PROFOUND GRIEF

A Love Story

A stone, a leaf, a door… O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

INTRODUCTION

Profound grief is as unique as the person experiencing it. Grief is a place where, in the end, each person discovers their own way and finds their own means.

I am a grieving, bereaved person who shared a profound love with a remarkable person named Lenore. This is the story of our love and my grief in the wake of her death. Grief is not linear. It is a tumbling, chaotic round of turmoil. Ground passed over before returns; unbelief and the emotional horror of the beloved’s loss does not fade simply because it is acknowledged once.

This book is being written in that world at a desk surrounded by unfathomable depths of darkness. There are times when I can think, and remember and feel. I write during those times. The rest of the time I neither think or remember or feel. I am null and void, a dweller in the regions inhabited by crushed souls.

It is all in pieces now. These pages hold what is left of a once whole, true, profound love between two people who found the secrets of the universe and the true meaning of life.

Profound Grief: A Love Story

The Human Being Behind All Anatomy

In the short story “The Anatomy Lesson” by Evan S. Connell, Andrev Andraukov is an aging artist and art teacher in a college. He is eccentric and obsessed with his vigil for a student who will “understand what it meant to be an artist; one student, born with the instinct of compassion, who could learn, who would renounce temporal life for the sake of billions yet unborn, just one who cared less for himself than for others.”

As his class attempts to draw a female model, Andraukov lectures them, instructs them, and initiates them into seeing anatomy as a vehicle to understanding the human being behind the anatomy, the particular human. Andraukov as mentor takes them deeper into the particular to see the universal: “He spoke of how Rembrandt painted a young woman looking out an open window and said to them that she did not live three hundred years ago, no, she was more than one young woman, she was all, from the first who had lived on earth to the one yet unborn who would be the final.”

I have lived with that very woman. For 33 years I saw her look out that open window to behold this life and then walk out to meet it daily with passion and gentleness and strength and goodness, being cheerful in all weathers and truly more interested and concerned for others than herself. She is the one I kept vigil for in my earlier life. She is the human being behind all anatomy, and from her I learned to care less for myself than her. She is, has been, and will always be my greatest blessing.

“I Understand.”

Today I have driven to Cannon Beach, a coastal town on the Oregon Coast and a place Lenore and I often went. On the trip here I found myself looking through Lenore’s eyes, or her through mine, I couldn’t tell you which. At times it seemed the first, at others the second.

Before she died we agreed to meet on the beach there after she had gone. I would bring a bottle of wine and two glasses. We would meet there, she on the other side of the curtain, me still here. And we would see what happened.

Everywhere, as I drive, I am looking for the light she saw here.

The grass on the hillsides and in the fields and orchard lands east of Portland is a brilliant green this time of year, glowing in the spring rains with life and new growth. It is farm and wine country, and the barns and farmhouses and wineries roll across the countryside with the grace of the undulating land. Under the cloud-scattered sky as I drove, gray chiaroscuro shades in the landscape filled with brilliant color and sharp definition in patches of sunlight drifting across the landscape.

On the winding highway through the coastal mountains sudden vistas of valley and forest appear, spread out for miles. I stop at an overlook and a swath of sunshine floats across the valley below.

The first week of last September we were here. She was able to walk short distances with her canes, in a wheelchair the rest of the time. We did what we always do, wheeling her all the way. We bought fresh salmon and vegetables and salad and fudge and wine in the markets and took it to our room overlooking the ocean. We prepared our meal together and drank the wine and ate together and afterward went out on the balcony and gazed at the ocean and talked for a long time about life and death, and beauty and joy and sadness and loss, and about how important every moment is.

On the coast today, driving through town, sunlight drifts between cloud shadows on the ocean. Light and shadows. In the sunshine the roiled surf glistens like foamy, hammered glass. The clouds are white on top, and gray beneath. Their reflections on the wet, tan sand create columns of soft white light with stretches of faded charcoal between. Light and shadow.

Sitting in the truck after arriving at our hotel, I was looking down the long, gray, weathered-cedar shakes on the side of the building and wondering if – even after the drive here, even after all the beauty and light seen in new ways and even after the presence of Lenore in me and with me as we rode together – if there is enough here in this world to hold me here. I wanted to be with her so much in that moment, to be with her where she is.

She spoke to me then, telling me that as long as I am here she can be here too, seeing through my eyes and feeling in my heart the beauty and joy of this life she loves so much. I asked her if she would fault me if I took that from her and broke my promise to stay here and shine my light, and she said, “Oh no, my darling. I understand.”

The sadness here is terrible, the grief worse. This coastal town we enjoyed so much together has become a place of shadows and sad memories and suffering for me now. The condolences coming in from many feel rote and superficial even though I know they come from good hearts, reaching out to connect, to touch me with love in the best way they know how. Some grieve with me, and I do my own best to connect with them and touch them with my love in the best way I know how. A few see how devoted I am to her, how very much I love her, how I honor her and how I cared and care for her. They touch me the most, they break my heart, they see and say the truth and in those moments I break down and cry, inconsolable.

I am leaving this place today and won’t come back. Instead I will hold the memories of our earlier days together here; the gulls arcing through the air; our walks together on the wet sand next to this great ocean; the clouds of tiny birds sweeping and turning in unison over the waves; the sunny times when two souls wandered together as one through this wonderful, beautiful life.

Unknown Waters

We used to sail on a nearby mountain lake. Lenore was an accomplished sailor and loved the idea of sailing in the mountains. We had some wonderful times in that high country.

Now I’m adrift on an emotional ocean. There are peaks and troughs and breakers; sometimes I can see a horizon, sometimes I’m down in shadowy depths surrounded by walls of dark water and can’t get a point of reference because everything shifts and changes. There are times when breakers hit and the world is turmoil and tumble and I’m drowning and my chest aches and everything washes away in tears. I’ve sailed beyond some mapped boundary into unknown waters, alone, where the only truth is the storm.

Her death has unmoored me. Together, for each other, we were anchor and tiller and sail on the sea of life; we found our way together in the winds and under the sky and sun and moon. We navigated as one. Now she’s gone and I’m trying to find my way alone.

I’ve been willing and open and cooperative in seeking out help and information about grief. I’ve reminded myself of my spiritual beliefs and knowing, my learned wisdoms, and previous experiences with loss and grief. I’ve done my best to use it all.

People tell me what I’m experiencing is normal, and with the best of intentions offer me the conventional remedies and wisdoms. They say it’s normal to feel this way, that love and loss are the same for everybody; that the bereaved always regard the love they had as truly special.

Conventional wisdom doesn’t apply here. Head-tooling and heart-tooling fail; it all proves to be nothing more than feeble attempts to rebuild this world so that Lenore is still in it. I tell myself she is here with me, she is in me. I tell myself we are one and that can’t ever be undone. I tell myself we can still be here together. I tell myself it just takes time and is hard and eventually I will find a way to live here. It is all desperate and removed from the truth that howls beneath. She is gone.

Recently I looked at a photograph of Lenore and only saw a picture of a planet that no longer exists. It’s an entire world gone, lost in time, a memory fading into history. I’m far away from that place, alone in an ocean of deep space in a dark capsule, moving ever further away. The only remnants of the world we shared are these faded pieces of photo paper, archiving a light which no longer exists in the world.

This is not normal, this is not conventional. We were not normal, we were not conventional. We were extraordinary, we were rare exceptions to the rules that define normal and conventional and typical. A few people know that. They saw it, they recognized us; they knew who we were together.

The Existential Netherworld

I arrived on the Oregon coast three days ago. Yesterday I drove north, today I drove south. In two days I’ve explored about 65 miles of what must surely be one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world.

The drive north was on a day of rain showers beneath billowing clouds riding easily inland on a gentle sea breeze. Today, going south, a spring storm hammered the capes and beaches under dark skies and storm surf. Hammering winds across the headlands curled down into the lees and drove deluges of rain across isolated bays and coves and the highway.

Both days spent in some kind of existential netherworld where I am there but not there, aware yet numb, moving yet isolated; and behind it all there’s a subtle, subliminal urgency to just keep moving.

Strange things happen on these journeys. I drive past places we have been together and forgotten about. Fragments of memory appear. On the journey north when I pull into a beachside place where we played with children on the beach and flew a kite and explored a tidal pool and lay on towels in the sun and had a picnic, the sun breaks through as I pull into the parking space. It filters down through tall coastal trees and I wonder if it is her, happy to be here again.

When I leave the sky goes dark, and as I pull onto the highway a cloudburst of rain floods the windshield and I wonder if it is her, feeling my sadness, sharing my sadness; or is it her own sadness at not being here anymore. And I am crying, and driving on.

On the drive south a beautiful panorama of stormy coastal beach appears and the unexpected, sudden beauty of it all is first an unbidden, joyful surprise we are sharing together – and then I remember she is not there, and I am crying yet again.

Standing on an overlook at a place so beautiful and perfect all I can do is be there with it and experience it, I remember how we stood together in those moments and places, her arms wrapped around my arm, snuggled up next to me. And I break, and cry, and move on.

This is how it is. This is what grief is.

A Part of Every Day

I’m glad she died first. I’m glad I’m the one taking the blow and not her. She died well, it was a good death. She was herself to the last; unafraid, enduring terrible pain, yet ever who she was to the bone – a sweet, loving person willing to hug everyone she met and learn their story.

Bereavement is a shattering experience. They say the pieces of the shattered self come back together slowly and a person is never the same as they were before. I wonder how that will look, that changed self. In our case that self, that person, is actually two people who are really one self. Lenore is still as much a part of me as I am, even though she has died. How can that ever come back together? She died, she’s gone from the body, and I’m here without her. That’s truth, plain and simple and clear. Her loss is in me forever. Wherever I go, it will go too.

Tears are a part of every day now. They come with thoughts, they come with memories, they come suddenly, unbidden, when I least expect it. Yesterday I was grocery shopping and when I turned a corner on my way to the next item on my list, without warning, an empty, overwhelming sadness welled up and just gutted me right there.

I live in some sort of exquisite, poignant, crushing alternate reality these days. Life is so beautiful and full and so colorless and empty. When I see couples together I don’t listen to what they are saying to each other anymore. I don’t listen and look for the nuances in their interactions that would inform me of the nature of their relationship. I’m just glad they have each other.

I hope they are making the most of their love, hope that they are aware of the perfect, terrible beauty of this life. We are born here, we live here, and we leave here. The love we find and share is here, now. One day the person or persons we share our love with may not be here anymore. It’s so easy to push that fact into the background of our lives.

I’m grateful Lenore and I knew that. I’m grateful for every moment when, unbidden, just like the grief that comes and engulfs me now, one of us went to the other in a moment of spontaneous, inexplicable joy and said to the other, “I love you.”

“How sweet,” we’d say, pleased and touched. Then we’d say something like “Why? What brought that on?” It’s always nice to know why you are loved. And the answer was always the same. “No reason. Just because.” We’d smile at one another, and kiss, and go on about our business in the glowing warmth and light of those moments.

No reason. That’s it exactly. It’s not a head thing, it’s a heart thing. The mind is a useful thing, yet when it comes to matters of the heart it only holds processed shadows of what the heart knows; it’s a repository of annotations, a reference source which may or may not be able to conduct us back to the source of true knowing.

There’s a Mary Englebreit card Lenore saved on our bulleting board here and it says, “The heart is the temple wherein all truth resides.” It’s true. Soaring love and desolate grief are the truths which live there. Joy and mourning live there. The perfect, terrible beauties and facts and realities of this life live there.

The Swallows

Six days ago barn swallows started building a nest on top of the porch light above the entry door of the RV. It felt like both a reminder from Lenore and a hopeful sign; life goes on, and our life together will too. I thought of how delighted she would be about swallows nesting with us in our nest. It was a good thought, and I didn’t feel sad.

I thought about it all through the day as I watched the swallows come and go, bringing mud from the river bank and tiny twigs from the forest and earnestly building the nest of this new season. I knew they had chosen the spot because it was under cover of the RV awning in a seeming eave on a human-built habitation – those are the conditions barn swallows in the northwest seek first for their nests. 

I recognized it wasn’t a place that would be permanently that way for them. The eave is not always there, I have to retract the awning during strong winds. The Mystic Wind is not a fixed habitation, it moves from place to place. I still wanted them to be there anyway. I started trying to devise a plan that would make it work for them.

These days I look directly and unsparingly at a lot of things. I looked into the length of time it would take for them to accomplish their aim. I sadly realized it would be better if they found another, better place to nest. The next morning at sunrise, before they returned to continue building, I retracted the awning and removed the beginnings of their nest.

I watched when they returned. One in particular with a small twig in its beak flew in again and again, looking for the home no longer there. It would approach, and hover, and then leave and fly in a tight arc about twenty feet out, anxious and confused. Finally it landed on a perch about a foot away from where it had placed the nest, had a good look at what was not there anymore, and flew away. It hasn’t come back since. I miss their wings fluttering purposefully under the awning and am sad that they won’t be back.

They’re in a new place. So is Lenore. I miss her angel wings fluttering purposefully here in my life and our nest.

Thelma and Louise

I always thought we’d be doing a Thelma and Louise together into the Grand Canyon before, at the last, she told me I must stay behind and share my light. That’s the honest truth. We spoke about it several times, laughing yet seriously looking at it. We belonged together; it was natural to think we would die together. We never really could decide on it one way or the other. It was pending, awaiting a decision when the way was made clear and certain.

I was so good with that plan. I was ready and willing to die with her, to go out together, to enter the next life together; to always be together. She knew all I was waiting for was her word that it was time to go. It actually surprised me when she told me I needed to stay here. She knew being with her was all I wanted and it meant more to me than life itself.

I know she considered my thoughts and feelings about that along with all the other things facing her, and us, and I know that when she told me to stay here and shine my light she meant it with all the knowing she had in her wonderful heart.

This morning after the sun was in the eastern sky I went down to the river and sat on a bench there. In front of me tall, thin stalks of grass, heavy with the seed-sheaths of springtime, bent and swayed in a soft land breeze. The river ran smoothly toward the ocean and light flashed on small breakers in the water above sand banks just below the surface, rising in the ebb tide. The contoured horizon of the treed hills on the other side of the river felt eternal and everlasting.

Down river toward the bay I saw the town crowded on the shoreline and the houses on the hill above and thought about how human beings don’t really have dominion over the earth at all. They nestle up to it and draw their sustenance and the food of their souls from it.

I watched a blue heron hunting on the sand shoals of low tide, seemingly walking on the water in the middle of the river. Its paced, majestic stroll and sudden, quick spears into the water caught something deep in me and I watched it with a peaceful, patient fascination for a long time.

And everywhere, everywhere – light and shadows. The heron’s beak gleaming silver in the sun; the eternal shadows in the trees on the hillside; the brilliant green moss on old stumps, ancient river snags, dark with age and twisted roots and branches. The impermanent buildings and houses in the town washed bright in light older than the ages.

On the bench I imagine Lenore is beside me, seeing what I am seeing. Yet again I feel her arms wrapped around my arm, her cheek snuggled up to my shoulder as it was so many times when we beheld the beauty of the earth and this life together. I lean into her embrace and there we are, together.

Later I get up slowly from the bench. In all this beauty I am again alone and she is gone. I walk back up the treed path from the river with tears in my eyes. There are moments these days which end with a wail, and moments that give me peace. There are times when grief pierces my heart and I bleed, when sorrow crushes me and I cry, when love comforts me and I rest. This is what it is now. Love in pain, joy in sorrow, peace in turmoil. The full, terrible beauty of this life is what’s real. All I can do is let it all happen, let it lead where it will lead and do what it will, let it be what it is.

My God, how I miss her!

Perfect Endarkenment

At times during the day I take my glasses off to clean them and notice a field of fine, dried salt drops sprayed across the backside of both lenses. Tiny dots, a lot of them. When grief hits me the explosion blows a fine spray of tears straight off my eyeballs.

I don’t get thoughtful or mildly uneasy anymore about the potential, low-probability dangers present in places I drive – like high, long bridges or roads along steep cliffs, or tsunami zones, or high-speed two-way traffic. Instead I feel a tiny, wistful measure of hope that catastrophe and deliverance are both just around the next corner.

Sometimes I suddenly come back to myself and realize I’ve been staring at the same place for several minutes, seeing nothing, feeling nothing; just numb and fixed in a state of suspended animation. Life, stopped in its tracks. It’s like the dark side of meditational bliss, the opposite number, the evil mirror-sibling. No-bliss, no-life. It’s Perfect Endarkenment.  

Sometimes Lenore and I kid each other and I’ll say something about how she’s the one in the box of ashes next to me and I’m the one left in a damn body to deal with all this. She’ll reply, “Yes honey, that’s true – but you’re the one hanging on to every word I say.” Then she flutters her wide-open eyes at me and gives me a big, sweet, innocent smile. She’s right, as usual. The authorities here are more likely to frown on my condition than hers.

Standing Alone Outside the Godhead

I try to keep it at bay. I stay busy, I hold to a loose but fairly consistent daily schedule that provides structure to my days. I keep up with mundane daily duties of taking care of basic needs. I shop, I do laundry. I make sure I get enough good food and sleep to take care of myself like Lenore told me to do. I keep our home clean and ordered and maintained. 

I read, and think, and learn, and write. I go down to the river or to the ocean or mountains and spend contemplative time beholding and experiencing the eternal perfections of nature and this earth. I go fishing, I eat out, I treat myself to special meals.

I meet new people and shine a part of that light she told me to share, smiling, looking them in the eye, communicating the countless nuances of connection she and I learned together, projecting energy which helps them feel safe and comfortable and invites them to join us – now me – in the moment.

It’s about connection, and up until now it’s been my experience that connection brings peace. Now there is no peace in the connections I make with the people and places and things in my life. The moments come, the moments go, and even in those moments of connection the loneliness I feel in her absence lurks like a dark, empty shadow in my mind and heart and gut and life. We’re separated, and there’s no peace in that.

We’re connected too, of course. Yet memories, and the presence of her in me, and the thing that became us and still abides in me, and the spiritual knowing we gained together of who and what we are really in this universe – none of that comes forward to stand strongly against this loneliness.

I think there’s a difference between being heart-sick and being soul-sick. The soul sickness I’ve been experiencing after Lenore’s death is like standing alone outside the godhead that together we were immersed in as one spirit.

The Fragile Edge

Every time I look at a calendar my eye involuntarily glances at her death date. Last month and now this month it’s been a day on that fragile edge that Lenore spoke about at the last, a place that sometimes just won’t hold you.

I open a cabinet door and there are the things she used to bake bread and muffins, and all the spices, and her shadow is in the kitchen, baking and cooking.

It’s a beautiful day here. All the beauty and she’s not here. She said she wanted to die before me because she wouldn’t know what to do in this life without me. I don’t know what to do in this life without her.

Every point of purchase gained doesn’t last and I am constantly back at the beginning, crying, driving away from the hospice center, dead, a robot on automatic pilot going forward out of habit without her.

I actually reset the trip odometer on the truck before I put it in gear in the hospice parking lot that last day. Mile zero of the road ahead. I have no idea why I did that or what it reads now. Today it’s still at zero as far as I’m concerned. Or it reads a million billion miles away from where I want to be.

The Ones Who Don’t Survive

The survivors of grief tell their stories, share their pain and loss and hope and wisdom and the nature of their lives after the blow. They’re still here, life goes on, kindness and caring and serving others and survivals are all confirmed and present. We are reassured, and since we are not the one dead and we have turned again to our own affairs, albeit with the enduring presence of the after-effects of our loss, we carry on.

I want to hear more about the other people: the ones who didn’t survive, the ones who died of broken hearts, the ones who ended their own lives. They couldn’t all have been weak, or sick, or clinically diagnosable, or in some other way conformed to the viewpoints and judgments the general consensus assigned to them and then comfortably filed them away under.

Were they just unexplainable anomalies? I don’t believe that. I think they were probably unexamined, but not unexplainable. I think that happens because there are things people don’t like to look at if they can be avoided, and death is one of those things, and most certainly suicide.

Religion condemns suicide, pigeonholes it neatly as a sin that earns the curse of separation and damnation. People seem to want to take the loss of another person to suicide as more painful than other losses to death. Voluntary death-with-dignity laws make people uneasy, they don’t want to think about it.

There’s just something about suicide that inspires a human being to look away, to quickly write it off with a neat label and push it out of mind. Is it fear of the possibility that rational reasons may actually in certain cases and conditions be present there? Is it because doing that is dangerous for the temporarily despondent or depressed individual who might see rationales and justifications in that knowledge which, in their condition, are neither rational or justifiable, but merely seized upon to be the vehicle which conveys them to the end of pain and suffering?

Why not simply have a look at it and regard it calmly as an honest fact of life and seek to understand it?

Ghosts

It’s a contemplative morning on the river here; the sky is gently overcast with cloud. Inland heat pressed in from the east last night and condensed the cool, wet sea air. Sound is muffled and colors muted and the slowing of sensory input gives rise to thoughts which ride just beneath the surface of louder, brighter days.

I wonder why this world is not overrun with ghosts, because I live with one these days.

Ghosts – the fading, ephemeral essence of those who once were here with blood burning in hearts which rose into the throat for a swallow flying, a morning rising, a lover’s touching. Why would they not linger here in this place where earth and air and fire and water burn and freeze, where the sun and moon and stars hold fast and turn, where connection and loneliness abide together and an exquisite fullness is present in every moment? 

Ghosts fade and eventually disappear from our history. We all do. Each day, all around us, the vast, dynamic, organic continuum of human life is filling with new arrivals, filled with lives living unique legends, and emptying with constant departures. Where are the ghosts of the ancient people who lived in what are now the ruins of history, the long forgotten everyday citizens living long forgotten everyday lives in Akkadia and Babylonia, Troy and Pompeii, living in the cliff caves of the Dead Sea, and the cliff dwellings in Mancos Canyon and Mesa Verde?

Where is Lenore? She burns bright in my heart and memory. Yet soon at some unknown time I too will leave here to join her where she is now. My memories of her will leave too and sooner or later, in a hundred years or perhaps more, a final article of her particular, unique life – maybe an old photograph hung upon a wall with no memory of the particulars and personality of her life – will be taken down, and put away, and lost.

Where are the ghosts? Where is she?

We are here. We are in the earth and air and fire and water; in the rocks and sand, in the cloud and winds, in the sun and flames, in the river and the ocean and the tears and life in rain. The physics of the universe is not confined within the overlay mind presses over it. We are here.

The Vanities

Early this morning, having my first cup of coffee and watching the sunrise and the birds and trees and clouds and river, my head laid back against the wall of the Mystic Wind, I had a chest pain and thought it would be perfect to die right there.

Everything has changed for me. The breakdown of my belief system which has come in the wake of Lenore’s death no longer embraces the spiritual beliefs and understanding I developed over my lifetime. The matrix of understanding I put together has proven to be  a collection of learned and taught bits. It’s the result of my nature as a human being, that adaptable creature who adjusts to relative conditions. I observe and experience life and then incorporate that into a relative reality.

The things within my ken which are real and true have dwindled. The planet and the life force, both of which persistently and habitually continue on, are still in the remainder of things which I see as being true. The rest is fading fast.

It’s been observed that there are seasons which have a purpose. My season now is in a land where old men dwell. It’s time to recognize the vanities of my life, time to own and admit that those pieces which formed the aggregate of my personal identity and my matrix of understanding and my navigational map were useful and necessary when I was young and not so useful now.

There is a time for vanities, for constructing and then living by belief within one’s particularly assembled matrix of understanding. There is a time when we learn about the virtues and vices of human conduct, about the things which fulfill us and the things which empty us, and navigate according to the map we assemble. And there’s a time to see the essential vanity of it, to admit the uniquely personal construct which we formed was merely a useful tool for the self while it existed in a certain season of particular conditions and circumstances. It proves to be only a substantial, serviceable, useable – and temporary – application.

I no longer believe in a personal life after death. I believe that when I die I will be dead. I believe that all the temporary perfection which Lenore embodied was just that – a temporary, exquisite, embodied perfection which existed then and does not exist now. She is a part of the essential material of the universe now. It will be the same for me.

What is true for me now is simple. Life goes on. The universe goes on. There will be, for eons to come just as for eons passed, earth and air and fire and water, the mountains and the trees and birds and clouds and sky, the sun and moon and stars – and human beings who encounter them.

Living Dead

Memories come unbidden now; they’re random emotional tics that hit my heart like a spear point. I wrench my mind away from them and go do something that requires my full attention. They return. Everywhere I go my face is numb and my mind barely engaged. I don’t smile except when it happens reflexively, when I meet and talk with other people. I am merely an automaton, but a good one. In those moments I am engaged, registering, responding, identifying, sharing without joy.

I’ve had a good life. Unusual, a rare mix of gifts and graces, a nature and nurture and experience that removed me so far from any norm or mean that I found myself a dweller on the outside edge of human society. I found few peers but those few were a joy to me. The one person I found who was my equal in intelligence, passion and insight was even more than that. She was the complementary fit to every aspect of my life, and I was that for her as well. The result was that two-who-are-one thing that everybody claims for themselves but few have.

Who were We?

Lenore was the one person in this life who really knew the most about who I am, and she loved me for it. In a way I’m like one of the old tea clipper ships with a very, very long anchor chain. I tend to wander widely across the oceans of the earth, rising at times on the tides of the clouds to sail far above the earth, among the moon and stars even while being tethered to the earth. We were both born to sail together on such a ship, and we did.

I have been gifted with an odd, strange genius and a nature and a heart that has made my life very interesting and rich. Lenore was the only person I ever knew who genuinely liked and enjoyed and loved always being in my company, and understood my unusual experience and the person I am, and took delight from it all. She was brilliant, she was uniquely odd in the rarity of her many gifts and perfections, and she was very, very human in an indescribably angelic way. We were so much alike in so many ways. And so much of what we were was far beyond “normal.” It was exquisite. Our life together was a constant, ongoing shared experience of those exquisite nuances of life which often go unnoticed by most people.

Contact

Yesterday afternoon, bent through a half-open transport van window, I spent 20 minutes with my hand on the back of a traffic accident victim, speaking to him calmly and keeping him from moving his head until paramedics arrived because he had facial lacerations and a probable head injury. I walked through a crowd of uncertain, milling bystanders and just did it.

I have no training at all as a first responder. All I could do was the little I did, letting him know through the contact of my hand and my words that another person was there with him and he was not alone. I learned how to do that from a stranger many, many years ago. No matter how little we can do in such circumstances, there’s always something we can do.

I came back to the RV after the first responders had arrived and a young fireman had been assigned to stabilize the head and neck of the man I was with. I wanted to share what had happened with Lenore and she wasn’t here. I realized she would have been there with me, doing what I was doing. I felt like it was her in me, doing what I’d done.

Ghost World

Yesterday morning I woke up drained empty of tears and found myself headed south down the coast for no reason at all. On impulse and numb from the day before when the seemingly depthless well of my mourning drowned everything, a sort of animal instinct took over and I fled the scene.

Lenore and I visited the southern Oregon coast often. If you come here with your eyes and ears and heart and mind and spirit open it roars and whispers and reveals magical things. The ocean and coastal mountains and trails into the wild, natural areas here are full of eternal truths that inform and fill the soul. When shared by friends and lovers it becomes an indelible part of their deep connection, a touchstone of memory, a vault of life’s true treasure. That’s what this area became for us.

Yesterday I was exhausted and instinctively fleeing. My grief followed close behind and every once in awhile caught up to me, threatening to drown me in my own tears yet again. I rejected it and fought it and redirected my thoughts and kept pushing down the road, blind to the fact I was driving ever deeper into the heart of a place we shared together, into one of the vaults of our shared, sacred treasure.

The first time I saw the ocean I was 11 years old. It filled me up with an indescribable awe and a certain measure of fear; it was immense and depthless and I felt the overwhelming power of it in my chest and gut.

Yesterday on the road the deep emotion of that old memory rose up again and the tsunami of my mourning threatened to engulf me so I cut off the memory, cut off the feeling. I just killed it all. If Lenore had been there with me I would have shared it again with her, would have let it live and grow into us together yet again.

All through the day I encountered places we had shared together. I remembered the general locations, but when I arrived somewhere and started moving through the area again I found myself on trails and remote lookouts and particular places we had walked and stood at and seen together. After awhile it almost seemed surreal to be standing like a ghost in those places. I became a sort of detached spirit wandering through old haunts, retracing steps made long ago in a different world.

In a gift shop I shopped for jewelry for her as I had the last time we were there. She liked my taste in jewelry and there were times when I found something I knew she would like even when she wasn’t sure of it herself and then later it would find its way into the jewelry box that held her favorites. I found a pair of earrings yesterday I knew she would have liked and thought about buying them for her, but I didn’t.

Now I wish I had.

You had to be there

You had to be there. I’ve been searching and trying to find a way to express to others in my writing and my words what Lenore and I were and are to each other.

Those expressions have mostly been about grief and sadness and the effects of what it feels like to be half of a split, separated soul. That sense of separation goes directly to the heart of Lenore’s personal path to self-realization, A Course in Miracles. It was a part of my path as well. Ultimately though, our path to truth in this life was through each other, with each other.

I remembered something we wrote together in 1992 when we introduced ourselves to an ACIM online bulletin board and dug it up out of our archives. Among other things, I wrote: “Lenore long ago taught me to say, ‘Thank you, God, for you.’ Lenore is a gifted person. When I see her in perfect clarity I see a high being, an old soul, a presence in my life that is a profound and indescribable grace. Our marriage is a great example of learning truth together through the principle of ‘wherever two or more are gathered.’”

In that same introduction Lenore wrote: “I have worked with ACIM (A Course in Miracles) for the past 12 years and also learn from that wonderful man I actually married. I guess when I think about it, it is really true that special relationships pale in comparison to holy ones.”

She continued: “Keep spreading your joy and remember that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Joy that ties us all together. I share that joy with you. Forgiveness is so rewarding – as we go through our days with forgiveness in our minds for others, for situations and ourselves, we are truly miracle workers and nothing can stand between us and heaven.

“We show up for our day with great expectation of the next miracle, the next moment that we are able to forgive another, a situation or ourselves. We show up for our day with the knowing that our life is better, happier and filled with blessings. We realize that we truly do have everything that we need to be happy right now, right here within our circumstance, our relationships, our job, our home, our family, our dog and the trees in the back yard.

“We are here on earth in a shared experience where we have forgotten who we really are. People everywhere are having this conversation about our oneness, about the love that we are capable of, about demonstrating in our lives every day who we really are and who we can be. Our participation in it is a blessing to others and ourselves.

“We know that we have the power to change the world because we are God’s creative force. We may be asleep most of the time, some of the time, or nearly all of the time, but the good news is that we can wake up.”

You had to be there.

You had to be there in the explosive holy instant when we saw each other clearly and were bonded together for the rest of this life for us. You had to be there down through the years we lived on the path ACIM calls the “happy dream.”

You had to be there when in some unfathomable way at some unregistered moment our consciousness transcended the dream and we did wake up and were flesh and spirit and One with all, simultaneously. When religion and thought and feeling fell away and then came back coalesced and infused with the simplicity of being here, today, with it all.

You had to be there at the last when, living with daily pain which at times was unimaginably savage, she smiled often and gave and invited hugs, and died with a gentle, peaceful smile on her face.

You had to be there to understand where I am now.

To be here where the ego self, shocked numb, screams in pain and demands precedence and attention for its agony. Here, where the still, small voice within bides its time, whispering truth. To be here in the predicament of a soul at the end of flesh and in a life experience fulfilled and completed.

What holds me here? Nothing. Why am I here? Because I am. Where will I be? I can’t say, I can only say where I am. I am with her. Here, today, with it all. That’s what we learned how to do together.

Grief must be witnessed

David Kessler said, “Grief must be witnessed.” In the throes of grief and loss we find comfort when others acknowledge our condition.

Kessler tells the story of how a small village he visited witnessed the grief of a community member who had lost a loved one. Every household would remove an item from their home in the evening of the day of loss, such as a chair or lamp or piece of furniture, and put it outside where it could be seen from the street.

Kessler asked them why they did this, and the reply touched me.

“It is to show the bereaved one when they wake up the next day that we share their grief. It says we know everything has changed.”

Give me a moment. I’m considering the Hemlock.

The day Lenore died her loss and my grief appeared in a shattering explosion and was nothing like what my previous speculations about what it would be like. It consumed me. That’s what an explosion does. The aftermath was pieces and numbness, of living in a totality involving only grief and loss and mourning. It was inchoate emotional pain and unmanageable mental chaos. My world view blew up, the basic root of my life paradigm vanished, the matrix of my own understanding broke down into senseless chaos. My spirit broke.

As time passes I’ve realized that the terrible grief I have is just one part of my experience. The shattered pieces of my paradigm and my understanding have come back together in a new configuration, informed by new, critical information. Lenore is not here with me in this life. She is in me, she still speaks to me and me to her, and I can imagine her presence with me. Yet she is not here anymore. She is somewhere else. My perspective has been rearranged to accommodate this new, massive fact.

Why is loss and bereavement nearly universally regarded as a thing human beings pass through on their way to more life, to survival? The assumption proves itself true in all but a few cases. It’s something human beings pass through, live with, bear with, suffer with – and survive with. They go on, recover, reorganize, rebuild. It’s assumed. It’s fact. Options need not apply. Start as far away as you want, but when you drill down to the foundation that’s where you’re going to end up. You survive. It’s an unquestionable underlying basic assumption of human existence.

In a place where everything dies.

Even if your heart is full and your life completed and you have lived out your reason for being, even if everything ahead is dénouement, a slow slide into deterioration and eventual death – still it is assumed you will live. Even if you’re sure you’re done, even if your mind tells you it’s time to go, and your heart desires it.

When Lenore died her loss was not one more marker on my path. It was the last milepost. I am aware of the joy life still offers me and aware of the others I can still serve with my experience and gained wisdoms and simple presence. I’m still aware of how wonderful and magic and full life is. I still laugh, dance, listen to music, think, feel, move, have places to go and things to do, people I love, people who love me and care about me. I can still impart love and joy to others. I still know the unexpected amazing development is just around the corner, waiting to delight and engage me in something new and unforeseeable and wonderful.

The thing is, I don’t need any of that any more. I’ve had it all. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. It’s been enough. And the context I gained them in, my life with Lenore, is perfect. I have no need of a different one. I’m happy with what I’ve had, and with what I have from it now.

There’s not one thing I can think of I’d like to do, or still need to do. I’ve been trying to come up with anything at all I’d like to do for quite awhile, no matter how crazy it was. Go to Dharamsala and have a laugh with the Dalai Lama. Get a passport, fly to Florence, see the Uffizi Museum. Go to Machu Picchu. Go fishing in Montana. Take the Mystic Wind somewhere – anywhere. I really am done.

When I die I’d prefer that people celebrate my life and not grieve or suffer my dying. I hope they remember my living. I hope they know I had a wonderful, beautiful, full, hard, strange, amazing, loving, thoughtful, interesting, fulfilling, completed life. I hope they know it all came to fruition and completion in the life Lenore and I shared together. The best thing about all the great love stories is not that they were told – it’s that they were lived. Lenore and I lived one of them.

The Dead Girl’s Song

The truth is in the dead girl’s song

In air and earth and fire and water

In cloud and sky and wind

In rock and mountains and meadow

In sun and moon and star

In rain and river and sea.

Her song threads every tree

Fills the cove, lilts on the cay

Echoes in faint swirls upon on the road

Where we were we.

The truth is in the dead girl’s dream

In eyes and heart and flesh

Seeing, loving, holding, walking

Through all things ever that are ever one.

The truth is in the dead girl’s light

The rolling shadow of the night

The sunset scythe.

The truth is there

Where we were we

In all things ever that are ever one

In rain and river and sea

In the sunset scythe

In the dead girl’s song.

And Yet Still I Am Here

When I told her I wanted to be with her all the way down the line and go where she was going and die when she did, Lenore said I needed to stay here and shine my light. “You have so much,” she said. I’ve done my best.

I’ve left a hundred smiles with strangers in brief encounters communicating our connectedness. I’ve openly shared my honest truth. I’ve served the persons who needed anything who appeared along the way. I’ve felt the beauty of nature and at times the joy this life holds, and the laughter. I’ve been nice, and kind, and gentle wherever and whenever I can.

Yet it’s all happened in a world of half-light, it’s all been echoes fading ever more faintly away from their source, it’s all been ever-fainter ripples moving downstream on what was once the pulsing, flowing river of our life together.

There are moments when her loss guts me. I remember one time in particular, and it stays with me.

It started with the familiar empty weakness growing in my chest and slowly rising up behind my eyes, and then the tears, flooding and falling, and my heart falling into darkness, falling into infinite, aching emptiness. My face contorts into a soundless wail, and I hear myself from far away, sobbing, the words coming out of me as if spoken by someone else, “Oh, this is so hard! I want to be with you!” And then I heard her voice, answering. She said, “I know, I know, I didn’t think it would be so bad…” I sobbed and the words came on their own, “All I want to do is be with you!” And she said, “Then come my darling, come. I understand.”

And yet still I am here.

I can’t begin to express how sad and confusing it is that I am still here, feeling more darkness than light, stalked constantly by loss and grief and separation. The days hold pockets of time when an uneasy, edgy trepidation and faint nervousness and vague tension take over. I can feel the emptiness lurking near, stalking me. I feel like something is missing and I can’t locate or identify what it is even though my mind knows exactly what it is.

Part of me has always lived out in border land, watching life and humanity and existence from the outside edge of the human social continuum, observing, registering, recording, and assembling my personal matrix of understanding from that broad-spectrum viewpoint. Lenore could join me out there, and it was a rich, soul-filling, wonderful view for us.

Now I’m out here alone, further out, out on the edge of the very farthest reach of human existence, just this side of the border between life and death, regarding life itself, looking backward down the long path behind that brought me here; seeing what is there in the past, and what is here now, and considering what is left in the time remaining ahead.

The Way it Is

Humanity lives in a cosmic nova, vibrant and dangerous and beautiful and chancy, a place where black-hole hells and starry heavens mark the waypoints of our careening, sojourning souls.

If in our entire lifetime we only learn to truly love one other person, that’s a lifetime well spent. When we finally figure out what love is, really, we are somehow collaterally blessed with the answers to those gnawing questions we come here with about the meaning of life, the secret of the universe, and why we are here.

I always wondered about the cowboy who, about to die, shot his horse and burned his saddle, thus obliterating his entire estate on the way out of this life. I think I understand him now, at least partly, although in my life the horse lives and the saddle goes to the country thrift store.

What that cowboy meant to do is leave not a trace of himself behind, because he knew that’s the way it is. Our life is our own, and no one else’s, and only here and now, and only for as long as we have it, and we only live in that brief time, and only then can we share it with anyone.

Warrior of the Heart

I’ve been thinking about our last year together and what a hellacious, beautiful, happy, full, sad time it was. Lenore battled cancer as only a warrior of the heart can. And there were battles. We fought them side by side, always doing the best we could, and in between there were moments when we laughed and cried at how hard the battles were and how well we fought them. It was traumatic as hell and soul lifting at the same time.

Some of the things Lenore had to go through were inhumane; blows delivered by well-meaning people who thought they were serving her but were blinded by institutional and professional biases, bound up in misplaced priorities that put the person second and the rules first – and so often those rules were not legal constraints but simply protocols put in place to streamline systems and efficiently process people as if they were fairly uniform units rather than unique individuals.

I feel sad and am sorry for those people who had their humanity compromised by the systems they were embedded in and dependent on. The quality of the services they brought to Lenore could have been immensely greater if they had only taken the time to listen to her and be thoughtful and compassionate rather than unintentionally discounting and authoritative and mechanistic.

Lenore was never able to make her doctors understand what she wanted and did not want. The institutional bias there was toward “curative” treatment rather than palliation. The “curative” treatments for Radiation Induced Sarcoma of the hip are crippling, maiming procedures which extremely reduce quality of life and don’t extend life that long.

Lenore knew her options early on and wanted nothing to do with radical treatments. It proved impossible to inform her treatment team at OHSU of her desires – and there is a tremendous written record in the files there proving how hard we both fought to have her desires known. In the end she had to go to a different hospital to be heard and have the palliative treatment she wanted. The delays at OHSU caused by the system in place and in particular the institutional bias toward curative treatment there took precious time from her life and it’s sad to think about that now.

Lenore already had experienced the quality of life damages of her previous “curative, state of the art” radical treatment for cancer in 2001 – which is what caused her bone cancer 15 years later. She learned to cope with the damage that came with that former treatment but it was hard-won knowledge gained without help from the medical establishment which delivered her to it.

It’s also sad to think that what doctors are convinced of as being absolutely, inviolably right treatment at one time can so quickly prove to be wrong and even barbaric in its nature in the near future. I can’t help but think that the attitude and humanity of doctors and the medical profession generally would be greatly improved if they were to embrace humility and own the fact that what they are doing to the human body today will in the future seem as barbaric as blood-letting, mercury treatments, trepanation, insulin shock, and lobotomies – and among them will be included radical radiation therapy for cancers with a low metastatic probability and a high surgery-only rate of success like the cancer Lenore was treated for in 2001.

The doctors did their best and of course what they did is justifiable by the fact that what they did then was the best they knew how to do. But it certainly does not support the hubris and certainty they brought to their patients in the light of what actually happened to people as a result of their mistaken convictions.

It’s a long tale, the story of what Lenore and I went through. There was the care center in Arizona, the Catholic hospice in Washington. Every place we passed through held a combination of horrors and angels. The angels were human, the horrors were the protocols and rules and institutional biases in play at every facility.

There was one human horror, a hospice doctor in Arizona so unimaginably incompetent and insensitive and self-focused that her actions and character flaws had damned her beyond retrieval to being unable to extend any form of humanity to her patients.

There was a nursing supervisor torn between compassion and the unwieldy, ponderous rules regarding proper paperwork and procedures concerning pain medications for Lenore. In the end that supervisor succumbed to the pressures of the rules and as a result Lenore experienced unimaginable and unnecessary pain while the system slowly processed paperwork for already authorized pain medications.

That nursing supervisor made the wrong choice, choosing to let Lenore suffer until the paperwork was where it needed to be even though she knew it was on its way. I pity her for that. She chose the institutionalized rules over the person they were meant to serve. I wonder if she ever realized that the result of that choice had a deep and wide-reaching effect upon her own personal life that went far beyond the pain it caused Lenore.

I have one caution to give about hospices run under the guidelines of certain religious beliefs: be sure the values in place there reflect your own. In Lenore’s case death with dignity was not an option at the hospice she was in, and there were no under-the-radar morphine options available to her to end her life when she wanted to. When she was ready to die and wanted to, she was prohibited by the institution and delayed by the death with dignity legal paperwork.

On the very day she learned during the conversation with the death with dignity doctor that one of her alternatives was to refuse food and water and that death would result in two weeks or so, she stopped eating and only took small sips of water. She died twelve days later. Her body ate itself and she starved to death, god-damn it all. I hope you can feel the heat of my feelings about how people can be forced to do such a thing, how I feel about all the ways and means which make it necessary. God damn it all.

The angels were many. We felt like they were flying in formation with us, surrounding us with their light and love. They were the boots on the ground in these institutions, the very real human beings in the trenches of institutionalized care, caring truly and connecting with their charges and serving them. They were the agents and deliverers of the quality of life Lenore desired to have in the days left to her after her diagnosis. They were loving, sympathetic, empathetic, connected. They were human. They are too many to mention, but some of you who are reading this are counted among them. You know who you are. You always did know who you are, really. You knew you were human beings, and what that means, and how it looks, and what it does. I thank you for that and honor you for that.

We fought every battle side by side, and she fought like the Danish Viking she was. She didn’t fight with axe and maul, she fought with open arms and a brilliant smile and a warm, forgiving heart. She knew who she was, she knew what she wanted, and at every turn she moved with purpose and certainty to the very end. In the old days her people would have given her the funeral accorded their greatest heroes and sent her off to Valhalla in a flaming Viking longship. That’s who she was. A warrior of the heart. It was an honor to fight with her. I weep every day with her passing and look forward to the day when I rejoin her and we are together again.

A Person Can Live Too Long

Today at sunset in the park I saw an old man and an old woman walking together with an old dog, and I was glad they all still had each other. And then I thought, my God – I’m living proof that a person can live too long.

It’s very lonely here now. Lenore was the only other person on the planet I met who I regarded as my peer, and it took me half a lifetime to find her.

I miss my friend.

Then and Now

It’s about differences, and being honest about it. We grew into our greatness because of how we openly shared the wonderful things we honestly saw in one another. It wasn’t about compliments. It was about truths seen and then shared between us.

Lenore and I shared the same wonderful differences; intelligence, thoughtfulness, empathy, insight, imagination, passion, creativity, a desire to keep learning and growing. We had an extraordinary measure of all of those things on board in our lives – we were very rare people in the human world. It was a blessing for the richness of life and broad perspective it gave us, and another blessing that we found each other and were able to share it together.

We were people who wanted to share with others the story of the thrilling adventure it was to be who we were and live like we lived and knew what we knew and saw what we saw and learned what we learned. So often the people we met were still learning how to get across the schoolyard, or were set in the few paths they’d worn into. They didn’t have the experience or the tools or the abilities and qualities it took to understand our tale and the lessons and wisdoms and depth and fullness of it all; people who didn’t have the time or inclination to join in with what we were both so willing to share with them so that we could all together affirm how mysterious and wonderful and great life can be.

We both had broad and deep exposure to a lot of the things life holds before we met; good and evil, happiness and sadness, death, loss, beginning again, carrying on, and seeking what you want until you find it and never settling for second best. We always did our very best to be good people. When we got knocked down or made mistakes or even when things got so bad our spirits were actually truly broken by hard, terrible experiences, we healed and recovered and picked ourselves back up and carried on, and we bloomed again wherever we were planted next because of who we innately were.

When we found each other after having all those life experiences, and being who we each were, it was like a coming home to our own true self wondrously present in the other – of finally, miraculously, beyond all odds finding another person in the world who we fit with.

Lenore and I knew who the other was when most people didn’t or couldn’t recognize how different we were from them and how big our world was. We saw each other, we saw the world in the same ways; in rare breadth and depth and awareness. We understood. Together.

Now I am an “I” and not an “us.”

I don’t fear much anymore, or have the same level of vigilance. I don’t anticipate possible developments. I don’t plan as much as I used to. I don’t care about people, places and things as much as I used to.

I don’t think about dying with the same sort of consideration I gave it before. I’m not afraid of it. I don’t wonder when it comes whether I will conduct myself with grace or a complete lack of it. Lenore showed me how to die. When it’s time to die you just go ahead and get on with it, you do it the same way you live your life.

Words disappear from time to time now because words can’t catch the inchoate nature of this experience.

My spiritual beliefs have reverted backward through time and history and I am now a casual pantheist. The word “god” has been replaced with “life.” The words “heaven” and “hell” have been replaced with “earth.” I avoid symbols, metaphors, personalities and stories in my spiritual thoughts. I see spirituality without thinking as much, or making it magical.

I’m still annoyed by ignorance, fear, insensitivity, low levels of consciousness and just plain bad behavior in others, but the presence of those things in human beings doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. I figure that in a place where heaven and hell are both options, if some people want to live in some kind of limbo between the two because that’s what they were taught and have chosen to maintain, well, that’s their choice.

It wasn’t ours, and it’s not mine.

Lenore is in me in all the places we merged our consciousness. She is in my memory. She is also dead. Not here. Gone. Dead is not smiling and watching over you from above. Time passes here, memory fades, the rat-brain evolutionary mandate to move on and survive asserts itself and starts ruthlessly rolling up the higher cognitive memories and storing them in boxes in the basement. Existing, that’s what I do now.

Being, that’s a whole other thing. Our meaning, our being, was achieved as two who are one. After such a life one who is one becomes meaningless. Together we found what we sought, we achieved what we dreamed. Together we realized life’s hopeful, bright potential.

Sometimes I try to work on a suicide note in case this path I’m on comes to that. It’s an awkward business. I want people to not feel sad. I want them to understand. But they will likely do the first and not the second. I hope for more, but expect the usual. My suicide will be explained by each person in their way, for their comfort. There’s not a lot I can do about how people see things, and what things they don’t or can’t or won’t understand.

Life after Death?

For me life after death is a mystery. I speculate of course on what the nature of being might be after death, but in the end it is all speculation. It will be what it is and until that time it will remain unknown to me.

Before Lenore died I held hopeful speculations about the afterlife and took some comfort from my experience and my thoughts about death and what comes next. I noticed that living things, and the universe itself, follow a pattern of development beginning in simplicity which rises to an ever greater level of complexity, and hoped that meant that at the end of this life we humans did the same.

It was my hope that perhaps, unencumbered by bodily limits, we would enjoy an indescribable level of consciousness and connection in the universe of what we call our “spirit,” that mysterious energy which is life in the body, and which seems to leap from the body at death.

Lenore and I had a deep empathic connection which at times was telepathic, so we were no strangers to the mysterious energies present in the human experience. This gave us hope that our connection would survive death, and in some mysterious, unknown way we would still be able to connect through the curtain between life and death, that we would pierce the “cloud of unknowing” between the mind and what we hoped was an eternal soul.

We hoped that in some way our connection would continue. Before she died, we decided to both do our best to make a connection together between life and whatever it is that is beyond death.

I have remained sensitive and open to such a connection ever since. Yet the only connection I have experienced is here, in the “we” we grew to be together; in the singular, whole persona we shared as two who were one, now only in me, and in the memories of our time together here, in this life.

Alone

“Well, it really isn’t such a cheerful place… But let’s just carry on cheerfully anyway and let the tears fall when and where they will – what do you say?” That’s something Lenore would say, and it’s something we could do – together. It’s not that way now. It’s just not.

Tomorrow it will be 5 months since Lenore died. There are nearly 4,000 miles on the truck since I first reset the trip odometer in the parking lot at the hospice center and numbly drove into a world without her in it.

It’s a different world. It’s a world where loss and grief eclipse the light of the old world and her absence in it reduces it to a place of thin light and long shadows.

Today I found myself, for the first time since she died, planning something for the future.

I haven’t wanted a future without her and haven’t even considered it before now. I’ve spent at least as much time wanting and hoping and waiting for my own death as I’ve spent remembering our time together. Noticing that I am actually planning something doesn’t feel right. I still don’t want a future without her.

I vaguely resent or am sadly ambivalent about every wheedling influence in my life trying to conduct me away from the life we had together.

I resent time, and fading memory, and the human mechanism of adaptability trying to assert itself into my life. They all feel like the devilish denizens of deepening shadows, slowly swallowing the light of our life together. Our brilliance dims, our fire gutters and the coals slowly fade into darkness. Time marches on and we who were one together slide slowly down into the dark vault of history.

I resent the ancient biological mandate as old as life itself to survive at all costs. It’s wrapped there round the roots of my brain stem, overriding my identity, my experience, and my thoughts and desires and all things present in the seat of consciousness above it. It is finished, I say. It regards all the arts and pains and truths of a completed life and the complex vault of the higher mind with stone-dead reptilian eyes and stolidly replies, “Survive.” It makes no sense to me. It makes it hard to die no matter how profoundly I wish to.

I am sadly ambivalent about sunlight, and the soft sifting of tree leaves in the dawn breeze at the edge of morning’s light, and all the beauties of the earth. They are exquisite and beckoning; they promise nature’s elegant, simple pleasures again tomorrow and whisper an invitation to be here for them. Alone.

This strange world is a place where the animated seesaw of the perpetual human perception of a dualistic experience is often suspended. In those moments there is no light poised opposite to darkness, no good struggling with evil, no navigational chart between safety and danger. It is, for long moments, lifeless and null. There is no person here then – only a savaged, separated soul.

Now I find myself planning for a future I have not wanted all the way down this long slow drive away from where she died. It feels ridiculous to do it and I resent it. I feel cozened and pushed and shoved by insensate influences and monolithic principalities beyond my control, forcing me to return to things and places I have already been and already done and already know. It is time to be done, it has all been done, and yet this senseless, insistent, disregarding – thing – imposes itself on me.
A Broken Heart

Does the universe remember a dead girl and her love? Does a tree remember the rain that came and runs now in the sap of its veins? What honors and cherishes and makes all things memorable, and holy? Is the essence of life holy in and of itself?

No. We make it so.

Mind and heart alone, and for a mere spark of time, remember the girl who came and went.

She appeared for a moment in the eternal, ephemeral mists swirling down the vault of time. She walked in sun and rain and lived and loved and died.

What honors her and cherishes her and holds her holy memory?

A broken heart, who watched her fade into the mist, and ran to follow, and was left behind.

Things I Miss

Delight. I miss that most of all. Simple delight. Sudden deep bursts of gratitude and love, and seeking her out immediately and hugging her and telling her how much I love her. Eyes meeting eyes. Shared thoughts and feelings about everything; laughing together about practically anything; holding hands; walking side by side; seeing the same things at the same time; holding her hand as I fall asleep; holding her hand when I wake up; her playing the piano, cooking, reading, watering the plants – patiently, joyfully.

Just looking at the way she walked and stood. She was so exquisitely, naturally graceful, she had a fine carriage and I miss telling her she was an angel “turned on the lathe of heaven.” She always laughed at that and was modest and shy about compliments, and I miss seeing that and how I could see they pleased her, too.

I am Thee and Thou Art Me

Robert Frost observed that people who were confronted with the loss of a loved one, “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” I considered that to be a cold, cruel, cynical observation about human adaptability and selfishness, and how love can be left behind and forgotten by people who lack passion and emotional depth, and commitment, to those they once loved.

Now I realize it is a natural thing. I have done so many times in the past; I grieved, I mourned, I healed, I carried memories of love and goodness, and grieving too – and went on. I was not the one dead. Now time has continued on, and I have not turned to my affairs. Lenore is dead, and she was me. I am the one dead.

Clarity

A simple clarity has replaced many of my beliefs. I am now informed by what I see, and what I directly experience. I have no room for beliefs, hopeful interpretations, or even the most substantial posits of metaphysics; every single one of them is supported by a given value of probability and not one is proven positively. They are useful to the living and irrelevant to the dead. In my experience now, where I am simultaneously living and dead, it all seems superfluous.

I was recently exposed to a religious interpretation meant to offer comfort to the bereaved, observing that the presence of the lost beloved can be present in the consciousness of the bereaved. In most cases it does offer comfort, and many do benefit by developing a conscious awareness of that voice in themselves. My response is on behalf of those who find no comfort in such awareness, or truth in the afterlife it implies.

The dead speak in manifestations of the mind and heart of the living. It is not the dead speaking. Where the beloved is now is beyond mind and heart. In the universe nothing is lost. In mind and heart when the beloved dies – the beloved is lost. Only the mind and heart of the bereaved remains, and they may or may not find comfort in manifestations of the beloved in her absence.

Everyone has a matrix of understanding they have assembled from their nature, nurture and experience. Often that matrix includes a religion, a belief system, and faith. It’s a useful thing. It includes a story, a context, a lexicon, an ordered construct built up for the purpose of organizing the things encountered in our human experience, and then expressing them.

Lenore’s matrix of understanding included A Course In Miracles as a singularly useful point of reference in her own spiritual life. She did not regard it as infallible holy writ. She regarded it as very useful, a system which provided words, thoughts and concepts which established a basic ground and point of departure for her own spiritual walk.

On her path and through her study and personal regard of the principles described in ACIM Lenore came to know – not believe, but know – that all life is connected by and in an often mysterious web of energy.

One of the things she used to describe her knowing was the ACIM concept of “The Sonship.” The concept of the Sonship incorporates several concepts of the spiritual life into its fabric. One of those concepts is basically an expression of the collective consciousness generated by humanity and all life. It’s a metaphor validating the existence of our relationship with every single living person, and every single living thing, and the planet it all lives on, and the universe it exists within.

Lenore believed that the “Sonship” is supported and enriched by positive energy, and that belief defined her life and actions. She was devoted to the practice of extending real love to all of creation and everything and every being in it. She forgave all illusions and devoted herself to keeping her eyes on the truth she knew. She found joy in every day, satisfaction in work, fun in play, fulfillment in service to others. She consciously embraced and constantly manifested what she knew. She was good and kind and caring, gentle and patient and nurturing, she sought and found joy in every day, she was selflessly present and available to everyone and everything she encountered, empathetic with all, sympathetic and supportive with those in pain, enriching and enlightening to seekers searching for what she knew.

Now she is dead. She is gone from this life. All that is left of her now is circulating in that mysterious web of life energy which she contributed so many good, positive things to. I am connected deeply to her in that web. Everyone who encountered her is connected to her there. Her life is enshrined there and the energy of her life pulses there and will be part of the ongoing, cumulative collective human consciousness.

It is the afterlife I know of. It’s a realm of the living, by the living, for the living, occupied by the living and the energies generated by those who are no longer alive. But it is not the realm of the dead. That’s unknowable.

Acceptance

I am so ambivalent about participating in life these days, so split off of the person I was when Lenore was here. I’ve revisited some writing and blog comments I shared in the days when we were walking this life together, engaged with such grace and power with everything it holds, and it all reveals how far removed I am from that now.

In those days acceptance was a key that opened us up to the mysterious energies of life and allowed us to walk on with grace and power, no matter what the circumstances or challenges. Acceptance of things as they are, no matter how terrible, is a powerful tool. You just keep going, doing your best, doing what you can, and over time things very often change for the better.

I suppose that’s what the robot in me is doing these days. It just keeps going, walking on. I watch it doing what I used to do, see it extending the love in me in daily moments when I encounter and interact with others. What is not present there is me. I have no acceptance, no grace, no power. The acceptance that Lenore is gone from this life is not in me. I will not accept that because it feels like a betrayal to her, and me, and us.

Turning that key has never been harder.

One More Adventure

I’m running in cycles these days. Busyness occupies me for fairly long times now. There are periods when a sort of equilibrium sets in and the days just keep moving on by themselves. Then there are times when I register my present day reality a bit too sharply and it seems so clearly empty and senseless. I go through some sad and dark days then, and after that the cycle starts over again. It’s been seven months today since Lenore died and I’m basically still shocked and numb and walking on with a thousand-yard-stare in the aftermath of her death.

I really don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I’m very ambivalent about most things. I just keep moving.

The edge of winter is showing up here in the Pacific Northwest. Heavy rain and strong winds the next two days will begin to strip the trees and then give way to shorter days of cold sunshine. Soon the angle and quality of sunlight will bring on the contemplative season of late autumn. It’s a time of reflection and memories, a time for summing up the returns of the year past, a time to set another waypoint on the timeline of life.

Lenore’s ashes and Charlie’s ashes and I are heading out. We are going to the desert southwest where silent, soul-filling sunsets mark the end of autumn days. The Mystic Wind is nearly ready to go, and early next week we will pull out of the northwest woods and make our run south to a camp on the edge of the Saguaro National Forest.

In the days before she died Lenore told me to just put her ashes in the back seat with Charlie when she was gone, and I told her I’d rather she rode up front with me. She said that would be alright, and smiled. She was pleased about that. So off we all go together – one more time, on one more adventure.

As always, and because it pleases me, I will be the facilitator and servant of their spirit and souls. We will go where they want to go, see what they want to see, and do what they want to do.

We will have lunch on the roadside where endless panoramas surround us. We will look for that place on the road where, last year, rounding a corner on a downhill grade with the morning sun at our back, a cliff across the valley stunned us with layers upon layers of desert colors gleaming in the light.

On the way we will talk, and laugh, and once in awhile I will turn my head to look at her, wordless when we see some beautiful thing together, and see her knowing eyes looking back at me, acknowledging she sees and feels it too.

Potholes

This trip isn’t turning out to be what I thought it would. There have been emotional potholes all along the way – memories of things that happened and places we saw together on our trip down there last year knowing we were making our final run down the long road we shared together.

We were so go-ahead and doing what we wanted to do for as long as we could, seeing new and beautiful places together, and all of it was punctuated by pain and meds and the wheelchair and a constant round of doing it, getting worn down, then gathering energy again and going on. We wouldn’t have done it any other way. It was who we were. It was what we wanted to do. What we did and how we did it was beautiful, and heroic. Yet in retrospect it has all become so very, very sad as well.

I’m so tired of taking these heart hits. I bear them and somehow keep on keeping on but the wear and tear is cumulative and now the only way I have of holding on to myself is avoidance of them. I try not to remember, try to avoid thinking about much of anything other than day to day, mundane things. It doesn’t work.

I will arrive at our destination in half a week or so. This trip has been a collection of crossroads where the natural beauty of the landscape collides with memories of our trip down these same roads together last year. Memories of the joys and pains of Lenore’s journey and the times and places we shared and the things we did together in those days come back to me and I smile, and I cry, and sometimes I flinch and look away, and just keep moving on.

Down around Mexican Hat in southern Utah I found the landscape that stunned us as we came around a bend on the highway last year. I pulled over and took a picture of it this time. The sun was a bit higher in the sky and the palette of geologic layers was muted a bit more than last year. It was beautiful – a peaceful, lovely place in the middle of nowhere, a place that travelers for the most part simply pass by. We caught its beauty and power together last year. This year I saw and felt it without her and nearly cried again but caught myself and returned to the truck and moved on.

Today I visited an ancient cliff dwelling site in the Verde Valley near a park we stayed in last year. It’s one of the best-preserved prehistoric structures in the Southwest, built of adobe and limestone blocks and mortar in a towering cliff face. As I walked below it for a moment I imagined hearing the voices and laughter of the people who lived and loved and played and planted and hunted and built there. They’re gone now, faded into the deep vaults of history. What remains is a peaceful, beautiful green valley with a river flowing through it and the ancient, towering limestone cliffs above.

I sat quietly beneath those cliffs for awhile and felt a mournful ache for the passing of the people who lived there, and those who have followed them down into the ever-longer shadows of history, and for all the living who will follow them – and I cried for all of it, and I cried for Lenore, and for being here instead of with her. Later I walked slowly back to the truck, and moved on.

Lenore and I knew that when we went into the wilderness and nature and beautiful places the solitude and grandeur there would inform us of what was in our heart. Every time, without exception, we found joy and peace and a deep awareness of the truly sacred thing our life together was, and in certain perfect moments we connected with the whole and holy essence of life on this planet and in this universe.

Today I found only a deep sadness in my heart. Our fulfillment is history. My soul is split off from itself, I have half a heart. My spirit is broken. This is a shadowy denouement, one of the cruel counterpoints to a full and tender life; a sliding slowly downward into shadows and the end of our brilliant story.

—–

I am now settled in the desert near Tucson. In the night and early morning here Orion and the Pleiades are lower in the clear southern sky as a result of the astronomical sum of my latitude change and the earth’s circuit around the sun, bringing winter on. At least two patterns of the cosmos are still in place and consistent.

All night long I hear coyotes hunting and calling, and ranch dogs informing them of their own territory. In the morning off to the west there are two roosters crowing, one getting enough pluck into it to end in what sounds like a hog screaming. Yesterday the wind picked up in the afternoon and left a thin coat of caliche dust on the truck. It is ancient dust, a mixture of calcium carbonate and desert soil, the powder form of the rock-hard natural concrete laid down over eons on the desert floor.

The landscape of profound bereavement is a strange, alternate dimension. It’s a place where everything encountered is the remnant of a former life: the cherished ring once worn, the pillow slept upon, the instrument once played, the art created with nimble fingers and flashing eyes – each is nothing but a remnant, holding no more of the former life than a randomly encountered strand of the beloved’s hair. Nothing is more than a partial wisp of memory, a far away whisper, a scent fading into still air.

It’s a place which holds a far-away echo of laughter fading into dying light, a half-breath, a broken thought, a ghostly brush of touch, a shadow passing through the heart. Nothing there is ever real, or whole, or clear. It is where wholeness is reduced to pieces, and the parts are scattered. It is a place where souls are lost, and hearts broken.

In seven days it will be eight months to the day since Lenore died. I am now standing on the far shore of my sojourn here – the place I set out for when I first appeared in this life. I knew I was here the day Lenore died. It’s a thing both sad, as every heartfelt leave-taking is sad, and joyful, as completion and fulfillment and new horizons are joyful.

Bread and Music 
by Conrad Aiken

Music I heard with you was more than music, 
And bread I broke with you was more than bread; 
Now that I am without you, all is desolate; 
All that was once so beautiful is dead. 

Your hands once touched this table and this silver, 
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. 
These things do not remember you, belovèd, 
And yet your touch upon them will not pass. 

For it was in my heart you moved among them, 
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes; 
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

Time in Eternity
by  T. Merrill

When you were as an angel in my arms,
Had laid your bare head just below my chin,
Your length pressed up to mine, entrusting charms
My whole youth’s starward longing could not win;
With still the murmur of your love in me,
Miracle-tones of all my lifelong hope,
I wished that there might start eternity
And seal forever that sweet envelope;
And as it did, my thoughts are now for you
As every star is blotted by the sun,
And so the sun itself
Has perished too,
And with it, every dream of mine
But one.

Nothing Gold Can Stay 
by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Luke Havergal
by Edward Arlington Robinson

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen, she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Bitter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this—
To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall,
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.

You, Andrew Marvell

            By Archibald Macleish

EPILOGUE

I’ve lived with my grief after Lenore died, have been taken to the larger picture beyond, and now I am here, on the edge of a slowly expanding transcendent clarity. I’ve walked this path a day at a time, a step at a time, seeking that clarity.

We see it coming, we all do. Down the long road ahead it appears, ever closer, each step we take another step toward death until it seems that death is taking another step toward us. When it arrives I will fling myself over the last ground and leap into it and be with her where she is.

Your life is your own to live as you will. I hope you will through your own efforts, combined with the mysterious grace which stands ready to fulfill the life of every person, have a life as great and wonderful as the one we had. It was full, it was wonderful; it was filled with joy and sadness, with every beauty and every ache our humanity encounters.

It was everything a life ought to be.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom after death. Do good; enjoy the good of your labors; eat and drink, and rejoice.

Enjoy life with the one whom you love. Two are better than one. If one should fall the other will lift them up; and if two lie down together, they will keep warm; but how can one be warm alone?

Our birth and our death are the happiest and saddest times of our lives. We are born to live and then to die, and leave this life. In between there are many small births and deaths. We grow fuller in life, we breathe it in. We learn love and know joy and gain wisdom. We see hate and pain and folly. We become filled with life and take it in. Then in the end we breathe it out; we are done with it.

Life is ephemeral and fleeting. While you are alive you are breathing in the soul of life; at the end you breathe the soul of life back out, return it to where it came from. The end of the world begins with the light from the sun, moon, and stars growing dim. The days have no pleasure in them; death comes for your beloved and waits for you. In the end you breathe one last breath out. You have been filled with life. You are done with it. You let it go.