Reflections

I'm writing on a train, and it's a train with no wi-fi. The man next to me is harrumphing his way through his coughs as he watches a show I don't recognize on his tablet. Everyone else is quiet. I have finished the homework I can do without wi-fi. My presentation for tomorrow is complete,  and to edit it, I'd need wi-fi anyway. My phone battery is fading, and I need to keep myself from draining it further in case I need to call my aunt to meet me at the station. This man next to me will not stop harrumphing. I shift my hands so he can't see what I'm writing, and then I write anyway. He's got his show.

In this space of relative disconnection from my preferred forms of new media (if with an inconsistent ability to ignore the other distractions around me), I find myself coming back to Erin's great description from last week of her own train experiences. What I like about getting work done on this train is that I don't have the internet to distract me. That is also what I hate about getting work done on this train. Since I don't travel this way that often, there's an allure to the out of the ordinariness of it that I think helps me focus. 

On the other hand, I've been riding this train, however intermittently, for years. I remember many trips when I'd call my mom on the way and she'd be the one to pick me up and drive me the 40 minutes to my aunt and uncle's house. Sometimes I'd chatter with her, and sometimes I'd be more sullen, depending on how attentive of a daughter I was being. (In my partial defense, I was in my early twenties.) I remember the one Thanksgiving when my ex-boyfriend called me from Texas and I spent the rest of the ride wondering what that meant for our fledgling friendship. (It's now definitely, deservedly ended.) I remember all of the times between December 2012 and the following January when my cancer patient uncle would pick me up and bring me to see my cancer patient mother. We'd moved her up to live with them, and my aunt cared for them both. I visited as often as I could. 

I remember the trip I took in the bitter cold of January 2013, my frightened cat in tow, when I thought I would have many more chances to take her to see my mom. (I think I brought the cat more for me than for either of them.) That's when I thought I'd go on leave from work and move up to Connecticut to be with my mom as she transitioned to hospice. Strangely, I don't remember the train part of the trip when my mom was, as I thought of it then, officially dying. What I remember is the car ride with my aunt, slicing through the dark, brining me closer to a mother whose last word to me, three days before she died, would be my name.

Internet wasn't the biggest concern for most of those trips. Even as I write about it now, I'm not crying. I'm still. I'm cried out for right now. Some of my recent tears have been for or because of other people. It's very interesting, I'm finding, when grief shifts to allow you to care about other things. Death is still there. My mother's loss threads through every aspect of my life. Even thinking of her as lost is still so evocative for me: it's like she's behind a wall, and I can't reach her. Sometimes she seems to be moving backwards away from me. Sometimes I can feel her calming, smiling, sometimes angry, always loving self practically peeking over my shoulder. That poor man, she might say, or Jesus Christ, just cough already. I wonder if the phrasing is hers or mine. 

The man next to me has packed his tablet in his suitcase and moved. I worry that he has seen what I wrote until it occurs to me that he's probably getting off at the next stop. As soon as he disappears, I wonder where the edge of the thinking I'm doing right now is. (I think this just as someone else coughs.) I have more space, so I decide to do a quick version of Sondra Perl's Guidelines. I settle my feet on the floor. I ask myself, what do you want to write about. I add, in silent parentheses, something that you're not already writing about. You are writing a memoir about your dead mother. You are writing about her life, and yours. What else do you want to write about?

I take mental stock of my in-progress abstracts. I flit my attention over to the essay I wrote for a professor the previous term, and the journal in my bag that I am hoping will accept it. I decide to edit it on the train home, after the conference. Thinking of the conference makes anticipation rise up, a combination of "oh g-d, am I prepared enough" and "oh boy, I get to present my ideas to smart people." I reflect on how far I am from my felt sense in this moment. I am having thoughts I have so many times, semester after semester. 

I try another version of one of Sondra's questions. What do I know about (and I add to myself, other than grief)? Today, I decide, I will think about knowing about - I cast around for something outside the window. Trees. No, reflections. There's a beautiful image outside the rushing train of the sunset above the lake and the evening-blackened trees reflecting onto the water. What can I write about reflections?

My first thought is that they express recursivity. You can look at them from two distance angles, but it's almost as though there's no beginning or end. You could have the trees without the reaction, but you couldn't have the reflection without the trees. Those ideas don't seem to go together. I look again, and I notice how fuzzy the trees' outlines are in the water, as opposed to to the way their progenitors cut sharply through the sky. This is Gendlin's edge: these fuzzy tree shadows. When you get to their end, you are firmly in the water, and there's no place to attempt to go but somewhere new. You probably haven't been there before. (I haven't.)

I am not the swimmer in this increasingly odd thought experiment, but my imagined figure doesn't want to go to shore just yet. She wants to see what else is out there. She wants to challenge her own orthodoxies, the meanings of her own words. She's not worried about someone else's coughing. She's like my mom in a lot of ways: fearless, open-hearted, gleeful, creative, dedicated. I like this swimmer. There's a bit of me in her somewhere. 

I take an email break (11% battery. Leave it alone, Hilarie). I take stock: 1,100 words and counting. Two guidelines at least partially considered. Annoyance at coughing man abated. Love for and feeling of connection to Mom re-established, as every moment I continue breathing ceaselessly allows me to do. In some ways, when my mom died, I thought I'd reached the edge of my strength. I didn't know how much I'd need to keep going, and to keep going in a healthy way. Sometimes now, fifteen months after her death, I still don't, but I keep going anyway. Like a train, like a lake, like a fresh thought, like love.

Scarlett O'Hara, Grief Counselor

I wrote this before going to my mom's to tackle the house. Now that we're in the during/after phase, I've got more thoughts, but I wanted to share this.

*

Now that I am staring down the packing up of my dead mother's things and the selling of her house, a task that's petrified me since the beginning of her illness, The house tasks glom together into what feels like an insurmountable mass, and that mass sometimes shines, mirage-like and as falsely, as worse than her death.

It's not.

Nothing in my life has been worse than her death, except the fact of the wall it put her behind, and the fact that I can't break it down.

But it's a hard task. It'll be like cleaning out her office times who knows what. I don't really want to think about it. So I'm not. Like the formerly unseen grief counselor Scarlett O'Hara, I'll think about it tomorrow. Another day.

Dwelling on it won't really help me handle it better, I don't think. I'm sure I dwelled the last time we went there, and that time, I utterly fell apart. I fell apart in a way I didn't in the days after her death. It felt like the house itself was suffocating me. Being there without her was worse than being haunted - it was utterly empty, except when it wasn't, and those two feelings alternated with me between them like a buffeted sapling.

There's no sense in being buffered more than you already are if you can avoid it.

Not thinking about things was a tactic I used when she was sick, too, though sometimes I'm not sure I realized it. Looking back at it now, I didn't spend a ton of time worrying about what would happen (or at least not putting the fear into thoughts or words). I focused on hoping, and when I wasn't focused on hoping, I was focused on doing. Taking buses to be with her. Living in yoga pants in her room in the ICU. Being forced by well-meaning nurses and family and sometimes Mom herself to go outside.

I thought about everything else another day. Today, and tomorrow.

First Book. Next Installment.

I read the following section of my memoir at the 2014 Winter Follies at Spoke the Hub. (Please never spell my name this non-way.) See if you can find one of the title contenders.

Dedicated, as always, to my amazing mom.

The year my mom died - 2013, last year - wasn't light. It sat on my shoulders and pressed me deeper to the earth, the earth they say receives us when we die. I saw the worst ravages of cancer claim her formerly healthy body. It only took nine months. She fought her physical demons and I fought my emotional ones, both of us staring down the prospect of our little unit of two being torn apart. It was unthinkable. I spent most of my childhood thinking it was unthinkable. Now it's my reality.

In another sense, though, the year was suffused with glow. It was the year I learned to take myself upside down in the advanced yoga classes I used to shy away from. It was the year I learned to lighten my own load of grief, discovering a fierce kickboxing warrior inside my runner's frame. It was a year with a lot of self-discovery and love along with grief and loneliness. It was the year in which I had to find a middle way - between that of my life with my mother and my life without her. It would take a book to tell you our story, a book that I'm writing, a book that will have this in it. It only takes a few minutes to tell you that she lived, she was so important, and I miss her with every fiber of the being that she made.

In The Long Goodbye, her memoir of her mother's illness and death, Meghan O’Rourke talks about mourners thinking that their lost loved one is somewhere else and will appear. I empathize. For me, it's like my mother is just around the corner, or behind an invisible wall that I can't beat down, no matter how hard I learn to punch. I wonder if some part of me thinks that writing this will bring my mother back. My words will somehow alchemize a turning back in time, or a sea change in biochemistry, a putting-together of rended matter. It sounds plausible to my little girl brain. The four year-old who lives in me doesn’t believe in the finality of death or what it does to the earthly body. The yoga teacher that I am now is starting not to either. It's more comforting that way, and there are holy traditions behind it.

I try to do things my mom did, to carry on her many, many small good works, working up to the bigger ones. I pledge to my local NPR affiliate in part because she always did. I compost like she did. I say, "Hey kids" the way that she did, and "I'm well, 'n you?". I wear her earrings and, when at home sometimes, her robe. I kept it folded next to my pillow for some months after her death. When I was tiny and she would leave me with a babysitter for a few hours, I would wear the same robe, and wouldn't go to sleep without it. I'm in grad school pursuing my Ph.D, and I'll be the second Dr. Ashton in our family, after my mother. I always knew it was something I wanted to do, but now I realize that it's in my blood.

Here's some of what I've learned in the year without her. Live your life as fully as you can. Don't save anything for a special occasion - use it now. Use it when it calls to you. Say the word love until you can live inside it. Make room for serendipity, and room within time. Breathe more deeply. Know that some things return. Some experiences repeat. This is the life you're living. Live fully within it. Nobody's keeping score but you, and guess what? You don't have to either. More people admire you than you even can imagine. And so many people love you. 

Moving (E)Motions

On NPR earlier this year, Sebastian Junger discussed the death of his friend Tim Heatherington, a journalist killed. He used a phrase to describe the pace of fear in combat - "[combat is] scary beforehand, the anticipation is very scary, and afterwards the fear catches up with you." The idea of an emotion catching up with you fits exactly with my experience of grief. I didn't have a lot of time to grieve when my mom was sick. I did it alone, at home, when I wasn't with her. I cried in hospitals, but I mostly tried not to, and tried to send all of my energy to helping her and hoping for her recovery.

Now, a little over nine months after her death, I'm grieving. (I could say I'm still grieving, but I hate the implication of "should be ending" that that little word adds. I'll grieve for the rest of my life - in healthy and productive ways, to be sure, but it will never end. The only way grief ends, I think, is if you don't love the person anymore.)

Compare Junger to this line from Fitzgerald's "The Crackup": "The world only exists through your apprehension of it." The first time I read that, I defined the second noun - apprehension - as understanding, as I think he intended. The second time, I thought of fear. Fear certainly creates worlds for some people. We talk a lot in yoga about letting go of fear, but it's not always so easy. When I was faced with the prospect of losing my mom's physical presence, I was more afraid than I've ever been. Now, just like grief, the fear is still with me - because the world without her is a scary place.

What fear and grief both do over time, rather than disappear, is shapeshift and change. They mold themselves to changes I'm making in my life. They shift a bit to the background, hovering, when I share happy memories of my mom or think of how earthshatteringly proud she'd be of me and all that I'm managing to handle without her.

Just as my fear and grief are unending, so does my mother surpass all boundaries. She is in the air, the sky, the sun, my smile. This isn't what either of us wanted, but it's what we have to handle, and I'm handling it in all the ways she taught me.

My Inspirations

My teacher Dana Flynn asked us to portray what inspires us. She emphasized thinking about what inspires us today, rather than yesterday or tomorrow.

Since breath is literal inspiration, I realized that I am currently being held up and pushed forward by things having to do with the movement of air. I wrote all this down more freely than I often do, letting my thoughts motivate and my fingers follow.

*

 "Can you give me a knockout / I'll turn it inside out."
--Air Waves

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Come as you are / As you were / As I want you to be."
--Nirvana

Kickboxing. (Gineen and Vlad and Emmanuel have helped me direct my breath and movement to a more badass place than I thought possible. They've given me a place to put my anger, and reasons to see past the things I thought I couldn't do and turn them into daily habits.) I can now put my old selves and my current self toward the same brave purpose, and there I find my eternal self.

* *

"Jailhouse gets empty."
--Sublime

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
--Pablo Picasso

"I'm not afraid."
--Eminem

Forearm stand. (Because of Dana and Sheri and Mary Dana, I am flying up the wall daily, and I am awestruck at my own ability to push aside the boundaries I've built for myself. I love this feeling.) I'm more free than I thought I could be.

* * *

"Take my hand 'cause I know what you're going through / At the time I had no way of knowing"
--Cut Copy

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose--a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."
--Mary Shelley

"He walked in circles till he was crazy and he lived that way forever"
--Neko Case 

The unseen. (Ali and Emily have opened my eyes to the subtle body and its powers.) I breathe into what I don't know and can't touch, and I'm suddenly aware of the energy that pulses through me and around me, and the things I can do to direct it into different physical and mental places.

* * 

"I love you 'cause you tell me things I want to know."
--The Beatles

"Find out who you are and do it on purpose."
--Dolly Parton

"And just where you are might be the right place / might be that sweet space / you don't know." 
--Blind Pilot

And, of course, my mother, the one who gave me breath in the first place, and held me through all life's difficulties, and and taught me to think as openly as possible. She is here with me as I breathe now, tracing her finger down the bridge of my nose like she did to calm me when I was a baby. Her baby. Her breath.

*

 "And who believes that my wildest dreams and craziest schemes will come true?"
--The Turtles

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Today is the greatest day I've ever known / Can't live for tomorrow"
--Smashing Pumpkins

Untitled

I have a recurring dream that I have lost my voice. I am sobbing for Mom, and sometimes I am screaming at someone about how unfair it is, and I can’t scream loudly enough. My voice chokes in my throat, and I scream without sound. When I wake, I don’t need much dream theory to suggest that this relates to the depth of my grief, and how it isn’t fully exorcisable, how it will always live in my chest along with my love for my mother. For the rest of my life, I will love and miss her. I will be only so happy. My happiness will always be laced with sadness - and yet I have to try to be twice as happy, for her, and for the happiness she embodied that she can no longer give to others. She gives it in memory, of course, and that is going to have to be enough - except it isn’t enough. It just is.

I hear a car on the avenue outside my window and I think it is my mother’s car pulling into the driveway of my childhood home. I think this for two full seconds, and then I remember. I travel back through grief and memory along the tow rope of the Way My Life is Now, Without Her, and I am back in Brooklyn, back in my pajamas, back writing about a mother who should be still alive but wasn’t given that chance. I should not be writing a eulogy. I should be planning to take her to Hawaii. I should be trying to convince her to visit, to hug her grandcat (a word I didn’t feel comfortable with her using until she got sick), to hug ME. I should be arguing with her over why I should take the couch and she should take my bed, with my discounted high thread count sheets. We should agree that they are not as luxurious as they should be, and we should then discuss that part of the appeal of hotels is the fact that you don’t have to do your own laundry. We should be making fun of my ex boyfriend together, and she should be meeting the dear friends of mine that she never got to meet. We should be visiting my aunt together.

I have done and will do all of these things. I have done some with her in life, and I will do all with her in death - in After Life, I guess I should say. To me, the After of her Life is togetherness with me. She is on my shoulder, in my heart, in my DNA, in my smile, in my eyes, in every breath, in every beat of my heart. I am without her, and she is within me. And it’s not enough. It just is.

Every Day Mothers' Day

This Fathers' Day (and every day), I celebrated my mom. She was a superparent. She raised me with little help, lots of love, and the kind of boundless energy and attention that I aspire to show a child someday. She made me inquisitive, brave, and sensitive. She challenged the boundaries I set for myself. She skipped down the street with me. She gave the best hugs. She listened, always. She worried about me. She reveled in my joys. She fought with steely, warm strength to stay alive, and she told me it was for me - I don't think I will ever receive a greater gift, nor be loved so hard. Her spirit sits on my shoulder, and her voice rings in my ears. I miss her with my whole self, and I am steeped in gratefulness for her love, her example, and the precious time that we had. Every new thing I do and every old thing I cherish is in her name. My Mama Nancy.

I also celebrated my auntie. She is my Mom Person now - more than an aunt. She is a best friend, a confidante, a tv watching buddy, a jokester, a good shoulder for tears, a tower of strength, a model of generosity. She has been dealt some jaggedly painful blows, two in just this year, and she honors the memory of our loved ones with her grace and generosity and bravery. I am so lucky to have her in my corner, and I will always be in hers. With my cousin and his wife, we are a little family that leaves room for the presences of our loved ones. Just try to pull us apart. You aren't strong enough. I love, you, famdamily.

Family: Loss and Love

From where I sit in my aunt's living room, I can almost see the room where my mother died. It's blocked by the bathroom door. One of the surprises of my visit here has been that I am not weirded out by walking through that room. I don't choose to spend time there, or to sit in the places where I often sat when Mom was dying, but I am okay being in the house. I came here because my uncle just died. My aunt lost her baby sister and her husband of forty years within four months of each other. My grief for my mother is deep, and I grieve for my uncle, but I also grieve for my aunt, and the unique and unfair position in which she finds herself.

My cousin and I have always been close, but now we are part of a special club. We have a bond that will never be broken: by losing our parents, we have become even closer. My cousin and my aunt are now my most immediate family. The three of us are a unit - it is now us against the world. We will have new traditions and inside jokes. My aunt will be the grandma to all of our children. Her house will become the family compound for holidays and special occasions. When I lost my mother, I felt the loss of my immediate family, but now I know that that was never true - i just lost the person at the core of it. It's a shattering loss, but not one that leaves me alone.

We have all cried a little on this visit - mostly tearing up. I decided a long time ago that crying is too emotionally and physically taxing to do all the time. My uncle died a week ago yesterday, and my mother died four months ago tomorrow. We have sat in the sun and reminisced. We have looked at family pictures. We have done lots of hugging. We have laughed until we wanted to pee. We have felt my mother and uncle's presences behind our conversations and shared experiences.

Someday I will wrestle small children onto the train along with my bags, and my husband and I will head up north to join the rest of my (now diminished) family here at my aunt's house. My aunt will pick us up at the station, and my cousin and his wife and their children will come out to meet us. We will remember my mom and my uncle, telling as many stories as the children's attention will hold, so that they can feel them as part of our family.

Little Things

I think that the little things kept my mother going through cancer, since so many of the more traditionally important ones were off-limits or impossible. When you can't go outside, the tweeting of a bird at the window is a bright spot in a monotonous day. When all your body does is hurt, an hour nap is a beautiful thing. Three months after her death, as I spiral into one of the most suffocating phases of grief (when the Toad Cave looms behind everything I do), I notice that the little things are all that feel important, some days. I only have a small fraction of my normal energy, so I have to be proud of myself for running in the unseasonable cold when before, I did it every day. A caring note from a friend means the world.

I have been thinking a lot about how to pull myself out of the cave. I discovered that a midday bath, in my particular bathroom, is a soul rejuvenator. (Listening to Charles Bradley at the same time helps even more.) I relaxed in the bath salted water in my tub, adding more and more hot water to the lukewarm silk of the bath oils. Then I had an exquisite moment under the shower, looking at the sun streaming through the water, making its way from the skylight to my face. For just a minute, I felt like everything might actually be okay, like my mom always used to tell me.

Some of my more prosaic small pleasures include: Vitamin Water Zero, warm breezes, a cat purring, my living room on a sunny morning, my block at night.

The (Over)-Interpretation of Dreams

Last night I dreamed that I lived in a two bedroom apartment owned by my real landlord, I guess in Brooklyn, but I don't know. I had a roommate, who I think was L, a friend of mine from my mom's hometown. L threw a lot of my stuff down the stairs, including the cat's litterbox. I went down and collected it while someone was seeing another apartment in the building. It was one of those dreams where I yell a lot: that if L had an issue with my stuff, she should have brought it up with me; that you don't just throw someone's stuff down the stairs; that I was the one with a good rapport with the landlord, so he'd back me up. At one point that roommate must have become another friend of mine, P, because I thought of the (real) text that P sent me about getting together this weekend, and sending me love.

This dream in particular makes me think about the dreams in which my anger tends to come up. Often it's rooted in a real incident, which makes this one interesting, because it didn't actually happen but it draws on past emotions from bad roommate situations. It isn't a rocket science observation that I must be filtering my rage at my mother's loss through other things. I'm intrigued at the fictionality of it, though - like why would I be mad at P? She is a dear friend who knows from grief, and has been quite an ally in my part of that process. I don't think I've been mad at her at all in the years I've known her. For that matter, the only thing I have to be mad at L about is that she hasn't offered any condolences. I'm trying not to be angry at people for that, because I know it's a tough subject and a lot of people just don't know what to say.

I'm still gathering my thoughts about Mom's first memorial on Sunday, and I've got some academic thoughts to work through, as well. (I'm trying not to turn this into a blog about grieving, but since it permeates my thoughts and life, it'll be part of this no matter what I intend.)

Refractions in the Self: or, the Toad Cave Theory

Part of the experience of grieving, for me, is knowing that there is now more than one person inside of my head. One of these people is my mother, who, to be fair, has always been there. Her voice comes out of my mouth when I talk to babies and animals. I also channel her when I teach, or when I have to be disappointed in someone, or when I am proud of someone, or when I console or congratulate a friend.

I'm also finding that I now have a divided self. There's the Normal Me, who writes every day, exercises like a maniac, laughs a lot, reads a lot, and is rarely home. The state of grief in which I now live overlaps that self with another, less familiar self. I think of this one as Toad Cave Me, because when I am most deeply sad over the loss of my loved ones, I feel like a toad at the bottom of a subterranean space, wedged in the corner of a deep, deep hole. I lie still, I cry a lot, and I sometimes lose momentary sight of the point of the things that Normal Me does. Normal Me moves a lot, and Toad Cave Me is the picture of outward inertia. (The brain can overpower the body, I guess.) Even when Toad Cave is on the move, she's lethargic and scared and often doesn't want to be where she is. You'll see both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me crying in the street, but I bet you could suss out the differences between us by our respective demeanors and the looks in our eyes.

Toad Cave Me has only appeared once or twice since my mother's death, and one of those times was immediately after my friend's death last week. The only other time she's been strongly present was a weekend when my mother was in the emergency room and a sort-of manfriend mostly best friend had just shattered my little heart to pieces. Toad Cave's presence makes sense, people tell me, because I am going through a serious trauma. My only parent is gone. Nobody misses her like I do. It takes more energy than I realize.

In the days after my mother's death, I was so motivated to be the daughter she knew that I wondered if stillness would ever come. It took about a month and a half for Toad Cave to reappear, on hiatus since my breakup and Mom's ER visit.

The ways I'm finding to pull away from Toad Cave's grasp now, or to ameliorate it when the pull is too strong, are varied. One is to imagine motion, and that at least lets me know that I'm valuing it almost as much as I normally do. Another is to stop, take a breath, run off and cry if I need to, and tell myself that feelings shift, and the courage and grit and love that my mother inculcated in me will rise to the surface soon enough, and help me power through. When it's really tough to move, another way is to ride out the stillness, to remind myself that it won't continue forever, that maybe I need the rest, and, above all, that my mother would be the first one to tell me that it's okay to take it easy, even for a mile-a-minute person like me.

Both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me are comforted by the recent words of a friend of mine: "How can you have expectations of yourself right now when you don't even know yet who you are without your mom around? Do the best you can do, for now. That's all you can do, anyway. And besides, it's enough."

Piling up

A dear friend was found dead in her apartment late one night last week. I am bowled over by her sudden, unexpected death - she was a vivacious person in her early thirties who had made lots of strides in creating the life she wanted. We don't yet know why she is no longer with us. I can't stop thinking about the overseas trip I was meant to take to visit her later this year. We were both so excited. Now her family has to bury her.

J was helping me through my mom's loss, out of the generosity and caring of a heart that was lucky enough not to have been through this. Now, in this space of missing both of them, I desperately want to talk to each to process the death of the other. All I wanted this weekend was to hide in my mother's arms and cry on her shoulder and ask, like a child, why J was taken from us so early. Now I have two loves' worth of grief sitting on my shoulders. My grief is not as bad as the fact of their absence, but it feels to heavy to carry nonetheless. Nobody shares both losses with me. I am the only one deeply mourning them both.

Another friend recently told me that when her dad died, she experienced several other losses soon after. She said she believes that when that happens, karma catches up with you and sets things right eventually. What really spoke to me was her conviction that the piling up-ness will end. My family's last experience of that was in 2003 and 2004 - my mother's cousin died, my grandmother died, our cat died, and at least two other relatives died, all in about a six month period. I had always thought of that as my annus horribilis, and I expected another the year of my mother's loss, but I thought I'd be much older and much more ready, and I didn't imagine any other deaths accompanying it.

While I am the only one mourning both my mother and J, I am also the only one who knows how their different versions of magic complement each other. My mom was magic. She raised me on her own, playing the double parental role with love, trust, and humor. She was the inciting architect of lots of my childhood daydreams and imaginings and plans, and she obliquely directed me to the path that allowed me to elaborate on them and work my way into a life of no small amount of creativity and movement. (That's a pretty good metaphor for my whole life, in a lot of ways.) She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. She knew which college would suit me before i knew, but she stayed quiet and watched m make my own decision. Even when she was dying, when she said that it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth.

J was magic, too. She earned three master's degrees before the age of thirty, and moved to a new country knowing nobody for the third one. She straddled the two cultures of her parents in beautiful and inspiring ways - talking to her always meant learning something about India or Ireland. As she helped me through Mom's illness and then my grief over Mom's death, she made sure I knew that because she was overseas, she was available to talk when nobody else was awake. We became friends because she reached out and told me she wanted to be, and I was so flattered, and now I am so grateful that I was able to have her in my life, even for a short time. My memories of her glow, and I will never forget her or stop missing her.

Both my mother and J were strong, brilliant women. Their intellects shone, and sometimes burned with the strength of their incandescence. They both cared so deeply about the world around them and the people inhabiting it, both in their immediate orbits and beyond. The world is a colder, sadder, duller place without them. I will spend the rest of my life missing them and trying to live up to their examples and their love.

Dharma Body

Thich Nhat Hanh says that when the Buddha was dying, he told his followers not to despair, that they still would be able to encounter his dharma body. I suppose this is one way of conceptualizing the presence of my mom's spirit that I so often feel.

I want to unpack it a bit, though. Dharma is, per Wikipedia (I know, but go with me), "that which upholds, supports or maintains the regulatory order of the universe." Based on the distinction that the Buddha draws between the physical body and the dharma body, we can infer that the latter is not corporeal. It must be what many of us would think of as spiritual, or the soul itself. But in the West, we don't have this added dimension of support for the universe.

I'm thinking of the dharma body now as the universe's scaffolding - everyone's soul/true self pitching in like the turtles in the Native American legend, each playing his or her own part in holding up the universe - or repairing it, if we want to turn to my originally chosen spiritual tradition. (I'll get to shul again one of these days, I swear). I love the way different faith and belief traditions dovetail; my mom's memorial will be a testament to that, as it fit with her beliefs, too.

Though I feel so disparate, not unified, scattered in my grief, I also know that I am being held together by certain things, and one of those is my mother's dharma body and the force of her love.