Judi B's Blog

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.

My aid, Claire, sent me this poem today. Others have also brought it to my attention lately.

“I wanted to share this with you: Absolutely Clear by Shams al-Din Hafiz”

http://allpoetry.com/8522605

First blog

Since I concluded my journal on the Caring Bridge website, I find that I am still writing every day. Tracking Richard’s last days and my subsequent journey into widowhood continues to be a sorrowfully glorious opportunity for revelation. More poems, more heart expansion as I let go of my former life, more lessons of grief and gratitude emerge as the waters ebb and flow around me. I wrote this today:

Diary 5/1/18

I am once more amazed at how time has shifted in my calculations. Kronos and Kairos time keep dancing in confusing configurations. (Kronos is the original Greek god of chronological linear time as noted by clocks and calendars, while Kairos, his grandson, is all about seizing the moment.) I am sure there will always remain a ‘before Richard died and after Richard died ‘ set point for many varied reasons as I continue to greet his death. Including my evolving emotional reactions, I also have simultaneously experienced so many changes of identity. I am now a widow without my own home. I am no longer going to be Woodstocker as I have been since my early childhood. I will be moving into a (wonderful) senior care facility in Ohio.

All of this was literally unimaginable to me two years ago. I must forgive myself the difficulty I have in grasping that it is more than two weeks since Richard’s memorial which was exactly two months from the day he died. Which was 16 months before he was diagnosed and the whole ordeal of treating his primary Central Nervous System Lymphoma began.

My past is unraveling gracefully. I may be the luckiest widow in the world. I will be taken care of financially even as my health deteriorates. My daughters are helpful loving, strong women who support me at every step. I have wonderful friends who love me and show it in practical hands-on ways. They hear my tears and fears and know I must move away. Even though we face the reality that cyberspace is a very poor cousin compared to sharing a cup of tea in person, it is right for me to leave here.

All of this movement is occurring around the huge boulder of loss that has rolled into my stream bed. The boulder is immovable. Life never stands still. I find myself thirsty for life, in awe of the hard surface of mortality. I finally am more cognizant that I can’t have my thirst quenched without also imbibing death. “Rock loves stillness, Water loves movement, Love loves loving. Perfect. Breathless. Ineffable.” I no longer remember why I wrote those words over twelve years ago. Three years later I asked Richard to record them for an album I created for my senior thesis in Interfaith Ministry. We played his voice reciting those words at the memorial. They speak on an even deeper level of truth to me now.

It is no metaphor that Richard’s ashes flow in the stream beside this rental house.They are carried by spring rains to the sea, washing exuberantly around all boulders in their path. A pinch of his ashes also lie beneath Cliff and Sara’s backyard redwood tree in California. And with his bother’s chosen places in GA and CO. Another pinch will come with me and Emilia to Ohio and a few more will fly with Emilia to India when her work calls her back. I know he is everywhere and nowhere. And I know that he is with the stillness of Presence.