Diary 7/15/18

Every community has its rules, written and unwritten. Beginning with the first and deepest imprint of our family, we then extend group participation as part of schools, jobs, places of worship, art collectives, performance groups, hobbies, sports teams, political parties, and country. We learn to read the signs of how the group works. It is a mammalian trait to find our place and fit into the flock or herd because our lives depend upon it. If we flaunt those rules, we become outsiders either forming a default alternative group or learn to function alone. Even if you are a hermit living off the grid, it is in relationship to a rejected community.

I am now living in an intentional community, a CCRC, (learning new acronyms is a necessary part of becoming a member). Kendal is a Continuing Care Retirement Community, and a particularly good one at that. Because it indeed provides care throughout the life and death of a member, this includes skilled nursing once you have reached the stage of losing your independence due to the ensuing physical complications of your aging body. There are state rules and inspections, mountains of paperwork for the staff, and laws that must be followed.

Moving into the designated assisted living area of Kendal, I am within one of the smallest groups. The majority live here independently in cottages or apartments. There is another small group of those living down my hall in a dementia unit or in another wing for those who are physically unable to care for themselves. Being compromised by MS, I need the support of having my meals provided and my linens changed, but can fully determine my own daily acitivities. Now that I have use of a scooter, I can get to them and back to my room on my own throughout this large campus.

I am different because I am a good 20 to 30+ years younger than the majority of the residents. I have met many who can literally run rings around me. They are busy all day every day with committees that serve both Kendal and interface with the town and the academic community of Oberlin college. They are a group of political, creative, savvy folks. Kendal was founded on Quaker ideals so there is a strong culture of enacting social justice with solid underlying moral values and spiritual concern for all. This begins as an individual and flows out to Kendal and the larger world.

As a newcomer I am still in observation mode though not for long. I am willingly being called forth to offer my skills as someone who loves music, singing, dance and spiritual pursuits. I am co-leading a small group that meets every other Sunday for Lectio Divina (Divine Reading) with a Presbyterian minister who wanted to retire from offering a Sunday service at age 85. Instead I was asked as my role as an interfaith minister to assist him when he agreed to offer readings from scripture for contemplation. I sing a hymn to start and finish the hour and am offering suggestions in how to approach silent contemplation which was a new practice for him. Of the handful that attend, two or three can interact with us, others are simply present within their non-verbal beings.

More opportunities for song and initiating a meditation group are in the making. I have even had a meeting with the admirable powerhouse women who organize such things about creating a dance for the ‘Spring Fling’ in April. I visualize choreographing a piece performed by people from my end of the more compromised Kendal world. I had a vision of each of us moving as we can with canes, walkers, wheelchairs and scooters in patterns and designs across the auditorium floor. I haven’t got a theme or the music yet but I was granted 5-8 minutes in a 16×30 foot space in the middle of the auditorium floor to contribute to the annual celebration.

I have blundered my way into the writing crowd and will see if any of my pieces will be accepted for a fine literary magazine published at Kendal three times a year. Clever little mammal that I am I have sought out the right people to find a way in to use my talents. There are the right ways and means to become part of this community and I have committed several faux pas already as the new actual ‘kid’ on the block. Committee leaders see me as fresh blood though I need to be upfront that though I am younger than their own children and I look younger than that (genes, I assure you) my body is older than theirs, and I have little endurance for long hours of doing anything.

As to unwritten rules, for one, I find that you don’t take your cell phone with you. The very occasional ring during a meeting or activity is actually frowned upon by all faces present. Unless you have an urgent call coming in, phones do not appear anywhere at mealtimes. Granted, as it is an elder community there are many who don’t relate to the world of internet. On the other hand, there is also the official ‘geek squad” of volunteers who help you if you have trouble with the technology here. Some of these are folks who worked on original early IBM mainframe computers and who kept up with all the rapid changes that have endlessly multiplied in their lifetimes.

Rules help to create healthy boundaries in all communities. I am both amused by and humbly grateful for learning them as Kendal becomes my final home community.

Diary 7/7/18

I took my loaned scooter off road to the edge of a pond. I picked some wildflowers to bring back for my room. That was a small act of independence, remembrance, and ownership all in one. I was a little scared the scooter couldn’t get back up the slight incline on slippery grass or jump back over the lip onto the paved path. I did have to push it a bit like a non motorized scooter with one leg until the wheels gained traction and then off I zipped back home.

It felt like a remembered activity from years of living in the countryside with a busy dining table to host a floral collection. These flowers sit alone in a vase on my bureau, and Richard smiles at me from the photo hanging on the wall above. I have the occasional visitor and flowers are always inviting and decorative. “This room is my room….” Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land is My Land”, is well known at Kendal, a kind of progressive patriotic anthem sung at weekly sing alongs and traditionally with the whole community on the fourth of July.

Diary 7/8/18

In your picture you are forever smiling, a little bit squinted, looking into the sun there on top of Mt. Blanc. This photo holds the forceful focus of your personality, it shows the eyes that held others firmly in their gaze. Those eyes reflect the intensity of your famous hugs, where you didn’t let go until you felt it was received.

It was what one daughter said she missed the most about you and everyone who had ever been hugged by you, concurred. People knew they had been truly embraced, every single time your arms went around them. Your hugs were never invasive, just insistently loving until the hug-ee surrendered to the inevitability of taking it in.

Lord, I miss the physicality of you, Richard. That physicality includes sex, of course, but just the smell of your soap, the touch of your face with or without your beard, the sounds of you making your way through your day in and out of the house and office, the taste of vitality you radiated from your strong body and devotion to hard work- the vibrant masculine sweetness you effortlessly inhabited from the day you were born. There is no one like you anywhere on this earth and I am not looking for you here. My memories are static like the photo I am speaking to. But Love is fluid and waves of Love are omni-directional. They are dynamic and infill me with painful searching and momentary islands of rest as I find and lose the ache of your bodily presence in my life.

Many MS people complain of the “MS hug.” This an unpleasant sensation of banding around the midriff- for me it is caused by a lesion or sclerosis at T6, on the thoracic spine. It can feel merely irritating to acutely hot and inflamed, radiating to muscle spasticity when I am tired. It is not a nice hug, it is rather a misplaced tug of an angry rope or an electrical shock wrapping round and round my ribs. Sometimes I take a NSAID (non steroidal anti inflammatory like Tylenol or Ibuprofen) to tamp it down but it is always there. My neurology also insists on being accepted, on not letting go until I surrender. Learning to feel this as Love is an ongoing challenge. Since I have rediscovered that my body is inside of Me, I do love it as best I can. Sensation means I am alive.

To summon the solid loss of you, Richard, is painful. Exiling memories of you is also painful and no solution. Living through recall and release, sorrow and acceptance, over and over is the only way forward. Within each release and moment of acceptance lies the seeds of new love everywhere. Not your particular brand of Richard’s love, but Love in a vast of garden of beings. The Hug of God is to be received until we surrender. Richard, one of the official Ambassadors of the Hug, may be gone, but the Children of Love are us and we are everywhere.

I’ve Grown Used to Miracles

by Adi Da

I’ve grown used to miracles.

The wonder is not whether

we be together

me with those I’m loving

on some other side.

The wonder is that we’ve met and been together

loving here, in this world,

where love is yet to take its hold.

Of course this is no consolation to you,

You who are seeking for me everywhere.

But this is not the place for consolations.

And only those who understand are fit for loving here.

I was used to miracles the day I lived.

And now I begin my days myself.

Even if I make a logic of your sentiment

If we found each other here

how should we lose the touch

in a world more light?

(from Crazy Da Must Sing,(Inclined to His Weaker Side)

I had multiple reports and digital sightings of ice cream eaten in Richard’s name yesterday. Another plus for Kendal is that they serve very good ice cream here. After dinner, as Emilia and I sat eating our ‘frozen dairy delight’ as Richard laughingly referred to it, just talking about him and ice cream lightened our sorrow. We followed that up with a post prandial walk, (well, she walked, and I zoomed in my scooter) across a little wild corner of the property that has covered bridges over swampy wetlands. It must be how much of this sprawling property looked before being turned into numerous tamed ponds with green shores where many cottages have been built.

I agree with the sentiments of this poem (and am caught by the perspective) that our friend Kim sent to me and my daughters. I have often said to my clients that it is a miracle that we find and love each other at all. It is not useful to focus on the idea that we alone of all people, didn’t find a partner to love us perfectly. We are very human and that pretty much rules out the chances of unconditional love in most cases. The exceptions are true saints and there are few enough of those around. Given our determined inclination to remain our limited selves throughout our lives, the fact that love finds and blossoms between us is a miracle in all cases.

I realized some months ago that losing ‘my own’ Richard’s face of Love meant that I now had the opportunity to find Love in every face. Steeped in his particular brand for so many years I am letting go of the specifics of his love-style very slowly. The releasing happens of its own accord. Every time a sharp wave of grief hits me, which happens with somewhat less frequency, I resist, yield, cry and then experience a quiet contented ground of being. From there I lift my eyes and can see, like a vast bamboo forest, we are all growing from the same interconnected root system. May love ‘yet..take its hold’ in our frightened human world.

Diary 6/9/18

Beak to Beak

There is a teenage fledgeling robin that hops/flutters up to a branch in the bush outside my window. Almost every afternoon it is there peering out through the cover of leafy branches. A parent arrives shortly thereafter, dropping food on the ground as its offspring gets down to join them. Sometimes the parent bird perches on the same branch and tucks some tidbit directly into its beak before swooping away again. The younger bird sits amid the avian camouflage, its small head taking in the world from side to side. By evening they are both gone. I expect that before long I won’t be seeing either of them at such close quarters. I have no idea where their nesting site is. It is a secure arrangement.

I have never observed this before. I assumed all nourishment took place in a nest until the babies could fend for themselves. I am always curious about the habits of how other creatures do their parenting. I found out that actually, these particular descendants of the dinosaurs take a full year to live on their own. They first have to learn the migration route to and from their summer and winter territories.

This Desert

                                              mid 90’s, rewritten 6/9/18 Judi Bachrach

I used to think that love looked like this:

A mother holds her child tightly to her breast.

She only lets go as the child needs her to

her arms remain there always.

This never happened with me.

Does it mean I was never loved ?

There are many answers

but only one is true.

I didn’t know

the painful holes in my childhood

would create the strongest possible jar

to hold my longing for Love

I say,”YES !”

and Love breaks the jar

again and again

until there is no me

no you

no jar

no way

to die of thirst in this desert anymore.

When I wrote this poem back in the early 90’s I couldn’t have imagined that my jar would be ground into dust. I didn’t realize that the disappearance of me, a jar, and even the idea of a limited God could be the best thirst quencher it has lately become. I couldn’t have known how much I would have to keep saying Yes to all that life brought me. Since Richard’s death, the underlying comprehension that we are Love itself has rerouted my faith. As much as I cling to my personal jar, it is no longer essential, I know it is not who I really am. Like the fledgeling robin, I still need beak to beak sustenance before I can remember that I carry my well within me wherever I go.

I left my old life completely behind while my daughter and son-in-law drove me to my new home in Ohio. I have been here at Kendal, the senior facility at Oberlin college for a day and a half. It is too new to talk about except to say I believe it will be fine and more than fine. Right now I am still stunned and exhausted from the journey and meeting newness at every moment.

I will just leave a poem to mark traversing the Northeast to the Midwest by car.

5/28/18

Screen Savior

Lying with my head on my mother’s lap

across the bench seat in our ’52 Chevy

tree tops and telephone wires

rush by

sweet smells of summer tucking me in

Today I left my hometown

semi reclining in the back seat of a Subaru

this long drive from Woodstock

upstate NY mountain greens and RVs rush by

Sitting up I see

Memorial Day golfers, hikers, kayakers,

trucks, motorcycles, American flags

morning beers and tents in the Oxbow campsite

orange life vests swimming in the Allegheny

Clouds pull away like taffy

into mashed potatoes and cotton balls

milky mares tails

of a hot summer day

My old home leaves me in miles and hours

the screen I am using hasn’t changed

only the projections on it from

childhood to widowhood

Always north and west

the same eyes see

Damascus, Bath, Cuba go by

the Seneca-Iroquois Nation museum and casino

Jamestown, into Eerie, PA

Rolling on to the flat lands of OH

through a haze of barbecue smoke

the Great Lake glimmers at Cleveland’s edge

we drive on through to Oberlin

my new home town

In the hotel at night I close my eyes

the world still rushing by

the screen never alters

it must be untouched Love itself

the only home that remains still

I am leaving the state of New York four days from now after living here almost all of my sixty six years. My belongings are reduced to what is essential. There have been many Last Times for seeing friends. Now I am focused more towards my First Times. Crossing over into Ohio, seeing Cleveland where my daughter and son-in-law live, staying overnight in the town of Oberlin, then entering into my new potentially forever home in Kendal, a senior living facility: these will be entirely new encounters.

Today I am less focused on departure and more on arrival. I am atop the highest mast looking to shout land ho! after so many days of being at sea. It was an unexpected voyage to begin with. My husband’s diagnosis of cancer in October of 2016, ending with his death in February, 2018, has been dangerous, exhilarating, tragic and magical. These experiences ravaged the illusion that I was ever entirely the captain of my own vessel. It is both humbling and a relief to be divested of false control. I now am more able to entrust the wheel and rudders to Other hands, and appreciate the role of being a sadder but wiser passenger.

I know the stars guiding me to my next destination are shining clear and true. I know a lot more of how to continue navigating with a broken heart. I know a lot more about how to ask for help and to appreciate how much love and kindness there is in our outwardly hostile world. I better understand how disillusionment, loss, and grief can lead to rebuilding a sturdy faith. I continue to experience the depth of the ocean floor lying peacefully below. It is an ever present part of the shifting seas that seems to toss us about without regard to our desires, hopes, and dreams. I am captain/not captain and I welcome you aboard my battered vessel as soon as I dock in Ohio. It is time to put new sailing skills to use and I am pleased to report I have no idea of what that will look like. Other hands For a New Beginning.

My friend Sage sent me this poem last week.

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

John O’Donohue

Diary 5/18/18

Another day, another school shooting. I can hardly stand it. It is unconscionable that nothing changes the meter on American fear and violence. There is not even an attempt to make a difference about guns of any kind on the part of those who could speak truth and not just some blind adherence to their own power. Money and power. Thus it has always been. “The poor will always be with us.” Therefore the wealthy and powerful will always defend their positions to make sure nothing changes.

From my perspective, the illusion of control is pervasive and based on a deeper truth. That truth is that as long as we are identified with our little separate selves we are desperate to fill the void with whatever we can grab and hold on to. The gap between what religion calls God and those struggling small selves grows ever wider. So does the gap between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and the self-identified Us and Them. The more limited we become in our identities, the more race, skin color, religion or simply any degree of otherness, becomes the target of raging discontent. Helpless to avert the acute pain of being human, we need to vent our blame and hostility out there- anywhere outside of ourselves to take away the burden of the unbearable. The real unbearable pain is the loss of our inter-connectedness in the heart (of the God of your choice). Once disconnected enough, we lose the capacity to distinguish our common humanity.

I weep a little, I pray for the passage of all the souls torn from their bodies, for all who are bereft as a result of this tragedy today. And I am angry and frustrated and hope to find ways as a citizen to use my voice effectively. I look to find my own hurt and retaliatory violence since that is the only thing I can attend to today. I try to see my own ignorant rages, fears, and hatreds before I hurl these shooters out of my heart.

I wrote the following poem over twenty years ago. I replaced ‘newspaper’ with ‘computer screen.’

The News

This computer screen separates us.

You never placed the gun in my hand

But I have killed a thousand nameless faces.

I never saw you on the battlefield

but I am at war.

Silently, I grind the faces of my enemies

beneath my boot heels every day.

I have drunk the victim’s bitter gall with you.

One day we shall be justified

in a terrible revenge.

This morning I sit at my warm kitchen table.

reading about you.

If news itself connected us to one another

perhaps

we could begin to hold forgiveness in our hearts

instead of these guns in our hands.

This next poem speaks to how I treat ideas from someone I love when I don’t agree with them.

NRA Membership 2/7/00

Unbridled enthusiasm runs amok in the fields.

Your thoughts are clay pigeons

And I want to shoot them down

Before they sprout wings and fly away.

Pessimism takes so much energy, you said.

But I believe I spend less on disappointment, I replied.

I’d rather resign my membership in the NRA

And stand there

With my hands in my pockets

Open

Not invested in the outcome.

Diary 5/15/18

Departure into the Unknown

5/11

Woke up with a clench of fear in the gut that dissipated as soon as I opened my eyes enough to be present. No husband, no identity, no ideas. It was an animal moment of disorientation. A momentary loss of ground. A total loss of any ground and then it passed; I am here for right now and here is where I will be until I am packed and driven away. I am safe. I am sad. I am un-tethering. I am happy to have a benign future to anticipate. I am speechless. I am a fount of the unknown.

5/15/18

My friend Cathie, who is soon also moving to the mid-west, asked me how I am. I said “confused, fearful, certain, doubtful, curious, sad, and excited.” That is taken with a strong pinch of love. That pinch sustains me for my last week and a half of living in upstate New York. Boxes stand everywhere, along with bags, and large rubber bins; some are labeled and sealed, and some still an open question. I am leaving here no matter how complete or unfinished I feel. The material objects packed into our car will be obvious, few, and necessary. The rest of my old home life will be stored for whatever purpose my daughter Emilia and son-in-law Zoran might want for their new home.

I have often used the metaphor of aerialists to point out that there is a moment when you must let go of one trapeze in order to trust your forward momentum to grab on to the next one swinging your way. You feel a weightless gap in the middle of every change. Thrilling, terrifying, and tremendously fulfilling when you don’t end up bouncing down into the net or further into the sawdust and regret below. If you do fall, you have to climb back up the ladder and strengthen your skills to try swinging out harder to reach the next bar or fellow aerialist coming along.

Departure includes making order out of chaos, retaining just enough of the old skeleton to resurrect a new life. I have had the luxury of time to strip down to a usable skeleton. I require little padding and have no idea of how to imagine what the new body will look like. It is an open experience for me and I think, in the long run, it is easier this way- to discover a context for daily living without so many preconceptions to prejudice me towards my future. I am moving into the unknown environment of Kendal, a senior living facility in Oberlin, OH. I am aiming for them to catch me at the other end of my swing to the west.

Fount of the Unknown Waters

5/15/18

Spewing out my known losses

makes room

for unknown aquifers

artesian wells spring forth

with every step

saints and god/desses do that

leave footprints of faith

well marked oases on desert sands

Thirsty

I try to follow

while clutching the world I knew

puddles shrink into sand

until there is nothing to grasp

Unlooked for

unknown waters arise

gushing forth

fountains everywhere nowhere

sprayed exuberantly from earth to air

dissipating mists of time and memory

unpredictable eruptions of pure faith

drench the weary traveler through and through

Broken Vessels: Four Gifts of Many

My cervical (neck) vertebrae are slowly being crushed by increasing stenosis. As result, I am experiencing bilateral nerve impingement in both hands.With a clumsy finger, which happens more often than not, I lost everything I wrote today, as well as my entry to online banking since I managed to mess it up by trying four times. I find keyboard computing more and more frustrating. I know I can use my voice to dictate what I write if my hands continue to disobey me, but that would be a big learning curve which I would rather not attempt right now.

Though I erased the words of my early morning thoughts, I do remember that I was addressing how I am dealing with so many losses at all at once. As I have written before, gratitude and grief are wound round a staff like snakes on a Caduceus. I never knew this before my husband died and I wouldn’t have believed you if tried to convince me 18 months ago. From a spiritual point of view, I could have mentally comprehended this theory. To discover the insignia’s truth by living through the worst pain I have ever endured, was the only way to integrate the radical nature of healing from such a loss.

Losing Richard meant losing my entire way of life, and all of the identities I acquired over our almost 50 years together. I flowered into a sixty six year old woman from the bud of a teenage girl within the sweet bond of our long intimate relationship. That vessel is broken never to be mended. We lived very full lives together as dancers, musicians, actors, spiritual seekers, parents, psychotherapists, and homesteaders.

My body long ago began withdrawing into the reality of secondary progressive MS. Many of those sub-indentities (mother, gardener, chef, cheese maker, teacher, active interfaith minister, etc.) were already fading. This contributed to the shock of Richard being the one to die first from an aggressive form of lymphoma. He was the vigorous one who held his counseling practice in one hand and his sheep and horses in the other. I was the one who was disappearing.

Gift number one (and this from someone who desperately cringed at the phrase “the gift of cancer” for both patient and caregiver) was that I was summoned out into the world again. In spite of my bodily pain and exhaustion, I had to be the one to supervise moving everything out of the house to sell it. The point person through Richard’s increasingly miserable chemo-therapies also had to be me. Though we hired wonderful help along the way, and our many friends and family members pitched in to navigate the dark waters, (we would have drowned without them) I was his primary anchor as he faced his death. My bottled genie was released and though I am even more compromised than before, I wouldn’t be able to crawl back inside even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.

Gift number two is knowing that the amount of emotional pain I experience is directly proportional to the amount of love we shared.

Gift number three is that once I allow myself to let my heart/guts rip open in howlingkeeningshrilling grief, I am cleansed and left open in a vast emptiness of unbounded silence. Paradoxically, I become a whole vessel embodying more peace and contentment than I have ever felt in my life before. This space requires no effort or striving. It just is, and seems to underlie Everything. If it is great loss that brings me there, I now welcome it.

Gift number four is witnessing the loving kindness from near and far that has poured my way. Family friends, and strangers showed up at my door for days and weeks and months with all manner of support from the practical to the ethereal in those last holy days of his dying. I see for myself that Love endures despite the worldly backdrop of our colossal human ignorance.

Without grief at this depth, there would be no equally profound gratitude for living without my beloved. I know without a doubt that everything I love, I will lose. This includes my own life which I am passionately relearning to love. As I surrender to my broken vessel, gifts appear.