Ancient Wisdom: What is Love Persevering?

Valentine's Through the Veil, 4"x12", oil on canvas

“It can’t all be sorrow, can it? I’ve always been alone, so I don’t feel the lack. It’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve never experienced loss because I’ve never had a loved one to lose. But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

—Vision in WandaVision

The last line of this quote by the fictional character Vision in the Marvel TV series WandaVision has been getting a lot of attention on social media and media in general—to the point of generating memes and alternative word twists on the original. It's the way I started watching the show due to the mention in an online grief group that I joined organized by grief expert David Kessler. So why all the attention? I think there are two distinct reasons:

Whether we admit it or not, almost everyone on the planet is grieving for something or someone right now due to Covid. 

AND historically North Americans have been getting it wrong for a very longtime. Here we talk about "closure, letting go, forgetting the past, and moving on". Just musing here but perhaps that is because most of us in the U.S. are not indigenous. Our forebearers literally and intentionally cut themselves off from their birthplaces or were forced to by the slave trade, war, or oppression. They left behind beloved family and friends with no or minimal means to return or stay in touch. Only recently has my family, though social media, become reconnected with one arm of our European family. Migration is a death in ways. Psychologists refer to this purposeful losing touch as emotional cutoff, it passes down through generations, and guess what? Cutoff is not healthy.

"In the Dark", 6"x6", oil on canvas

Thank heavens that around 20 years ago mental health and grief experts realized that we had it all wrong. Instead what grievers need is to remember—to stay in touch, to find the way to carry those they've lost  forward. As David's tagline for Grief.com states "Because LOVE Never Dies". 

Another beautiful, fictional (and not surprisingly situated in Mexican culture, not American culture) media example of a healthy approach to grief is found in Pixar's Coco. In Coco a young boy travels into the afterlife to reunite his family. That movie and my friend Wendi on Halloween really saved me. To look at grief in media portrayal in regards to WandaVision, this is a good read https://www.thegamer.com/wandavision-vision-grief-love-persevering-quote-meaning/.

Culture is very slow to adopt new knowledge or even old wisdom. Me too at times. I really didn't understand grief until Jim died. I still don't. I'm finding out the hard way that grief is actually my friend. I know that I had misconceptions and said the wrong thing to folks many times. When one is the griever, the subtle and sometimes blatant social pressure by well meaning folks to ignore one's grief is often heavier to hold than the grief itself: deepening pain and loneliness exactly when it feels like the world has imploded. And here I can only now offer to the folks that I did not support fully my apologies, I'm very sorry. Please forgive me. I should have simply been there to listen.

Even as Jim and I spoke before he died (and thank heavens I recorded one of those conversations), I still didn't understand. He was worried for me, hurting for me. He said that he would give away everything so that I didn't have to grieve. I was confused as I was worried for him thinking his burden was so much heavier. We were like that Christmas story about the destitute couple: the wife gives away her hair for her husband, and he gives away his watch for her. I wonder now even, did I fully support Jim's grief?

This month marks a year when not only Covid locked us all in but also when Jim entered hospice at home and I knew I would lose him. It was a very hard time full of anticipatory grief, I struggled: how to stay fully in the moment with Jim; how not to get lost in my own grief; and how to honor and support him, knowing at the same time that he was dying....all while the entire world closed us in.

Grief takes a lot of work. For me it has entailed reading, finding comfort in friends, working with a counselor, attending online groups, crying, being angry, arguing with God, being angry at cancer, pouring through photos and memories, lots of walking, writing, skiing, painting, and just sitting. There are months that I can remember nothing except shock, anxiety, walking in circles, and the deepest pain I've ever known. Yet, Jim shown like a light in front of me, showing me the way forward. He gave me permission to grieve, to live, to find joy, and even to find love again—which for the record I argued against. Which I now know made him sad, which makes me sad now. Jim didn't want me to stop being the woman he fell in love with, much like I didn't want him to die.

"Grief and Grace #2", 6"x6', oil on canvas

I've been reading John O'Donohue's "Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom". It is beautiful and painful. Anam cara is Celt for soul friend which is different from soulmate. He writes that one has many soul friends in a lifetime. This I know is true. However in reading, the hard part for me are the sections such as "Intimacy as Sacred", "Love as Ancient Recognition", and "The Transfiguration of the Senses", and the entire chapter "Toward a Spirituality of the Senses". They leave me breathless and tearful, recognizing what I have lost and what I desire to have still. 

In the book he explains this concept of the soul: O'Donohue recounts that we tend to imagine the soul as a tiny light within us that is released when we die. I witnessed that release when Jim died. It was in an instant and I felt his spirit rise on his last heart beat. O'Donohue says this concept of our soul inside us is wrong, that instead our bodies are within our souls, that our souls extend beyond into the infinite. When we discover a soul friend, our souls embrace and we are connected forever, across time and space. He writes "The eternal world and the mortal world are not parallel, rather they are fused. The beautiful Gaelic phrase fighte flaighte, 'woven into and through each other,' captures this."

Lately, I've noticed a shift in my grief. In part propelled by Jim's desire for me, in part because of life's push, in part because I am giving grief its space to mend me—like Japanese kintsugi. In discussing with Ally, my grief counselor (or perhaps I should call her my grief ally), I said I'm not sure how I am or how long it will last or what lies in the next wave, but I don't sit stunned on the couch for hours anymore in the morning. I've found that I've become fearless (but not stupid), I laugh and I can once again give, I find great happiness when with friends or painting or skiing. I notice all sorts of tiny miracles and I'm propelled to create meaning. Yes, I still cry every night and have an ache that will not go away but I've also begun to recognize that in my heart space, which felt so hollow and as if razed by fire, I am now holding a tenderness. I sense our love as living. In part Jim has entered my soul. Anam Cara. I ski some of his smaller rabbit holes in the trees at Bolton, I stop to help someone on the hill as he did. Some of his ways of thinking about business have infiltrated my thinking. I'm planning a celebration of his life with friends and family this summer. I recognize that though I can no longer be held by Jim, I will not lose him after all. I will not forget. I think I'm beginning to fully understand what the meaning of love persevering truly is: Jim promised me when we were married and reminded me of it in every card he wrote and every silent message he sent me that he would 💗 me ∞ +70 years. 

Now I am seeing this is true.

“Espírito Santo”, oil on canvas, 24”x36”
(one of Jim's rabbit holes that Kelly and I had a magnificent time skiing late one day).

About the paintings: I hadn't been able to paint once we learned there was no cure for Jim and that we were on his final journey. I squeezed out one tiny painting a few months after he died when I was deeply in the shock phase of grief and when it was complete, I recognized that it is about cancer and death. Then, this year on his birthday, returning from a beautiful day of skiing with Kelly and Fiona there was the most amazing sunset—a sunbeam rising straight to the heavens. That gift reopened my ability to paint. This last painting when it was completed I realized was about the gift of the spirit. The day I completed it I read the following passage from John O’Donohue’s “Anam Cara” and knew I was right.

 “The Holy Spirit is the wild and passionate side of God, the tactile spirit whose touch is around you, bringing you close to yourself and to others. The Holy Spirit makes these distances attractive and laces them with fragrances of affinity and belonging. Graced distances make strangers friends. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself. You live and move on divine ground.”