Coping with Difficulty

It frightens me when my niece, Sophie tells me that she isn’t coming to my sister’s commemorative because she doesn’t believe in the afterlife. What if she’s right and I have been wrong all along? What if this anger that is lodged inside of me forming a cliff around my heart is anger at my own illusions? In the middle of the commemorative two flautist play Bach’s magnificent "Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring" while the names of the dead are projected on a large screen. I think about what Sophie said at the hospital as she watched life fade from her mother’s body: “How am I going to tell Emme that there’s no more Nannie?”

No more. No more.

Then I see my sister’s name  written on the sand and I think about Neil Young’s Cowgirl in the Sand, how I played not just that song but all Neil Young’s songs over and over in the ‘70s. I wanted a boyfriend like Neil Young. I was in love with Neil Young. It’s the woman in you that makes you want to play this game.

My attention focuses inward where in the flesh of my memory I am seeing Neil Young on stage. Hello woman of my dreams. (Will I ever be someone’s woman of my dreams?) By the time it was out on the charts Diana, my sister, had married. At her wedding I was her bridesmaid in a long pink A-line dress; my happiness stained with anger at her abandoning me to marry Richard. Now she is leaving me again. But this time it is for eternity. The song has nothing to do with my sister. If anything I am the cowgirl, the “Brown Eyed Girl,” while she is the “Save the Last Dance for Me” and “Ain’t no Sunshine when She’s Gone.” Perhaps this is what the Buddhists mean when they talk about interconnectedness. Past, present, future merge into one. Events are not so random as they seem. Facts. Fiction. Imagination.Thought. The butterfly in Madagascar. Your ancestors. The child not yet born. Timelessness. This is not the way it seems.

I try to separate my sister’s loss from that of my mother, who died nine months before Diana.  Daughter. Sister. They weave into each other like stitches on a quilt. To grieve the loss of a mother and a sister at the same time is more than the sum of the two parts.

In the past, I have experienced the power of religion to make me feel less lost. Less alone. Less angry. I have been witness to the fact that religion soothes. In my 20s, I clung to the hopeful promises of religious beliefs. Knock, knock on various religious doors hoping to find a home for my vagabond soul. Catholicism. Reborn Christianity. Baptist (the gospel music drew me in), Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism. These days I rely on yoga as my spiritual practice. Yoga and meditation.  Albert Einstein once said that religion should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. When the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff asked the Dalai Lama which was the best religion, his answer was this: “the best religion is the one that makes you a better person.”

In holding a yoga pose I often think about gratitude. Gratitude for being alive. For my daughter. For enough money to buy food. For the people whose hands in some way touched the food on my table. For shelter. Friends. Health. Being positive. Love. And then I think, to whom am I addressing this gratitude? I have no answer. I lay in corpse pose and place one hand on my heart, another on my stomach and feel my breath. In and out. That’s the only thing I know for certain. I wear earrings made by a yoga teacher I once had at the Kripalu Centre for Yoga and Health in Massachusetts. The earrings came with this message: Sacred Om for unity with self, nature and others, and to celebrate the infinite. Jewelry for the soul.

I have a friend who tells me that religion does not talk about what happens before life but only after. It is the mystics and the gurus who talk of reincarnation. A few years back, in my continuous search for proof that life is as infinite as death, I became interested in Raja Yoga. Life, according to Raja Yoga, was karmic preparation for a better one the next time round. I stopped going to these ceremonies because it saddened me to think that my present life could not be good enough.

“There she is,” Debbie cries out and my attention is brought back to my sister’s name in the sand on the screen. Lined on a shelf in my sister’s bathroom in the lovely mountainous Eastern Township town of Bromont are bottles of sand collected from the different beaches she laid on throughout her travels on Earth. Seeing my sister’s name on the screen is accepting a bit more the reality of her death. One more mini-death in the long process of letting go. One of the principles of Indian spirituality is that when something in our life ends it helps our evolution and so that is why it is better to let go. Attachment causes suffering. Detachment brings freedom.  Anger clings to me like a cocklebur.

My anger finds its apex at the College Christmas party where I teach. That afternoon I come home to a freezing cold home. My furnace has stopped. I call the plumber who installed the heater. His answering machine says that he is on holidays until the beginning of January. I call up the gas company. Nothing they can do until next week. I look up plumbers in the yellow pages of my neighborhood and in less than thirty minutes two young men, no older than the students I teach, appear at my doorstep. They follow me down the dingy, dark, dusty basement where I point out the heater.  They touch this and that, like it is an object from space and I become suspicious that they don’t quite know what they’re doing.  I leave them alone and return upstairs to my apartment to get ready for the Christmas party. An hour goes by and I go check on them. Both of them are sitting in the company truck smoking. Pot I dismally think. Getting high on my time.  I tap on the window. They get out like they are in some slow motion movie.

“What are you doing?” I ask

“We’re trying to figure out what to do with your heater. We think it needs a new starter.”  I know nothing, nothing about furnaces and I get the uncomfortable feeling that I am being taken for a ride. Again Neil Young. It’s so hard for me staying here all alone when you could be taking me for a ride. Meaningfulness revolves around songs stashed in my head. I am helpless. No, hopeless is what I am.  By the time the boys leave I am worth three hundred and fifty dollars less and an hour and a half late for my Christmas party.

By now, most of my colleagues have finished eating and I see that Sylvie has saved me a place next to her. “I’ll just go get my meal,” I tell her as I glance at the pink flesh of her lamb. A month before the party, forms are sent for us to indicate our choice of meal:  Rack of lamb. Chicken. Vegetarian. I checked the rack of lamb. 

I stand in line next to a professor whose office is on the same floor as mine. He has often flirted with me in the hallways, in the elevator. I have always felt uncomfortable about this.  I dislike his gross sexual advances. The way he looks at my chest when he speaks to me and then leers up to smile at me. Here in the line-up for my lamb I politely endure his sexual innuendoes, pretending that I don’t get them. Playing innocent. More like stupid and I dislike myself for being too fearful to tell him that his comment about my short skirt offends me. 

Finally we arrive at the end of the line-up. My gratitude quickly fades when the woman serving says,  “the lamb is in the other room.”

 In the other room I am encouraged for there is hardly any line-up but I shortly discover why. They’ve ran out of lamb. I stare at what is left.  Once frozen vegetables and rice. I ask the tired lady serving behind the counter to fill my plate with this. She looks at me oddly. What does she see in my face that I cannot see; that I cannot yet feel?

I take my plate and head back to my table. Sylvie is no longer there and the places next to me are empty. Further down are other colleagues, younger ones. Something too intimate is unraveling inside of me. My grief is so heavy that I do not even have the energy to make it to the other table and so I sit alone.

I stare at my plate then I hear, ““You look so alone. Come and sit with us.”  It is the voice of our department’s secretary who is sitting diagonally from me. I look at her, stare, actually, as if I have landed in a foreign planet.  And then it happens. In the midst of five hundred people I am alone and I begin to cry. I leave to go back to my office. My coat is already on when Sylvie appears with Elaine another colleague.

 “Oh, sweetie, what’s wrong?” she says.

Where do I begin to tell them about my anger at Sophie for not attending the commemorative service, at the plumbing work at my home that I had to pay double time, that I miss my sister and my mother and that I am falling apart like a rag doll whose seams have come undone?

“They had no more lamb,” I say.

They laugh and Sylvie takes me into her arms.  I weep. In the book which Sylvie has written on crisis intervention she has said that we come into this world alone and will leave it alone. In between there are people around us but our intense experiences we do so alone.  In our grief we are alone.

In the days that follow I cry but my awareness now shifts from grief for the loss of a sister and a mother to that of my loneliness. Either I will drown in my tears as the cliché goes or they will be cleansing. A passageway to growth, to wisdom and most important to compassion. But this I do not think of at the moment. What I think about is that the salt from my tears has dried the skin on my face and no intensity of cream seems to help.

I begin to read articles on anger. I learn that to suppress it is to refuse who we are. Still, I want to understand my anger and begin to meditate on it. As I go inside, my anger turns into fear and it keeps poking at me while I keep poking it back into its dark hole. How do I take care of my anger so that it does not transform into hatred?  How do I untie this knot of anger towards Sophie?

Then as I am dusting my library a book of poems by Rumi catches my eye and I read his poem The Guest House.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
—translated by Coleman Barks

Come in, anger. Welcome anger. Accepting it wholly as part of who I am, brings sense of calm within me as I realize that much of my anger towards Sophie for not coming to the commemorative service was that my faith had been shattered and I blamed her for taking away my belief. For instilling the seed within me that perhaps there might not be anything else but emptiness. I blamed her for disturbing the comfort of my beliefs leaving them torn like a tattered flag.

Parallel to all of this is the increasing sensation of distance between my sister’s spirit and my own.

In one of my meditations, a realization comes to me. As long as I hold anger towards Sophie I cannot be in touch with my sister. It is as if a spiritual boundary has been erected and in order to break it down, in order for my spirit to be able to communicate with my sister’s spirit, I need to dissolve this anger I hold towards her daughter. 

For the next few weeks I think of calling Sophie, but I resist. I do not know why this is so. But I do know that I want the getting back to her to unfold in its natural flow. I do not want to force anything. We do not choose when to grieve. Instead it is grieving which chooses us.

I practice patience but I am also curious as to see how this will develop. It is on a Wednesday evening at a yoga meditation practice that my heart begins to unthaw. At the end of the class the teacher says May the strength and persistence of your practice be transformed into calm and clarity in your lives off the mat.

It is a calm, cloudy evening as I walk home. It suddenly strikes me that I am searching for my sister. I search for her in the leaves of the trees, in the clouds above. How much of myself left with her I wonder? I keep seeking her with an anguished heart. Here in the whispering of the wind I sense her. Then she is gone. Here in the night song of the sparrow I think I hear her kindness speak to me. I am playing a peek-a-boo game with her. For a fleeting moment she is here and then there is only empty space. 

Diana’s kindness will live in my heart. This is a promise I make for myself. A promise that I must make to keep her close to me. For it is kindness which she was best at.

Once home, I water my plants outside and then the feeling to call Sophie becomes clear as if from somewhere out of space I am receiving a message. I look at the time. It is past nine. Her children must be in bed and so I punch in her number.

At first I sense worry in her voice. Am I bearing bad news ? Someone hurt? Or is it a shiver of fright from her? A memory of my anger at her resurfaced from the last time we spoke over the phone, six months ago.

I am aware of  my heart filled with respect and this calms me. I am able to speak with love. “How are you? How are the children?”

Her boy, Matt had an incident last week. He split open his forehead.

“Did it frighten you?”

There is silence. I am asking her to go inside.  She starts to cry. “It is such a big scar. Right in the middle of his beautiful face. If it were on the side he could hide it with hair. He can’t hide it.”

I say, “Skin heals really well. Especially with children.”

Her crying soothes me in some tender way. She trusts me again to show her vulnerability. A scar will give him character I tell her.

I tell her that I have turned sixty. Now it’s serious and then deliver my standard sentence: “I’m much too immature to be sixty.” Her laugh makes me happy. I am retired now, I tell her.

“Are you scared?” She asks.
“Yes a bit. Change is always unsettling. I’m glad everyone is well.  I just wanted to see how you were.”

I hang up with the certainty that this is how my sister’s spirit is reaching out to me. I have been seeking her and she let me find her in reconciliation with her daughter. I weep. For loss. For love. For kindness.  Welcome all.

The Guest is part of a collection of essays which appears in an upcoming book titled Mourning Has Broken (essays on grief). For excerpts from other essays, you can read Carol Ann Fournier's blog under the category Excerpts from Essays on Mourning.