Tag Archives: Loss

Life Is Going To Get Us: On Close Calls & Gratitude: Everyday Magic, Day 361

Posted on July 8, 2011 | 3 Comments

In the past few days, I’ve heard from two friends who lost close friends, another diagnosed with cancer, several facing financial despair and one in great physical pain. Then I woke up this morning to several friends’ postings on facebook about gratitude, not the kind of mild satisfaction at getting a check in the mail, but gratitude rooted in vast appreciation and understanding of what it means to be alive against the backdrop of close calls.

When I was going through chemo and bouts of fear storms about mortality, I had a realization that stayed with me: surviving anything means being around to survive or not survive another. Life is going to get us, one way or another whoever we are, whatever dark leafy greens we do or don’t eat, and whatever we believe: our beloveds will endure hardship, pain and eventually die, and so will we.

Yet at the same time, life is going to “get” us: show us who we really are stripped clean from our stories of why we are this way or that. Even the “this way or that” will fall away in a moment: sitting in a doctor’s office, trying to take in a surprisingly diagnosis; answering the phone to discover an old drinking buddy and sweet conspirator has died; running into someone we haven’t seen in decades and who only knows us long before however we clothed and accessorized our identity.

That moment, one that comes more often for me after rounding the half-way point of what I hope will be a long life, when a close call cleanses us free of any illusions is also a moment to land in gratitude. Not to say there’s not sufficient or overwhelming pain, grief, loss, betrayal, anger and despair also, but being shaken alive so often shakes people into gratitude for this life. I think of funerals where I hear, “At least she’s not in pain anymore,” or car accidents when so often the talk is, “We were so lucky to be hit on this side of the car instead of that side.” I think of the writing groups I lead for people with serious illness who, even when facing years ahead with Parkinson’s or very limited years with late diagnosis cancer, the writing and talk is both “Life sucks” and “I’m lucky to be alive.”

I remember especially a woman from an advanced metastatic disease group I facilitated last summer. She had late-stage pancreatic cancer, and wrote about how thrilled she was that her young children could now ride their bikes on their own to the mailbox and back, down their long driveway. She was happy because that showed her they would be able to get around some after she was gone which, sadly, came to pass within months. While I doubt her children will ever be grateful their mom died, I hope they can feel some of what she felt: a gratitude for life cycling itself forward.

It seems the flurry of close calls and losses comes in waves, and many of my friends are riding such a wave now. While there aren’t words to made up for whatever is gone, whoever has died or however the next medical scan turns out, I hope we can all get the gratitude on the backside of the close calls, which opens our tender, breaking hearts to the song of life.

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Mark is Gone: Everyday Magic, Day Nine

Posted on July 22, 2010 | 12 Comments

“hard to write this    Mark Larson died    blood clot after surgery     tears  db” — that’s what the email said, coming from my friend Danny to the Kansas Area Watershed Council listserv at noon today. I was sitting at Signs of Life, in the middle of a serious multi-tasking frenzy, when I was stopped stunned in my tracks. I did the only thing I could think to do: pack up, walk to the car, and drive to Danny’s so we could look at each other and ask how this happened, how this could happen.

I met Mark over 28 years ago through KAW and he’s been a steady part of my life ever since. Mark and I ran with the same pack to and through potlucks, campouts, presentations, workshops, protest marches, heart-to-hearts and more potlucks. We sometimes had a complicated friendship in the early days — seems my New Yorker sometimes hard-hearted 20-something-year-old self clashed easily with his farmboy-quiet-sensitive 40-something-year-old self. Once we even tried to share a house — he wanted companionship, and I needed a roommate. It was a disaster, but at least a short-lived one, and time is a great equalizer.

We connected mainly through bioregionalim, poetry, and occasional forays into rich desserts. He knew our children from birth onward, and although they scared him at times (scared me, too), he gave them enough benefit of a doubt to enjoy good talks with them every so often. He even knew our families of origin. In  recent years, Mark was always at any party, bat mitzvah, graduation celebration, walkabout and whatever else we hosted, and occasionally, he even dropped by on a Saturday morning to sit in our living room and visit. What I liked most about conversations with him is how he often used the phrase, “Say,” as in “Say, did you happen to see….” I find that phrase as charming as “right as rain.” Mark was kind of like a relative — a cousin who lived in the same town. I’ve had his phone number memorized for close to three decades.

Eventually, all the veils are lifted, and we start to see glimmers of who we are beneath who we think we are or the other is. Mark loved gardening, writing and reading poetry, studying nature, working for justice, being heard and helping others hear, and his little dog, Felix. He was frugal to the point of outrageousness, dogged about standing up for those with no voice, and steady presence in many groups and many circles. He could sit through meetings with the best of them and put together potluck dishes from the garden and what he salvaged. Although a relatively quiet person, he thrived on being around people and being involved in the community.

While it’s obvious at this moment how much I took for granted that Mark would be around for a long time longer, it’s also obvious how little we can see who will die when and how. Mark was probably about 77 or 78, but seemed younger. He was pretty healthy, walked a lot and wanted to walk more — which is what led him to the hospital to get his second knee replaced on Monday. No way of knowing that on Tuesday a blood clot loosened by the surgery would cause him to have a heart attack and die.

Meanwhile, my child-mind struggles with its little explanations of “Why do people keep dying?” while my elder-mind answers, “Because this is what life does.” I stared mindlessly into space, mis-hear “meth addicts” as “methodists,” eat too much or too little, can’t work or can’t stop working, all as ways to cope with what I can’t fathom. Mark is gone. And he won’t be back.

Photos: All are on my computer from years of knowing Mark. Bottom photo is most recent: Mark at Natalie’s graduation party in May, 2010, talking with Gary.

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The End is the Beginning: Everyday Magic, Day Five

Posted on July 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

I just walked in after my last class of yoga teaching training, finishing a year of one weekend each month devoted to doing yoga, studying anatomy, chopping vegetables while singing kirtan (call and response chanting), puzzling over The Bhagavadita and Yoga Sutras, and talking a lot about how to teach a spiritual practice. While there are many pages I could fill talking about how beautiful it was to be a group of vibrant women covering a wide span of years and to follow the lead our gifted teacher, Gopi Sandal — not to mention coming to experience how Bhakti yoga — the yoga of devotion — unfolded in my life, for now I just want to say something about endings.

All weekend, I knew this was the ending: This particular group of women meeting for 16 hours each month, these places where we met (at Gopi’s home and mostly at the Holiday Inn Express, dubbed the Holy Day Inn), this exact configuration of hotter-than-hell humidity and very large cucumbers and vibrant tomatoes punctuating our meals today, these moments we spent breathing together in Corpse pose or doing Sun Salutations in tandem. There was a bittersweet undercurrent that made our ordinary work together a little shinier, a little sadder, a lot more vivid. I told myself to pay attention to these moments as they unfolded, and such attention also brought to each moment more of its innate weight and greater lightness too. I found myself laughing and crying more easily, resting deeper, stretching further.

At the same time, as we lay in a circle at the end — our heads touching or almost touching in the center of the circle we made — I was also cognizant how this is the beginning of whatever is next: in our individual yoga practices, in our occasional ways we’ll do yoga together, in our connections when we run into each other in the parking lot of the Merc (our local food co-op) or on facebook. Just as yoga itself brings us back to the beginning — the beginning of the breath, the beginning of the open space in the mind when we lift over the steady noise of our thoughts, the beginning of not knowing, and the beginning of knowing in our bones and muscles how to reach past our previous limits and land in new strength and flexibility — so do the passages we make with good company. Together we’ve passed through a year of edges, in the weather, in each other’s lives, in our understandings, in our motions and stillness.

Not so surprisingly, signs of beginnings abound, particularly in seeing the small pea chicks at Gopi’s, just born a few days ago and guarded by a tired but attentive peahen and strutting peacock. All year long, we’ve been enamored with these birds who were very timely with their calls and perching outside the living room window at key points of discussion on yoga philosophy. Now there are more than two of them, including one new one with an injured leg for whom we wish quick healing and easy walking. After all, he’s just at the beginning of his own awakening, and like us, he’s ready to discover what life has to say to him next.

Gopi Sandal’s next teacher training class starts in Sept. — contact her through Bhaktivana Yoga if you’re interested, or just come join me at yoga there sometime. Top photo by Aly Youngster.

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The Best Pie-Maker in the World: Remembering My Dear Friend Weedle

Posted on February 17, 2008 | 1 Comment

When Paul called my little cell phone that evening, I was immediately taken by the very still tone in his voice. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he said. I wondered if Weedle had a heart attack or a minor accident, but before I could spin out a scenario that ended with everyone intact, he said, “Weedle was killed in a car accident.”

Paul. Weedle. The friends we knew well before they found each other. Paul, who used to live in an upstairs apartment of a small alleyway home, the hermit of Old West Lawrence with his books, architectural drawings, sharp mind and beautiful heart. Weedle, who lived for years in an old farm house in Vinland, where she majored in meat loaf, child-rearing, a weary-but-knock-you-over humor, piles of books, insane genius in any word-focused board game, and the very best pies in the cosmos. Weedle was what you would get if you cross-pollinated Mary Englebreit with Rosanne Barr (the Rosanne before she just had one name) – and by the way, she loved both Mary and Rosanne.

I first connected with Weedle in a large car with her then-husband Walt, friends Dan and Kat, and my not-yet-husband Ken. We drove around Kansas City, laughing uproariously, switching lanes fast on our way home from a Joni Mitchell concert at the Starlight Theater. The night smelled like roses, honeysuckle, car fumes, popcorn, and darkness. Weedle demanded we stop at a quick shop so she could get her mandatory diet Pepsi.

At the time, most of us subscribed to walking the carob road, eating little or no white sugar, chocolate, dairy, meat, and generally consuming a whole lot of tofu, granola, and those awful carob brownies. But Weedle never followed convention in such ways.

Weedle had an intellect of immense sharpness and wit, a heart as big as all the pies (and we’re talking thousands here) she ever baked lined up across Kansas, and God help you if you ever crossed her. Weedle loved her friends, family, and especially Paul and her children like nobody’s business, with a fierceness that rivaled a pack of Grizzlies. She collected quirky and moving tales from the lives of her children that showed just how much she loved watching them grow up, try new things and new places. The thrill of her day was when the cell phone rang with a call from Laurel, Will, Kevin or Kelly. She also adored all their spouses and sweethearts, she was over the moon about her grandchildren – Katie, Allison and Joshua.

She was also the funniest person I ever met.

At a party at our house last year, people were hanging close to the kitchen table, covered with beads of all kinds for making jewelry. Food overflowed the kitchen counters nearby, and there were about 30 of us reaching over each other for a piece of turquoise or another slice of Weedle’s cherry pie. Weedle herself was on the phone, trying to reach Paul to find out when he would be here, but the phone was continuously busy.

“I can’t reach him. He must be downloading porn,” she announced before taking another sip of her diet Pepsi. Now for anyone who knew Paul, imagining him downloading porn was analogous to George W. Bush revealing that he was a gay, vegan, meditating Pacifist with the IQ of Einstein. The next hour, she kept juggling the joke about Paul downloading porn, to the point that when he arrived, a bunch of bead-bearing women immediately called out, “You done downloading porn?”

Weedle cooked up more than jokes. She was the diva of the kitchen in the grand tradition of comfort foods. Nobody made spaghetti and meatballs, meatloaf, fried chicken, chocolate chip cookies, mashed potatoes, gravy and especially bread like her. When I was walking gingerly from the car to my bed after my hysterectomy, Weedle was already on her way with an industrial-sized tray of her chicken pot pie.

Of course it was her pie-making ability that trumped all. She could not only make the best-tasting pie (winner of grand prizes in the very competitive pie division of the Vinland Fair, and deemed by my mother-in-law, a fellow pie competitor, to be the best ever), but she did it at the speed of light. I once timed her making a cherry pie from scratch (although the cherries came from a can) to oven: 6 minutes. Really, I’m not making this up. Her hands knew dough.

Her heart knew love. When Weedle met Paul over 15 years ago (at my backroom prompts of, “Weedle, Paul likes you,” and “Paul, Weedle likes you”), she met her match in mind and heart. While Paul is relatively quiet and internal, he fit around her like an exquisite home-made quilt. “You were the love of her life,” I reminded Paul the night she died as we sat in the kitchen, dishes Weedle washed in the drying rack behind us, and to our left, the open oven to warm the room. “She was the love of my life,” he answered.

She found in Paul someone who also brought home piles of library books to read on everything from the Black Sea to Harry Potter. They went to farmer’s market together. They walked their pony-sized Great Pyranees down country roads. They took trips to Chicago, New York, and other outposts. They played with their granddaughters. And they sat with us and our friends Courtney and Denise playing board games, mostly “Taboo,” a game where you have to make your partner guess the word on a card without saying the obvious thing. “It’s like a….” Weedle began. “Dishwasher,” I yelled, and we were right, again in a kind of telepathic word-game connection neither of us understood. Together, we prided ourselves on wiping our opponents into the ground, and we never lost when we played as a team.

Weedle was a whiz at any game that had to do with speed, words, imagination, and no wonder: As a long-time librarian after being an excellent elementary school teacher, and a writer, she was always a storyteller. When the kids were little, when the kids were grown, when the grandkids were born, when she took a road trip, when she stayed home.

The first Weedle story I fell in love with concerned her taking Will, who was just a little kid at the time, to see Bambi. When Bambi’s mother died, little kids throughout the theatre raised an intense collective crying chorus. After they were finally soothed quiet by their mothers, the movie’s final scene revealed a pastoral twilight expanse, with smoke from a campfire in the distance. “Is that where they’re cooking Bambi’s mother?” Will yelled out, tilting all the kids in the theatre into hysteria again.

Weedle loved that story for its irreverence and freshness, for its perspective, too, all three of which were ample in Weedle’s surprisingly-tender, full-voiced, fierce and imaginative writing. From her short essays for an old Lawrence publication, Well, Well, Well, to the brilliant memoir she was writing of late, Weedle’s writing brought to the page all you saw of her and so many more layers. The writing was gorgeously funny and poignant, just like the writer. It was one of Weedle’s great dreams to have more of her writing published.

As the news lands, I remember the long after-dinner walks we took from her house to the road alongside the elementary school, watching the sunset through fields of coming twilight. I see her turning to my children – from the time they were babies through their teen years – to hand them cookies, videos to watch, and roll her eyes at wry asides. I think about the last time we were together, New Year’s Eve, with Paul, Ken Denise, Courtney, Marek, Daniel, Natalie and Forest to eat vast quantities of miniature eggrolls and toast the New Year with sparkling grape juice at 8:30 p.m.. We played a game we had come to love because it often made all of us laugh ourselves into falling-over crying.

It’s called, “Moods,” and for this game, there are 8 moods, each on a card, displayed at any given time. When it’s your turn, you draw a card with a statement like “It’s getting bigger” or “Would you like fries with that?” and shake the dice in a little cup, look inside, and see which number mood you have to bring into how you say this statement. Everyone else has to guess which mood you’re conveying in your voice.

Life is giving us all a new card to draw here, and the moods on the table, for me this week, are numbness, irritability, fear, grief, despair, spacey-ness, love, and sadness. I know Weedle is on the other side of the table even though I can no longer see her, and my heart is breaking at how far away she is. Yet at home, on the shelf in our refrigerator door, are a few cans of diet Pepsi she brought for herself for New Year’s Eve. I think I’ll keep them there as a fitting and well-placed memorial of someone, even without the diet Pepsis, I never could forget.

Please see http://www.LovingWeedle.blogspot.com for a community scrapbook on Weedle and lots of her good writing.


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