conjuring her

I try to work the magic, and have her with me. Life without her doesn't feel possible, but trying to bring her with me in new ways is so hard. I so love those that remember her. Her friend at college, Christina, recently set up an account in her memory, to loan money to girls at Wellesley. Just typing the place of her death brings a blow that I must absorb, that's the way it is. It wasn't just the place she chose to end her life, but the place she chose to live her college life. Pain is. But love is too. I wish I could hang windchimes in the tree the girls planted there in her memory. Christina sent me a picture of it from last winter, and I was stunned, the love of her lives on. I want to see it with leaves some day, but I'm so afraid of taking that trip, and coming back without her. I could only come back for you, Gabe and Jason, know that.

May Day

I have survived what at the time didn't seem survivable. My heart has been broken and battered, but now I see beauty and kindness. Today is a strange day, there is so much overlap between past and present. Six years ago, the present was a moment of horror that stretched forward through time, while the past seemed golden. Now the present is tough, but still beautiful. On this day, when I think of the past, I think of those horrible breaking moments of her death, the sight of the top of her head through a window, her body cold in my hands at home. It's a long reach to find her still alive in my mind, all of us together, the way things were. I don't like that, I hate it, but it's such a relief to not have intrusive memories of her death present in every moment. I want the liveliness of her here, not the presence of her death. But my suffering has abated, the grief has been worked, and for that I give thanks. It's not over, but it's bearable. In the beginning my chest ached painfully and there was screaming in my head. Now there is a lot more peace in my life. The color has returned brilliantly, and so has the love. Not the love of people that come and go, walking away after they've had their fill of the spectacle of our grief, but real love that lasts and is kind. I choose to think of that love today, and how Katie loved us, and we loved her.

and on this day

After a lovely day visiting Jane's backyard on Table Mountain, I impulsively pulled into the Cherokee Cemetery. Not having been there before, I was surprised by the marker for a little girl named Katie that died in 1868. And then I read the stone for her brother Dannie, and many more after that. A cemetery is a pretty safe place to cry, and I broke off some lilac and brought it back to Katie's stone. I may not have a stone or a place to go for my Katie, but this Katie I can bring flowers and think of my Katie, in this moment in time.

Grief no longer fills all the moments of my life, but this week is a tough one. The days of the week line up with the exact dates of her last days and her death and our search for her. Sacred tears come in these moments, tears that used to fall daily have learned to wait until I can make time for them. I will miss her the rest of my life. That is reality.

resonating with life

Thinking back it's fitting that we flew her body home and lifted it for cremation near the cemetery in Chico. Her atoms were released to the the sky and united with all that is. My youngest son told me that in Irish legend the spirit or soul returns home. So maybe all of her came back to us, her soul and her body, and we've learned to live her and share her, releasing her to the universe that gave her to us.

March is a difficult time, a slow and painful march of her life to her death. She was here and enjoyed the wildflowers of Table Mountain with her friends that last March, and I find solace in that. If she was suffering we didn't see it, perhaps because she was so happy to be home. Her descent was swift and brutal that April. No one saw it coming. I would have done anything I could to save her, stepped into her place without hesitation. We don't get to die for our children, and as difficult as it is, we must sometimes know their death. I remember the moment my soul was ripped from my body, and it's only recently that I've begun to wonder what those with me witnessed.

On a recent cross country hike on Table Mountain, I was humbled by the perfect skeleton of a coyote, cleaned by vultures and insects and microbes. It was empty and hollowed out, yet beautiful. The green grass in contrast to the mystery of death, the mystery of life. I know that the space within me left by Katie's death, once filled by her life, is somehow sacred. Five long years of grief have carved deeply into me, and I know what it feels like to resonate with the death of my child. Sometimes it strikes so hard I'm stunned, as in that first impact of knowing her death. After more than 5 years, it's become a relentless longing for her, for what we all had. I've learned to humble myself and resonate with my love for her, my grief for her, all one and the same. And I walk in the wildflowers on Table mountain each Spring.

sharing what works

A Guided Grief Meditation by Stephen Levine

from his book Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings

(To be read slowly to a friend or silently to oneself.)

Find a comfortable place to sit in a quiet room.

Take a few moments to settle into the quietness.

Gradually bring your attention to the center of the chest.

Let awareness gather at that place of high sensitivity. Notice any ache at the center. Is there a physically painful quality to your mental longing?

With the thumb, press gently into this point of grief and love.

Begin gradually to exert pressure on that point. Feel the sternum, the bone beneath, as though it were the armoring over the opening to the heart. As though it were that which blocked entrance so often to your spacious nature.

Slowly, without force, but with mercy and steadiness, push into that point.

Press in gently but firmly. Let the pain into your heart. Breathe that pain through that point into your heart.

Stop pushing it away. Push into it instead.

Let it in.

Breathe that pain in through the griefpoint.

Let your thumb push steadily, but without force, into that ache, awareness entering deeply that point of sensation at the center of the chest. A merciful awareness, using the pressure on the griefpoint to enter through years of accumulated sediment of unfelt, unexpressed, unexamined feelings. Penetrating the exhaustion of our everyday, ordinary grief compressed hard as rock.

Push into the pain. Past the resistance to life. Past the fear, the self-doubt, the distrust.

Past feelings of being unsafe. Past all that holding around being unloved. Past the ten thousand moments of putting yourself out of your heart. The judgment, the longing, the anger.

Past years of hidden grief. The shame and secret fears, and unrequited loves we have spoken of to no one.

Let the pain in at last.

Have mercy on yourself.

Let it in.

Let life in at last. Breathe that pain into your heart. Past the holdings and armorings of a lifetime. Let it in. Let it in at last.

Let your heart break. All the losses, all the injuries, all the grief of a lifetime dumped there, layer after layer holding you back from your life. Holding you out of your heart.

Push in. Breathe that into your heart.

Let your heart at last experience all those parts of your life you have pushed away.

So little room in our hearts for our pain. Let it in. Receive it with mercy instead of fear or judgment.

Cradle your pain in your heart. Let each breath gently rock that cradle.

All the pain in our heart we have tried so long not to feel, now drawn in with each breath. Fear says stop, but gently continue in mercy for yourself and the deep healing.

Push in gently to the fear. Gently but firmly. Not as punishment but as a willingness to go beyond old protections and devices for escape. Past the old fears. Have mercy on you. Let this pain you have been trying to elude come into the heart of healing.

So much pain.

So much posturing.

So much hiding there.

A lifetime of fear, of anger, of distrust.

Let it in. Let it in.

It is so hard to live with our hearts closed. It is so hard to live armored and frightened. Unavailable to life, to ourselves.

Have mercy.

Let the tender heart receive all those parts of you that say it is self-indulgent to forgive yourself. That cruel, merciless judgmental mind. That cold indifference toward the suffering of others and ourselves. Let these griefs dissolve into the opening heart.

Breathe them into your heart. Let them melt. Let them be healed.

All the pain in this world, all the fear of this world. All the moments we have hated ourselves. All the moments we would have rather been dead, armored right there at the center of the chest, melting.

All the times we couldn't say what we wanted to because we were afraid we wouldn't be loved. All the times we wondered what love really was. All the times we were disappointed, there at the center of the chest.

So much holding. Breathe that pain into your heart. Let it in.

Let it in.

Each breath drawn in through the griefpoint carries the pain right into the center of our heart.

So much room in our heart for our pain when we let go of the armoring and resistance. It is difficult to open to this grief-pain in our tiny body, in our fragile mind, so breathe it into the enormous heart.

The heart of mercy drinks from our pain. Let it in.

All the fear that we are less than good in God's eyes, that we are not the beloved. Breathe it in.

All the fears that we have fallen out of grace, that we are cursed and unlovable held right there in the griefpoint. Breathe it in.

A lifetime of pain. Breathe it in.

Push into that point. Notice how part of our grief comes from trying to keep grief under control. This mercilessness with which we reject ourselves repeatedly. This often unkind mind, this fearful child we carry.

Have mercy on you. Let it in your heart. Let it break your heart at last.

Let it in.

So much of ourselves pushed aside. So much shame and mercilessness. All the places we will not forgive ourselves. All the places we are diminished. The despair, the helplessness, breathe it in.

Breathe it in.

Let the breath take the pain to the center of your heart.

The heart has room for it all. Let it in.

Have mercy on you. Let the pain in past the fear.

All the moments that we weren't loved and weren't loving.

All the parts of ourselves we've coldly disregarded, regarded with mercy at the griefpoint, warmly drawn into the healing heart. All the self-cruelty. All our unwillingness to love ourselves. All our judgment.

Each breath bringing old mind into the heart, melting in the embrace of such kindness and care.

Fear melting.

Doubt melting.

The armoring falling away, exposing the luminescent whorl of the heart center. Our shimmering nature discovered just beyond our pain. The sense of loss flickering in the enormity.

Each breath drawing in gratitude for the moments shared with those we have loved and lost. And gratitude for the mystery of connection.

The fear of a lifetime melting into the heart. Push ever so gently into it. Breathe that healing mercy right into your heart. An enormous energy. Let it in.

Just let that energy into your heart.

Draw the shadows into the light.

The armoring disintegrating.

The griefpoint dissolving into the touchpoint of the heart. Hard-edge sensations softening. Dissolving into loving kindness.

Bringing home the lost child. The heart embracing the mind with the soft breath of mercy and the tender caress of forgiveness.

As the griefpoint becomes the heartpoint, the body begins to hum. Feel the cells like a dry sponge absorbing this mercy and deep kindness.

As the griefpoint surrenders its pain to the heart the pained contents of the mind float in the spaciousness of mercy and awareness. The feelings of separation increasingly become a sense of inseparability from that loved one, from ourselves.

Now let your hand come gently away from the griefpoint, let your hands settle into your lap.

Take the pressure off that point.

And notice that there seems to be an opening where the ache used to be.

You can feel the touchpoint of the heart when you take your hand away.

Breathe in and out of that point. This is the breath of the heart. Let awareness of the flow between the world and your heart be your constant companion.

Let the pain which drew your attention to the heart be an initiation into the healing you took birth for.

May all beings be free of suffering.

May all beings focus the spacious heart on the pained mind.

May all beings know the joy of their great deathless nature.

Stephen Levine

A Guided Grief Meditation

from Guided Meditations, Explorations and Healings

reality check

In the beginning I really hated that authors in books I read talked about bereaved parents learning or growing or benefiting in some way from this experience...I didn't want it, the price was too high. And how can I know how I would have grown or what I would have learned with my daughter here? I can't process this as a positive experience, even with the cultural pressure to do so. I can only continue to heal and grow and learn alongside of the reality of her death. I can choose to go on living, even though it still occasionally hurts like hell after 5 years. As one person said so well, you don't 'get over it', you 'get on with it'.

sudden death

When life brings an echo of that fear, that falling into the abyss of her death, the pain envelopes me and burns deeply. Where is she, I can't find her, never did find her, just her empty shell, and slammed my hands against the glass and screamed her name to try to wake her. Several days later I touched her so tenderly and brushed her hair and sang to her, until they pulled me away. How could she be gone from us forever, she was just here, how could this have happened? It all seemed so surreal, but now it's painfully real. I will carry the emptiness of her little body deprived of it's beautiful being for the rest of my life. She is part of us, once so lively and joyful and loving, now gone. I don't understand, I will never understand how I'm supposed to live without her. The loneliness is unbearable.

Time shifts

Time shifts between what is and what was and I feel stunned. There are no snapshot-like memories of Katie, just an awareness that when I was here each day, she was here too. An intensity of connection beyond sensory memory draws me back to who we used to be. Now there is a Katie shaped hole in the world.

There's no time for memories as I move from one classroom to another every half hour throughout the morning. Breaking the present into so many pieces, each in a different room with a different teacher and students, seems to have made it easy for the past to reach into the present. Moving through spaces that held the four of us for so many years of togetherness makes some moments feel like the present moment has been pulled back into the past.

Missing

a void so huge that I can't contain it
yearning and loss and always missing, missing
I want to transform it
into something beautiful
so that instead of being painfully consumed,
I will gaze into it and drink deeply
my woundedness becoming a view
I can live beside

Katie's Life

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. ~Kahlil Gibran

A few days after Katie's body was found, I realized that her death was over-shadowing her life, and I hated that. I worried that when people thought of Katie, they would only remember how she died, not how she lived. Newspaper headlines and TV reports used pictures of my child to talk about her death. People that had never met Katie knew about her death, not her life.

I didn't want how Katie died to be more important than how she lived. Katie was so much more than her death, Katie had done so many wonderful things in her 18 and 1/2 years of life.

We struggled and then we picked ourselves up and went back to work and back to school and went on. Katie's death had shattered our lives, but we were still here. We have learned that broken hearts still beat.

For over five years, we have grieved, and it's been hard work. We went on with life as best we could, but there was always an important person missing from the center of our family. We were grieving the loss of our irreplaceable daughter and sister, our Katie.

But just like I didn't want Katie's death to define her life, I've realized that I don't want Katie's death to define my life either. I want Katie's life to shine forth in my life, as my friend Mary said, I get all these years to live for her. I want to live my life as joyfully as I can for Katie, she'd like that.

I love you Katie!

Dear Heart

Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains. ~Kahlil Gibran

My fifth grade teacher used to occasionally call me 'Dear Heart'. We were her first class, and she was fresh from college with a degree in English. She would leave the next year to teach and be a missionary in Afghanistan, and I missed her terribly. She was the kind of teacher that would rally her friends to drive us on field trips to San Francisco to ride the red and white fleet around the bay or go to a museum. She took us to the public library once a week because our school didn't have one, and she bought us paperback copies of Tom Sawyer that she based our curriculum around. She did the same with the book The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, a book that has been indelibly written on my heart ever since. But most of all, she loved us. She kept in touch with me, eventually coming back to the US and marrying.

A year or two after we moved north, she had me come and stay with her one summer for a few weeks when I was 16. Yes, she did send me to a huge conference on how to be a good christian during that time, kind of overwhelming. She had me stay with her best friend Marsha. Maybe it was because Marsha had just broken up with her fiance and my former teacher was worried about her being alone. Marsha was a bit wilder, she treated me like a grown up, not a student. Marsha told me some of my teacher's secrets, things I would never have known about her otherwise.

When I married at 18, my teacher was there with her husband and infant son, and we still have their family photo from that day in our wedding album. A year or two later, I read an article in a church newspaper that was written by her. I don't remember much about it, except the horror that her sister and her niece had been killed tragically. The article was about her grief. This was over 20 years ago. I thought it was wild that some local church had picked up her article and printed it and subsequently junk-mailed it to me. But it did explain why we had lost touch after all those years of staying in contact. She was grieving deeply.

Last year, I told this story to a friend of mine, and I decided to google my former teacher to see if I could find her and get in touch with her. I wanted to tell her that I was a teacher now, that I was following in her footsteps, and that I wanted to learn from her about grief. I googled her name, and the first thing that came up was her grave marker. I screamed, I cried, this was all so fucking unfair. She had died in 1986 when she was 34. I was ten years older than she lived to be...ten years older than my fifth grade teacher.

I hope she was there to greet my Katie and call her Dear Heart...

weeping willow

A year ago last spring I bought a small willow tree and brought it home for my husband to plant in the backyard. We had been surprised to come home one day to see the line of trees along the fence completely removed, stumps and all. Not wanting my sons to come home and see the starkness of the landscape without the willows, I decided to plant some hope. It wasn't really an adequate replacement for what had been there, but it was the best I could do. When the boys came home, they looked at the pathetic thing, and nodded their heads when I said someday it would be big enough to enjoy. I bought a tiny set of brass bells and hung them in the tree.

Last Fall, after the branches were bare, I went out to trim it up so that it would be nice and tall someday. I was saddened to find a huge bug infestation in the upper part of the trunk, and was thinking I'd have to start all over again, planting another and dragging out the process of ever having a satisfying tree to enjoy. I trimmed away as much as I could, but realized the damage had gone to far into the heart of the trunk. I sprayed it and saved a chunk to show a friend that's knowledgeable about such things, and she said it was probably borers, and that I might have to plant a different kind of tree altogether. Shit. I was discouraged, and I did nothing about it.

This spring it branched out and up and my son noticed it in the backyard when he came home. We stood and looked at it through the living room window, and he said it's really getting big. I started explaining about the borers and that the tree needed to be replaced, but I hadn't gotten around to it. He said, so it's damaged, just like us. And I stopped, and looked a the tree with new eyes, at how it was flourishing despite what had happened to it. And right then I decided that's it, the tree stays for now. We need to watch it grow and survive. It may fall down someday, which is okay, since it's planted far enough away from any houses, but for now it's a symbol of going on anyway, with life as it is. The weeping willow is still alive, and so are we.

Fledglings

On the next to last day of school, we had two new birds show up at our viewing platform! The magic school bus/portable ride was not over yet. We were able to identify our new fledglings by the parent robin that flew in to feed them big juicy worms, an awesome sight. They were huge compared to our tiny little goldfinches, and had mottled chests with pieces of downy fluff still sticking out from between their feathers. I had to go and get Cathy, for whom robins are a sign from her brother that died the year before I came to Shasta. We stood and watched them together, happy for one last miracle.

It rained that night, and I came to school afraid of what I might not see, but there they were again, sitting in the paper birches and eating juicy worms that the parent bird was easily plucking from the newly damp soil. All was well.

The teacher that was in our classroom previously had retired from Shasta, but when I saw her at an end of year party, I asked her if she'd heard about the birds outside her classroom window. She said that never happened when she was there, that it had nothing to do with her. And while I was more than willing to share the pleasure with her, I guess it did make me feel a bit special. I wonder how many miracles are all around us just for the noticing. Perhaps grief has just sharpened my senses and made me grateful for the simple beauty all around me.

And the most precious fledglings, my students, flew off for the summer with some special memories buried deeply in their hearts.

What a day, Glorious by MaMuse

Hallelujah by MaMuse

The Oak Tree

This graceful Oak lost a bough from the center of its being. The branches that sprouted from the trunk and roots each traced their own unique path against the sky, together forming a canopy. Now one of them is missing. A limb that grew and reached for the blue sky and danced in the wind under the stars has been torn away. It can't sprout green leaves or sway in the music of the breeze, it's forever gone. This beautiful oak will never be the same, but it will live on for many years, bearing the scar of what was lost.

The absence of Katie's presence in the canopy of our family has wounded us all. But we will live on, embracing her spirit with our memories, under blue skies and starry nights. She is a part of us all now.

Bidwell Park

I go to Bidwell Park several times a week to walk. I usually walk about 5 miles, focusing on the trees and birds and butterflies around me. The trees arch above the road framing a vault of blue sky that I never get tired of looking at. Red shouldered Hawks call and hunt and mate in this woodland, and Acorn Woodpeckers are everywhere. For a time there was an Owl living in a hollow half-way up a sycamore tree that I looked for each time I passed. Once I even saw a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet eating something red (tomato or pepper) that someone had dropped on the ground. Pipevine Swallowtails are everywhere with their black iridescence, and occasionally a Tiger Swallowtail flutters by. Hummingbirds and ducks and deer and squirrels also make their homes in the park.

the songbird

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
~Maya Angelou

Our 13 year-old dog Cosmo has decided to bark obnoxiously until we give him what he wants. What he wanted when Nola came over was a walk, and Cosmo barked so relentlessly that Nola and I gave in. I walked Baru and Nola walked Cosmo, and while the furry boys sniffed and peed on everything they could, Nola and I checked out the the landscaping in the yards we walked by and the clouds in the evening sky. The temperature was mild, not scalding like last week.

A bird flew over us, singing while it flew, and perched at the top of a small dead tree. We stopped near the barren tree and were treated to an incredible variety of calls and songs. It was a tiny, plump little bird, and it just kept singing. Nola thought it was lonely and looking for another little bird of its kind, but it sure seemed to enjoy giving us a concert. Once it even tilted it's head down as if to bow, letting me see it's dark little cap. It's colors were difficult to distinguish in the evening light, but it seemed pale underneath and grayer above. Then it flew away, and we continued our walk.

Small miracles remind me that life is still good. Small wonders like the little songbird giving us a concert, like the vibrant seashell rose blooming in the yard, or the clouds glowing with the setting sun. I don't know the answers, but I can still hear the song and enjoy the sunset.

I'll Fly Away

The last time I walked the beach, it was early in the morning, and this hymn sprang from my heart to my lips:

some glad morning when this life is over
I'll fly away
to my home on God's celestial shore
I'll fly away

I'll fly away
I'll fly away
when I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

I took off my shoes and climbed the rocks and walked in the wet sand, humming and singing as I went. The waves accompanied me, and I felt embraced by all that was there. Being in the moment is where I find my balance, my center.

My friend Mary speaks of the place where her daughter's spirit flew near a flower market, and it makes me imagine that Katie's spirit flew like a bird from her little body. How does a spirit fly? I'm not sure...it's a mystery. I just know that Katie's spirit wasn't in the shell of her little body when she was found.

It's her spirit I've been searching for, and several times she's come to me in my dreams. After struggling so long with wanting her just the way she was, my loving daughter, I've begun to look for a new kind of relationship with her. One in which I get to live all of my days for her and carry her in my heart. I want her to become part of me and together we'll go on.

Give Sorrow Words

My friend Joanne sent me this quote today:

"Give sorrow words;

the grief that does

not speak whispers

the oe'r fraught heart

and bids it break."

Shakespeare, Macbeth

I replied: I love it Joanne, I think that's why I've searched for words that describe this hell, for the relief that expression brings.

Joanne replied: Me too, Lisa, and relief is so hard to find and then it seems just temporary. It's amazing how we need expression for our heartbreak (I love the expression "bids it break"...because it WILL) yet so few will listen.

The quote is validating and consoling.