Grief is a natural part of the death process. It comes over us, comes out of us in the face of death’s mystery. It has its own rhythm, its own logic, its own mystical healing powers. It’s a force to be surrendered to. It’s part of the transformation, the ongoing cycle of integration and disintegration that we may see what is ahead of us and embrace it without fear.
She is at rest, and she is at source. She is mingled in the ashes of my father, and mingled in the air. Remember, o man that thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return. It’s a useful remembrance. What lives in us is eternal.
I’m sitting at the window counter at Huckleberry’s in Spokane, rainy Easter morning. Yesterday I flew back from the East coast where I spent a few days visiting my family. Our mother is dying, not imminently but surely, progressively from the natural process of the body’s dissolution.
It is always a gift to be with my sister and her family, their busy, multi-generational lives. It’s a textured experience of love. Being with her now grown children, my 18 month old great niece. Aligned with the time spent watching my mother sleep, knowing that she is passing and that her passing will likely come while I am back at home in Washington.
At home. I moved here permanently almost two years ago after half a decade of seasonal visits. And it is so completely my home now. Just getting into my car at the Spokane airport last night, my body dropped into a deeper place of rest. Spokane is my airport of choice for flights East. It’s marginally closer than Seattle and more manageable. A few trips under my belt, it is its own kind of home with its various tree filled neighborhoods that belie their easy access to and from the Interstate. I know I will find a good meal and coffee and friendly, helpful people.
After a good night’s sleep, a bath, a pile of French toast and a triple shot latte to go, I can set my GPS for “Home,” and drive without heavy traffic or stop lights or towns, even, West to my Beloved, the dog, our home, familiarity.
In Jersey, church is finished, dinner is cooking, the branches of my birth-family tree come together to celebrate not just resurrection but the deeper, pre-Christian holiday of birth and fertility with bunnies and colored eggs and new clothes. Our mother sleeps, partly from pain management, partly from life’s exhausting regimen. The baby gets passed from one set of loving arms to another. The circle is complete: birth, life, death, birth. We all cycle through.
The sky’s clearing, sun burning through clouds. It’s time to get back on the road home.
After the Solstice
Chest deep in fresh powder,
clusters of deer eat the tips
of Summer’s golden grasses,
not waving now. Patient. Roots
sleeping deep under three feet
of snow. Heart-shaped tracks
stitch a trail from hills to house.
Nothing here to threaten them.
Even the dog, who barks in place
like a windup toy, barely stops
their thoughtful chewing. She who
snores undignified upon the chintz
chair placed–just so–for this.
Dark-eyed Juncos flit and feed
on scattered millet. Their tiny
formal morning coats and black caps,
their silver waistcoats stretched
over rounded breasts and bellies.
We all fatten in the early dark. Pillowed
and insulated by layers of crystals.
Precious, rare, one of a kind, merged
into this one body, undulate, frozen,
shimmering in the lengthening light.
I’m lying in bed this morning watching the snow fall through the dove gray light. No sunshine although the light came on schedule a little after seven. Here on the north slopes of the Cascades, we take the Solstice seriously. A frigid vigil as the sun rises, 108 Sun Salutations, a fire circle ceremony in a ring of candles and song. Everyone has their own way of celebrating the end of the darkness and the return of the light–the minute(s) slivers of daylight added to each day as winter arrives.
It’s a paradox. The dark days of winter start with autumn’s arrival and lift with winter’s. Winter stretches itself into light like a cat until the equinox at the start of spring.
We’re counting down the remnants of the calendar year, but the seasons, older than this conceptual map of days, weeks and months, tell us all we need to know. The cycle is closing to begin again. Circle inward, beings of light. Let your hearts warm and shine you through these winter days and nights.
Came down with a case of the blues this morning. The “I can’t handle the material world” blues. What a huge pressure it was. Aching in my head and heart. I was lucky to be able to speak it to my beloved. To speak the crazy “fix it” energy and hear her sane response. This helped me to drop into the hurt, the wound of self-blame. Then the tears that wash out that wound and let the healing come.
I headed into town to do some shopping for our family Thanksgiving gathering tomorrow. How good to be out in the cold blue day. The streets are empty. Each shop offered a friendly greeting. And a Blue Star eggnog latte in the sunshine, afforded by the wait for our boy who’s at basketball this morning and needs a ride from town in an hour.
The wheels turn and carry me, carry all of us from place to place, inside and outside. I’m thankful for that. For this golden moment of freedom.
It’s 9:00 on a Tuesday morning, October 6. I’m sitting by a window where the sun, recently risen above the hills, shines golden and warming, glinting off the black roof of my car. Blaine Harden’s book, A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia, sits on my lap. It’s quiet. My partner is in the kitchen making cereal.
I clicked onto Facebook to check for a message from a friend, and what I found was a post from a former colleague at the Community College of Philadelphia: “Gunman in my building at CCP. Class is on lockdown mode. Not getting work done. SWAT just went by.” That was an hour ago. The gunman’s been caught. Class extended an hour. Students want to get to their jobs and so on.
I’m trying to wrap my head around the whole scenario. The apparent normalcy of the situation. Yes, the college clearly handled it well, but I must be missing some essential starch in my Being. I can’t imagine being on lockdown with an armed person roaming the halls and then getting back to the business of teaching composition.
The shooting last week in Oregon brought this phenomenon closer to home, home being rural north central Washington with its small regional school and where guns are a common element in many homes.
I haven’t the space, time, energy or wisdom to draw any conclusions about the frequency with which we are under armed attack by our neighbors. There seems to be an epidemic of misery and misplaced aggression that can only be released through mass killings. I’m remembering a Chris Rock riff on gun violence in which he suggested pricing bullets out of affordability. “You better watch out, because I’m saving my money to buy some bullets, then I’m coming after you.”
Annually, according to the CDC nearly 25,000 people die from prescription painkiller overdoses. We are clearly a nation of suffering. Maybe someday someone will successfully run for the presidency on a platform of human wellbeing. Maybe then we will lay down our arms, breathe freely, walk in safety in our homes, streets and schools.
Until then, be as safe as you can.
I myself am hell–no one’s here says Robert Lowell’s narrator in his poem “Skunk Hour.” It’s loosely cribbed from Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great realization of the fallen angel, Lucifer: Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”
These words have held deep resonance for me for many decades, since I wrote as an undergraduate about Milton’s Satan as a Romantic hero, since encountering Lowell’s homage cum apology to Elizabeth Bishop and her (superior) poem “The Armadillo.”
But the merely literary hence intellectual resonance has suddenly found traction in my body. In myself as that which is.
I realized recently, on a day when I was once again trapped in a hell of my own making, unable to end it or free myself, the absolute tenacity with which my mind will WORK to lay blame on outside sources and experiences for my feelings. My bad feelings.
In the parlance of psychology this is called projection. It appears to me to be a fairly common human endeavor. To blame our parents, partners, bosses, children, and various public functionaries for our anger, hurt and suffering.
It was quite bracing to realize in the throes of my particular misery as I wallowed in it with profound awareness of it that my mind was making every effort to lay blame outside of myself. And at the same time, these words “I myself am Hell.” The truth of that.
Whichever way I fly is Hell if I myself am Hell.
Or: everything is arising in consciousness. My pain is mine. It is arising from my own conditioning. It can be triggered by others (in as much as there ARE others) because they mirror us to ourselves. Relating is a reflection. Sometimes what is reflected is our best and highest self and sometimes it’s our deepest, most burdensome and unseen wounds.
To see them as they arise is liberation. To know them as yourself without seeking an outside source is to begin to integrate them and bring yourself closer to wholeness.
I’m feeling a lot of love and openness today. The rise and fall of ease. And the ease beneath that, the wave and the ocean.
I wrote those words earlier today to my beloved. It was after responding to an online discussion for a course I’m taking with Saniel Bonder about living in what he calls the Core Wound. It’s a way of talking about the difficulty at the core of our being in living our divinely human paradox, being both form and formlessness, finite and infinite. Living what Saniel calls the spirit/matter split.
Living the dharma that Saniel and his circle of founding teachers have manifested comes to living in and as this Core Wound. A life of apparently unending dropping into and merging with our own individual realization of the Core Wound. Our core issues and conditioned patterns.
As I continue to drop, rappelling down the spider web of Being, I come up against my own particular issues. And today I landed in an awareness about myself that is captured in the title of this post. It draws on and deepens the non-dual teaching about the wave and the ocean.
In my case, I happen to be wired with what is called in Human Design as an emotional wave. My emotions come up organically out of the ocean of my Being. This sounds obvious and self-evident as I write it, but it landed in me quite profoundly and surprisingly just a while ago.
The way I experience the Core Wound, my frequent sense of discomfort mediated by an underlying wellness of Being is the way the wave arises from the ocean. Tsunami or wavelet, their source is the same. Under the wave there is always the ocean. Within the ocean is the wave.
Being is everything. We flow like water in its myriad forms: mist, rain, hail, ice, snow, rain, river, stream, lake, bay, sea, wave and surface and depth. When we stop looking for ourselves, we land in this realization that we are in all and all is in us.
Life gives us so many opportunities to experience its innate sorrow. Being alive as a human being is to know sorrow intimately, if we are willing to open to it, to allow it to take root in our hearts. Take root seems an apt phrase now that I’ve written it. Our lived experience sheds the seeds of sorrow, every loss, misunderstanding, disappointment, every illumination of our powerlessness. Every encounter with aging, sickness and death. With scarcity, chaos.
My life has been a paradoxical relationship with sorrow. There’s a way in which it has been my constant companion and a way in which I’ve treated it like an embarrassing relative. When I was a child, one of my mother’s constant refrains to me was “why are you crying?” As a college student, publishing my first poems, neighbors asked “why are they so sad? You’re always so happy!” I learned to put a happy face on my own innate melancholy. It took a lot of years, is TAKING a lot of years, to slip once and for all out of the mask, to come out of the closet and live freely as a melancholic.
Today, I’m feeling the juicy fruits of sorrow. The soil is moist and receptive. I feel pregnant with it. The seeds continue to fall–an email ending a particular sort of relationship, a conversation with my mother in which we trade “can you hear me? How do you feel? How is your weather? Thank you for calling.” It’s the lingua franca of our family for “I miss you. I love you. Are you alright? Are you still there? When will I see you?”
People come and go through the doors of our many rooms. They brush against us with the fibers of their Being. They leave their scent, their texture, “an impression” as Joni Mitchell once sang “of their loneliness.” And yet, and so, we do and we must embrace them and what they bring and what they leave. We must gather the flowers of every passing, every meeting. We must allow ourselves to rest in the bed of our sorrows.
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