It’s Steve’s birthday. He’s 71. We wake at 4:30, grateful for our lives.
I snuggle in, lie flat on my back in bed, feel myself as a garden, feel myself as soil. My brother’s passing 51 days ago is fertilizer, liquid fertilizer, liquid love, seeping into the soil of my being, blood and bone, circulating. Plants hold roots as we hold hands. Life and death do the same.
I lie in bed allowing the space in my head to open. Eyeballs breathe, nourish on roundness. Legs part like legs of a frog. The soles of my feet touch.
I lie there receiving. My legs make a heart with soul, pelvis a cauldron receiving what comes now.
An owl calls who, who, who, and insides reply, “all here”, and outside fog holds a veil of mist, and ridge and ocean, though unseen, are here.Gratitude completes.
Today is the 49th day since my brother passed. I’ve been wondering how this day would feel as the Buddhists honor this day as the one who has passed makes a choice as to whether to return or move on.
Yesterday I felt my brother on a boat tossing a rope to a dock on which I stood. I woke this morning knowing that’s not it at all.
First, I noticed my breath was/is everywhere. I’m being breathed.
There’s no inhale, pause, exhale, pause. Breath is everywhere, in all the cells, and expanding out. I’m breathing through my whole head, allowing separation between my eyes and throughout my head and heart, and I realize all this with the 49th day isn’t related to him or me. It’s like when I was at the Everest Memorial only in this case rather than feeling impersonal, and grounded in cold, this is a feeling of warmth and knowing. I am the boat, the dock, the water, the earth, the universe. There never was, and is not now any separation between my brother and me, between life and death.
Perhaps that is what people risk at altitude; it’s one reason they keep climbing. They want to touch this knowing, Less air and less oxygen allow one to live knowing an expansiveness that can’t be found at sea level, and then, this morning, it’s here. I’m here. I am.
People are dying wanting to get to the top of Mount Everest. People wonder why. Perhaps I give a taste in my book, Airing Out the Fairy Tale: Trekking through Nepal & Midlife.
In my book, I write about stepping into the circle of stones, the sacred site where those who’ve died on Everest are honored, the Everest Memorial.
“Celeste, Sante, and I separated, each drawn to explore different sections within the circle, each needing to find our own way to honor and grieve. The wind blew icy cold. Something new entered my bones. Not fear or even grief. I stepped out – or was brought out – of humanness, into something more elemental.”
I say more in the book and then come to say: It’s as though those who’ve died “were winging there way through stars, as though the expansiveness of death was impersonal. I could believe we sing the universe into being as we tune into the vibrations between the cells. We are tuning forks.”
We continued to walk outside the circle of stones and continued along and up. and as we did so, I felt my “steps were elemental like candle flames, ignition for prayer”.
In this moment, sitting here in my chair as the day is softly lit I feel my breath elemental and rich. I know all is one and my brother is here.
The word healing is about wholeness, feeling whole. In this moment, I am whole: tree, seed, root, air, water, soil.
I’ve been honoring the days since my brother’s passing, preparing myself for the 49th day when the Buddhists believe a choice is made by the one departed.
I’m flooded with memories of all we shared and my heart breaks and comes back together over and over again. It’s like the tides slowly wearing away and piling up sand.
I plan to honor my brother on Saturday, the 49th day. I prepare.
Today I wash and touch with tender fingers and soft heart a feminine figure he gave to me years ago when I felt a bit stuck. Her lap is a cauldron, a heart, a bowl, a place to hold wishes and incubate desire and need for fulfillment and creativity. He used it to manifest his art and the next stage of his life. I use it now to manifest what is meant to come. How can I know?I trust that the universe brings me more than I can imagine. I trust what comes to me now.
Trust what comes
The creek in Mill Valley yesterday, soft, gentle, and tender in flow
It’s the 44th day since my brother passed and a day to honor those who’ve died while serving in the Armed Forces.
I pause, slightly stunned, as though I’m a bird who’s flown into a window and fallen for a moment. I shake myself awake, sit outside as squirrels run up and down the trunk of the redwood tree. A woodpecker pecks into the trunk of a tree on the other side of the deck. I feel that peck as though my insides ask for a nest, request room for breath and rest.
I’m reflecting, reflected like the marsh I photographed this morning. I stood therefeeling how what’s reflected is simply that. It causes the water no pain.
This morning my breath lengthens on the strength of the light. I feel fulfilled – full – filled.
Rain is predicted and birds are singing. Tears fill my eyes but they aren’t tears of sorrow. They are tears for the beauty that is here, the beauty of trees, clouds, sun, and rain.
It is a weekend of remembrance, and I remember my brother – so many memories and in this moment, I smile with the memories, grateful. My heart unravels its ball of pain and spreads light to welcome growth and response to lengthening days.
It’s been 43 days, six weeks today since he passed, and for me, there is healing in appreciating the time he was here as he transitions to what, for me, is unknown, yet stretches support in the marrow of my bones.
It’s the 42nd day since my brother passed away. I wake aware of the directions, east, west, north, south, up, down, and how they come together to encompass and embrace a whole, a hole, a synergy expanding life and death.
For me, the three day Memorial weekend is a time to pause and reflect. I look out on stillness tapped with the chirping of birds.
Yesterday I listened to Jonathan Maberry’s speech at the Bram Stoker awards which inspired me to read Shirley Jackson’s story, The Haunting of Hill House which then led me to re-read her story The Lottery, written in 1948 after WWII.
I sit now with this balancing of in and out, of what my mind may create within the larger structure of which I’m part. How willing am I to break with the crowd?
Certainly this weekend asks us to examine what is worth fighting for, what is worth dying for. It asks us to open our hearts to what is true for us, to open to what enlivens and enhances the connections in our lives.
I am with the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Life goes headlong. Each of us is always to be found hurrying headlong in the chase of some fact, hunted by some fear or command behind us. Suddenly we meet a friend. We pause. Our hurry & embarrassment look ridiculous. Now pause, now possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of our own heart until it supersedes sun & moon & solar system in its expanding immensity. The moment is all, in all noble relations.
Walk with the weight of petals opening out to touch
It’s day forty since my brother’s passing and I wake feeling refreshed. I notice I’m breathing fully. Perhaps it’s the nap I gave myself yesterday which was followed by bed at 8:30. I woke dreaming of my mother who passed away in February 2005 but she was alive and well in the dream. We were looking for a place where all of us could live.
Forty days is a spiritual number that comes up in many religions and practices. Our skin cells take, on average, forty days to renew.
I am with the words of Jelaluddin Rumi:
What nine months does for the embryo
Forty early mornings
Will do for your growing awareness
This morning when I woke I felt the reins of the horse loosening as though I didn’t need to hold on. I felt a new awareness of the consciousness we all share. I felt my cells expanding out, but that is for me, sister, not wife.
At 6:40 my brother’s wife calls. They were married thirty-three years and together longer than that. They were/are soul-mates. I can’t imagine what this is for her. Grief. How do we make it through? How do we offer support?
When my father died in an accident in 1969, I was 19 and my brother 15. My mother was 42. She said if it weren’t for us, she wouldn’t get out of bed. We all slept in the same room for a time, but the daughter of my brother and his wife is 24 with a life of her own, and, she, too, is grieving.
I sit with that now as the fog brings wisps of white to the blue sky. The coming of fog shimmers the trees, offers change – fog, saliva for air.
The moon and fog
Who calls to whom?
Recently I learned of the work of Professor Kathryn Geurts with the Anlo-Ewe speaking people in southeastern Ghana. She discovered that balance is a sense there, the primary sense, and is physical and psychological, literal and metaphorical.
They have a word seselelame which means “feel-feel-at-flesh-inside”. They are connected to the wisdom of intuition. In that, I touch into what another might need. I offer support, relationship, leaves to tree.
I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It rained the whole time we were gone and I look out on vibrancy, growth, and green.
I return to a sympathy card that brings tears. I feel like today is the first day since my brother passed that I have a whole day to sit and cry. Yes, there is laundry and grocery procurement, and checking plants, but kitties are cuddled, and as I respond to emails, I look up and my feathered friend sits on a branch outside the window. She waits for me to get my camera and take a photo through the slats of the blind and another through the glass door. She sits with me, a comfort in the weight of grief.
I feel molted, tender before new growth and skin form. I feel fragile and tears continue to pour forth, harbingers seasoning what comes.
Outside my window – comfort through the slats Honoring a Cosanti bell of celebration
I’m honoring the passing of my brother and what comes as I move up and down in space as NYC definitely requires stair, elevator, and escalator transport, and I’m up and down in mood. Showered and after coffee and a blueberry muffin, I invite myself more thoroughly into a new day.
I didn’t take a picture of the “bubbles” I saw the first night we were here, and when I went back yesterday, they were gone. Maybe I imagined them, or maybe they were an exhibit meant to show impermanence. My plan has been to post on grief for 49 days in honor of my brother’s passing/passage. 49 days is the time Buddhists believe it takes for one who has passed to more thoroughly move on. Today I wonder if 49 days will be enough for me to move on, and today is today.
Here is a poem by David Whyte.
The Well of Grief David Whyte
Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins, thrown by those who wished for something else.
Artwork outside Rockefeller Center Listen; receive!
After I interpreted the above sculpture as hand to heart and listening, I read about the artwork currently displayed at Rockefeller Center. It is a “raised fist that morphs into a gramophone”. Perhaps it says something about what I need to believe. Read about what’s represented in the sculptures here.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/arts/sculpture-frieze-new-york-.html
The sun is shining in Shelton, CT for the first time it seems since my brother passed thirty-five days ago. The rehearsal dinner we attended last night was beautiful and now today a wedding but first, we’ll meet with Jan, my brother’s wife. The intention had been that we’d meet with her and my brother but now it is just her and so we balance life and death, love and its accompaniment, as the more we love, the more deeply we are carved, formed, birthed, and fertilized by pain, and yes, we mix our metaphors because we are abundant with our evolving maze of curves.
Yesterday I read Mingyur Rinpoche’s discovery when he recovered from a near-death experience. When you love, the world loves you back. His book comforts me as I feel my brother here in a way I don’t need to comprehend. I only need to know that he is the butterfly and I the caterpillar, and one day I, too, will fill out my wings.
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