My Last Words on Grief

Recently I ran across an anonymous quote that not only summed up the last four years for me, but also a similar experience for my eldest son. The quote went something like this: "I felt so much, that I started to feel nothing." Take that in for just a minute. It's kind of a mind bender. And it wasn't until I saw this (somewhere on social media) that finally put into words where I had been. Past tense. 

For my son, he had lost his best friend of sixteen years, his soul friend, his Anam Cara—his name was Jeff. For me, this young man was as near of a son as you can get without birthing them. And he died. Unexpectedly at 37, in multifaceted ways of messed-upness and oddly divine at the same time. It is a day I will never forget and one of my worst recorded days on the planet, including being the chosen one to deliver the news to his parents. Twice. "Can you repeat that?" 

Being on the inside of grief, I've come to realize that I began to live some kind of new norm. I lost the vision of my own hopes, dreams, wants and desires. Try as I might, I couldn't see them anymore—let alone feel into them. I spent a good two years feeling very numb, going inward, not wanting to come out and play with the world, and then another two years taking baby steps to dance again with life. Occasionally, I'd feel a pang of joy and rekindling to my past yearnings and yet those moments didn't yield themselves with any kind of sustainability. My synapses were regenerating but they were on their own timeline. 

During what I will call my regenerative time, a romantic relationship presented itself, and I knew I still had a deep longing for one, yet it was just out of my emotional reach and more than anything it kept shining a light on where I was in my process. It was frustrating not being able to be on the same page as he (and equally frustrating for him) and I actually began to feel bad about myself. Which I finally got was not right and I forgave myself for exactly where I was. He wasn't wearing my shoes, and I wasn't wearing his and by no parties fault could places be truly understand, appreciated and without circumstances being taken personally. It's hard to be a human sometimes. And there isn't one library shelf full of 'self-help' books or a room full of good-willing people that can talk you or love you out of grief. In fact, there can be more harm than good when you can't allow someone to be as they need to be, and love them right where they are, unconditionally. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just sayin'. 

They will be back. I am back. I'm so happy to be back! Sometimes you don't know where you went, until you come back. It's been a long time coming...

So what happened? How'd I find my way back? Who the heck knows! Time. Space. Time. Space. Time. Space. Nature. 

All I know is that the opening, clearing and reconnection to my feeling self started on a beautiful solo hike in Death Valley in March, one month from the four year anniversary of Jeff's death. Reconnecting more and more through every hike out into nature, and I've been on plenty since. Then profound opening experiences were exploding inside me during the road trip I made across four states, and back, in June. The answer(s) to the question I was repeatedly being asked, I could actually answer with all of my heart and authenticity: "What do you want, Lori?" My heart started to pound out of my chest with my own resurging information! I was dreaming again about love, marriage, kissing, travel, moving, dancing, playing...the list goes on and on. Life. Feeling. Joy. 

My last words on grief. Don't judge someone who is going through this process, don't take it personally, those are all positions from the ego. That is neither love nor loving. Don't give them books to read, or your own unsolicited advice or opinions. Instead, open your heart a little bit bigger and spread it wide into a holding place until we can hold ourselves fully open again. That is love.

2-2-2

Today is 2/22/16—February 22nd, 2016.

It starting happening in 1997. I would wake up consistently out of a deep sleep at 2:22 a.m. As a studier of numerology I looked up all the known meanings and symbolic messaging around this trilogy of digits, and nothing seemed to add up for me. The year 1997 marked a period in my life that was quite transitional, and these numbers showed up on the embryonic side of a life rebirthing process—of course at the time I had no idea (like most of us) what was coming down the path.

The numbers starting appearing more frequently in my awake hours; license plates, register receipts, signs...you name it. They even show up as part of the number sequence in my driver's license.

I delved more deeply into inquiry about their potential message—what does it mean and why does it keep happening? When the calendar date of February 22nd rolled around, year after year, I thought "something" was going to happen. Nothing ever did. Never won the lottery, of course I never played it on that day either, perhaps I will today. ;-)

It wasn't until 1999 on a return trip from my birthplace in Lancaster, Ohio that I realized the address of the home that I had been born into was 222 Maple Street. I didn't see it when we toured that little town preserved-in-time, and only after I picked up my photos from the photo lab did I make the connection. I couldn't believe it! The strange thing was, while I was there in Ohio visiting my grandmother, that I felt this incredible connection to it, even though I moved away and to California near my third birthday. The house was very modest, clad in white clapboard, where the numbers 222 hung quietly on a downward slant. Wow, I'm home! I also was remembered that my birth-time, NOT 2:22 a.m., was 2:12 a.m. Thinking about that now, I wonder if it took me 10-minutes to wake up to the fact that I had arrived, taken my first breath, cleared my lungs and head from my mother's anesthesia. Just a thought. Nonetheless, this WAKE-UP time on the beside clock in 1997 was a wake-up call. Literally. Three years later I would find myself divorcing, children coming to the end of their mothering needs, jobless and about to be homeless (not the living on the streets kind,) finding my way to a new life.

The numbers continued and continue to show up for me today. I've learned over the years that to bring some kind of meaning to them, is a forced exercise in intellectualizing something, that isn't THAT. What I began to realize and accept them for are divine pointers. If I had some unfounded doubts about something, that series would show up for me as if to say "Yes come this way!" Or "You're on the right track." "Keep going, keep showing up!"

I don't overthink them any more. When they show up I simply smile and offer them a quiet internal note of gratitude. Thank you 2-2-2 for being my divine pointer—my divining rod.

The Trip that Rocked my World – Part I (June 14, 2014)

I was beyond excited, already grinning at the mere fact that I was visiting a new city, staying in a beautiful hotel suite (feeling like a Queen) and about to visit the architectural work of Frank Gehry. I’m his #1 fan—but he doesn’t know that.

As we rounded the corner to the Pacific Science Center, I saw the Seattle Space Needle peeking above the tree line, behind it hints of the colorful and wiggly work of Gehry, his architectural signature in contoured lines of bended metal sculpting the EMP building.

Giddy as a teenage girl, I’m armed and ready with my Canon arsenal dangling from my right shoulder. I’m wide-eyed and smiling ear-to-ear. I can’t believe I am here!

Just around the next bend, we’re almost there, just a few more steps to my own personal amusement park of architecture and…BAM!

The pathway, lacy concrete block style pavers, specifically made for grass to grow in between the decorative gaps, proved to be more dangerous than met my eyes and greeted my feet. The ill perceived evenness skewed by its indifference to shadow and light, under the typical overcast Seattle sky. My right foot caught by an unexpected elevated section, sent me flying—and by no means was this first class with champagne and steaming warm towels.

I knew in my heart that I would not be recovering from my own body’s trajectory. It’s incredible just how fast the mind works. Tried as I might to adjust my core to right myself with invisible wings, I shifted into a preparation for landing, which was no more than a thought, less than a split second acknowledgment to myself that I was going down, with no landing gear to speak of.

I’m sure you’ve experienced the phenomena of time slowing down during events like these. Yet in reality, it all happened so fast. My hands instinctively lifted up and came forward to protect my body and my face from the now inevitable impact with the ground before me.

Down, down, down.  My eyes closed shut tightly. I mean who wants to see what’s coming right? Pain starts to register in so many places my brain can’t file the information quite that fast. What to attend to first? I feel the bulk of the impact in my right breast. I landed on my camera. The lens that had been pointing out and away had somersaulted inward and broken my fall. I would learn later that my fall had also broken my lens. (Side not to Apple, the rest of the trip was photographed with my iPhone!)

My eyes remained closed for a while. It was better that way I thought. I began to scan my body, check-in on my own collateral damage. I rolled over onto my back, knees bent and up. I hear Steve saying “Don’t move… don’t get up.” I wasn’t going anywhere. The information continued to pour in on me, over me. Broken bones? Nope, don’t think so. No need for the bone density test. Check! I can feel certain parts radiating out in painful reaction. The top of my right foot, palms of both of my hands, my knees and elbows and my right breast. That’s going to hurt. I had no clue then just how true my thought would actually manifest.

As I laid on the ground I could hear people as they passed by speaking in concerned tones, asking “Is she okay?” After some time, I slowly rolled up with assistance to a seated position and today as I think back to that very dazed moment in time, I was in some kind of altered state. Somewhere between here and there…

Fast-forward one year as I reflect today on the, count-them-on-less-than-two-hands, pain free days, I remain grateful and for the healing hands that continue to bring me back to my whole being. I’m sure there are many great lessons to be learned, as of this entry I have not met them all…yet.

Notes from the Purple Bench

Do you ever have moments where you wonder if you are doing enough with your life? I do. I'm not a rocket scientist, nor am I a PhD working on the latest cure for cancer. And for the most part, I am satisfied with how I've participated in the career world and in my personal life. It's curious however, that I continue, now and again, to have these kinds of 'less than' thoughts.

My greatest accomplishment to date [according to me] may be summed up in two really nice human beings I birthed and loved into this world. Yet there are times when in the midst of people with impressive educational acronyms behind their names, a shadow is cast in self-doubt and reflection of what kinds of value I have contributed here during my time of Earth.

Why is that?

It seems, in America at least, the standards of success and value are wrapped up tightly in what we do as workers, how much we bank, what kind of car we drive and where we live. This is the short-list of those sort of markers of "making it."

And so I wonder...am I supposed to be doing more, being more, making more, buying more? Just yesterday I actually had one of those damn thoughts waft through my head!

And then something happened to stop me in my thoughts.

I carry a belief the 'Universe' can hear what we think, say, question and feel, and will respond [sometimes in record time] in-kind with some type of message. On the heels of my thought/question [am I doing enough?], I found a note from the Universe in the form of a yellow sticky wrapped around a music CD I had left on my purple bench for neighbors to take, the one that sits on the city parkway for my neighbors to take a load off during their neighborly strolls.

I had just decided the day before to begin a collection of photographs of the bench. I occasionally see neighbors sitting on the bench, but more often I only know someone has been there with the obvious shuffling of pillows rearranged for each person's individual taste and comfort. Evidence that someone has been there when I wasn't looking. I snapped the first in the series and walked over to the bench to see if the CDs had all found new homes.

There were two remaining out of the original five and oddly one of them had a note attached. Strategically wrapped and tucked into the CD sleeve to keep it from blowing away, here is how it read:

"Hello Sweet People on the Corner. I really enjoyed listening to this CD. Thank you for sharing your positive energy and for also making this a happy corner in the neighborhood. My daughter and I come by every day on our walk. Thanks! Noelle & Grace."

A blanket of warmth ran over my heart as it grew exponentially with the reading of the note. This 3" x 3" yellow square a prime example of what money does not buy, the priceless value of humanity working at its best and a note from the Universe [and the purple bench] that I am enough, I am contributing something of value and making a difference here on Earth.

I've also decided that my curriculum vitae [the course of my life] may need a little rewriting to include a section titled, "Notes from the Purple Bench." Signing off to write a note back to Noelle & Grace and post it on the telephone pole.

Love: Lost and Found

At age 18, what usually marks the time to spread one's wings and fly free from the family tree, I fell fast and hard from the nest instead. My wings unprepared and entangled with the twigs and twine of the nest builders, only to become paired up with another fledgling.

I've often thought that my life as a budding adult, through what is deemed as the 'identity phase' [roughly18-25] was put on pause. Over the years, I've looked inside from the mature responsible woman's exterior and could still see and feel the 18 year old in me waiting for the fun, adventures and reckless abandon to begin. Hold please! The path of individual growth merged with the care and responsibility of other fledgling beings. Forty years down the road I still have a sense of her and through later-in-life experiences she has emerged ethereally a beautiful bird soaring at unimagined heights with layered depths of perception.

I've listened with big attentive ears to the stories of youth through the breathed memories of others. I can't say I ever really feel sad or a loss around my chosen path versus the path of [natural order]. It's as if I already knew it, through a past life perhaps, and so I walked before I crawled into adulthood, I mothered on the edge of transition between child and adult. Many of my ideals and dreams stowed away for another time. That time is now.

The recent passing of my 58th birthday has me reflecting on my wants and desires, the list of which has been tempered with time. Shortened to nothing that money can buy. A sincere soulful attempt to "do unto others" from the book I've never read and to love and honor myself. To understand and live the rest of this life knowing that, just as I am—I am enough. To no longer rely and look for praise and love outside of myself, for that path is entwined with the opposite effect that can clip our own wings of wonder. Everything else that arrives at this point is, as they say, icing on the cake.

I've arrived at this much spoken about [unaccepted] place of self love. Not withstanding going through some very low, alone and dark places. Those places might just be prerequisites and damn hard lessons in the cirriculum of life. (Insert smiley face here.)

I wish everyone could feel this kind of love. It is freedom, it is peace, it is love. It's our birthright.

This Moment

If all I have is this moment, then what?

I slide into the perfection of support from the genuis of an Adirondack chair.

I gaze out from the deck into the enchanting forest inhabiting the island.

I see the sun rising in a quiet peek-a-boo through the trees.

I listen to the sounds as the winds dance in whispers around limbs and leaves. 

I smile as the sun's shine paints in hues of warmth and glistening effects. 

I admire the fluttering leaves above dripping like diamonds against new morning skies.

I thank God for allowing me, in this moment, to be in "it."

Little notes from the A-frame on Islesboro Island, Maine. 

A Fork in the Tree

It was the last morning at the A-frame on Islesboro Island, Maine and the sun was shining in full strength for the first time in a few days. The surrounding landscape of trees, the enchanting forest, started to come alive.

In one unfolded moment, a beam of light projected itself onto a tree to my right, illuminating first a section of its branches then the leaves. The branches formed a couple of V-shapes with my mind bent toward this thought, "A fork in the tree."

What followed next goes a little something like this: A chipmunk scurried up the trunk of tree. Like a fork in the road it hit a point of decision, where two branches meet. One going this way, the other going that way. And unlike the human-way...the chipmunk at the fork in the tree, with great instinctual nature and without a moment in hesitation—made its choice.