Tag Archives: freedom

And Then She Was Gone

Reflections on understanding how to embrace the loss of my sister

My sister Susan died on May 12, 2022. These words are true. For me, they hold an impression of unreality.  I don’t as yet, recognize my life in this configuration. While I no longer view myself as a shredded sail after gale-force winds, the awareness of her death walks with me, everywhere and every day. It is this spirit, this guidance, that escorts us through this life passage that I call Grief.  It has so much to teach, if we can bear to let it touch us.

 I have a long affiliation with the study of the end of life. I hold this life passage as pregnant with opportunity for all involved to grasp more of the great Mystery; who are we, what are we, and what are we doing here? This is the stuff of Vision Quests and Vigils,it is rare and precious knowledge. It arrives through our relationships, emotions, mental constructs, other people’s words, even exposure to intense events. These seem all designed to be absorbed by the heart, accepted by the mind, and installed within intentionally as a system upgrade, and to be retold to whoever will listen.  The revelations of grief arrive via an impossibly high price tag.  Possibly the best we can do is to experience our grief, and let it “have at us” with as much courage as possible. Why then, is this so difficult?

Sue was a heart-centered person, quick to love and easily injured by thoughtless words. Her heart was her Achilles heel.  It was literally broken before she was born.  A small hole between the atriums rendered her heart fallible, weakened.  The pioneering heart surgeons of the 1960’s repaired that hole when she was ten.  They were unable, or unaware, that an extra blood vessel continuously overloaded her heart-lung system and this would ultimately create an untenable situation. Hers was a heart that could never catch up physically. Therein was a blueprint for her life.  Hers was a body that made living in it, more difficult, from her very beginning. Her real stamina lay in the emotional realm. When she chose to, she loved with infinite strength and unshakeable resilience.

Across the last two years, her life narrowed to an ever diminishing and tenuous path dominated by breath and heartbeat. She walked the edge of a cliff of independent life, or dependency, and never fell off. She could describe her task and practice of compartmentalizing any thought or emotion, event, or interaction, that would cause the mysterious “keeper of the heartbeat” to lose footing. She learned to parse out actions in small doses. She learned to leave other’s emotional baggage untouched.  Such was her last year.

 From my vantage point, she became intimately familiar with her own body and soul. My heart beats happily and my breath goes unnoticed until challenged with hills, elevation, or too much ballast. Her heart was transparent in its fragility and strength, and her awareness of both possibilities was an integral part of her experience of “life.”  Eventually, she embraced the obvious need for these dear companions to part ways.  Her body was just too confining and her soul had been patient.

But that is my imagining. Completely tidy head talk that serves nothing, not my life or hers. I really can’t know what her process is, or was. On this day I can see that what I am really doing is mourning the loss of her in my life. A physical structure of my life is gone. As one of four sisters we were a scaffold, we now are a tripod. I am an unreliable witness, shaken to my core.

 I am grateful for the end of suffering and fear that she managed with such dignity and grace.  And it was suffering. In the last hours of her life, she graciously received the anticipatory grief of dear friends and family. I saw a different version of Sue emerge. Shyly at first, and then with increasing conviction, I saw something being revealed. Compassionate yes, but her view felt more expansive, inclusive of her life and ours, not seperate but as part of a continuum.   As I watched her silently, I named this to be her SOUL.  It appeared to me to be shining out through her eyes. It was a part of her that I have never seen.

“You will be broken for a while, and then you will be better.” She said. These words spoken quietly rang out like a clear bell.

I knew there was something different happening when she assumed absolutely no responsibility for another person’s emotional state, or their task of mourning. Possibly she could see the denouement and the purpose of the pain and suffering? Or was she was already headed home, and this was a courtesy call to those who couldn’t yet understand.  And that would be all of us who watched her transfigure, we just didn’t have the same view.

“And that’s OK,” I hear myself think.  “There is nothing so terrible here, life and death are the same movement.  Out of one world and into the next.   She is graduating, we will be fine.  She will be free, all is well.”

And then she left and the world turned over.

All of us, her children and siblings and friends were cracked wide open when the portal opened and she slipped into what my Grandmother called, “The next room.” My mind’s platitudes were a thin trickle compared to the roaring flow of life that swept into the room and floated her willingly into the next life. It is so much more powerful than we expect.  I can feel now that she held parts of me and I of her, and it’s time to give them all back. 

On this day, I believe this is one of the tasks of grieving. And I have just scratched the surface. There is so much more here to understand.

Thank you Sue for all you are.

Seeing in the Dark

Beneath the blue skies and cows of Schoharie County, New York lies a deep vast cavity, a cavern, named Howe. I’ve met other caves, with more expressive names like Mammoth, Wind, or Jewel. They were remarkable, but Howe Cavern holds a place in my childhood mythology. On the impetus of children two generations forward, I went there again.

A journey in the deep underground is like a stroll through your subconscious on catwalks. 

img_0501.jpg

We are creatures originally designed for the horizontal paradigm. Moving vertically feels different, it requires machinery, it requires trust. A bit of vertical venturing, like a bit of adrenalin, sharpens the senses, opening the mind to abandon limits of gravity and time. Remember your first view from 10,000 feet? Yes, human beings can fly.

Our group of 30 explorers represented most of the ambulatory human life stages. The elevator squeaked open and multiple three-generation family groups, and a twenty-something couple shuffled into the small space. “She” and a child squished in the back between two bellies, giggled as we landed at the bottom of the shaft with a delicate “thud.”

Our sticky tribe of humans and a cloud of upland humidity exited the shiny silver elevator as if a single entity.  We squinted into the dimness, collectively feeling our way forward into the cool rocky vestibule.  Once adjusted to the close proximity of strangers, chilly dampness, and low light, we shuffled down a gentle grade to form an awkward body of souls at the mouth of the cave.

Our elevator operator slid around shivering children and elders in tightly laced sneakers. Reaching the edge of light and darkness, the recent High School graduate turned to face us, identifying herself as our tour guide. There was no doubt. Her pale skin and light blonde hair were a reflection of where she spent her summer days; 200 feet underground in 58 degrees. With the flat A’s, and nasal tones of Central New York she greeted us.

“Welcome to Howe’s Cavern”

I intended to listen but something in the deep darkness beckoned. I was attracted to a sound. A single drip of water spoke in the velvet blackness behind me. Nothing is so dark as the inside of a cave. Breath aligned with the water’s cadence, and a well-practiced response of relaxation and expansiveness dropped into place. I sensed a movement and a gentle migration of air.  It was as if we had landed inside the great chest cavity of a great snoozing deity. I stifled a giggle.

The group began to move.  I stepped out of the reverie in time to follow the group down the path, as the lights clicked off behind me. The guide looked over her shoulder at me. Wielding all the power of her position she shot a stern, silent warning in my direction to “keep up.”  She addressed the group before turning on her heel and continuing around a rocky corner.

“Don’t touch anything, stay together, follow me.” She said.

The rules of visiting this alternative reality were simple. The path that followed along the tallest side of the cave wall was lined with iron handrails. Warnings about defiling the cave were dire.  It was enough to know that our worldly breath and the lights for safe passage had caused small patches of green moss to grow on the walls. Taller trekkers might have to duck here and there, but it was as easy as a stone path through a formal garden.

 Spring water: a term that has lost its magic.

It is alive and well and living under the earth. In her practiced patter, the guide explained that it was water that carved this open space, it was water that rearranged the limestone into round smooth assemblages across years with six or seven zeros. Lest we think this system is always a quiet trickle, she pointed out the high water mark a good 20 feet over our heads.

A small trail of pristine clear water traced the crevice along the irregular stone edge of the walkway. The sound of the water romping with small pebbles erased the chatter and footsteps around me. I imagined my relative position underground with all that dirt and rock between me and the sun. A sense of childlike joy and excitement welled up in my chest with clarity and memory trotting along just behind. I turned to speak to the person behind me and found the space empty, and the darkness full of “life.” I shrugged off a minor Déjà vu moment and padded along behind our group.

Caves are surprising.

About midway through the cave, the cool moist air became an animated interactive participant this 90-minute “Walking Meditation.” Each breath seemed to “high five” on the inhale as it flooded my bloodstream and cells with its own unique Mantra. Standing in this singular place, my busy mind stalled and rolled to a stop. I stood in the present, and the physical part of eternity turned her face to me and smiled.

Not everyone was dazzled. School children rubbed against their boundaries and irked their elders. A few visitors checked cell phones, chafing under the unexpected silence of “no service.” The guide led us along the red brick path to where two wide boats waited on the now substantial river of water.  The tiny capillaries had rejoined; this must be the Carotid of the cave.  We floated toward the sound of a waterfall, water flowing black ink at the sides of the boat.

“Keep your hands in the boat!”

A sense of familiarity settled around my shoulders as we moved through the dim tunnel. A pale ethereal finger sifted through life experiences filed under “deep in the ground” and the smell of “wet limestone. Because the sense of smell has no use for the fine filter of ego, it remembers “all.” Back on the path, I spotted a hint of the original path. Old slippery bricks leading to a too small rock opening now barricaded by the lack of illumination. When lantern toting adventurers gave way to paunchy tourists with spending money, it needed to be an easier trek. The slick wet rock floor had been redesigned to modern expectations, but the old steps were still visible to those who knew they were there.

It came as a short movie; one elevator with a rusty gate, creaking down through rock with a small cadre of schoolchildren transported in batches. Someplace between handpicks and hydraulics, I had been here before. The 3-foot pillar formation rose out of the floor with a rakish tilt like a small tower of Pisa. The water glistened on the outside, not nearly enough to form a drop, never dreaming of a rivulet. The guide droned the words with the modulations of a hundred times said,

“It takes hundreds, maybe thousands of years to create each inch of stalagmite.”

birdhand

 

The cool damp fingers of the moist cave air wrapped gently around the back of my neck. It was all here; in the smell of the wet rocks, and the muted echoes of children’s voices just ahead. The memory was inserted back into my conscious like a coin in slot machine.  I felt “her” as clearly as I remembered the square, sticky red tokens we purchased to buy milk at Goodrich school.  “I,” or “me” became multiple choice answers with a lifetime of editions. Holograms of earlier versions of myself tapped at my shoulder and winked at me as they touched the forbidden stalactite forms with their invisible fingers.

I had stood exactly here; in front of the stalagmite named “Chinese Pagoda;” when I was 12, and before that at maybe 8. Fifty years had passed, “up there.” Most of my lifetime was already listed as “past experience.” Down here? Same old, same old. In the land of Quantum Physics, how fast does a rock vibrate?

My sixth grade “self” came forward then. Did I bring her or was she here in the cave the whole time? She leaned forward and I saw her curly brown hair and wide plastic headband. I looked down at my feet expecting to see the turquoise Keds and white socks of 1967.  She seemed unaware of me as she reached out- almost daring to touch the forbidden rock formation, but pulling her hand back in at the last minute. I saw her look over her shoulder as if she felt something, someone who couldn’t be seen. I couldn’t mistake the movement; I had done the same around the last bend.  She was looking for what she felt.  Looking for validation of what her more subtle senses knew:

“There is someone here with me.”

The thought of an older wiser version of myself following the “child me” down the cave path made me smile, then giggle, then laugh out loud. Nesting dolls and onions and artichokes!  The universe has a sense of humor.  There is no “back then” or “will be” there is only Now.  We are all here together.  What a hoot!  Images of all of us, countless iterations of “me” turning our heads simultaneously when asked,

“What’s so funny??”

If you would like to experience a bit of personal eternity and there is no cave nearby, there is a process for seeing through the partitions past and future.  It involves laying in the Earth, like a child on the beach. You could cover yourself with a cloth, some sand or earth. Stay there until all the doubts and illusions have migrated out like earthworms to the damp darkness and you can arise again reborn.

Reborn into the knowledge of who you really are.

You will find yourself renewed with the understanding that life is not a permanent condition and one had better get on with it.

Let Yourself Grow!

Winter Landscape at Sunset

antonsnow

Winter Landscape at Sunset, Anton Mauve (Dutch,  c.1885-87.)

“Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.”

— Albert Einstein

This week in mid December the thermometer at the wide window of my western exposure has reported -7 to 44F. Standing close to the fire in the woodstove, I watched the “outside life” slide slowly into the quiet whispers of winter. In just a few hours, the last leaves caught in the wire fence, tufts of emerald green grass, and stiff stalks of Kale disappeared beneath brilliant white snow edged in hard grey ice. The sky darkened, the wind blew. The Poplar communities huddled together, the white Birches leaned and dipped, carrying pencil thin snow loads in silence, until wind or sun relieved them of the burden.

The spare plainness of organic form on light, black branches on white snow, wiped away any subtlety or shading. The four elements of life shouted out their truth; the earth is quiet, the water still, time in the light is short! Sporting illusions are meant for gentler, longer days. Epiphanies come fast and furious in this stark landscape. Ice isn’t gentle, and cold has no conscience.

We are not separate from what we like to call “Nature.” Bring on your fancy down jacket, and the heat tape, we are that which we call Nature, and she is us. Skate if you wish across frozen natural truths, you will eventually come home to the thin ice of Earth born mortality.

I have already accepted the mantra:

Whatever works for a tree, works for me.

edvardmunch1915winterlandscape

Winter Landscape, Edvard Munch 1915

These are my gentle alignments that come to pass on a quiet walk in the overgrown backfield on a snowy December afternoon. The frosty air clears my sinuses. I watch as the dogs push warm noses into mysterious snow mounds. They look up at me with fantastically funny white beards and a comic’s straight man face, “What? What’s so funny?” New snow is a dog’s miracle.

Extraneous thoughts drain out of my head like the watery mucus from my running nose. It’s very bright, very clear.

“A bonus!” I think.

The snow adds so much light to a dark day. I am grateful for the reflected light that fills my eyes in the days of long slow darkness. I have left my backpack full of, “I need to,” over there, leaning against the side of the barn. When words stop, senses come out of hibernation.

Stepping back, there is a crunch of boot on fresh snow. A tall elegant Truth strolls by me, donned in ice-encrusted branches with hoarfrost festoons on curled brown leaves. I follow the crooked finger with my eyes, walking across downed Goldenrod and winding grapevines to the rear tree line where I see the Dogwood relative splayed out across the fence. The still attached leaves had taken on ice and snow and the weight was too much. The cold caused brittle, the wind blew, and the graceful tree was snapped in half. In a tenuous fracture, she was broken from the weight of water and ice encasing the leaves that clung to her branches; a casualty of the natural progression of cold and wet at the entrance of winter.

Standing in the hour of sunlight of the afternoon of just pre-solstice December, it came to me. In this light it was crystal clear. It is our inability to let go of our leaves at the end of a season that causes human beings so much angst, and yes, agony. It is our inability to accept that seasons come and go, wind happens, all things have a natural ending as well as beginning. It is just all grist for the mill. To argue this changes nothing. To cling to the past is to be weakened, taken down, cracked open in the cold leveler that is winter.

I heard it clearly out there.

“Let it go already! Give it up! Move on, forgive,

 Let yourself Grow!”

The anger, the hurts, disappointments, the stuff, the sadness, let it all go. Toss it onto the great sacred compost heap of human experience. Let the leaves of past seasons become the rich indiscriminate fertilizer of collective wisdom.

Out in the field, my crunchy truthful friend spoke.

“No need to understand the whys, drop the leaves on the ground and walk away.”

 

davidgrossmanwinterdayending

Winter Day Ending David Grossman

In the past week at this Northern latitude, mountainous grey thunderclouds have tumbled across our upper landscape. It has snowed, rained, precipitated in shapes that only the far Northwest Native people would recognize as separate entities. We have been blown about by winds capable of moving massive arctic fronts across our entire continent. We have been frozen solid, thawed, wet and flooded all in the same afternoon.

These are powerful forces and yet the trees, for the most part, stand strong in the wind, despite the cold, despite the short days. All the while, in the dark ground, the roots stretch out, growing thicker and stronger, reaching out to new depths.

 

Tomorrow will be a short dark day, the next the darkest yet, the Solstice of 2016. I intend to enjoy this time. I wish you Safe passage and Much Growth this blessed Winter season.