It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly… Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them…throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you…trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly…on tiptoes and no luggage…completely unencumbered. —
~Aldous Huxley
Today, all I can do is write through the grief
As I reread a post that I’d written last January, “A Year to Live: Intentions ~January 27, 2024” I distinctly remember wondering at the time of that writing, “Who might die this year?”, praying it wouldn’t be someone close to me. Asking God to protect my family and friends.
As I write today, my father, Jim, has been dead an astonishing 23 days.
Today, I feel ill, lost, disoriented, out of sorts, angry, sad, and once again wanting nothing but to be left alone, isolated, and distant. My mind racing a million miles an hour to a million places in that hour, my body sick with a bad chest cold, sore, and achy, heavy with sadness from watching my father surrender it all in his last few months of life, his shoes, his ability to walk, his independence, his care, his mind, his faith, and ultimately his life. My head is filled with feverish cotton and the residual emotional stress of dealing with all the “forces” at the table, watching and participating in the emotional game of tag that only a family of the dying can play. Exhausted and weirdly disassociated from the once sharply focused dealings and decisions of medical and Hospice care and the “business side” of my father’s death, the closing of my father’s estate, and the emptying of his home in preparation for sale. My body is in revolt, taking over, forcing me to stop, to be still, to shed tears, and to let go of the “holding of it altogether”. My heart, broken, jolted, and yet guarded and armored up like never before.
Today, the world seems so big, so unsafe, and grey all of a sudden. The idea of my most trusted counsel and the people who loved me like no other are gone leaves me feeling strangely…displaced.
Today, the world feels less vibrant, darker, and less welcoming without my parents in it.
In this place of grief and sadness, I need to be careful, I may only linger here in this rite of passage for a moment. I need to step lightly as I walk through this sacred time. I must pay attention, I walk a familiar, and dangerous path of my own psyche, my own grief-clouded perception of things. I want to run away, I want to throw my beautiful life away into the abyss and let it die with my parents,
Today, nothing seems to matter…
Except, in the breath of it all, it does matter. In this painfully beautiful juxtaposition, in the grief of death, I can see, I can FEEL the fragility, the briefness of life, the profoundly, and yet starkly insignificant sharp jolt of witnessing a loved one’s last breath. Oh, God, those last few precious breaths are so fragile, as beautiful and delicate as the soaring wings of a butterfly. In this experienced wisdom, I can see straight through the dark, the unwelcoming world, and touch the richness and texture of my own life just by grabbing hold of the thread of my breath in gratitude and following it through my body, knowing that without a doubt my breath is the breath of my parents, of my ancestors and they live on in the light in my eyes, smile on my face, and in the warmth of my hugs.
It is interesting, solemnly funny, and bizarre that at a time of loneliness and loss, I want to push everybody away, I want to fill this void with the distraction of running to a place where no one knows me. Where I can let my eyes brim with tears and never smile again. I want to hide from death, and from living. I’m distorted and confused, I’m sick, I’m tired, I’m sad and lost. I need to be careful. I need to hold on to this contrasted awareness as if I were carrying the brightest flame in the darkest of times. I need to listen intently to the voices of my parents echoing in my heart like a distant wave in the vastness of love.
I can hear the sternness of my mother’s voice at those times in my life of self-pity and wallowing in my own misery refusing to eat, to get out of bed. “Get your ass up, Leora, eat something, and stop feeling sorry for yourself, you’ve got a life to live. and you are to live it”. “I am right here in the beat of your heart and in the sound of your laughter, you’re not alone Oradora.”
I can see my father’s smile every time I close my eyes. I don’t know. I don’t know where to begin to pick up the pieces Dad, I don’t know what my next step should be? I don’t know anymore, I’m lost. Dad, I don’t know what to do. “Reeeelax”, whispers my father, “you don’t need to try so hard, It’s going to be ok, I’m ok, I’m walking right alongside you”.
I do have my tools. The heart of my healing kit, my writing and self-exploration, my yoga, my breath, my faith, my traditions, my healing mantras, my community of friends, and my family, but it all seems so hard and so far away, impossible to let in right now. Yet, even here, in this place of impossible, I continue to hear the voices of my heart.
“Wrap up in your mantra as if it’s your favorite purple blanket”,
“Even if all you do is lay on your mat in stillness and breathe you are doing yoga (yoking/joining together with the Divine)”
“I love you sweet Le’, I’m here”
“Thank you, Leora, I couldn’t have done this without you”
“I love you, Mom”
Thru soulful eyes 