Hostage to Fortune

"I think to love, for such a long time, is a detriment." The woman, a widow after 40 years of marriage, wiped her eyes as she said this. She added that she planned to always wear her wedding rings.  I smiled sympathetically and nodded to encourage her to continue, noticing that she wore a man's wedding ring on a chain around her neck, obviously her late husband's.

Although I was there for a counseling session, she had set the table elegantly. Dark pink napkins were tucked under white soup bowls, the only splash of color in the white room. I could feel the heat of the stove as I followed her into the kitchen. Even though I had dinner plans, I recognized her need to serve, to sit with someone in her empty apartment, to prepare something for someone else.  It's all about her, anyway, I reminded myself as I sat down to sip a small amount of soup.  Sharing some food with her, appreciating her effort, was part of the unconditional positive regard I was there to provide.  "Mmm," I said. "Delicious."

As I listened to her express her sorrow, I wondered if what she said is true. Is it a detriment to love someone for a long time or for any amount of time for that matter? Do we really offer "hostages to fortune," as Sir Francis Bacon said, when we love?  Isn't it worth the risk, even though we will lose eventually? I wonder if comments like these reflect more of a desire to control or avoid emotion than a true regret.  Yeats said we should never give ALL our heart, "for he gave all his heart and lost."  Is it a waste of time just because we hurt when our love dies? Honestly, is it possible NOT to love, just to avoid the inevitable pain of losing?

Consider the alternative, if this were possible.  Human beings seem hardwired to develop connections, to be in and thrive in relationship.  It's almost like it is coded in our DNA, to relate, to mate, to love, to hope, hopefully to grow. It is not easy but the challenge of it can be thrilling. Consciously, I'll offer myself up as a hostage to this challenge, because this is where the flow and the juice and the pulsing blood of life is.  It may be a full catastrophe but I don't believe for a minute that it is a detriment.

The weight of love

Has buoyed me up

Till my head

Knocks against the sky.

~William Carlos Williams

Euphemistically Speaking

Dear readers (all twelve of you), I have been absent for a while as I adjust to the working world. In addition to building The Karuna Project's private practice, I am a Bereavement Counselor at Holy Name Hospice now, several days a week. It is wonderful, sometimes painful but very meaningful work. I hope to be more present on this blog in the future!

Words, words, words.  We all use them but they often mean subtly different things to each of us.  Words are affected by interpretation, culture, by the books we read or do not read. Choreographer Pina Bausch said that "words can't do more than just evoke things" adding that this was the purpose of art.

This is why I love poetry.  The literal words, distilled down to a minimal essence of expression, evoke more than inform. In poetry, there is a visceral resonance that speaks to the heart.  Reading a poem, a curious and literally minded colleague asked me, "but what does it MEAN?"  I dislike picking apart the meaning of poems. Listen, flow with them. FEEL what it means to you.  It's like staring at a Rothko painting; at first it is just a blue canvas, a pretty color. You think, what does it mean? Open your heart, your eyes, enter the color. Movement exits there, deep blue washes you. The painting becomes a meditation, awakening feelings, associations, stillness. This resonance cannot be described, even though I am attempting to do so.  It must be felt.

Grief is like that too. Someone said, "I cannot speak about this, it is too deep." Talking helps, but no words can really describe the dark abyss, the agitation, fear, the dissonance of life after a death. And we are hindered by a habit of using euphemisms that purposely obscure grief.  He "passed away."  This might be a good descriptor of a quiet, peaceful death but it doesn't work for a sudden one. She's "gone to a better place."  This is comforting to many people, but infuriating to some. I "lost" my husband.  A woman in one group asked testily, "why do we say he is lost?"  He's not a set of keys or one of my three pairs of glasses that have gone missing.

Good question.  "Loss" refers to what WE have lost – our partner, lover, friend, mother, sister, daughter. The loss of this relationship is what we mourn. The loss is of whom we are, our role, even our purpose. The hole in the middle of our lives where that person is not creates a place in which we wander, yearning, seeking a way to repair the chasm into which we plunged at the moment of death.

So why talk at all? Words are what we use to build a bridge.  Words are how we connect to each other, and when we speak, we also evoke. The position of our body, whether or not we are making eye contact, the tone of voice, our eyes welling up with tears,  color our words. These subtle clues create a responsive resonance. The listener, understanding and sympathizing, evokes a metaphorical buoy we can hold on to.

Maybe words have no literal truth at all. The Heart Sutra of Buddhism says form is emptiness, emptiness is form.  I use my words to reach you and perhaps they do.  Or maybe each word leaves my mouth and disappears into nothingness, flitting by you like a wisp of air, barely noticed. While I am no longer inside the chasm, I sometimes sit on its edge, dangling my feet down into the dark. If you want to know about it, maybe you could just sit next to me for a while. Sometimes I just can't speak about it.

Birds in the morning

9/11/11

This is the path they took, following the widening
River, snakelike brown.
It was their navigator, those men who left their souls behind
shoving, stabbing their way into cockpits;
This churning River on its way to the unfull sea
a brackish flow of shit, toxins, discarded drugs and dregs.
The single minded men followed the River,
with twisted histories in their heads.
(The crooked cannot be made straight.)

I have often stood by the River
On a long wooden pier jutting just below the Bridge
Or high in the Hudson Bluffs where lookouts searched
for incoming warships. I protested
by this River, singing of pain, chains and change.
I believed the words I was singing
that everything was beautiful
everything was connected but somehow
we have lost the thread.

(To every thing there is a season)
These words repeat, over, over,
I heard them long ago, sung by the River, with head thrown back,
banjo thrummed and we nodded, yes.
Today I hear these words again, near
the River that pointed straight to the Towers

(and a time) to what purpose, really?
One translation claims that all is meaningless
but this is used to justify the time for war.
Those men who revved and sped
near the end of the River must have thought so too.

Ten years later (there is no good but to rejoice)
We hold hands and each other, by the River.
We enter this house of mourning
where (wisdom is better than the weapons of war)


Eccl. 1.7; 1,15; 3.1; 3.8; 3.12; 7.4; 9.18

A Hurricane Dance Party

The news is playing endless loops of bright red and green spirals, the animated edges of Hurricane Irene which is heading our way. The dark clouds are Irene's tentacles reaching out to cover us, about to open up. We sit in suspension, before the deluge. People have been in excited panic for days; stores sold out of D batteries and large containers of water in a matter of minutes after opening, and someone told me gleefully that one store sold $24,000 worth of generators in an hour on Friday morning.

Even as I attempted to liken the hyped up terror to those 6 pages of possible side effects (including death) that come along with prescription drugs, I too have been very agitated. Perhaps it is the energy of nervous people around or maybe it is the anxiety of my daughter, trying to finish her last week as a nanny while packing for a four month trip to Italy. She has insisted on taking only one suitcase which required several elimination sessions, color coordination choices and teetering around in various shoes, with a quizzical expression. "Should I take the neutral heels or the hot pink ones?" she wondered. I reminded her that Florence is cobbled and heels might not be the best choice at all. She snapped at me because apparently I know nothing about dressing for night life, which of course is true.

The packing dilemmas are all moot now. New York City has completely shut down; for the first time ever, all modes of transportation have been halted. The airports are closed. Even Broadway is closed. Over 370,000 people have been evacuated. After hours on hold, we finally got through to the travel agency and the earliest she can leave is on Friday.

One thing is clear: Irene is bigger than all of us, bigger even than Europe and we have no control over what she will do. She may weaken and everyone will feel a bit foolish. Or the predictions could hold; lower Manhattan with its honeycombed tunnels and subway tubes could be underwater. We could lose power here in the country, but we are prepared for that.

So why am I so agitated? It always comes back to uncertainty. Not knowing touches an edge of extreme fear in my psyche and in my body; before I am aware of it, I am tense and churlish. I overreact to the slightest tone. You would think I would get this at some point – the lesson of sudden death should have taught me that I have no control anyway. All my talk about staying in the moment ought to have honed some skill. Yet I feel like an unhinged possible projectile, waiting to be caught up by a hurricane wind and thrown against a tree.

Oh well. I can't control Irene, I can't control the airlines or the newscasters. I can calm down though; I could bake something nice. We could put on some loud music and have a Hurricane Party until the lights go out, then continue by candlelight. Sounds like a plan….one which I can control.

Devoted Sisters

One of our favorite songs is "Sisters" from that Danny Kaye/Bing Crosby movie, White Christmas. Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, with her impossibly tiny waist, sing it first, dressed in matching blue gowns, carrying blue feather fans. My sisters and I sometimes call each other on the phone and sing the verses to each other: "Sisters. Sisters! There were never such devoted Sisters…" Our devotion to each other spreads like golden tendrils across hills, mountains and right now, through telephone lines out to the West. Our voices, our minds and our hearts reach out, trying to touch, listen and soothe one of our own.

In a distant city, in an impossibly hot desert, shiny buildings sprout like the models of alien landscapes in old sci-fi movies. Neon flashes, drunken tourists and celebrities stagger through facsimiles of world wonders. Gondolas float on a fake river in a shopping mall, and a giant, artificial Sphinx does not sweat in Vegas any more than the real one does in Giza. And somewhere, on the 8th floor of one of these buildings, our baby sister is lying on a couch. She is in pain; she is feeling weak but she is strong and intrepid. She has paper and art supplies right next to her, and when she cannot sleep, or when she is waiting for another pill to kick in, she draws. Her feelings flow from her heart and mind, bypassing her damaged, soon to be repaired chest, pouring color and emotion out on the page. Her littlest child stands next to her, helping her color.

We, the older ones, cannot quite believe this is happening to her. We don’t have cancer in our family, we whisper to each other. I hold the phone away from my mouth as she tells me the latest news, which is not as good as we had hoped. I wish I was holding her close and I am glad I am not, because then she would know that I am sobbing, soundlessly, helplessly, hoping she cannot hear me. Why should I weep when it is not my body that has been assaulted? Why am I vicariously sad? This is not my pain; this is not about me. This is happening to my beautiful Baby Sister. I remember rushing home after high school to watch Sesame Street with her; I remember her tiny voice chattering away to her three imaginary friends.

She makes another drawing, this one with a tentative smile on her face. We all want to tell her she will be just fine when this is over, in a few months, honey, it will be alright. And we do tell her this – only no one knows if it is really true. This is just another moment where we have to narrow our focus, turn inward, draw out all our resources. This is just another moment where we have to reach across the continent and remind her that no one ever had such devoted sisters. Even though she will always be the Baby, she just might be the bravest one of all.

Living a Meaningful Life

I spent last week at the International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society, which was held in conjunction with the Association for Death Education and Counseling's annual meeting. There were hundreds of people there from all over the world – scholars, doctors, clinicians, funeral directors, hospice personnel, counselors and therapists. Research was presented, panel discusses attended. There were keynote speeches on compassion and dying mindfully (Roshi Joan Halifax), on identifying at risk families for early intervention at Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center (David Kissane). A psychologist from Australia, Dr. Chris Hall, spoke about the multiple government outreach programs to help the communities that suffered major losses in the Victoria Bush Fires of 2008, which had me and the woman next to me shaking our heads, saying, "that would never happen in America."

What struck me was how kind everyone was, how welcoming. Of course, everyone there works with raw pain and suffering, and has learned how to attain some balance. The compassion and thoughtfulness of attendees was palpable and inspiring. It was also interesting how many people who work in this field have come to it in response to their own experiences with death. It is one of the ways they seek to turn bad into good; to make meaning.

When I first read about the concept of making meaning after death, I did not understand it. To me, it was the equivalent of that supposedly "helpful" statement, "he's in a better place." As if being here, with our children, was not good enough? How could his death MEAN something, other than pain and horror?

Robert A. Neimeyer, PhD, is the scholar who coined this phrase, saying that it is a necessary part of the reconstruction of life after suffering the loss of a loved one. But Neimeyer is talking about living a meaningful life after this loss. It is what you DO with it. Some people start scholarships, some people plant gardens. Some people become grief counselors and name their work after a tiny word found on the top of a page.

I attended a lecture by Dr. Neimeyer at the Conference. He read a poem he had written about a couple who was in counseling with him after the suicide of their 19 year old daughter. He said that "we seek the meaning that is viable, not necessarily valid." In the process of reconstructing our lives, we come up with ways to cope, to live and to grow, yet we will always have gaps. The meaning we attribute to our lives after the death of someone we love will always have some rough patches, some areas of unsettled dissonance.

Meaning is what you make of it, I guess. While it makes little sense to me that Alby is gone, before he could see the graduations, the weddings, etcetera, our lives have meaning. Some of this sense of purpose is related to him, some of it is reaction to his death. And a good deal of the meaning we make correlates with our own growth as we deepen and mellow. Hopefully over time, this growing purposeful, meaningful life slowly becomes as valid as it is viable.