It’s 68 days since my brother passed and today I pause, slip between the seams.

It’s been a busy week.  Last night we attended a meeting of our local Tam Design Review Board.  We have local say on development in our area, and it felt comforting to gather with thirty or forty neighbors most of whom have lived here, as have we, for many years.  We moved here in 1978 when Chris wasn’t yet one, and Jeff just turned four. At the time, many of our neighbors had moved here after the end of WWII and literally built their own houses.  They’re gone now, passed in their homes, and now, here we are, attempting to hold the fort on greed and environmentally disastrous development. We live on a non-county maintained road without street lights and sidewalks in an area called Little City Farms.  All of this is obvious when people move in but then some want to change the character of what we oldsters love.

When I walked to my neighborhood book group Tuesday night, I spoke with a neighbor, Paris, as we looked down into her yard.  A doe looked up. Paris said there are two fawns and a bobcat who spotted looks similar to the fawns living there.  Harmony.

I sit here now balancing like a teeter-totter on that space between up and down, feeling a tender ache in my heart. We gather tomorrow to scatter the second half of the ashes of my brother.  Knowing that, feeling that, I pause and gather myself together and reflect. I wonder how one captures a pause in a photo, and there’s that word capture.  In this moment, I’m setting all photons free, and allowing them to wave my mind-body within the comfort and curtain of fog.

Yesterday my friend Marlene and I walked around Lake Lagunitas, a reservoir, to come to the bench she donated in her sister Bambi’s memory. We sat and talked. We talked most of the way, with some times of silence to listen for the Pileated Woodpecker and to honor the newt crossing, currently unnecessary.

We spoke of friendship and death, complexity and simplicity, when to hold on and when to let go. We examined our part in what happens in our lives.

This morning, I look out on summer fog, feeling light, lifted, as though I dipped into the lake like grebes and ducks, sang and flitted in the reeds like Red-winged blackbirds. We were accompanied by the landscape; we were the landscape. Healing happens. My brother passed sixty-seven days ago, and today, this moment, my heart sings.

I slept like a log which may have had a great deal to do with traipsing to different beaches yesterday, getting a sense of which one would be the place my brother would best like his ashes to float to sea.  I learned the high tide at Maverick’s is at 3:30 PM on Friday, the solstice, the longest day of the year. We will gather, and as the tide goes out, wade out into the water, and set or toss the ashes into the outgoing waves as though they are seals and otters released back into the wild.

I’m a bit volatile these days.  I know it’s about grief, the weight of grief which sinks and rises like a bird in flight. Happy, sad, happy, sad, as I look to balance like a log left on the beach by high tides and storms.

When I found Maverick’s Beach – not on the beaten path I learned – I looked for a sign it was the spot.  Three pelicans flew overhead – mother, father, brother. Then, I found a heart rock. I sat and learned it was a pelican conference center.  The tide was low. I felt the convergence of water and sand.

Then I went to a more private, local beach.  The sand was silk. A harbor seal floated along the coast.

I’m leaving Friday open as to plan.  I know I go to the airport and meet my niece Kate, flying in from Boston, and her mother, flying in from Hartford, through Chicago.  Then, we go over the hill to the ocean where we have a place to stay and will meet people coming from north, south, and east. Nobody is sailing in from the West, and that makes sense, since that’s where we go when we come to final rest, and for now, I’m still here.   Like Ram Dass, well, not quite like him, since he’s more evolved, but I am still here, open to change and waves, even as I appreciate the stillness of a driftwood log when it’s up above the reach of the waves for now.

My brother passed away at the age of 65 and this is the 65th day since he passed.  I wake at 3 and rise. The Strawberry moon is hidden in fog. I meditate and what comes is my own transition as we move from spring to summer, as I honor my own maturing process and ripen.

Today my friend Terry and I are meeting along the coast near Half Moon Bay.  We’re going to explore the beaches in the area. My brother was a surfer and loved the ocean as do I.  I brought back half of his ashes from CT. and on Friday a group of us are gathering to spread his ashes in the surf.  He was an East coast-West coast kind of guy, so ashes spread on both coasts feels right.

Yesterday I was talking to my son about the weight of grief I feel with my brother’s passing.  I know it’s related to him and also to all passings. It’s the weight of knowing life is finite.

I was lying in bed this morning listening to birds singing.  I don’t know if there are more this year or if I’m more aware of noticing as I’m grateful for the preciousness of blood moving, marrow living, breath swaying.

Lying there, I found myself doing inner pole-vaults, little ones, but powerful – running and jumping in my cells, or maybe it was imagination, but it was fun.  I felt the lift. I remember when my brother spoke of “rodeo snails”. I loved the image of snails on tiny bucking horses waving tiny hats in the air.  I felt the lift when he said it, and I feel the lift now, the lift of a horse on a carousel, the lift of a smile, as I rise and swing on inner pole-vaults.

We all know the Beatles song, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four?  Ho!”

Well, here I am sixty-four days after his passing, still feeling grief, still needing to be fed, and so I remember when I was 15 and the Beatles were first on the Ed Sullivan show.  My best friend and family gathered around the TV in 1964 to watch four youngsters sing, and young girls scream.

My father always wanted to give me everything, so he went out the next day and returned home and proudly handed me an album he’d purchased. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was the Beetles, and not the Beatles, and the difference was profound. The point is that intent counts, and I still carry that memory and lift it in the air, a gold medal for my heart, and I keep on jumping, my pole, a star.

I rise and look out at the trees.  It’s cold and the heater is running.  I sit with the concluding words of Mary Oliver’s poem “Today”.

Stillness.  Out of the doors

Into the temple

Contemplating the branches of an Ash tree, I wonder about the curves, the rise, dip, and reach.  I see a woodpecker approach first one part of the trunk and offer a few pecks, and then another part, peck, peck, and then fly off.  

The May National Geographic has an article on a study scanning the craniums of cosmonauts before and after six months in space. Scientists found that “their gray matter – responsible for things like muscle control, memory, and sensory perception became compressed by an increase in the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions it”.  Sitting here on earth, I nudge my gray matter to expand and receive a massage from the fluid surrounding it. I suggest we make tender waves.

And speaking of waves, though I prefer my ashes be scattered in the temple of ocean waves, I learn I have options. My ashes could be made into a diamond, or a company called And Vinyly could make them into a custom-made vinyl record. Who knew there are ways to continue in somewhat permanent form even after death.

It’s been sixty-three days since my brother passed and I miss him.  The grief is deep and maybe that’s why the woodpecker and cerebrospinal fluid intrigue me right now.  How do I peck at and cushion grief?

Years ago, when my children were young, I read A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech.  He writes of how children enter school as question marks and come out periods.  I want to stay a question mark. When I die, I’ll become a period, well, an ashy one, but right now, I want to keep questioning and learning.  I’m inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. I may not have his genius, but I can keep looking and asking, delving, pecking, probing, waving, and receiving.

In Ursula le Guin’s book Left Hand of Darkness, she asks if we lived on a planet where we never saw anything fly, would it occur to us to want to fly.  I have no answers but I find myself feeling my gray matter expand to play with the fluid that surrounds it as though it were a branch looking to curve, or a trunk calling “come” to a beak.

I continue reading the Kathryn Geurts study of the Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana.  When the children are born, they are ritually bathed, and their legs and arms are stretched and pressed at the ankles and knees.  The idea is that flexibility in the body is flexibility and adaptability in life. It’s a way of living imprinted on the newborn child in the presence of the tribe.  

Entranced, I sit here moving, massaging, bending, and stretching my elbows and knees. I stir my passage and play with waves. I incubate, hover, and reach.

Fog has blown in like the wind in a fairy tale.   I’m reading today at The Hivery from my book, Airing Out the Fairy Tale.  I went through the book to choose what might most entice and stimulate, stir the elbows and knees of my audience and me.

The section on the Yaks is a given, as well as the shower scene, so I’m sitting here, both in Nepal and the past, and in my home and the present.  My heart reveres companionship shared.

It’s been 61 days since my brother passed.  Grief is there but it’s more like a flag waving in the fog, aired in the wind.   That’s the feeling today.

Another book has been recommended and I’ll begin reading it later today. The book is, It’s Okay that You’re Not Okay and Meeting Grief in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand by Megan Devine and Mark Nepo.  My friend who counsels with hospice feels it’s the best book on grief she’s come across. I look forward to reading it. Meanwhile the fog invites me to swim beneath.