Alice in Authorland

Fire, Water, Mother Earth, God, Angels, transform me. Rebirth me. Pull me from the ashes. I welcome the metamorphosis. I do not resist. I do not go numb or deaf or die. I awaken. I’m a seedling under the cement—screaming to bloom. I’m parched for water and sunshine. I seek the light with my entire being. Even in the night, I see the stars. I’m enchanted. I feel angels hovering over me, making way for me to break through. Everything is different now: my brain, health, vision, belief, expectation… The sky is lavender tanzanite. Clouds are the purest white. My voice. My tears. My physical presence shifts. I am hearty. I’m here for the party, hangover and all. I’m learning to BE. Remembering to listen. Walls have fallen. Boundaries clarify. My scars expose themselves without apology. My dreams arise, not from my mind. Time is precious. Moment by moment. Intention for pleasure. Acceptance of pain. Connected. Alive. In all the messiness. All that it means. What no longer matters. Beauty to behold. Unafraid. Unattached. Free.

Yoga does me, the way a good man can. Since my man died, and I’m not ready to leap into another’s arms, I do yoga.

I did yoga before he died. I did yoga before we got together. It feels good to stretch my tight muscles, like a massage from the inside, based on movement and breath.

Yoga’s simple, but rarely easy. I went on a yoga teacher training retreat. After doing yoga 2-4 times a day for six days, the last experience was excruciating. Not in my body, but in my unmanageable mind. What? Are you fucking kidding me? Haven’t we done enough yoga?! That was my practice for the day. Yoga mirrors life.

Off the mat, I find myself saying, Haven’t I done enough? Eaten enough vegetables, drank enough water, seen enough loved ones die?

When I heard the news about Kevin, I thought, What? Are you fucking kidding me? He’s dead? That’s not possible. But it was. I could feel my heart hugging itself so tight for protection it was closing. Grief had me. My reality was pulled out from under me. I felt sucker punched by the universe.

I couldn’t get myself to do anything. I texted two girlfriends saying I’d go to yoga if they’d pick me up. Their answer had an exclamation point.

It started to rain. I made a cup of tea and relaxed on the couch with a thousand reasons to back out.

Grief wanted to hold me back. I suddenly wondered if there’s such a thing as grief yoga. There is.

In the midst of my heavy sadness, I felt hope. I can’t explain it,

but grief, writing, and yoga feel like my three sisters. I may have a lifelong relationship with them.

Because, shit—people are going to die in my life. This will not be the last time I’ll grapple with grief.

She’s a hard, tough, mean coach, with wisdom and heart. Grief softens and I strengthen with each yoga practice.

I practice being present. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by music or a movement. Yoga opens me up.

When Kevin first died, I went to yoga with desperation to have some sort of control and someone tell me what to do because in the face of death, I lost my sense of direction.

I asked the instructor if it was ok to cry in yoga and could she please focus on opening the heart?

People in yoga were gracious. They gave hugs like sharing food. They didn’t expect me to talk. They were strangers and I felt at home.

I do yoga because my mom died at age 56. Though the doctors called it cancer, I’d argue my brother’s death from a car accident five years prior caused the broken heart that hit my mom like an illness.

I don’t welcome either of those to live in my body. Yoga makes me stronger, safer, more present and peaceful as I make my way through life’s WTF? moments.

I started to send my nephew a text: Happy 4^th of July! I stopped—the 4^th. My boyfriend Kevin died on March 4^th. It’s been four months.

I shouldn’t have a calendar in my head for these things. I rarely remember my nephews’ birthdays, but death imprints itself upon my brain. December 10^th, April 28^th, March 4^th. Fuck the 4^th and the 10^th and the 28^th! And Tuesdays, Fridays, and all the days people die on. My friend’s brother died on June 14^th. Found on his kitchen floor—his last mess at age 61. Fuck the 14^th.

As if life isn’t hard enough, my heart hurts watching the news. Sometimes I force myself to avoid it. It’s too much pain, like all of humanity is breaking. My heart aches for those who’ve gone numb or crazy and those they take it out on irresponsibly, too often violently. I worry about our collective society.

All the while, Kevin’s death scrolls like the news feed across the screen of my life. I grapple with logic and buck-up bullshit I don’t appreciate others saying. I wrestle with my grief as I reach to overcome it.

It’s Independence Day! I want to celebrate my independence and my freedom, but that’s not how I feel. I feel hollow, sad, and sick with grief.

After Kevin died, I no longer hold my independence like a trophy. Just an empty hand that he held too tight and made feel so right. Freedom? What’s freedom if you can’t enjoy your deepest desire?

Last night, I watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. After Oscar lost his father on 9/11, the boy began chasing time, his father’s clues, and the impossible. Yep, that’s what grieving humans seek.

Our country’s founders pursued the impossible when they formed the United States of America. Today it feels like we’re all divided—like the divisions in my heart—pieces trying to break off and walls threatening to be built.

Still, something fierce inside me fights. I call upon my bravery and beliefs. Freedom is responsibility and independence a gift.

We’re all united in this thing called humanity—complete with hardship and heartbreak, death and birth, beauty, fireworks and a thousand things worth celebrating—even when it hurts. So, here’s to the 4^th!

Kelleys Island, Ohio. Three days, six women, one bathroom. On day one, I decided this was going to be a nightmare. I needed to get out of there. There wouldn’t be enough alcohol.

I was wrong—not just about the alcohol. Five of the six women have experienced grief due to the death of a close loved one: a husband who committed suicide, a son killed in Iraq, my sister’s husband—cancer, another woman’s long-term boyfriend died of cancer this past February, making my March loss of the greatest love of my life due to a heart attack in his sleep almost seem trivial. Almost. Nothing could, but I certainly gained a grander perspective witnessing these women walking with their own grief.

I found it interesting the one gal who hasn’t grappled with this brand of grief spent much of her time trying to plan where we’d go, what we’d do, and creating more questions about a dinner menu than I could imagine. Her plan, plan, plan mentality seemed to have her missing the present moment.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts of grief: plans fly into the wind. Yet, life goes on. The women whose losses were further in the rearview mirror held a higher perspective, though not necessarily better.

I mean, my God! It’s not like anyone ever gets over wanting all of her son’s body parts to come home. Yet, that particular woman has grown more grounded since the first and only time I met her two years prior. Looking at her, I see both grief and growth reveal themselves in one’s face, eyes, and even her gait.

By the way, this wasn’t a grief group. My sister met one of the women while working in Cleveland—back when Jayne’s husband was diagnosed and dancing towards death. That’s when Jayne and Barb become friends. The other gals are her friends.

I call them mine after three days, one bathroom, plenty of beers, tears and laughter. They may not know it, but they helped me heal by reminding me: I’ll take my own crap—thank you very much.

Even the gal death hasn’t walked so close to, but who liked to talk about her hardships while professing God’s angels on our paths. I believe her, but I couldn’t see where she embraced or embodied the lessons she seemed bent on impressing upon us.

Maybe I used to be like that, I thought. Then, she told me she’d never been loved. She repeated it. Do we demand love come only in a particular form? What about her friends, right there, right now, in front of her?

The daughter of one of these women is going blind. Maybe we’re all blind to certain things.

Grief gives me new eyesight. With each blow, I need a stronger prescription to see from my heart.

These three days, these women, what a gift they gave me. I reawakened to the reality of other people’s pain, each of us serving a purpose, and how grief can be a gift for growth.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m the gal who opened far too many gifts and then my big mouth with, “Is this returnable?” There are no gifts I’d rather return than the ones coming out of Kevin’s death. It still sucks.

When the ladies and I went to the winery, I bawled in the bathroom because my man and I talked about going to a winery, but we never went. There I was with these women when the only place I wanted to be was with the one I love who’s no longer here.

This time though, I didn’t come out sniffling, or worse, denying so I didn’t have to deal with pity. Nor did I come with the need to explain my pain to people who only want it to go away. With these women, I didn’t say a word. They already know.

The psychic said my sister shouldn’t compare the loss of her husband of 33 years to the death of my boyfriend—the fresh death of a twin flame love.

We compare.

We compare stories and grief.

Similarities and differences.

And damn—how the hell did we get the double wham?!

Well, we did and it’s done.

For me, the grieving’s just begun.

I’m blessed. I’m broken.

He’s here. He’s gone.

I’m alone with a thousand angels.

I know it could be worse.

Still, for me, it’s bad enough I’d like to leave.

Dive into his arms on the other side.

I know I can’t go.

Couldn’t leave my sis missing me the way I’m missing him.

A hole in my heart, but maybe hers was bigger.

I watched her survive, even thrive.

I compare and know: if she can, so can I.

My mother died in April 1994. In August, I attended Tony Robbins’ Life Mastery University in Maui. I cried on the flight, thinking my mom never got to go to Hawaii. Not that she wanted to. I cried even more thinking about how when she was diagnosed with cancer and given a death sentence—which I thought we’d defy—I asked her if there was anything she wanted to do, like maybe go to Europe. (I’d make it happen!) My mom said, “Oh, honey, I’ve done everything I wanted.”

The whisper in the wind warned of an impending tornado in my soul. Dr. Bernie Siegel said his cancer patients who have goals and dreams have a better chance of defying the odds.

At Life Mastery, (with ropes for security), I climbed a 50-foot telephone pole, which by the way, sways. I stood on top of that log and leaped into the air to catch a swinging trapeze bar. Before I made that climb, one of Tony Robbins’ staffers asked what this meant in my life. What?! Like isn’t doing it enough?

“No. Tell me what it means, a metaphor for your life.”

On the spot, I declared: “It means I’m leaving my past (I meant my mom’s death) behind and leaping into a new chapter of life.”

I caught the bar! Within a year, I left the company I’d been working for for seven years, moved from Chicago to Phoenix, and fell in love.

After my sister’s husband died, she and I went to Australia. Jayne would’ve traded that trip for time (even 20 minutes) with Tom, but since that wasn’t in the cards, we went. Jayne rocked raw and vulnerable. I determined to stand guard for her heart. Maybe we secretly hoped the Great Barrier Reef could overcome her grief. No. All it could do was offer her a new experience. That’s the point: experience anew.

When something bad happens, we want it to be undone. Instead, we’re undone, unglued, unhinged from reality as we knew it. When reality turns to raw vulnerability, when the pain feels like purpose and pleasure feels foreign, it’s time to step in a new direction.

That’s why I’m in Belize. I’d like to say the palm trees and aqua water washed away my grief. That would be a lie. The loss lingers, even in paradise. Last night, I sat on a dock, alone in my soul, wishing to be a fish or a star, and crying over Kevin’s death. Still.

And yet, I’m here. I’m in a different place than I was before. I tried something new. I took a risk forward. I can’t say I’m reborn, as one of the yoga instructors said I’d be. But, I’m pecking at my shell and believing rebirth is my right.

Maybe not right here, but who knows? I do know he died and I’ve been left with a life before me. I had to do something good to remind me and reignite the pleasure that resides in my soul—not instead of, but in the midst of my sadness.

Move slowly. Banish guilt.

Walk your path.

Music, as much as therapy.

Nature, and nurture yourself, too.

Write. Love letters to your

Deceased and to yourself.

Quiet: seek it like a bee seeks nectar.

Distract yourself, if you must.

Then dive in. Stay conscious,

Even when you get a little drunk.

Drop the cry of Why?! in the river of mystery.

Engage in the art of living, remembering

Grief is a part of it.