Silence is Not an Option

 “In this past year of profound loss and grief, it is hard to find comfort. No matter how many philosophers or theologians seek the answers, the meaning of death remains a mystery. And yet silence in the face of this mystery is not an option for me, as it wasn’t for my father, perhaps because we know that, while we may find solace in our rituals, it is also in the seeking that we must persist.”

—George Yancy, "What I Learned About Death From 7 Religious Scholars, 1 Atheist and My Father" New York Times January 2, 2021

This is not a post about grief though from my experience of and reflection upon profound loss. It's a post about living. 

When I first began talking with my hospice grief ally, Ally, she told me that grief was like being in the ocean and that it would come and go in waves. The trick was to remember that it was like that—that I wouldn't drown. Even with her reassurance there were so many days that I did indeed feel as if I had gone under, panicked, unable to breathe—rows of days and nights and days and nights. Being a widow, you lose not only your beloved but also everything one has become—lover, wife, companion, caregiver, explorer, chef, gardener, side by side TV watcher, stepmother, grandmother—the list is incomprehensibly long. Covid, especially that first year in isolation pre-vaccines, made it seem as if I would be lost in that ocean forever. At my core I know one thing about myself, I am an extravert, my joy, my meaning, comes from being with people. The questions like the waves crashed about in my head and heart, "Who was I now, who am I becoming?".

Who have we each become since 2019?

My soul comfort was in looking to the lives of others before me and realizing my loss was, though pain-searing, really not unique. Others have survived. Almost all spouses will lose their spouse just as most children lose their parents, perhaps not at the age I was or so close to losing the other, but we do. Life and Death are a dance that we can not break from just as Love and Grief are tango partners. To never love is to never sorrow. Yet there are losses, to my mind, that are significantly harder to bare than mine. They are the unending kind. I think of my travels and work with some of the poorest people on this planet particularly: the forcibly thieving, begging gypsy children in Macedonia; the multitudes of desperate, deformed beggars that approach one in India; the families struck down by schoolyard shootings; folks like those in Alabama, Arkansas, and Colorado who have now lost so much in 2021; and of course those lives upturned forever by the great upheavals caused by politics across time. Visions that should never leave the soul.

Floating across all of those, the biggest loss is not to love and not to be loved. To stop loving.

In this life, I have been blessed to be loved first by my parents, then by my daughter, and for fifteen blessed years uncompromisingly deeply by Jim. And I have loved them and so many more, held up by their love—my family, students, colleagues, neighbors, and friends. In the paralyzing pain of deep loss, one is like a wounded animal that needs to find a cave to heal in. To love again seems impossible. Covid provided the cave but also became a prison. Folks reached in, how could I reach out?

In order to be able to truly emerge, the most important question that I needed to answer was "What is the point of living if love ends this painfully?". It is a question that has clouded over every holiday, every anniversary, and every birthday since Jim died. The glistening lights, the rich foods, the joyful gatherings and subsequent social media posts of the winter holidays ring untrue when that question haunts my heart. Like a Tolstoy novel the response is heard, 

“The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true” 

― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Before Jim's death, the Christmas holidays had always been a favorite of mine. It struck me in many different ways at different life stages. As a child, the mystery of the magic and gifts, the shadows of the colored lights and pine needles upon the wall, the chorus in church, midnight Mass, and the making of gifts. As a young mother, I was awed by the significance of the holy family, of the promise of new life, and of the poor and common exalted.

In eight days, it will be eighteen months since Jim died. To some this may seem so long ago but to me it is like yesterday, even though my traumatized brain and my broken heart have traveled a lifetime during this time. Eighteen months ago I was married. Today I live alone. I have spent most of those months repairing my home, my finances, building relationships, doing my "grief work", in many ways trying to reconstruct my life but I, for all my efforts, I can not bring my former life or self back.

This holiday I took faltered steps, plans becoming undone, reorganized, then celebrated, fell apart, yet throughout embracing and embraced by those I love. No longer in the shock of last winter's grief, it truly felt like the darkest of seasons with an ember about to catch or go out depending on the whims of Covid. Then slowly because of love, because of life calling out, my eyes began to see it all differently. The Christmas story is not simply a story of a baby. It is about a baby, born into poverty that through his own suffering would change how we see life and love and death and life again. It is about loving despite dying. It is about our shared humanness. I think we all seek answers. The answer given by this little child born among the animals has stayed in the hearts and minds of humanity for over 2000 years. Older religions hold counterpart stories that gently rock in and out of this main truth.

That is what strikes me this season, this new year, this beginning again of a human cycle living amidst an Omicron wave of uncertainty, twenty some months of a pandemic, a frightening future in a global disaster called Climate Change, and a time of deep political disruption and corresponding inability to act.

There is one thing I have come to know for certain from Jim's dying, learned in the complete giving of our love. Love really is the answer, isn't it? What we are left with in our last breath, is those who we have loved, who have loved us, and what our loving has created. We tell each other's stories. We amplify each others gifts. That love opens us up to eternity. That love is worth striving for in our living.

As we die our breathing changes, a breath takes, fumbles, stops, begins again, pauses, catches, a fact that medicine calls "air hunger". Our heart rhythm follows suit, slow, coming to a standstill, fast, fast, slow, slower, a percussionist who has lost their timing. This was true for Jim too. As I held him—his last breath, his final heart beat, one last embrace, holding him so tightly trying to not let him die—all came to stillness. And yet I did not feel him dead. I felt him leaving, lifting. I can even show you the direction he took like smoke in the Sistine Chapel. I did not feel his consciousness end, I felt it depart, joyfully. Following love.

“And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?”

—Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.”