Shattering and Becoming WHOLE Again

Spring is coming; even though it is early March, green shoots are rising up from the damp soil. Birdsong has changed and we are collectively hoping for something positive to generate along with the change in seasons. At least I know I am.

I’ve been focusing on a project that’s been burbling just below the surface, sometimes bursting forth and sometimes lying dormant. Over the years it has metamorphosed from intense journal entries to a sort of memoir to a travel guide for the journey with no map. If you’ve ever grieved, you know what I mean. Now, I have committed to the project and in order to hold myself more accountable, I am going public with it.

It’s a book and its working title is Shattering Grief: Picking up the pieces to become WHOLE again.

My theme (my personal mission?) has always been working through those feelings of brokenness, the sense that your life is in shards after the death of someone so integral to you. That feeling of being shattered was so pervasive that it required a quest of repair. I wanted, no, NEEDED to feel WHOLE again. There have been so many discoveries during this process and the most wonderful one is that now, I feel relatively complete. Was that broken feeling just an illusion? In the same way that grief can masquerade as depression and insanity, perhaps it put on a grand costume of fractured mirrors.  Whether this was real or not, it required a lot of attention.  It compelled me to look at all the pieces of my life and my self and consider each one carefully. By considering the various roles I play in my life and in the lives of family and friends, the possibility of growth and even some change appeared.

Death often creates a sort of identity crisis. We can cope with this by considering who we thought we were and who we are now. We can use our relationship as the foundation on which to rebuild; to use qualities of our loved one as some of the bricks. We can enhance our own abilities and develop new interests. Slowly, we can begin to ask another question.  Who do I want to be? And how can I accomplish that?

Life After Death

Working in an interfaith, spiritually centered Hospice affiliated with a Catholic Hospital, I hear many people talk about what they expect after death. They say with certainty that they know they will see their loved ones again, or they joke that the husband, mother or father is up there (pointing to the ceiling) having an argument with Aunt Elsie, or driving everyone a little crazy.  It's a comforting thought for believers.

I've also listened to grievers who are troubled by their beliefs. Some worry about their loved ones, for whom they put so much time and desperate effort in trying to keep comfortable.  One man said he spent most of his time praying for his wife, because he feared that she needed him.  This week, a woman said, weeping, that she had the unnerving feeling that her husband wanted her "up there" with him. It felt like a pull in his direction and was very disturbing. She was not interested in harming herself in order to get there but she had this very clear feeling and was troubled by it.  This was in Group and several other members offered comfort and suggestions for her. I asked her if she could turn it around and ask him to be present with her here, and she again said that she thought he wanted her to come to him. 

In my spontaneous Sagittarian way, I blurted out without thinking, "well, it's not very nice of him, is it!"  The woman, along with everyone else in the room burst out laughing.  I feared I had been too provocative, but really, it seemed to me that she is alive and should be free to live fully, after his death.  If there is some presence there calling her, where is he expecting her to go? It seems almost rude of him (if it IS him and not a turned around thought about giving up) after all those years of care she gave him.  It would be nicer for her to find ways to re-engage in her life now, despite the sorrow and loneliness.

I have been thinking a lot about Life after Death myself lately but not in the same way.  To me, life after death is what you do with your life after your loved one died.  Life is not a passive place in which to wait, although grief often feels like an empty room in which everything is askew.  It is up to us  to embrace life, reshape it, re-invest in activity, new endeavors, new friendships and maybe even new relationships.  Immediately after my husband died, I heard a voice in my head saying, "your life has radically changed. Now WHAT?"  This has been the motivating thought even when I had no answers about how to live and walked around for years in a life that felt like an alien landscape. 

It is not easy to rekindle a desire for living when all you can manage is the most minimal of activities.  But over time, life begins to be more comfortable, even interesting.  There is life after death, and it can be whatever you want it to be. It is yours to shape.  Make it beautiful, full and fun.

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.

A tribute

I thought I would write something new but words fail me. I offer this, spoken at the first planting of the Spiral Garden, on May 6, 2006.

When I first met Alby he planted a huge garden, nearly half an acre. He was always full of garden plans, flowering gardens, vegetable gardens, dreams of ginseng growing in the woods. Together we planted lilies and hostas to feed the deer; we played together in our new home and we grew little people.

We used this poem at our wedding and gave it away as favors: The faith waiting in the heart of the seed promises a miracle of life which it cannot prove at once.

The heart of the seed promises abundance in its future flowering.

The seed of a new baby promises unimaginable miracles in first discoveries.

The promise of miracles is found in each of these amazing children, and I feel strongly that our partnership and love helped guide them into the people they are today. They continue to teach me and fill my life with abundance with their ideas, insights, compassion and hope.

The faith that Alby and I could step off the cliff into the unknown together, the heart in the seed of our life blossomed into blessings of home, travel, laughter and love, and even in the midst of the shock and grief of this past year, and in the suspended place of my life now without him, I am reminded over and over how I still live in the abundance we created.

Alby, you have been released into pure energy, and these remains are simply the dust left behind. You are all around us, in the air we breathe, in the feelings we have for each other, in the music we hear and in the love we share.

Alby, May everything you have given us live in us and let our legacy be to create abundance of love and blessings in our lives.

Everything we need, everything we are and can become is right here, right now.

Il faut cultiver le jardin.

Winter waiting

Here, at the turning of the year, again I am standing at a crossroads. I am longing to take action, to jump over the steps it will take to develop the next phase. I've been working towards this for the past two years, maybe longer. There is value in methodical steps, there is the necessity of incubation. And I can't, as it has been said, push the river, especially when it appears to be frozen.

I am often impatient. I like to move quickly, I want to make things HAPPEN. I am restless; I have been internal for too long. Perhaps fear is clouding the situation, which actually is a good one.

Winter is the time for stillness. The world seems to be holding its breath; I am holding my breath, trying to fend off the panic generated by what seems like an endless transition. When I relax, I realize that the process is going well. I have spent a lot of time studying, dreaming, seeding. I am ready to manifest, once that proverbial river thaws.

There be Grief Monsters

Widows call it a monster and it has a sneaky, surprising quality, especially after several years, post widowing. It rears its massive, ugly head suddenly, causing overwhelming sadness and a feeling that death just happened and no healing has taken place. I try to imagine what the Monster looks like, and see a large leer, something like a mastiff dog, with a lion's mane curling around its face. My grief monster is probably a line drawing, colorless, its teeth sharp and its tongue dripping. It has wings and a long tail, like the dragons wrapped around the edges of a medieval map of the world. It sneaks up over the edge of my waking life, curling its tail and breathing hot, fetid sorrow all around me, coloring my world dreary. The Grief Monster has a tendency to pop up at the turning of the seasons, or when the children leave to go back to their lives, or at 3:33 am. While it is no longer a constant companion, it has been hanging around a lot lately, taking a seat on the chair next to me, waiting for me to calm down so it can rile me up again.

The Grief Monster likes to create misinterpretations, to cause tears to fill my eyes when I am driving so I have to intuit the road rather than actually see it. The Grief Monster enjoys a good argument about nothing important, and likes to remind me that I am very small, completely alone and not particularly worthy, even though none of this is true. Except perhaps the small part.

I want to banish it to the nether realms, send it careening off the edge of the flat, dull world, burn it into oblivion so it will leave me alone. I want it to sit in a corner with my Inner Critic and have a slightly bitter cup of tea, discuss the price of goods in far off places and then take a long hike somewhere else. In fact, the two of them should get a place together, preferably in another time zone and only visit me when and if I invite them, instead of when I least expect it. I could conveniently delete their contact information from all inboxes and never see them again. Now, wouldn't that be nice.

Cold Calls

"Hello," I said into the phone. I am calling from Hospice, to offer condolences on the death of your mother. "Oh, thank you, I suppose," said the man." But I expected my mother to die, after all. She was 93. But, perhaps you don't know this. My wife died two weeks before."

I asked him how he was doing and if he had thought to talk to anyone. After all, the purpose of my call was to make him aware of the bereavement program, which includes lectures, support groups and even one on one counseling. "Well," he said, "if someone could give me a clue as to how to rebuild my life, I'd really appreciate it."

How, in the face of what seems like insurmountable pain do we find a way to go on, let alone build a new life? Yet, most of us who are widowed do manage to find a way to live fully after loss. We get up in the morning, we eat, breathe, we pay our bills, we continue to raise the children, go to work, in fact, we live. In the beginning, we are often surprised at our ability to get through the day. We are shocked that the sun comes up every day. I was amazed for months that the birds sang in the morning, building nests, mating, feeding their little ones. Numbly, we float through, or we bravely plough through with tenacity. We really don't have a choice; after all, we are still alive. It would be prudent to live well. In fact, this is the highest honor we can offer our lost loves, to continue to live vibrantly, passionately.

This man, who has suffered two losses back to back, cannot see how he will accomplish this, yet I am confident that eventually, he will. It takes time and he is only in the first months. My motto in the early years was to "proceed as if." Even though I kept asking myself, "Whose life am I in," I went through the motions until the motions began to feel natural and part of me. I identified things I loved, activities that gave me joy and forced myself to participate in them.

The man said that he just wants everything to get back to normal. I told him gently that he would have to find a new normal and that I was confident he would, in time. I certainly hope he does.