11/1/11
All Saints Day, and tomorrow, All Souls. I know you’re in there, somewhere between the saints and the souls. Maybe all of us are saints in some surprising and secret ways: what we get through, what we turn from, what shapes and sharpens our love for life, what we sacrifice. No one can really know what it takes for someone else to make it through hard times. Maybe you were an everyday saint. Maybe I am, too.

Lately, the sharp, searing edge of knowing you’re not here is pressing against my heart, burning itself into my awareness in a way I was hoping to avoid. My eyes see a world that you’re not in, no matter where I look. My ears remember, so happily, the sound of your voice. My arms know just how to press you into a hug and hang on tight. All these parts of me are afraid. Of the truth.

You’re not coming back. You’re not coming back? I don’t know how I can ever stand this. Really, it has felt like you have just left the room of this life to go get something. And everything has been waiting, holding its breath, until you return. How could I be breathing the air of a world without you? What would that possibly nourish? Certainly not me.

I’m still trying to find you; reading about the Bardo: the time, described in Tibetan Buddhism, when the soul leaves its body behind and waits, and learns, and finishes with its just-completed life. Is purified, and travels toward its next incarnation. But the Bardo only gives you forty-nine days, and that’s not enough. Here it is, more than a year since you’ve been gone, and I still feel you. I don’t know if you’re really here, but I can’t imagine two lives could be so intertwined and rooted in the heart and then just come apart. So I’ll keep reading. Maybe the mystics have more to say, or maybe there’s nothing to say. Maybe there’s only this: the odd, remarkable, unbelievable, stunning reality of being here, and then gone. What?

Our love room is thick with questions, and the still-shocking possibility of the end.

Loss is so impossible. How in the world can we actually “get it” that someone, so woven into the very fabric of our lives, can just disappear? After the death of my aunt, I floundered  in a sea of feelings. There was sadness, disbelief, anger, confusion. And there was also regret. After she was gone, I couldn’t help but look back at my time with Aunt Min, and note the many things I hadn’t done. Or that I had done begrudgingly, in the midst of many care-management chores. I felt that there were so many opportunities, in that long time of helping her,  to have deeper, more open conversations about what was happening – about how she saw herself, and what she wanted from that final chapter of her life .

Of course, some of that happened in and through our everyday conversations. I listened to the stories of her teaching years, of her travels, of her childhood in Hahnville. I listened to her wisdom of 100+ years of life. But she was a very private person, and there were certain territories we didn’t travel through easily.

In looking back, I can see that the regrets were just another way to hold on – another emotion to fill in the empty space where she had been.

The following are a couple of excerpts on regrets from the letters –

From Year 1

4/8/11
Dear Aunt Min,
In the cemetery, on my morning walk to see the pond, I pass the many headstones and think of you. And feel, again, a little guilt. How many days in that last, hard year did I wish you were gone? How many rough times did I slog through, wrestling with all the details of taking care of you, trying to leave your dignity intact, from so far away? How many crazy conversations did I have with your impassioned helper, and end up wishing that you would hurry along toward your next life, toward whatever mystery was waiting for you, that final good-bye?

Now my heart feels weak and cowardly, but what was I to do? Trying to hold up the head of my own life, all the while keeping you above water; it just got to be too much.

I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t somehow figure out a way to do it all, for longer. I’m sorry I didn’t insist earlier, in some ridiculously cheery and positive way, that you come up to Maine when you could still have made new friends. Maybe I could have been sneakier, tricked you into loving a new life here. But I didn’t. I didn’t, and you wouldn’t, and so there we were—and now, here we are: finished. All the chances dried up, fading into themselves, impossible.

And yet…maybe it was just all that it could be. In these odd times, nothing is predictable, not even the planet, or life, or the money you tucked away, thinking it would save you somehow from uncertainty, from the kind of living and dying you didn’t want. Nothing was certain, so you left.

From Year 3

1/28/13
A rosy dawn. A dream with so many parts: You are in a nursing facility and I am doing work for you. You’ve been sharp and bright and talkative, still seem to be healthy. Then the nurses tell me that you have stabbed seven of the workers. You seemed fine, then your black eyes glittered and you slashed at them. I feel relieved that people know this about you, because then you can stay in the hospital, and I won’t have to keep figuring out what to do.

What does this mean? Am I trying to get rid of you, and be done—or did you do this to me? Kill me off in a small way no one could see? Well, my health did fall apart when I was trying to live both our lives. And here I am now, trying to recover.

I feel guilty about dreaming this, even though we can’t control our dreams. Maybe I’m sorting out all the conflicting emotions and realities around having helped, and been so mad at, and loved so fiercely, and then lost, you.

As painful as the loss of my aunt was, there were also times of unexpected joy. While my sense of suffering seemed heightened, so did my sense of awe and gratitude. The following letter, from the first year after her death, describes one of those times –

***

8/5/11
Yesterday I actually relaxed: swam in the quiet pond, lay in the finally bright sun, stared at small ants tunneling under my beach towel, grew hot. I felt my bones sink down, my muscles rest, my thoughts disappear. There was only the letting go, the water lapping, breeze freshening, clouds flickering over the sky.

It’s been a long, long time since I could do that. And, oh, how much more I still need. But I can feel it coming. Something big and heavy, something pinning me into a sad, uncomfortable place, is slipping away.

It might be you.

Funny, how such a tiny person, so light, could be so much to carry. But I guess that’s the weight of a life: a collection of so many years, of longings and thoughts, joys and fears, and the motley, many ways to be. They don’t lie easy on us. It’s hard enough to live our own lives, harder still to do someone else’s.

But you know what? I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Our rich, tangled-up time together was like a sweet, medicinal honey: nourishing, though not always tasty; giving life, yet costing something to digest.

***

I wonder if others have experienced those hidden joys during the journey through grief –

In the last few years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) classification and diagnostic tool, has included some forms of grief as a potential pathology warranting treatment. There are ongoing conversations about the significance of this delineation, but one outcome has been a public recognition of loss and bereavement as a wrenching, and meaning-rich, life challenge.

During the “love room” years, I certainly exhibited signs of what might be called depression. I often found myself in a kind of fog. Anything that took effort was just too hard. I still loved my family and friends, but preferred, often, to be alone. I was exhausted. The only people I wanted to be around were those who were grieving, too. I couldn’t tolerate anything that seemed “shallow,” which almost everything did.

I eventually did agree to begin a low dose of antidepressant to relieve some of my “symptoms.” And was grateful for the bit of lightness gained. But I also felt strongly that what I was experiencing was not just something that was “wrong,” but a true participation in a stunning Mystery of life – how someone, anyone, could be so fully here, and then gone. I was, even in the midst of such suffering, living the questions that underlie our lives. And I didn’t want to give that up.

I certainly agree that as we grieve, we need to be watchful, and allow others to keep watch, with us. We need to be open to support, and to seek it in appropriate ways. But we also can acknowledge the deep spiritual and emotional gifts that grief offers. There is no love without concurrent loss, somewhere along the way. There is no opening of the heart without suffering. And despite the wrenching pain of the loss of my aunt, I am so grateful for the chance to have known and loved her deeply, and to have landed at the love room door – even though it was wrenchingly hard – after she was gone.

The following is a little excerpt from Year 1 of the letters –

12/13/11
This past week, the tiny dose of antidepressant I have started to take has lifted me up a bit, and I’m glad. But I want to be careful. Whatever this invisible enclosure has been, I don’t really want to set it aside. Even though it’s been uncomfortable—weighty and sobering—I want it to unfold as it will. For one thing, it’s what I have left of you. But even more, it is real: some law of the universe of coming apart that I don’t want to miss. If even animals grieve—if wild elephants have impromptu “funerals” when one of their tribe dies, walking around the lost one in a circle, each taking a turn, trying to nudge the fallen one up, then finally fading off into the trees—who am I to pretend this isn’t happening? This low and sunken state, this rarified place?

Are you still there? Am I slipping in and out of you? Does the love room—oh, that world of just the two of us—miss our hands holding on? I have to think it does. Surely the universe must so love, and therefore miss, its children the stars, its snuffed-out sparks of light, any of us who fall.

A few weeks before the first anniversary –

8/14/11

Only three weeks until your one-year-gone day. Last year I was visiting you in the nursing home, trying to grab you back, anchor you to your unraveling life. Sometimes Celeste and Lara came with me. We’d try to get you to talk, tried to pull you back from that distant place where you went, all by yourself, when things were too hard: eyes that worked – but not together; walking that was too confusing; a bed that wasn’t your low, sunken cot, shaped to your sleep-curved body; and diapers. The vulnerable chaos of infirmity.

Remember when we came? How we all stood around, talking, joking, urging you to suck in the pureed mess of whatever was served that day – squished turkey, spinach, custard? Baby food – except for ice cream. Even when you stopped talking, when you tucked so far inside yourself that you stopped answering most questions, if they asked whether you wanted ice cream, you said yes. If they asked what flavor, you said chocolate. You were saving your energy, I guess, for what mattered most.

Sometimes, toward the end, you would suddenly sing: all the sweet memories of being young and playful bubbled up and out of you in a creaky-throated song. And you spoke French. In the last weeks, you answered questions in the language of your childhood, of you parents and grandparents, especially when they wanted to talk privately if the children were around. I guess you were  going backward before you edged away. Your memories shimmered so much brighter than your now.

And then you were gone.

And here I am, still holding you, still grounding the shimmery, transparent space of your tender, remarkable life, of the things you couldn’t have predicted, but weathered anyway, with grace and not a few sharp words. Oh, your sharpness is gone, but the shine still lingers.

I sure miss you. Do you show up for the anniversaries? Does the love room become a ritual, then? If so, I am standing here at the altar of what used to be, loving you

9/4/11
The morning of your leaving day…

This time last year you were slipping away. All by yourself, you were churning around, tugging away from the womb of the world that had held you in place. You were going home; a reverse kind of birth.

Did you know that you were leaving? Were you intent, and just counting down?

Probably you were praying, talking with the Mystery that had held you up, slipping back and forth in the Great Communion toward your unbecoming, toward the restful emptiness.

I am so happy to be thinking about you, on this, your leaving day. My body wishes it could turn in your direction one more time. But, of course, that isn’t true. If I could turn to you, again and again, I would. One time would not be enough.

I’m wishing so many things: That I could have asked you more questions. That I could have been more open, freer of all the twisty, needy times when I heard everything as a slight, when your sharp and piercing tongue met my shaky tenderness, and I withdrew.

I wonder what you would have wished. How was it from your end? Well…you can’t tell me now. But we did it all: tangled and tussled, learned and leaned toward each other, laughed and talked and butted heads.

Now, I am feeling weak, shadowy, only half here on this, the day the world broke open and took you back. Oh, I want to press my cheek against that small scar left by your passing, and feel you close.

3 p.m.
At the frog pond, where I go sometimes when I want to be alone, I lie on dry scrubbly ground, hidden behind small willow shrubs. Ants skitter around me, cicadas drone, crickets screech, red dragonflies dance at the edge of the pond, dotting the shallow water with their eggs. Sun and heat make a kind of womb in this in-between time of your passing.

No one really knows what time you left, but the death certificate says 4 p.m. That’s when they found you, when the nurse who had just told me by phone that you were great—sitting up in your chair and watching out the window, having a good day—hung up and went to check on you; maybe to tell you I had called. That’s when she knew. You were not great. You were gone.

It helps me to imagine that, in those little bits of an hour before you left, you must have been peaceful — communing — stepping over gently, inch by inch, into the Mystery. You didn’t struggle. You slid quietly, sighed, and let go.

I want you to know that I’m holding the door open for you now, in this hour of your end. Maybe you’ll reach through and touch me. Maybe you already are, and that’s why I needed to be in a quiet place, why I feel so insubstantial.

Maybe it’s a little like what I’ve read about Yom Kippur, when the gates between worlds—between whatever heaven is, and here—are open. Even though we’re not Jewish, I’m holding them open for you now.

Today, our love room is all aflicker with dragonflies, aquiver with breezy leaves, warm with sun, sweet and sad with memories and longing and love, damp with tears. I am here with you.

Evening
After the beach and some work at home, I talked with my friend Margaret, and asked her to say a prayer to honor this, your dying day. She did, and it made me cry. I’ve needed to cry all day, I guess, but the prayer and the witnessing of your bright and complicated life, the holding on and the letting go, unleashed the tears.

Margaret told me about Yahrzeit, the Jewish one-year anniversary ritual of lighting a candle at sundown and letting it stay lit for 24 hours. So I’m lighting a candle now, small but bright and burning steadily. I‘m setting it next to the picture of you at one hundred and another in what must have been your early teen years: legs bare, your rounded, girlish body perched in the open door of a Model T with a smile on your face.

The hallway light is on, too; will stay on all night and all day tomorrow. I can keep that going for you. I can light your way, in case you want to reach back, or keep the gate open if anything is left of you that needs to leave. Maybe tomorrow, when I’m not so tired, I’ll write down my story of your leaving day.

Now, crickets are ringing all around the house, the ripening moon is pale pumpkin through the hazy, dark skin of the night. The house is quiet. Everything is thrilling toward you, leaning toward your departure into the Generous Unknown that has wrapped itself around you. Everything is love.

Gratitude seems like an odd thing to have felt in the midst of such wrenching pain, but it was a continuous thread throughout the love room years. Sometimes, it showed up as a piercing beauty of the natural world that cut through the fog of loss. At other times, it was an acute and visceral joy at being with family, or returning to home ground, or penning the small notes to my aunt. Often, the gratitude occurred neck and neck with grief.  I wondered if perhaps, in the life-quake of loss, the world’s everyday beauties and gifts get exposed for the bits of Mystery they surely are.

Here’s a little note from the 3rd year of the love room’s unfolding….

“Tonight I am loving the owls and their raspy-throated calls, a sky that sizzles with stars, crickets ringing all around the house—and having waited for you. Whatever rough edges this—the love room—has pressed into the tender tissues of my life, I am nothing but glad. Some happy chance has landed me at the love room door, and I have stepped right in.”