sunset

At a recent neighborhood picnic, several neighbors expressed ecstasy about the sunsets that could be seen from our homes.


Sunsets?


I notice, sometimes.  As I occasionally acknowledge trees, birds, but never sunrises, not if I can help it.  Which makes me wonder where my mind is most of the time, and where I want it to be, and when will sunsets matter again.


Rich and I used to take our sleeping bags outside and watch meteors.  And our after-dinner tea, most warm days, to watch sunsets.  And he, alone, to see the sunrise, and give me a report later in the day on what I missed.


Now I'm missing just about everything.  Because I don't yet know what I should be seeing in this world, alone.  And because I'm pissed at the sun and the moon that they don't know what's missing in this world, and damn them for pretending everything is normal.


Candace

carved in stone

Today I contacted the stone carver to mark Rich's grave.  It is a rectangular-ish flat stone, one I pulled out from the muddy hole, six weeks shy of a year ago.  Not much room on it beyond the basic information -- his name, his days among us.  If room permitted, I asked "Beloved" to be carved, too.


Sweet Rich is gone.  I can say this a thousand times, and still my heart is strangled. Pain eases, then drops to another level in a bottomless hole.  Setting the stone in place will be my last "official" act of grieving. Everything else is done.  But not finished.


Candace

rushing

A few months ago, I noticed I was rushing.  Rushing, that is, with no reason.  Through brushing teeth, showering, walking from one room to another -- galloping through my days for no purpose.  A remnant of days past, I realized.  Because for years wherever I was, it wasn't the only place I needed to be.  Always I pressured myself that Rich needed me to be there, do that; sometimes this was true, but mostly I was running against death.  If I didn't keep moving, Rich would be taken.


Slowing down still takes mindful effort.  Part of me remains manic, forgetting that he's gone.  Someday I will catch up.  Meanwhile, I try to live deeply into this beautiful life that will vanish, too quickly.


Candace

how to grieve

These letters have been lacking in matters practical.  For one thing, plenty of information on widowhood -- psychological, sociological, spiritual -- is available in books and on websites.  I've read a small library's worth, but to quote Thomas Merton: "How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books."  Grief obscures reason and feeling; clarity during these days is more often than not recognized by chance.

I offer a few ways of being that have been healing for me, with emphasis on what I have not found in books. 

1. Solitude:  Severed from life shared with another forces one to undertake a retreat that would challenge -- and perhaps baffle -- the most advanced Zen master (no life! no death! no desire!)  Everything in these days is about life lost and death won and desire unfulfilled.  Going out of my mind is not an option.  It is not playing at a religious game.  Solitude gives the razors freedom to cut as deep as necessary.  Solitude allows the bleeding to happen.
2. Relationships: Not an opposite of Solitude, but a compliment.  Friends have saved my life.  By feeding, listening, and occasional use of cattle prod.
3. Dreams: The stuff of the sleeping night, yes, and also the awake days.  In the first, horror and release; in the second, a possible future.  Dreams won't bring back the "real" Rich and cannot predict a "real" life, but in both is a sweet taste of what was and what might be.

Candace

digested

Someday I hope to write these words:  Grief eaten.  Digested.  This meal is over.

Never will that happen, unless I have a lobotomy.  Nor do I want it to.

But in the past week, I have come closer to gut health as a series of events and people moved into my life, equipped with forks and knives to carve up the indigestible and serve up only the good parts. 

One will be mentioned here because the event made no sense.

I was relaxing in the Tranquility Room at my local day spa (an indulgence this year) when a woman walked in.  She was not the usual spa type, who tend towards the healthy and fit.  She emerged from behind the massage rooms' curtain on swollen, wobbly legs, and her well-creased face was testimony to many years.

We caught eyes.  

"I just had a massage," she said.

That was all she said.  But her glow said more, as if she were revealing a secret, as if no one ever heard of a massage before.  I moistened.  I melted.  

She slowly walked to two other women lounging in the room, who I guessed were her daughters, and kissed them.  When the massage therapist brought her a mug of lemon water, she glowed even brighter in amazement, staring at the miracle of the cup, the water, the fruit.

With all of her self -- and more -- she gave me a massage, too, easing out the tightness that didn't expect to be touched.

And revealing possibilities of a life yet to come.

Candace