#6 Mourning Rituals: Fire

My birthday is December 21st. The longest night of the year. The day with the least light. It is a dark and depressing time, but it is also the time of renewal and rebirth. The solstice is traditionally celebrated with fire, both for the warmth and comfort and for necessary light, but also because fire indicates rebirth. The phoenix must catch fine in order to be reborn and to increase in strength and regenerate its power.

But fire is also associated with death and release and a cleansing. A body burned can never be reanimated. Ash is one of the cleanest substances on earth, we pump charcoal into people’s bodies to absorb toxins. In many parts of Asia bodies are burned both to ensure that the rotting flesh does not infect and contaminate the living as well as to release the soul from the earthly form of the body.

#5 Mourning Rituals: Re-Mapping the Self

What does it take to restitch oneself back together? How does one create a roadmap to find oneself? How does one come to know oneself as a new being, scarred, marked by loss, without seeing the old imagined being? How does one emerge, burned from the ashes of destruction, to become a new version of a self, changed through the burning, but somehow closer to the truer version of yourself? How does one go about finding a self, lost perhaps, perhaps never found?

Maps guide us, but the do not determine where we will go. Maps provide information, a world view. One location can have hundreds of maps that explain the viewer and guide them to find what it is they are hoping to find. Maps provide choice, not resolution, certainly not the destination.

Unraveling is the unstitching, the unweaving, the unsewing, the unmaking of something. So what is the opposite? To stitch, to sew, to knit, to weave, to make. Embroidery is the embellishment of something, once it has become “a thing”. It is unnecessary and decorative and bold and colorful. Stitching is essential. Stitching leaves evidence of the passage of time and the passage of the needle. When repairs are made, rarely is the rending not implied beneath the repair.

How does one discover one’s essential self? For me, I often write myself into existence. I don’t know things about myself until I begin writing and then I discover things about myself from what I have written. But what are the building blocks, what is the essence of a self? The body is the house for the self, the shell, the container. The body holds vast information about our experience passing through the world. Joy and memory, trauma and history. Everything gets lodged in the body whether we want it to or not. The body tells all our secrets through scars and wrinkles and birth marks and defects and age and prematurely gray hair, why else would we try and hide it with clothes and make-up and cosmetic surgeries. Our body is both the ultimate betrayer (we all die) but it is also our truest and most honest friend. Grief is housed in the body and the body must must be unraveled, released, and repaired.

#4 Mourning Rituals: Release

The knowing loss is one thing. But it requires more than that. It requires flame, cutting, marking, sailing away. It requires actions. It requires a line; a line between life and death, between marriage and divorce, between before and after. It requires a line of demarcation.

In the Jewish tradition, people often leave stones at a grave site. It originated in the idea of ghosts and the need to weigh down the grave so that the soul cannot escape in the world. Stones are markers for me. I despise cairns built by hikers and day trippers to announce “I was here!” disturbing the natural order of the world, but I collect stones to remember, “I was there”, it happened. Stones are also used to weigh down the dead buried at sea, ballast sewn into the cotton burial shroud. Stones are needed to complete the act of grieving, to leave something behind, and ensure that it stays behind.

Torma is a food offering in Tibetan Buddhism. It can be offered to the very thing that causes the suffering, because suffering provides us opportunities to inch closer to enlightenment. Rather than running away from the suffering, suffering is embraced as an opportunity, a gift.

Wrapping, enclosing, containing, dead bodies, gifts. How do we mark a separation between what is and what will be? How do we contain something so it can be left behind? How can we be grateful for the gifts of loss?

#3 Mourning Rituals: The Unweaving

How do I acknowledge loss? I must let go of what I thought I had. I must let go of the idea of permanence. I must let to of promise. I must let of hopes and dreams. It is about the letting go, it is also about taking in and knowing the pain. It is about entering into a prayer for the lost people and places and things. It is about attaching to the pain and acknowledging the very nature of loss—that I never had anything to begin with. It was all an illusion. How can I count the losses I have endured in the past decade, how can I parse out and create a hierarchy of each one in relation to another if I won’t allow myself to feel them? They are a thread, a necklace, a continuum of lost people and places and ideas and feelings and beliefs. The losses of these illusions belong to me but are separate from me. I must accept and embrace what I have lost. I have to feel that pain. I have to know the rending of the fabric of my experience, the destruction of the relationships and places I relied on for my safety, the irretrievability of all the lovely and precious thing that were blown up and gone like Nagasaki, in a blinding second. How do you let go of yourself, your imagined identity, your history, your belief systems, your future without loosing your entire self of your self as a person. Not much remains. What does remain? The threads of the losses. The water which provides solace. The color blue.

In Tibetan Buddhism, people sometimes do prostrations. They raise their hands to their foreheads, their throats, their chests, say a prayer, a mantra, and then they reach to the ground, keel, lie flat on the ground, and then, stepping forward, repeat the action. It is a prayer, an offering, a cleansing. Some of the devoted will do this for miles, wrapping cardboard around their hands and their knees so they can physically endure the labor without bleeding or physical harm; this is not penitence, this is not penance. I do not have the fitness to endure such devotion. But in walking 2,000 to 10,000 feet I can say a mantra each step of the way. I can think about the unweaving of the fabric of suffering, samsara, the human experience of unavoidable pain. I can think of impermanence and letting go. I can think of water, my solace, and the color blue.

#2 The Endeavor

It all starts with a plan.

For whatever reason a plan helps me move forward. It provides structure and a goal, even purpose. I began wondering why, if I could plan an unknown trip to a foreign land that seemed to scare most people, then why could I not jump into the unknown land of the world beyond grief? Why could I not figure out how to journey without a plan? Because that just isn’t me. I like maps, I like imagining paths, even if the journey is transformed along the way.

Talking with my friend who knows grief allowed me room to formulate a plan. I was going to spend two months back in Asia again. What could I do with those two months that would at least help me move forward in my desire to begin better integrating my grief.

First, I needed to recognize the thinking that I hold fast to in life. My belief systems:

1. Every child deserves to be protected even if that child isn’t mine.

2. Blue is the most interesting color.

3. It’s worthwhile to do nothing but listen to the wind and watch the ocean and the trees.

4. Making is a way of knowing and the process of making is more important than the image or object.

5. Living in relation to the nonhuman parts of the world is life affirming.

6. Part of being genuinely connected with people is being with them where their wounds lie.

7. There is nothing more valuable than taking time to be present with someone else in their moment.

8. My son deserves better than what circumstances have given him.

9. Joy, beauty, and abundance are best shared.

10. There is absolutely nothing better than being in relation to water.

11. Genuine, non-manipulative love is possible.

Then I took the raw materials that my friend had let me borrow from her accumulated wisdom and I began to craft them into something.

1. Grief is rooted, not in the mind, but in the body. Grief, at times, is incomprehensible, but the body knows.

2. Grieving is a social act. Pain that is shared is more pliable and less fixed.

3. Ritual is how millennia worth of humans have processed their grief.

4. Solitude can help, solitude can kill.

5. Time will not fix grief, but time will change grief and help it find a place, a home in our bodies.

I decided that I would give myself a project—a four-month project. I had a month before I would leave the country. I would be spending a month in Nepal climbing from 2-10,000 feet to a high mountain plateau and back down. Then a month in Southeast Asia and a month at home in December. I would give myself a 4-month span of time to try to actively grieve and transform my pain into something else other than this fog bound darkness. What I would do at the end of 4 months I did not know, but I at least had a glimmer of hope for the next four months.

#1 Telling My Story

I grew up in a traumatic narcissistic family cult. My father, a grand and imposing genius, orchestrated and constructed the lives of his wife and daughters. His wife, dutiful, supported his grandiose sense of importance, neglecting her children. Her neglect was made worse by her depression. Grief is something I have always known. I carry a grief for a loss of my own personhood begun the day I was born, and a childhood appropriated by my parents. That grief is stitched into every thread of my existence. I lived a fabulous childhood, all over the world, experiencing incredible places and having amazing opportunities. The only condition was that I never show myself in full view of my family. What was required of me in order to participate, was that I remain the dutiful, well-behaved child who reflected my father’s illusions, designed and cultivated in order to prop up his sense of insecurity and his own early childhood neglect. I never dared show my true nature because it was always belittled and attacked.

In high school I developed eating disorders as I struggled to separate myself from the self my father had constructed for me. Ultimately, the struggle to gain autonomy was too much and I took a massive overdose and leaned into the oblivion that would allow me to escape the constant pain. I survived my suicide but would forever be punished for having spoken up. I was shamed and wore a family scarlet letter; I was the failure; too sensitive. I moved on with my life, went to college, married, had a child, and built a home, carrying my shame and my assigned worthlessness with me.

My son was diagnosed with autism soon after my first husband left me following an affair.  In many ways my son’s diagnosis saved me from the despair of the divorce.  His condition gave me purpose and a reason to get out of bed when I couldn’t imagine having the motivation to do so otherwise.  My son’s diagnosis helped me escape a lifetime of numbness and taught me the power of connection. My son’s diagnosis was, in many ways, the beginning of my life, because while I could betray and abandon myself to my family cult, I could not do that to my child. He deserved better even if I hadn’t.

In 2014, my second husband had emergency heart surgery to replace a bi-cuspid heart valve he didn’t even know he had, let alone that it was failing. When he awoke from the anesthesia his entire personality had shifted and I lost my husband in the blink of an eye, even as his body continued to share my life and my home for many years to come.

In 2015, my mother died unexpectedly of a stroke.  She had been living with Alzheimer’s and we had expected that to be the cause of her death, a slow and agonizing decent.  Her death taught me things I had not expected to learn, most significantly, how this quiet woman resided so deeply in me and how much the things I admired in her were actually things I knew in myself.  In many ways I came to know her more richly after her death.  The grief, at first overpowering and unbearable, became a place of learning for me and I found grief not to be only a searing pain and a longing ache, but also a place of discovery.

Five years later, my father, seemingly immortal, was given a sudden diagnosis of cholangiocarcinoma, or cancer of the gall bladder.  It is a rare and terminal disease, not usually detected until it has become overwhelming to the body, in my father’s case, causing multiple tumors on his liver.  At the age of 93 he fully expected to overcome it and continue his work.  I did not, and so moved in with him at my childhood home to care for him in the last months of his life.

This of course was occurring while the world descended into the strange psychedelic world of COVID. My personal grief became utterly confused and intertwined with a global grief as we all struggled to find a new way to live intractably governed by fear and distrust.

While all these losses were occurring, I also was experiencing a different kind of loss.  My husband, no longer the sweet and gentle man I married, irreparably damaged by childhood abuse and trauma, descended into a kind of mental illness he was powerless to recover from.  Unable to bear the horror of his own family and instead of learning skills to bear the unbearable, he began creating elaborate constructed realities in order to cope.  Triggered by his near death experience and heart surgery, he began a 7-year descent that took our little family of three into a multitude of different directions, until ultimately the constructed reality he chose to live in was one where I was what was the thing most unbearable and his abusive family essential.  While he did not die, the grief I experienced losing the man I loved to insanity and altered realities, was as devastating as the previous losses. One month after my father died, my husband left me, declaring me, the person who had patiently nursed him through unemployment, heart surgery, and multiple hospitalizations in various mental hospitals, unbearable. He threatened me, and accused me of horrible crimes. He divorced me in two states, using the most vicious of lawyers, preventing me from collecting my belongings, finally shipping me the contents of our house in mismatched, unlabeled boxes, important files and trash intermingled. My new home felt like it was being crushed by the weight of his newly acquired superiority and entitled disgust and repugnance for me. 18 months later I still could not bear to finish the process of sorting through thirty years of history and garbage. I stash boxes in corners and try to live around the visible disorder.

Strangely, the loss of my husband was tempered by the fact that his personality had died in 2014, so in essence I had already grieved the loss of him, but the divorce triggered chaos that I still struggle to organize. I had to suddenly buy myself and my son, about to graduate college, a new home. I had to live without my belongings, piecing together tax returns and doing battle with insurance companies who wouldn’t send me paperwork unless I received them at the home my husband was threatening me from. I lost my father, my husband, my marriage, my community, my friends, my art network, my gardens, my routines, my hidden copses in the trees, my familiar hikes, my favorite shops, my history, my dreams, my hope, my plans, and everything in between in one minute a month after my father had died.

In between these catastrophic losses I was also experiencing the losses that occur every day.  I had miscarriages and an accident that left me in a wheelchair for a time. I lost homes when I divorced, chose to move, and had to move.  I lost friends who stopped speaking to me, had intimacies broken, and affections abandoned.  I lost hopes and dreams faster than I could hope and dream them anew.

A year after my divorce, as I tried to settle into my new house, now populated by the many mismatched boxes, I went overseas to rebuild my work in Asia stalled out by the travel embargoes of COVID. It was a joyous three months and I stopped looking so haggard and began laughing again. As I returned home, exhausted and cautiously hopeful, I was met by a sister blinded by impotent and unresolved issues with our father and profound self-absorption, who felt unable to work with me and our other sister, and who decided that she “had” to break up our family foundation so that she could have “autonomy” to do the charitable work she wanted to do, destroying both our parents’ gift to us and the world, and damaging all the work I had just done in Asia. Like a set of dominoes put into motion, our entire family was destroyed. I could no longer swallow my own disgust after a lifetime of her bullying and stopped speaking to her. I had endured a lifetime of rage she had visited on me for the crime of being born; her need to murder my soul palpable in every interaction so that I barely reacted anymore to the cruel and diminishing things she said to me every time we spoke. Her response to my no longer answering her incessant emails and texts was to launch a “family reunion” that summer. My family celebrated their unity and took family photos pointedly erasing my absence. It was as if I never existed. Three generations of my family gathered without me and all I could think of was the adage, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?” I had been completely erased by my family in a single weekend. They had apparently not even noticed my estrangement from them. These losses and betrayals both deep and small, are the kind that one never gets over, because the build-up to the rupture occurs over decades and is accumulated in so many myriad forms it is like an ocean accumulated by individual drops of water.

I had taken a lover after my divorce, an old friend who had declared his love for me, a love he had carried for over 15 years. I felt grateful and joyous to have the opportunity to explore love again at middle age when I had given up that love would ever find me or me it. We had a passionate, playful, joy-filled two years experimenting in a non-attached, pure love that was not about possession and ownership until the consequences of his choice had repercussions we could not anticipate. My lover and I ended our relationship in order for him to manage the chaos that his choice to leave his marriage had created. While not as great a loss as some of the previous losses, I felt the brunt of this one possibly more than the others because it has come so honestly and purely and there was no hate or anger or cancer to precede it.

And then, the most glorious of losses a mother can endure. My son bought his own house, and moved on with his life, bravely having hope in his own future, and dreams of his own.

After a decade of never-ending waves of emotional destruction, after a decade of coping through becoming numb and powering through it all, I suddenly could no longer cope. I had used numbness as armor to survive and deal when, in fact, I was feeling with excruciating pain. But I knew I could no longer live if I remained numb. I was alone, and scared, and hopeless, and broken and I could not move forward. I was suicidal. I could not find a reason for anything. I could not imagine a future, could not imagine building anything knowing it would also be destroyed like everything I had already built. I could not feel at all. I knew I needed help because the suicidal thoughts made emotional and rational sense and I could find nothing to give purpose to getting up in the morning and continuing to breathe. After a life like mine, death made more sense than remaining alive.

Then the crying began. Uncontrollable crying all the time. In the grocery store, in meetings. Halfway up the stairs. After being numb for so long the feelings were unbearable. I now understood why I had been numb. Anguish overwhelmed me in waves within waves. I could not breathe, I was sick. My body hurt where the emotions were situated. Holding this much pain, holding this much pain that had occurred for no good reason, was dizzying. I prayed for the numbness to return but it would not. I distracted, I wrote, I paid my bills, I tried shocking my body into being present and alive by swimming in the cold Atlantic waters naked. I drank, I smoked, I danced. Nothing provided me relief from the unrelenting numbness, the pain, and the despair. I needed help, I could no longer keep myself afloat.

I leaned on my friends, my son, my therapist, the kindness of strangers, the landscapes I nestled myself into, finally reaching out to a friend with an intimate knowledge of grief. Not only had her daughter and nephew died, but she knew a variety of her own losses, and she worked with parents who faced their children’s suffering and death. She not only knew grief personally, she chose to walk in the world of grief embracing its wisdom. Knowing she could give me no answers, I asked her for signposts, lifelines, things that would help me find my way through towards integrated grief. She led me in the direction of a few ideas, and I have picked up those threads to find my own path towards the integration of my grief.

This is my story. I am writing it hoping that it will have an ending. Hoping that this won’t just be a litany of pain. I suppose this blog is my first act of faith in a long time.