Judi B's Blog

Thanksgiving is early this year. Which means that commercial Christmas is, too. Besieged earlier by endless election ads, we apparently now require ads to boost our need to buy and give more stuff.

Richard’s folks lived in Florida and when they both passed, family members requested various favorite pieces of artwork and furniture which were sent all over the country. The larger items Richard and I chose arrived via a moving company owned by Russians. When they trundled up our steep driveway, I gladly received them, relieved they found their way up our winding mountain road in New York state. The team of efficient young men spoke no English but the boss/driver did, a little. I directed them up and down the stairs by vigorously pointing, “Here! Careful with that! No, outside on the deck!” and other helpful gestured advice. When it was all done, the driver came up to me with the receipt. I wrote him a check and he said very seriously with a heavy accent, “ Enchoy your stooff.”

It was delivered in such a sober tone that afterwards it struck me hard. I didn’t ever consider us as ‘wealthy’ but compared to many we were. He didn’t actually say,” Oh you rich Americans with all your crap, you hardly have room for what you already own.” Maybe it wasn’t even implied. He might have simply used that simple English phrase with all of his clients. The truth is that there were many things we inherited that we didn’t need, but rather accumulated out of nostalgia. Some of those things I still have, some of those things my daughters have, and most has been auctioned off for an unknown somebody else to ‘enchoy’.

‘Downsizing’ is a familiar phrase at Kendal. Everybody here left behind their former lives, professions, and many possessions. We brought only what could fit into a cottage, or an apartment, or in my case, a single room. It is a familiar phrase to all of my aging friends as they are contemplating the approach of the inevitable move from their current homes. We all have more than enough stuff to see us through our elder years. Sometimes I still think, “Whatever happened to the St. Francis tile Richard bought in Italy? I thought I kept that.” Perhaps it is still in an unopened box in Emilia and Zoran’s attic. Or perhaps, in the chaos of leaving my life in Bearsville behind, it is on someone else’s shelf.

If it doesn’t appear, I will say goodbye to it again in my mind. I still have my grandmother’s small wooden statue of him here on my windowsill. I love to watch the birds on the bush outside my window over his shoulder with the little birds carved there. I know this was bought by my grandmother in Assisi. It is enough of a reminder for me to love who this saint is storied to have been. I don’t actually need the tile. Richard’s life with me is everywhere in tangible form; from the leather chairs he had in his Manhattan office, to the small earring tree he and Emilia at age four built for my birthday. And in a moment of grief inspired clutching, I kept the last pair of pajamas that he bought before his final trip to the hospital. He wore them maybe once. They are a masculine gray, have a button fly, and are a little too large. At the time it was clear I needed them as the packing ensued. And I do wear them. (You don’t have to picture that.)

More importantly, he is a presence whispering in my deep inner ears. I don’t worry any more if it is “him”, that human Richard I loved so well. I just let the whispers touch me, help me, love me whenever his voice appears. This is from an open letter to a fan that Nick Cave wrote about the death of his son. He speaks to this listening so beautifully.

“I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.”*

*I thank my cousin, Bob Barnett, for sending me this letter. He is another reconnected cousin from my father’s side of the family who sends me inspirational writings just when I need them.

I spoke to a couple of friends about my new relationship to experiencing memory loss. MS has already created my Swiss cheese brain, but this additional dreamy haze of the past has happened since Richard died. I asked my ninety-eight year old friend if she is also sees her past through a scrim as it continues to exist farther away in time. “Yes, but not when it comes to memories of my children. I also have photo albums to remind me.” I don’t look at photos yet. I am not sure I can bear it right now. For me, the metaphor of the old rug I trod so urgently every moment of my whirlwind focus on creating my identities as girlfriend, wife, mother, therapist, etc. is being rolled up behind me with every step forward I take. It is disorienting but happens with everyone as we age.

For me it was abruptly intensified due to losing Richard. He had long and deep memory skills. Old clients would be amazed if they met him on the street twenty years later. He’d ask, “How did your Aunt Sophie do? I remember she was your close adult ally as a child and how hard it was for you when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” Clients would be astonished and clearly touched. He was also the ardent memory keeper of our relationship. His memories were embedded in all of the material possessions he acquired with each new enthusiasm he embraced; that tool, that hat, that horse bridle, was acquired on that day in that place and the sun was shining and it was on sale. He loved living here on earth in a palpable, sensate, way. He dove into everything that caught his attention with passion and intelligence.

I was never so fond of the earth plane and material items-  I was always hovering a little above it all trying to escape the suffering of my unstable childhood. I spent hours alone in the woods around our house being a fairy. I couldn’t escape on those tiny wings, of course. As I have learned to address each old wound through years of work in self- awareness, they have less hold on me and the need to escape seems less urgent. Tuesday’s miasma of suffering was a reversion to old habits inspired by new pain. But even as I fanned the misery flames, I knew I would have to relent and turn towards the pain of my body and soul. I knew it was a temporary delusion; that I was fighting against my current losses to no avail. As I am often heard saying these days, “You can’t fight reality. It always wins.” Like my friend Einer used to say, “Gravity. It’s the law.” True, that.

Accepting submission to reality as the last gasp of “NO!” passes my lips, is Grace. For me it is usually followed by tears of anger and/or sorrow. I release the physicality of denial, of holding back against the waves of emotion that emerge. Then I feel less full of Judi, and that emptiness allows a drop into the nourishment of Silence; as awareness of Being. There is a magnetic pull towards the depths, and my longing is met by an upwelling of peace that meets in the middle. I have this image similar to Michelangelo’s God and Adam, but reaching not to touch fingers, but to merge beings. That painting would show Awareness and the manifest earth plane as not two, but as one and the same. Being and being. In my mind’s eye the artist’s next painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, would be only a radiant fusion of light, as Adam grows up to know that he and his God are One.

Another friend reflected to me that I now seem less concerned with creating a new ego identity here at Kendal. I have been fueled by the adolescent drive to figure out who Judi is as I blundered about joining this writing group, petitioning to start meditation classes, establishing myself as a contributing performer to the community, and so on. It was a necessary step to find out who this individual woman was without Richard entwined in my every thought. That structure is established and more and more I can just show up so that life is living through me. The identity is mine and I like her. But she is already a bit dreamlike as I am invited to live more moment by moment. At any time I can always choose to pick up my troubles if I wish to. I am not less, but more, committed to being here in this world with no wings.

Yesterday I was counting all my losses, not my blessings. I nourished them tenderly all day long. I was miserable. The loss of Richard arose as unbearable loneliness. I seem to be in the middle of an MS exacerbation resulting in further loss of communication with my left leg. I am dragging it about lately. Despite an ongoing scheduling conflict that I could not resolve, I went to the first rehearsal for the Winter Solstice choir (assembled for the next big community wide celebration at Kendal) just to see what music they were learning. It was an impressive, diverse and complex selection. I am only a modest sight singing reader and many of those singers were, and still are, pros. They were terrific, the conductor was an enthusiastic force of musical nature (former professor of voice at Oberlin), and I realized I did not have the stamina required to challenge my brain and body and voice at that level anymore. Another loss that was sadly acknowledged on top of the rest of my losses.

What to do? My friend reminded me earlier that morning, that the first Noble Truth as stated by Buddha, is that mundane life is suffering, or Dukkha. Pain is pain, but suffering is caused by the very human tendency to reject it vehemently. I once wrote, “It is not easy to forgo suffering in the face of pain from … a chronic condition. Nor should you skip over it. It is an essential step in the journey to accepting pain for what it is (to embrace pain and work with it, not against it). We project endless suffering into the…future based on the fearful experiences of the past. Suffering cuts us off from the respite of … possibilities available in the moment. Learning to release suffering into original pain, brings us into reality, plain and simple. Life is no better or worse than what it is right now.”

Nice words, Judi, and the source of that wisdom was unavailable as long as I huddled inside my self-imposed dark cell. I came back to my room before dinner exhausted just from being an observer of the rehearsal where I had stumbled along, tracking the difficult (for me) musical scores. I found a small package waiting outside my door. A cousin of mine (John Moncure Wetterau), who I have not been in touch with for years, sent me a book of his poetry, Greeting Buddha. He had said he would send it to me after we had emailed each other around a larger family matter. He was in Greece at the time of our original communication, shortly to be on his way back to the States. I was as moved by the fact that he followed through with his offer as I was by his poetry. People often don’t take the time to put something in the mail when they say they will.

Greeting Buddha within me took the rest of the evening and well into the time before sleep. I was very entangled in my woes. I used every meditation tool l could think of. Finally I took Richard’s set of mala beads from the back of my bedstead, going around one hundred and eight times. I went first in one direction and then the other, over and over, making short prayers that were authentic to each round. After I could focus on genuinely praying for others, there was a crack of light as the cell door slowly swung open. I put the beads under my pillow and mercifully sleep arrived.

I wrote this chant some years ago and it was one of the tools I used to get me through until the new day.

In the dark before the dawn,

When I’m wandering all alone,

May I search for, may I find

A light to guide me home.

Hold to that light

Through the long night

Until my eyes

Bless the sunrise.

I just finished work-shopping the sonnet I wrote for our poetry class. We followed the Shakespearean format,  of 10 syllables per line, the correct ABAB rhyme scheme in three quatrains and a finishing couplet.  It was daunting, impossible, until all a sudden it wasn’t and I “got ” it. Nobody in my class suggested any changes so here it is. It belongs to Halloween, the thinning of the veils between the worlds.

Death’s Garden; A Sonnet

by Judi Bachrach 10/22/18

Sitting alone at the top of my head,

The mind grasps at everything to mean something.

Tell me how to live now that he is dead!

My heart cries, keens, remembers how to sing.

The soil of pain breeds rich fertility.

The mind cannot comprehend the reason,

Wonders at its own inability,

To reap Love’s harvest from this dark season.

Death’s bounty brings me spaciousness at last,

Lets my mind rest inside the mystery.

The heart frees my thoughts from future and past.

A seed planted now creates history.

Life is the digging, love is the growing,

My soul flourishes in peace, Not Knowing.

Diary 10/12/18

Bulls to Seashells

The bull market “is not ending, but it is ‘resetting’, according to my financial manager’s report from his banking institution. The message being, “Don’t Panic” as I interpreted his words from the email I received the day before yesterday. It had to happen eventually, as everybody knew. Constant expansion is not possible in our world. Everything moves in waves- everything is in flux, including financial systems, governments, weather patterns, beliefs, life cycles of flora and fauna, birthing and dying. Sound moves in waves as does electricity, as do the intimate undulations of blood flow and breath. Every molecule is either a particle or a wave depending on how it is observed. Nothing remains static. If there is life, there is movement, and movement means change; beginnings and endings.

Most of us spend our lives endeavoring to stave off the effects of unwelcome transitions. In times of chaos, our desperation increases in order to hold on, to grasp at anything that we can use to stop the forward momentum of the next wave. It can be a tsunami, or it can be the slow rise of temperature that remains invisible. Until worldwide droughts and increased storm violence and frequency reveals our unwillingness to deal with the consequences of our actions, we freeze; we hold on. Slow or urgent, the dynamics of life are always at some point on the arc of swinging pendulums; back and forth, in and out, up and down. Though we wish to be in control of these motions, we never can be. We can only attempt to learn better surfing skills, learning to read the gathering volume of wind and water as best we can each time we venture out on our boards.

Given such unpredictability, the prerequisite to living a full life is both riding the waves and diving deep below them to where the ocean floor is essentially unaffected by the turbulence above. To me, this is the slow discovery of Silence as my ground of being. Many simply call it Awareness, or our True Nature. To source my life from these peaceful depths does not mean withdrawal from the messiness of being human. Rather it means embracing the whole ocean from shifting waves to stillness. Swimming in the ocean often means being roughly tumbled about, scraping onto the shore with your swimsuit full of sand. It means floating in bliss as the sun warms you from above and the water cools you from below. It means donning the right gear with the right preparation to enter the silence and rich grandeur of what lies beneath the surface. The bigger the wave above, the deeper your need to dive in order to emerge with the wisdom of spaciousness and fulfillment, of no grasping, and no resistance to wherever the waves deliver you.

I have not been able to stand upright at the oceans’ edge for quite a few years now. My precarious balance cannot handle the pull of the tides. I can’t even navigate over an expanse of sand by walking on my own two feet. Yet I love the beach, the wide horizon, and the smell of salty marine plants and creatures at all stages of their lives. My life is now so full, so engaged with meaningful relationships and activities, that I remember the beach with pleasure and not loss. It is not in my current experience but I have imbibed past experiences within me to draw upon when needed. I can let my past life be as it was, my present as it is, and more and more the future arises as it will. I have a rollator and a scooter (no board) to help me surf, and the mysteries of the deep keep calling me down, spiraling inwards like a seashell towards Home.

DISSOLUTION

by Judi Bachrach 20014

In my dream, the last wave delivered me to a shore

my eyes not yet open.

I groped to fill my usual basket

Confused

by tangled seaweed

Weighed down

by barnacled stones

Worried

over half a sand dollar

Desperate

over everyone’s garbage.

Fully re-collected

I arose with the sun

and trudged along the shore

towards the breakwater.

Midday I sit to rest unconcerned

as I watch my basket

dragged away by the gathering tide.

Empty

I close my lids against the sun.

Bright lights dance inside.

I taste

the tangy salt air

feel

the gritty warm breeze on my cheeks

hear

the mingle of birds and waves and buoys

smell

the death of countless briny creatures

Observe

my endless dissolution in the sea.

Diary 9/25/18

It is coming to the end of September, the start of fall weather, which to me, is always good news. Hot humid climates are that much harder for most people with MS. Everybody feels draggy in such conditions because wet heat slows down the transmission of electrical messages from neurons in the brain to muscle receptors. (Think relaxing in a hot bath.) My neurology already has slowed communications due to the road blocks or scars (sclerosis) of the disease, so sticky summer weather can be additionally crippling for me.

The Kendal Kabaret was a great success. My surprise was that after an absence of performing for almost 30 years, I saw how my wounded neurology was very challenged by the the nervous energy of being on stage again. The inevitable gearing up with the frisson of fear that accompanies performing was almost more than my fragile nervous system could handle. It didn’t automatically convert into the charge of projecting my voice as it used to do in the past. I was very fortunate to have a calm professional stand up bass player to accompany me. He kept me from being too pitchy (going sharp or flat) and kept my tempo nice and steady. He was like a grounding rod, and now he is a new friend among the residents.

In addition, my family was here all together for the first time since my husband’s death. We adjusted to the loss of the brother/father/husband/father-in-law at the same time. It was like watching a slow shifting of gears as they slowly turned, quietly locking into place. It felt natural and easy and fun to be with one another. That they got to see me in the Kabaret was icing on the delicious birthday cake (not a confection) of their presence.

My daughter from NY stayed with me at Kendal for two full days, meeting my new friends, swimming in the wonderful pool here, hanging with a friend who happens to own three gorgeous Borzoi dogs- and taking photos of them which she hopes to use on the back cover of her soon-to-be published novella. She watched the dress rehearsal for the Kabaret and enjoyed the finished program that much more after seeing what went into putting it altogether. It was delicious to simply be in my room with her in our down time, playing word games, reading in silence, and talking, talking, talking, about the past and her dreams for the future. My heart feels full up until I see her when she comes back by train for Thanksgiving. My older daughter and my son-in-law graciously hosted us all in their new home.

Today I am grateful that my old skills are being put into use in a new environment. I think of my little girl self, dancing to my mother’s songs. I imbibed music in my household though I never studied music properly. I remember my mother sitting me down at the piano a few times and saying, “Judi, this is a triad, and that makes a chord…” and me running away from her. My brother was a serious musician who wrote orchestral music, played both piano and oboe, and later went to to Yale graduate school for music. He had a Fulbright scholarship to study choral conducting in Munich. I felt it was too much pressure for me to compete with them and turned to dance instead. My other brother was also a musician and played both drums and guitar throughout his life. I took to writing songs when I was a teenager and played guitar just well enough to provide a musical structure for my melodies. But I played ‘by ear’ alone, still refusing to learn the basics.

To be known for singing now is amusing to me. I don’t have a great voice but I do know how to perform and since I don’t score my own music, if I don’t sing my songs, nobody else will. I am touched that my new community loved my efforts and enthusiastically joined in the chorus I taught them. Somehow, my music is being drawn forth after a long dormancy and I am very grateful to have something to share with my new larger family as well as my own family, of Bachrach+Stojakovic.

Diary 9/9/18

Richard is present in me in new ways. It keeps shifting, this relationship with his ghost and then simply my internalization of his human impact on my life. It is such an interesting path to walk, this grieving, this waking up, this longing, this fulfillment, this gift of mortality and loss. I feel like I only now begin to understand what it is to be human. I am immersed in a sea of loving mortality at Kendal.

A woman died this week who I barely knew. Her husband was a famous set designer and she was a Medieval art historian. He and I had lunch once when she was in our care center before she died. Then she moved back into their apartment together for a month or so, with hired help, even though she was pretty deep in dementia. Two weeks ago, I was saying good bye to him one night when I had been invited to have dinner with others in the large dining hall.  I was standing behind her chair while talking to him and put my hand on her shoulder spontaneously as I was leaving. She did not know who he was talking to nor could she see my face, but she reached her hand across her shoulder and took hold of my hand. She squeezed it gently with such tenderness I almost wept right then. I said.”good bye, Helen”, and she squeezed it softly again before I walked away. Love simply Is, whether we are in the waiting room of death or not.

My dear friend and colleague, David, died yesterday in the early morning. I wrote this poem for him a month ago and feel free to post it now. For those of you who have sung Dayenu at Passover, you know the melody. Our family celebrated this holiday together with David’s. You traditionally leave the door open for the prophet Elijah to enter and you pour a glass of blessed wine for him to drink. Richard and David would take turns surreptitiously sipping Elijah’s wine and point out at the end of the meal that Elijah had been here because, “Look- the glass is empty!” As the girls got older they knew what was afoot and always tried to catch their fathers doing this. When they were thirteen, they secretly folded a piece of scotch tape to the bottom of the glass and triumphantly caught their fathers when their resulting inability to take a sip lifted up the whole table cloth along with the glass. After the children found the hidden afikomen (Matzoh) we all sang Dayenu for one another, choosing one good trait for each person. Dayenu means ‘that would be enough’.

Dayenu for David

Judi Bachrach 7/28/18

Richard, one day

when it is his time

David will join you

I know you will be there

to let him know

astonished as you were

how loved he is

how he is Love Itself

how many individual lights

gather him into their One embrace

and hold him forever

always have

always will

the long dream of forgetting

lost in Always

our dear human selves

at rest in Awareness

the brief separation of

God knowing God

Elijah comes through the door

raises his own glass on high

(he thanks you for the years you and Richard did it for him)

drinks down with a laugh

and softly sings:

If David knew how much he’s loved

If David knew how much he’s loved

If David knew how much he’s loved

That would be enough

Day, Day-enu,

Day, Day-enu,

Day, Day-enu,

Dayenu, Dayenu!