Loss

I am thinking a lot about loss these days ... a good friend in New Mexico failing in her battle with cancer, another friend suffering brain damage as a result of chemo, the intimacy I hunger for with another like-minded being, a lion hunted down in Zimbabwe and decapitated, the massacre of the magnificent elephants in obscene numbers, the loss of flexibility and reliability in my body, even the loss of my mother, and all the old stories of my past that I can't tap into now because they are like dust.

How do I hold loss?  How do I ride out the journey of continuing to lose what I love? This is a hard one because it demands that I stay steady and willing inside the lightening speed momentum of this life, not looking behind me or in front of me.  I've been reminded time and time again that there really is no past and no future, and much of the time I agree, but I am still likely to float into these realms out of habit.  So, what do we (I) do?  I guess we (I) try to understand what it feels like to lose.

I haven't lost a good friend recently so it's hard to know how to talk about it.   I have been lucky in this, as most of my contemporaries are still kicking.  We all know that losing one another is around the corner, but we don't often talk about it... and we go on our way trying like hell to live in present time.  So, I'm faced with the "idea" of losing, I guess, that projection of an experience that will undoubtedly come, one that will feel sad, empty, achy and bleak.  And once I cross that landscape of grief, I'll be left with nostalgia, looking back at the good old times when none of us ever gave a thought to mortality.  I remember my grandmother in her late eighties talking about losing all her friends, about feeling terribly alone in the world and less hopeful about what lay ahead.  In some way she was telling me she was ready to move on.  Our friends provide a sacred community of people whom we have chosen and with whom we have rich and interesting things to share.  Now that I'm seventy, I understand as I never did before what she was saying about the void left in life with the departure of old friends.

When I gave up my last "romantic" relationship that had soured quickly and yet drove me to endure, I knew that I would probably live out my days without a partner.   When I set out on my own,  I didn't give it a thought, but now I do.  Now I watch couples in restaurants and on the street and I feel a tugging in my heart.  I want what they have.  Closeness, laughter, understanding, a life together.  The more I look back on my story the more I realize I am ill equipped for intimacy, that what my mother modeled and what I embraced in my twenties and thirties and beyond, had led me to a very distinct place of renunciation.  I was sure I wasn't good at intimacy and speaking about love, and therefore I needed to content myself with the solitary journey of an elder woman.  There is loss here, yes, and sometimes there's acceptance, as well as deep sadness.  But there is also the pleasure of old age wisdom!

The wiping out of wildlife in Africa has been breaking my heart lately.  Like a sponge, I tend to absorb all the news, and I speak to others about it when it makes sense, and yet it remains one of the deeply troubling pieces of being alive in this world at this time.  Animals have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and I think I have always felt as though I was related to them, part of their family, whether they were cats, dogs, birds, or even the epic elephant roaming East Africa.  So when I read about the murder of elephants and lions, I feel as though someone in my family has been ripped away.  There's heaviness in my chest, a weepy feeling inside.  And a whirling sense of outrage at the injustice of it all.  What then?  I must hold this, not look away.  I need to speak the truth, and try to believe that humankind has the capacity to become more humane.  That is all..

I am seventy years old and my body is starting to become unreliable.  I've been told it is strong and vital, and that deep down I am healthy.  This makes me feel lightheaded for just a while, and then I return to the stinging pain in my ankle as I walk, the clicking and wobbling of my knee, and the occasional feeling that I am standing on a very unsteady surface, and it is then that I understand what I am carrying.  The body is speaking its truth, and what is good about all this is that I am finally able to listen to what it is saying.  If I'm lucky this paying attention brings good will and compassion, as long as I'm able to stay in the present moment.  The past houses the narratives that are blurry and distorted, and the future holds only random dreams and dark fear.  So instead of mourning loss, I can attempt to offer love to my aging self.

The loss of my mother still lies heavily on me.  You'd think I would have outgrown or moved on or something, especially since she had always been such a shadowy presence in my life.  How do you mourn the loss of something that was never really there?  There is an idea I hold about her as a mother, and then there is the mysterious relationship that actually unfolded starting in February of 1945.  In fact, there's a lot I don't know.   There was always hunger and yearning and a sense of being in the shadows, but there had to have been other times of sweetness, or so I tell myself.  No way to know now.  I do know that I still feel this deep dark relationship to her, and I suspect I'll be stuck with that for the rest of my life... In narrating my own story I have unearthed this intimate connection between the two of us, this complicity in secrecy and self destruction, and in the telling of it I have felt her come alive in a way.  But everything that is alive does wither and die, and so there is that path to experience a loss of love, imperfect as it was.   I surround myself with her bold paintings, some pretty furniture and decorative pieces, and find myself more times than I can count speaking in her tongue, using her vernacular.  "Bob's your uncle!" she used to declare, and I love saying this too.  I'm not quite sure why...  Am I calling her back, or just making way for her to show up every once in a while in present time?   I don't know.   This is a heavy loss still, and I am still trying to figure out how to live with it.

Memory has given me problems for some time now.  I can't see the texture and substance of much of my young life:  living in North Beach when I was in 6th grade, going to the mountains for my 10th birthday, what I did with my friends at Miss Barrie's in Florence, or those beautiful sunny afternoons I went horseback riding in the Sonoma countryside with my great friend Sue when we were self-conscious teenagers; there are so many other little scenes that don't come in clearly, and all I see is the sweep of an experience, much like the floating smoke from my mother's cigarette ... When I decided to write a memoir, I wanted to be able to flesh out some of these small chapters of my childhood and tell vivid, detail-filled stories, complete with lots of interesting dialogue.  As I cast my mind back, I rarely saw the particulars, nor did I hear the conversations.  I became frustrated, I worried about memory loss, and then finally decided to fabricate here and there in order to offer a story, and this usually worked.  Aside from the challenges the book offered me, there is a much larger conundrum, that of ultimately losing the bulk of memory and becoming unhinged and confused.  Yes, I'm thinking of that elephant in the room called dementia.   A total loss of personhood.  The ultimate nightmare, even worse in my imagination than losing my eyesight, which I used to believe was the worst possible deprivation I'd have to face.  I used to play different word games in order to sharpen my brain power, and I persevered with piano study because I've learned somewhere that playing a musical instrument may be an antidote to Alzheimers.  No, in truth I play the piano because I love the sound of Bach on the keyboard of my grandmother's piano, and feel proud to offer it up ...  But now I do take solace in the notion that the discipline of piano practice might be therapeutic for my overworked mind.  I think I know how to live with this loss:  just stay in my life fully, attending to what comes and holding all the difficulties with love.  No other way...

What is going to happen to me will happen no matter what decisions I make, and today has its share of wonder and beauty that must be seen and felt.  Because we are very lucky to be alive in this strange and complicated time, adding our own portion of goodness.

Life as a Fugue ... Musings from the Carmel Bach Festival

I gave myself a break for a week and didn't prop myself up in the chair and order myself to work on this blog...  Thought more time passing would help me see some ideas things more clearly, like whether it matters or not  if a lot of people read this, and whether I could resist beating myself up for not performing my weekly task.  Did pretty well with the not beating myself up, and as far as the other goes, I'm not sure how I feel.

This has been a complicated time for me and a number of people I know and love, and because I am in some ways an emotional sponge, I end up carrying around other people's weighty stories, which often gets me confused.  Let's see what was going on before things got complicated ...  I was motoring through a second draft of my memoir so I could send it to another wise writer to read and give me feedback.  Crunching through those 220 pages was tough at times but I plugged away and completed it.  Done for now with version 2.  I meditated regularly and learned a new kind of diaphragmatic breathing that creates more space in the body and brings calm, I kept up regular piano practice and had a thoughtful lesson with my wise young teacher last Friday.  I visited a few doctors to talk about a painful tendonitis in my ankle, hoping I'd get reassurance that the affliction would eventually pass (like everything else).  Ah, the non-stop tending we must do when we are aging... I repeat this to people and try to act as though I find it curious and amusing, but deep down I find I'm out of sorts and discouraged.  I so want to be brave and accept adversity, and often feel I lack the tools.  And I wonder a lot if it's like that for everyone else...  I am still spending more time alone than I'd like, but when my ankle was acting up and I really needed to stay off my feet, that of course provided a good excuse to sink back on the couch at home with some yummy delivered food and a good few episodes of MASH on Netflix.  It's pretty easy for me to retreat like this.

When I'm not watching something on the tube, I'm often thinking about my oldest daughter who is going through a very tough time with estrangement from her daughter and an old friend, and my old friend from the 70's who is facing a big move and the giving up of an old and beloved home in order to find a simpler way to live.  These two women - one 50 and the other 80 - are suffering these days and I see myself wanting to make a difference while I know my power to do so is limited.  I let go of daughter #1 a very long time ago, or at least I thought I did, and she has been hugely resourceful and forged a rewarding purposeful life; she has kept me at a distance often so that she can work out her problems on her own because that has been her nature.  But now it's becoming harder for her.  My friend is a highly intelligent and stoic woman who rarely asks for help, and yet I see fatigue and worry in her face each time we get together and talk about our lives.  The themes repeat themselves over and over ... our families, the books we're reading, maybe the news and politics ... with the unspoken thoughts lurking under the surface.

For the last few days I've been listening to Bach here at the Carmel Bach Festival, closing my eyes and following the notes of the cellos, violins, the harpsichord, the basses, and lutes, and feeling at home again.  JS Bach brought the world an unusual new musical form called the fugue, and this morning when I sat in the beautiful old Carmel Mission listening to a series of preludes and fugues for the organ,  I had this dreamy notion that the fugue form is a lot like our life.  The different voices from the organ were dancing in counterpoint, and I tried to follow them in the cool dark church.  It was like trying to track the images in a kaleidoscope in a way.  I am currently learning one of his simpler fugues for the piano, and what I keep coming back to is that this is a tough job for someone like myself who never could juggle or multi-task.   It is hard, and I am going to learn it (hear the intellectual imperative here?).  In the fugue, a "subject" is introduced in the beginning, and repeated in a mind-tingling counterpoint by a number of different voices as the piece moves forward.  A response to the subject follows and is woven into the composition, also in more than one voice.  What makes Bach a genius is his ability to build this composition so seamlessly that you hear BOTH the totality of the voices and each individual voice clearly and at the same time.    Interestingly, I have learned that there is a whole other kind of "fugue" that signifies a psychological disorder in which a person loses awareness of his or her identity when fleeing from a familiar environment.  In a strange and perhaps obscure way, this definition relates to the musical form (you have to give up first subject to take on the next or offer the response ... identity has to be relinquished ... you cannot hold on).

Both of the above definitions make me think of our journeys through life.  As a child, we are on the receiving end of a "subject" (or subjects) handed to us by parents and relations, those multiple voices, and of course there is our response to the subject that follows.  As we go through life a multitude of subjects arise, and we carry them with us in our bodies and minds as we grow up.  We respond and we voice our own subjects.  While I worked at fathoming and responding to the subjects handed down to me, such as "be seen and not heard," or "be a good girl," the themes that I gave voice to as a girl, such as "I need to know the truth," "I need to be heard," "I want to be loved" often met with no response, and so the piece of music lacked harmony and solidity.  Later in life, I believe we modify the themes and create our own, and cast the music in a different "key," perhaps.  I think this happens when we have a clearer sense of self, and we cease reacting so much to those around us.  We carry the profound old subjects like: love and connection, doing no harm, and being of value in the world, but we come to understand those in new and interesting ways.  Many of us have also had times in our lives when we run away from home and temporarily forget who we are, where the only way to see ourselves more clearly is to leave the familiar behind and perceive ourselves in a foreign context.  My memoir was born from that understanding.

This book has shown me the "subjects" or themes of my life more clearly, and allowed me to get closer to my life, into the dark corners and forgotten spaces so I can see them.  I used to think it looked like a mosaic or kaleidoscope, but now it appears to me more as a tapestry, with the different strands of "through line," or "subject" creating an interesting colorful piece of fabric.  I'd also like to think now of the journey being played out as a multi-voiced fugue with its varying voices speaking their own truths and answering each other and sometimes coming together in stunning harmony.  

Random Thoughts on Healing

When I had my nighttime panic attack on retreat recently, my brain tried to convince me I was a bad Buddhist.  After all, it said, you've been meditating over 17 years, can't you get it right every once in a while?
Here are some other weird and perverse stories that I have carried:
When I got ulcers about 8 years ago, I was convinced it was because of all the hard drinking I had done in high school when I was trying to numb out and pretend I wasn't angry at my mother.   I had effectively worn away my insides from being irresponsible.
When I had a month's siege of headaches four or five years ago, I was convinced I had a brain tumor and my mind fixed on the fear factor and kept me spinning.  Working in hospice and seeing people with brain cancer brought this into focus and feeling I had inherited my mother's innate frailty with life, I was convinced.
When I couldn't remember elements of my childhood while working away on the memoir during the last couple of years, I was sure that it was because I had done drugs and alcohol in my youth and destroyed most of my brain cells responsible for childhood memories.
When I heard from two orthopedic doctors that I might need knee replacement, I immediately thought it had to do with carrying too much weight around for too long, which of course led me to proclaim that I didn't know how to live a healthy life.
When I sit in the midst of feeling lonely and sad, which has been happening a bunch lately, I begin to question my innate ability to love others, to be lovable, to know how to be in relationships, thinking frequently that I"m too aloof and know-it-all  for my own good.  Since that was a childhood defense for me, it's logical it would continue.  Mostly I think I"m pretty good with family, but as to the rest of it -- the friendship and lovers, I'm not so sure...


There are many more instances of my judging mind than the ones mentioned above, because my brain has been busy for a very long time monitoring my behavior, ever ready to give me failing grade for not being good enough.  Being mindful and seeing this as I do, my job is clearly to head this off at the pass, to close the door to the judgment and stories, say "no thank you," and get on with the adventure of living, as opposed to evaluating.  A conversation I had yesterday with a gentle healer went a long way to opening up the concept of trauma to me, and I want to bring this to bear on all of this.  Trauma takes many forms in our life -- it can look like child beating, or just plain neglect and contempt.  It can be wartime blood and death, or it can be getting clobbered by a car while crossing a city street in my neighborhood.  It can be rape and incest, or a continual negation of one's character.  Our body is an amazing vessel that carries all our life experiences, storing away the more painful into a deeper place often, and as we age, get a little more tired, we slow down and become quieter, and this body begins to reveal the truth.  There is pain, and it has a history.  We can respond in a couple of ways:  we can continue doing what we're used to, telling stories and making judgments, or we can approach the difficulty with love and compassion.  If we choose this, we can heal ourselves and begin to feel normal.

It turns out that the primary faculty that leads to healing the heart (and by association the body) is love and affection.  I enjoy saying that because it reminds me of the Dalai Lama who said that his religion is kindness, and this feels profoundly true to me.  So, despite whatever suffering (trauma) we (I) have endured, we (I) need to summon kindness and compassion so we can continue with the adventure of being alive.  I have come to this wisdom late in life, but no matter, because I see the fruits of this kind of attention.  I have discovered my own ability to stop and rub my fingers when they ache as I practice the piano for hours, and say to myself gently, "there, there, it's just stiffness."  I've found my vital breath in the midst of a storm of mindLESSness and been able to return to balance.  I've looked back at the trajectory of my life and seen all the beautiful humans and animals I have loved and been loved by.  Or ... just recently I've looked at my swollen knee and just seen a creaky sore joint that is now 70 years old, then touched it with care.

The road ahead for all of us is getting shorter each day we are alive, and it only seems reasonable to apply love, which is the root of being a human, not stories and judgment which lack form and truth.  I write and I tell stories because I must, it is part of inhabiting my life, but those stories are part of a much larger trajectory which is, in fact, about telling the truth and creating beauty.  I think that's why I'm here.