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Day 12 – The Weight of Grief

The fog has come in. There’s a gray embrace, a clasp of wetness.

I am heavy with grief, weighted down as though pregnant with new birth, though I’m not bringing forth a child into the world, but the weight of myself, a knowing in the cells there is a wider birth of earth than just this collection of cells I am right now. It is my energy that animates, and that energy halts now as it rearranges the knowing with which I connect. My umbilical cord is stretched and will snap back.

I open John O’Donohue’s wonderful book, To Bless the Space Between Us. I open to his poem “For Grief”.

For Grief

When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you becomes fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.

There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.

It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time. 

John O’Donohue

Two rocks – One from Monhegan Island – the other from the Ganges
Healing abides
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Day 11: A Well of Compassion

I wake and see the moon, a light in the sky, not whole now, or full as we say, full of light, but still whole, still knowing itself as full, round, whole.

When people I meet  in daily tasks, people for whom there isn’t time for the story, ask how I am, I say, “I am well,” and those who know me look at me more closely as though there’s something not quite right in that response, so this morning I sit with it, sit with how one responds in daily life.  I know the eyes are a giveaway and my energy, too, and yet, I also feel the truth of it realizing I can internally modify it for myself. Though I say “I am well”, I can know that I am a well. I may be empty or full, offering, receiving, or simply still.

I am a well, and this morning my heart is heavy, so I stay with that and feel myself as an island, perhaps Japan or Monhegan, perhaps formed from a volcano.  Yes, this passing of my brother is a volcano, and I am an island forming, and islands connect with other islands.

I need a moat around my castle right now, a drawbridge. I venture out and return to feeling.  I’m working on a “speech” for my brother’s memorial. I poured my heart out last night, memories flowing like lava, now ash.

Then I checked the word count.  I offered to speak for three minutes, figuring five was fine, so at 125 to 150 words a minute, I had the freedom of between 600 and 700 words.  I was way over that, so I cut and cut again, and now I sit with how one defines 65 years of sibling love and connection in a number of words. No wonder I wake thinking of islands, and look up at a moon not full, and yet, in that I can feel the well I am, a well sometimes full and other times dry.  

Today, the pain is tender, soft tapping within, as though the moon reaches into the well, and says look up, keep looking up and hear the birds sing, and see that the limbs on the Maple tree that were bare a month ago, are full, luxuriant, and harbingers of life. They are foundational fountains; they monitor and hold; they move and offer newly formed leaves like fingers as they stir sun, rain, light, and shade.

I am well, well with compassion, well with understanding the phases of the moon, the phases of life. I know that even when empty, I’m full, and even when still, I offer. I am a well, a well of compassion, for you and for me, for being and doing, for living and dying, all held and shared as one.

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Day 10: Sweetness

My college roommate Robyn Anzelon was a bridesmaid at my wedding. She comments on the photo of my brother and me coming down the aisle with “so glad the sweetness is wrapping around you,” and yes, that is the word, the feeling: sweetness.  

Sweetness wraps around me, stepping stones in grief.  My brother’s eyes, and he always had better than 20/20 vision while I, not so much, are now expanded out.  He draws me to stars and sky even as I more clearly feel the ground beneath my feet. Aliveness. I feel him augmenting sky and soil inside.  I’m tenderized with sweetness, wrapped in love.

I’m reminded of my mother’s sweet smile as she said over and over again, “All is love.”  My parents, our parents, lived as though rolled in tenderness, bathed in it from birth, many births. They saw a wider view. They were Holy Beings, as are we all, and yet sometimes we need to be touched again and again with the sweetness we share in living here.  We need to touch each cell inside with the recognition and acknowledgment of the sweet power and joy-filled frequency of love. There, is support.

In fourth grade, I was the fairy who gave kindness in the play Sleeping Beauty.  I stepped forward and touched my wand to the baby and said four powerful words, “I give you kindness.”  I often say the words to myself. “I give you kindness, Cathy.” I do that today, give myself the sweet fruit of kindness, as it ripens in sun and rain, fulfilling its purpose with the growth, care, and protection of seeds, generations of seeds. We are here for more than ourselves. We seed with sweetness our future as we honor our shared needs.


The heart of St. Francis fills baskets then and now with Love

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Day 9 – Earth Day

I wake and rise. The moon shining along the wood floors invites me to receive its beams outside.  I come back in and sit as light streams into the room and the moon appears to move across the sky.

When I was going through chemotherapy and radiation my friend Jane and I spoke every morning and then wrote.  The book Breast Strokes came from our talks and my posts on my Live Journal blog.

Because Jane spent the first three months of this year at Tassajara Zen Center, today was the first time we touched voices in almost four months. Handwriting back and forth was our form of touch. When we spoke at 6 this morning, we watched the movement of the moon from different sides of the bay. We spoke of touch, the ground of being, touch, an honoring, each day, earth day.

I’ve been going through photos for my brother’s memorial.  My tears are sweeter now, softer. There is sadness at times, a piercing, but the piercing is a puncturing as though my heart will one day be completely open to flow, no blocks or rocks in the stream, though Carl Perkins says the rocks in the stream make the song. Perhaps my song will come to silence, vibration so widely spread, it will be a blanket of calm.

This photo in particular strikes me because though we thought, at the time, we were adults, we were young with so much before us, and that continues for me, and I believe for him too.  He has simply changed form but perhaps he is more accessible this way. I feel him close as though I’m absorbing his essence, and in doing so, augmenting my own.

I continue to feel a deepening, widening, more substantial connection to what I call Source, and some call Nature, and others call God.

I was married in 1971.  My brother walked me down the aisle because our father died in 1969.  I was 21 and my brother not yet 18. Perhaps we walk a different aisle now, or maybe all aisles are one.

My brother walking me down the aisle in 1971
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Day 8 – Resurrecting

We each have a different tradition on this day. I look out as sun strikes the ridge with light and birds sing and squirrels chirp.  I read about the explosions, blood and killings in Sri Lanka. I’m tempted to leave this page blank, feeling there are no words to express what I might say, and I resolved to post each day after my brother’s passing as my homage to him who was my greatest cheerleader.  As older sister, I could do no wrong.

My family is gathering today.  I look forward to the sanctity in that while knowing there is death for others, pain.

I feel my brother coming through in various ways, allowing me to know he is here in different form.  Spirit speaks. I feel love in my being, peace.

St. Francis and Froggie Buddha together today!

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Day Seven: Resting

It is the seventh day since my brother passed. I’ve passed through something, perhaps carried with him like a scarf. It is said that when a person dies, they circle around Mount Everest, known in Nepali as Sagarmatha and in Tibetan as Chomolungma. I feel that now, feel myself dropped as he moves on.

I feel myself as a grain of sand on a beach with other grains of sand. The tide has moved in and out. I’ve been wet and dry, but now I just am. There is a neutrality in me now. It’s not numbness or distress. In this moment, I am rest, a grain of sand on a beach with other grains of sand, not wet or dry, only grateful that I’m part of a whole.

In this Holy time, death and resurrection are celebrated. For now, this Saturday, I rest, not pulled one way or the other; I am rest.

Swan rests on the lips of wider wings


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Day Six: Layering

I awake to the word “layering” and think of compost made from gathering organic ingredients and layering them until they come together to make a nutrient-rich mulch for the garden.

We do the same when someone dies – come together – layer various people known in different ways – we layer and compost levels and layers of grief until one day there is a little more life and ability to raise our heads from the ground and look around.

Oh, what a beautiful world it is today.

I woke this morning thinking of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers”.  He was a gardener and a poet, and perhaps the two are twined.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

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Evening Healing of Grief

It’s the night before the full moon and I watch it rise through the trees.  The greatest love swells in and around me. Is it the soft evening light that deepens the passage into Spring?

Something shifts in me.  Wrapped in a blanket, I’m enveloped in the soft, sweet fragrance of Pittosporum.  The moon rises in me and there is comfort and peace.

There she is, a vision in the sky

The fog blowing in blurs the moon and trees

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Afternoon Grief

It’s different than morning grief.  The sun is shining straight down. There are no shadows in which to hide.  All is revealed, and today where I am the sun is hot. I feel scorched. My friend Elaine says it’s okay that I need to hibernate.  I’ve been burned. I need to wait for new skin to form before I emerge.

Today is the day of my brother’s cremation.  His wife and I talk and cry together. We are touchstones for each other, two women who love the same man but know him differently.  My grief can’t equal hers and yet there are the memories of childhood, parents, a shared DNA that seems to cry out, “Nooooo!”

We want to understand; we want to be brave and here we are connecting in shared pain and maybe that is the place where moisture connects in the flow of tears as they lubricate and cleanse.

I am oiled, bathed, possibly soothed at a level I don’t yet know.  A hidden spring comes forth or so I tell myself as tears continue to flow. I want to be brave and I know the word courage comes from “coeur” heart, and my heart is certainly involved in this process of letting go. It joins the beat and waves of love, the rise and fall of whales, and the float of feathers in air.

Elaine and I see a whale, the lighthouse and a white feather floating across symbolizing Mother Love!

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Fifth Day of Grief

On the fifth day of grief, my feet are cobblestones, walking ancient paths.

I wonder if part of the grieving process is the other also letting go, a separation, gently, roughly, tenderly, kindly, agonizingly painful separation of paths.

Both stand at a crossroads, and then, how do we let go?

As we gather in connection, I wonder if the one who has passed is beckoning us together, gathering us like flowers into one bouquet and for a time we share a vase, in gathering, a vine.