cactus garden and surroundings by author

It has only occasionally felt like summer for a day or so before spring weather returns, wet and chilly. Flowers have taken their time, but are blooming, nonetheless. Lettuces overflowing from a friend’s garden have found their way into my salad bowl. Above is a picture of our magnificent cactus garden and surroundings that is a breathtaking glory every year.

Who knew that northeast Ohio would support such a display? But the biologist who planted and maintains this garden knows his cacti. We are blessed to have such diverse garden designed to bring health and calming nourishment to our Care Center where it is located. But this courtyard garden also draws the whole community of residents who live farther out in their cottages and apartments. Every year people ask- are they blooming yet? and scurry over to the garden for the brief glory of vibrant color with thorns that glisten in the sun.

June is my husband’s birthday month. He would have been 75 this year. That is still relatively young for this community. I don’t plan on feeling sorrow or dwelling in the past when his birth and death dates arrive, but inevitably I am triggered by a memory from one source or another. I honor the tinge of sorrow or loneliness that arises. It is a doorway to acknowledging the love and life we shared for almost 50 years. I am aware of how fulfilling our relationship was for both of us in terms of healing our own childhood wounds and the fact that we understood from the very beginning that we were also spiritual partners.

Having worked with many folks as a therapist and spiritual counselor, I understand how challenging and infrequent that kind of relationship can be. I am deeply fortunate in feeling that Richard and I did everything we needed to do together in our lifetime. That leaves a lot of grateful love behind. He and I were not saints! Far from it, but we learned together as we went along with as many challenges as all young people face while we matured since the beginning of our teenaged partnership. What do teenagers know about loving themselves or another person? Not much- and the growing pains were evident in propelling us towards deeper understanding of our own issues and the longing to pursue a Greater Love we both knew was possible.

The fact that we now have two grandsons Richard will not meet is a fact that is buffered by seeing them grow and change with a little bit of their ancestors shining through their own young selves. Perhaps it is a projection, but certain looks and behaviors cannot help but ring a bell of familiarity. They are a joy and lend a welcome reminder that we are all a product of our ancestors reaching back into unfathomable histories. I give thanks for those unknown predecessors. Whatever this turbulent world will be like when our grandsons are adults, I know that they will have had deep loving support to fulfill their own contributions, whatever they may be.

Richard would be so proud of them, and our family celebrates his memory by eating ice cream. It was his favorite dessert throughout his life. Friends, former clients, and family members fondly recall that we served different ice creams for 300 people at his memorial. Spoons up, everyone!

8/7/24

8/7/24
The downdraft of last night’s storm
partnered a terrific tarantella with the trees.
The sky turned black, the wind 
howled in powerful gusts.
Then the slashing downpour 
we had hoped would happen
turning our brown lawns green again.
Others lost power but not where I live.

Had it been us years ago on the mountain
we would have been prepared to be off grid.
Five-gallon containers filled with fresh water, 
LED lanterns, a windup radio with a built-in phone charger,
a woodstove, a gas stove
that, lacking an electric spark, would light
with wooden matches, 
eating food from the fridge freezer first,
laying plenty of insulation over food in the chest freezer-
checking that all was well with the horses, sheep and chickens-
that was what you were born to manage.

As the days of the internet grew into necessity
we knew all the places in town that would be restored first.
Driving with our phones and computers we
connected to family, friends, and clients 
outside the library, at the edge of town
or behind certain homes on the side streets.

Today the morning broke partly sunny and calm. 
No damage that I could see when I got outside.
Tomorrow would have been our 54th wedding anniversary.
Today I dance a sedate waltz of memories
that sweetens my heart, and I imagine yours
to know that I am well and safe as are
our daughters and grandsons
in this violent stormy beautiful world 
we live in.

February: Grief and Gratitude

It is the second month of the new year. What signifies that it is a new year besides the celebrations declaring it to be so? I look to seasonal weather patterns that highlight the fact that our planet has completed another circle around our star. The nature of time seems to keep changing as I age. The past reference point that a new school year had begun when I was a student, a teacher and then a mother, no longer applies. A year unmarked by schooling (though I do take an ongoing zoom class) or by the lack of a regular job does not leave me bored or untethered. To the contrary, it seems that my life is fuller and more creatively engaged than ever before.

As a retired woman living on a fixed income in a wonderful CCRC (continuing care retirement community), I no longer need to decide where I will live next or how I will earn enough to support myself. This is it. This is my ‘Last Resort’ as a former neighbor used to jokingly call her ideal future living place. I do not feel sad that this is my final home: rather it is a relief to be in such a wonderfully supportive environment. Given my ongoing physical decline from a variety of neurological issues, I know I will be cared for all along the way. I also have made good new friends here and have encouragement and appreciation for expressing my creativity in writing, singing, and more, in various venues within this remarkably dynamic community.

Of course, as a grandmother, I am thrilled by both of my grandsons’ brand-new year. They are three and one-years old, and are still changing every month, let alone every year. It is a joy to delight in their growth. My older daughter is a professor, so she does have the academic context of the new year and a new semester. Their family enfolds me into another new year as I share with them the busy life they lead. My younger daughter has entered the new year by moving into a wonderful apartment and I am happy to track her life as it unfolds in a new environment.

The other yearly anchor point for me, is that this is the month that Richard, my husband, died. It was on Valentine’s Day in 2018. My daughters and I have our own quiet ritual to honor that day in his memory. For five years I have let myself recall whatever arises. The earlier years of acute mourning have softened until now there are more recollections of the best of our almost fifty years together. Other widow friends of mine assured me that eventually not all memories would end in feeling grief. Of course, there are still pangs of loneliness or sorrow, feeling the loss of his loving warmth, intelligence, strength, and his many passions in life. Watching other couples here who have been together for almost seventy years, I sometimes feel sad that we didn’t get to navigate this ending chapter of old age together.

At the same time, I can laugh at a remembered in-joke of ours from when we were teenagers or know how utterly in love he would be with our grandsons. I am also beyond grateful to him for leaving behind his support for me to be able to live here in Kendal at Oberlin. He and I worked hard for many years and this is the result of our labors. He would be thrilled to see me safe and loved and cared for in my new home. I am lucky and grateful every day. I am grateful for another year and even grateful to work on embracing all the unknowns that our challenged world holds in store. This year, I offer the following poem that I wrote for Richard and what my journey after his death has revealed to me. Before he died, I did not know that Grief and Gratitude are in fact, one evolving experience, one whole.

Grief and Gratitude                by Judi Bachrach

Grief swept me out with the tide

farther than ever before

you weren’t there to lift me up

guide me home never

there again

fifty years out of practice

sink or swim crawl to dry land
alone

Miles of mudflats abandoned

toy shovels sand buckets

dry seaweed crackled underfoot

seabirds overhead shrieked

broken seashells held to my ear

scattered empty houses

echoed with memories

Waves of grief holding

engagement with life

with cells run amuck

the irrevocable gift of death

release reality reflection

gradually reveals

endless tides that turn

waters raising me higher and higher

greeting the mysterious undertow

floating my body supported from below

fully embracing sorrow

sun flooding my face my soul

my heart infilling with gratitude

cleansing all wounds

Gratitude a state of being

embeds the ocean floor

salty tears of love awash

in grief

and gratitude

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of my husband’s death. I celebrate Love and loss and grief and gratitude. We had rented a funky house that became an unlikely temple as Richard’s death journey proceeded to his final breath. Our former home had been packed up and sold. The lease on the rental was up just a few months after his memorial, so my daughter and son-in-law quickly and efficiently helped me secure a place to live in Kendal at Oberlin, a wonderful continuing care retirement facility near their own new home. There was a final flurry of marking boxes for storage, auction, and “Bring to Ohio”. I know for sure one box I had meant to keep was lost in the shuffle of that final push, and it surprises me when something I did not know I had saved turns up at random moments in my room. Opening up some documents I needed for bringing my old will up to date in Ohio with a new lawyer, a paper slipped out onto the floor.

It was a lovely handwritten note from a couple who had stayed at the Hope Lodge in Manhattan at the same time as Richard did, accompanied by his childhood friend, Cliff. Hope Lodges are well set up free accommodations for those out-of-town patients undergoing cancer treatments in various cities. Richard was heading into his final stage of preparing to receive stem cells for his small B cell Lymphoma.

He knew it would be the hardest part of his treatment yet. After the fact, his main oncologist said, “Yes, we bring you as close to death as possible before implanting the stem cells.” Although Richard seemed remarkably well after the many months of basic chemo and radiation, this powerful next step was intended to kill all of his bone marrow, hopefully to be replaced by growing his own brand-new cancer free cells. He would be like a newborn infant with no immunity. As I was unable to be with him because of my own weakened state of health, Cliff decided he would fly out from his home in California to escort Richard to and from Manhattan and stay at the Lodge and support him for the time it would take to complete the grueling process.

As Cliff remembers, “It was a very tender time.” This is the note I discovered just two days ago.

Dear Judi and girls,

My name is—. My husband is —-. We met Richard at Hope Lodge this past year.  My husband was battling cancer, too.

            We both want you to know what an impact Richard had on us. In the kitchen at Hope Lodge we would sit with Richard and Cliff, sometimes talking, sometimes quiet. Richard’s mere presence conveyed compassion, humility, and strength. He shared his love for his family, his beautiful home and his horses.

            To observe the friendship that he and Cliff shared was also very moving. What a beautiful gift they shared for all these years.

            We pray that you are staying strong. Know that you and your daughters are in our prayers. Also know that we are so grateful to have crossed paths with Richard and therefore you. The fond memories of him will stay in our hearts forever.

                                                                        Sincerely, ———-

I am grateful for the reappearance/synchronicity of that heartful message. Happy Day to honor Love.

My techie friend did indeed show me how to plug in a recording of a song I wrote on this blog. I put the lyrics in a former blog, titled, “Back again” on November 6^th My thanks to Robin for this. It is a very rough recording of, Find Your Way, Children, Children. I’ll keep at this to do cleaner versions of some songs as I go. Love, joy, thanks and peace to you.

Diary 9/12/21                                 

On September 13^th 2001, my husband and I planned to leave for our meticulously planned two-week trip to Tuscany. It had been a delightful destination for him when he had gone years before with a male friend of ours. It had seemed the perfect place to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. We had to plan meticulously because although I was more mobile with my MS compromises twenty years ago, I still would have required a wheelchair for lengthy walking. And a wheelchair meant not having to traverse too many quaint cobblestone streets which meant a careful itinerary to share with me at least a few of his favorite locations and some brand-new ones. We found online international support for free wheelchairs to use on arrival at the airport. The map of Italy we had folded and unfolded to travel each road with our fingers was left worn and tattered during the months before the much-anticipated event.

September 11^th. All flights were cancelled. Our friends in Europe, giving workshops or traveling, were frantic to come back home. Even if we had been able to fly out in in a few days’ time, it would have cut enough into our already short vacation time to render it moot. Every single Italian host and hostess in every venue refunded all of our deposits. There was a warm swathe of caring for Americans during this tragedy. They did not forget how many Americans had supported them and died during the war.

Besides, Richard and I both had psychotherapy clients directly and indirectly affected by this event. Calls started coming in over the next few weeks to begin coping with the unimaginable. Because Richard also had a Manhattan practice as well as the one we shared in upstate New York, a flood of new referrals kept calling him. Anxiety, despair, depression, grief, illness, rage, and PTSD all required his care. What was the loss of a balloon ride over vineyards and olive orchards landing in a field with a champagne breakfast compared to the losses endured in this deliberately public act of mass slaughter?

My father died in a car accident seventy years ago on the eleventh of September. I was born eleven days after he died with over one hundred bones broken in his body. My personal history of loss resurfaced for a while in the aftermath. Grief was heavy in the air along with the fumes of a desire for vengeance, a justifiable retaliation for The Enemy. The chaos of that time bleeds into the current situation of ever more catastrophic losses. Biden has touted the unity of our nation after 9/11. But the widely differing seeds of action to address terrorism were already there. The “patriotic” call for hate and violence vs. the call for genuine national/international political self-reflection for viable boundaries and repair was simmering. It boiled over into an ongoing largely fruitless war which further mucked up our image on the world stage. The long war cost the lives of many more thousands of civilians “over there” as well as leaving thousands of our own soldiers dead or maimed for life.

Those same divisions in the need for action now show up in our ‘war’ against each other with the foe being a deadly virus. Who do we hate, who do we blame, to whom do we deny any impulse of understanding, who do we manipulate into being an ally made in our image? How do we grab what we can while we can? How do we manage our own affairs, dire as they are? There are no easy, no quick, answers.

I do have faith that there is an order in the universe. Much of the time, I am as blind and wounded and overwhelmed as anyone in knowing where that coherence may be found. During the planetary chaos we are creating, it is only clear that each of us must find a center we can trust, hold to and act from. Surrendering to that point of singularity, the still stable point of infinite potential within myself, within us all, is the most important journey there is for me. May we be guided by Love in action.

Though in retrospect, I must say that our envisioned trip to Tuscany was the best trip that I never took. Despite the terrible associations, I still remember it fondly.

8/8/21

This morning I woke up feeling inexplicably happy. I don’t believe that I’ve heard a recommended time limit for widows to stop memorializing their wedding anniversary. Our wedding itself I have described in an earlier anniversary blog. I clearly remember several other special anniversary celebrations – our fifteenth in the backyard of our home in Red Hook N.Y. was a particularly joyful one with our older daughter and her cousins dashing around, and the one where Richard and I renewed our vows to one another inside the circle of hemlock bushes that were barely knee high in back in 1970. When we held a private recommitment ceremony, climbing back up the familiar wooded hillside in Shady, NY, the hemlocks were towering over us in their frothy greenery. Our fortieth was when we introduced our new son-in-law to our friends who didn’t attend the Texas wedding….well, there were all the other parties and special dinners on this date in August. I was always sure we’d at least reach our sixtieth anniversary, given that we were so young when we were married.

And that was not to be. Today is what would have been our fifty-first anniversary. I look at Richard’s photo taken in his fifties on the summit of Mt. Blanc straddling France, Italy, and Switzerland and I summon his visceral warmth through seeing his intensely present gaze. Dutch friends of ours had invited us to stay with them in their vacation home in France to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary and this picture I have on my bedside table was snapped by our friend Daphne on a daytrip to the mountain overlooking the entire area. It was our last big vacation and a joyful occasion to celebrate relationships.

Today, I am reflecting on the nature of love. The intimate dance of a marriage over years of sincere hard work tracks the growth of us as individuals and how we nurtured both of us within the partnership. To have been schooled in that university with Richard was such a gift. We received from and gave to each another in equal measure. Our strengths and weaknesses became less and less the focus of how to love and be loved. We cultivated the belief that love between us could become less conditional based on our behaviors, and more of a constant anchor, a given mutual well of sweet water always available to draw upon. As I was more and more challenged by my chronic declining health, we learned to navigate some rough roads. Parenting two very different daughters pulled us together as our priorities shifted as a family. When it was Richard who developed life threatening cancer, it was another huge lesson of how to stay in love, day to day, moment to moment, right up until his death.

During the periods of isolation during this pandemic, I am acutely aware of the loss of the deep and easy companionship that Richard and I had co-created. There is no one else in the world who can remember events and episodes the two of us shared over those many years. No one can ever walk with me again who could hold the depth of understanding of who and what I am becoming as I continue aging which he never will. No one else remembers our treasured private jokes and personal triumphs. I have dear old friends who knew Richard and me together from our early days, but theirs is still an outside perspective. Memories of that past life are now mine alone.

Today I am beginning to understand that the intimacy of love that I remember is still available to me. It Is not just based on shared life experiences. It is not just in relationship with another single human being, but within the single human being that I am. When I summon the love that I felt for and from Richard, it sets up a resonance within my body/mind/spirit. I had such very good training in the best of conditional human love, that exploring unconditional love leads me on, and takes my hand, my mind, and my breath away. I find that this love is not as confined nor is it dependent on anything or anyone else. It is often unnamed, simply showing up inside my room this morning or when I was outside looking at one of Kendal’s many ponds smelling so sweet after a rain-washed night. It is in my ninety-eight-year-old neighbor’s struggle to rise up out of her chair, the high school aged dining servers bringing me my dinner tray as we once again are unable to dine with others during the latest shutdown. Love is in the faces of the overworked short-staffed nurses as they are back to COVID testing us twice a week among all of their many other duties. We are united in love by hoping that no one else at Kendal tests positive. Love is listening to sad news reports as I sip my morning tea. Love is when I am wide open to living fully all that life entails.

Third Anniversary of Your Death- 2/14/21

Today our two daughters and I

will lift our ice cream spoons to you

on zoom.

You loved ice cream since we first met.

As teenagers, we broke our meager banks

to eat the best ice cream that we could find.

Your favorite flavor always?

Mint chocolate chip.

When we were vegans

coconut milk ice cream would do

but frozen dairy delight was still the best.

In later years, now mostly vegetarians,

you discovered the perfect gelato-

sharp creamy mint studded with

a galaxy of tiny chocolate chips.

Three days before you died

you had an unconscious undressed rehearsal

with spiked fever, and labored breathing.

I was telling our next shift helper

how you had emerged from the danger zone.

You said, quite clearly, with humor in your voice,

“Is there an ice cream zone?”

Of course, there was and

one of the last foods you ate.

At your memorial service we served

hundreds of people ice cream and sorbet.

Today we remember your sweet love

your galaxy of human gifts

melting ever deeper into our hearts.

Intermingling grief and nostalgia catch me unawares. The sound of the snowplow outside of my room at Kendal brought tears to my eyes last week. For years and years every winter, you listened to the all-weather radio station eventually spoken by a stilted digital voice. Expertly plowing the driveway, and in some years, the entire dirt road we shared with our neighbors, was a point of pride and hard work. Our therapy clients made it safely to our house, the next day’s freezing rain hit dirt, not compacted snow, and your damp padded jumpsuit hung out to dry over the closet door, revealing the neatly dressed professional beneath ready for very different work after downing a cup of hot coffee.

Maybe it’s the glance at your picture sitting on my night table- the one that our Dutch friend took of you standing on Mt. Blanc when we visited her and her husband for their twenty-fifth anniversary. Your warm eyes look directly into mine. The half-smile is enough to send shivers of physical loss inside my heart. Empathy, clarity, and fiercely loyal dedication to all you encountered shines through the glass frame. Above that, are all of the early photos of our baby grandson who you had not met in this life. I look at his little round face and sparkling eyes, and I cannot help but see you as well. There is surely a through-line there and I don’t mean just DNA.

Other times I am reluctant to use the last of the dental floss that came in a box of a million (OK maybe only 25) that you had ordered before you died. Or sitting on the chairs in my room that once were in your Manhattan office, I wonder, “Was this the client’s chair or yours?”  I think maybe I should be able to tell the difference, to feel the hours of loving counsel you gave to so many others besides your family.

You are everywhere- in a song, a meal, a landscape, a breath- in the absolute stillness when I meditate; the tangible empty solidity of creation holds us closer than close.

The poet Hafiz has a line in one of his poems: “Love is simply creation’s greatest joy.”