Well… I wrote this all down in my journal in October. It is honestly insane how time continually slips through fingertips like the clearest water. I figured end of year was an appropriate time to post this. May we all revel in the beauty of our imperfect humanness, remembering that in experiencing pain and suffering, we are experiencing joy, and connecting as a species in the strangeness it is to be alive.
2015.
2015 has been an extremely difficult year for me. Full of loss, desperation, and confusion. Sometimes I look back over the months and honestly don’t know how I made it through. It seems that in hard times, I am often a recipient of the common human fallacy of telling each other all the shit in life will “make you stronger.” … How could something that creates a feeling of being as weak as humanly possible, build strength?!
And then, I survive. And I do recognize my strength. At times thriving, at other times it being all I can possibly muster to dress myself, keep eyes half-open, half of the day, and remember to turn the lights off before bed.
I suppose it is the remnants of precious moments when I feel I am kicking ass in life, full of zest, energy, and excitement for the future, that get me through the ones when even breathing hurts.
2014 was rough, but life was such a whirlwind, I look back and feel hardly present through any of it. I graduated University, losing what I had used to define my self-worth, my mechanism for being “good enough,” with A’s on paper to prove it all. At the same time, I walked away from a religion I didn’t feel was serving me. I made the conscious choice to step away, following a more authentic path, losing credibility in the eyes of many, being forced to search instead the two blue eyes in the mirror for a sliver of worth and acceptance.
The individual I had shared the past 5 years of my life with and I divorced. I went through an existential crisis of individuation and separation. I felt like a toddler. Who was I, if I was all I had? I took back the last name I was born into, dug my smile from the solid ground in which it hid, looked up toward the sky to receive my previous passion for life, and started writing again. In the most painful loss of my entire life, I found something invaluable: me. Now I just had to figure out what that word entailed.
2015 rolled in with no clarity whatsoever. Tears every hour of every day, consuming my cheeks and stinging my wrinkled heart. A huge apartment I could not fill, regardless of how much stuff I bought and brought in, aching to satiate my loneliness. Colors I painted, on canvas or on my skin each morning and handful after handful of food I gorged myself with on my kitchen floor could not fill the emptiness. So, I left.
Selling everything I owned, leaving everyone I loved, and ending up in another hemisphere with a backpack and a broken heart, I thought life could only go up from there.
After not even a month of bush walking, blistered feet, aching legs, learning to sleep weeks on end alone in foreign mountain ranges, and continuing to drown my sorrows in whiskey every chance I could, I received devastating news. My sweet cousin Terik, having only experienced 17 years of life, decided to end it once and for all. Flying to a place of freedom and expansive endlessness. So, there I sat. Tears gushing from my eyes at a speed I could not fathom. Emptiness consuming me, thoughts swirling, trying to talk to my sobbing baby sister on the other end of the line, thousands of miles away, hours behind, in a completely different hemisphere.
Shaking, sweating, lost and in shock, I found myself trying to soothe her. Trying to explain everything. To answer her when she cried out time after time “Why? How? How Rachel? This cannot be real. I cannot stand this hurt.” ……… Please stand this hurt, Rebekah. Please, please… Stand the hurt. Taking a deep breath and masking my shaken voice, I was brave for her. Brave for 45 minutes. Brave until we hung up. Brave until I completely fell apart. I look back and see that maybe in allowing myself to “fall apart,” I was experiencing bravery in a truer form than my perception of "being strong."
In times of excruciating pain, where do we turn?
I had recently lost my husband, companion (dictator)… The person I had fantasized would be there for me through it all. I proceeded to lose myself in self-degrading apologies and frantic attempts to GET BACK TO MY COMFORT ZONE! FIX IT! MAKE IT ALL BETTER! Apologizing time after time to him, begging him to try again, completely debasing the entire last year of work I had put into living as my authentic self. It is funny what we do as humans in an attempt to make ourselves more “comfortable.”
The brutal end to Terik’s young life threw me for a loop. Where could I turn for comfort? Not to myself. I had no idea who I was and didn’t like much of what I saw. Not to my family. They were thousands of miles away, hurting worse than I was. I felt I needed to be there for them. Not to a man so dear to my heart who had become my best friend, I felt I couldn’t burden him with anything more. Not to my ex-husband, who was so detached he wouldn’t allow himself to answer my frantic phone calls, crying out to him that “Terik had passed away, and I know he hated me, but I NEEDED HIM RIGHT NOW!” … Nothing.
I had no one within one thousand miles, other than myself. My dirty, rotten, empty, exhausted self. And then, in the strange serendipitous way life often presents herself, a stranger almost kicked me in the head.
Legs swinging from the wall ‘round the lakeshore I had planted my sobbing self on. Her mud-encrusted boots hung above me from the ledge. I heard an Irish accent “Oh, shit. Didn’t see you there. Sorry…”
I, unresponsive, was paralyzed in thought and after a long while of silence, I heard “Hey, you okay?”
One shared cigarette later and a hug from someone who didn’t even know my first name, I recognized I wasn’t alone. That the repetitions in my head over and over and over again of the last time I saw Terik, how I didn’t say enough to him, what else could I have done, how I had known he was sad, and I should have reached out more… and all of the madness of slamming fists against a closed door with no handle, that all of the exhausting shit we put ourselves through as humans, could never bring Terik back.
And in the days, and weeks, and months that followed, in my silent hikes on the day of his celebration of life, and in my many conversations with my Mother, and my sisters, and in the longing I felt to be with my family, all gathered in support at my Aunt’s house, and in my decision to stay in the bush, because I didn’t know if I’d ever make it out again if I went back, and in my spoken “conversations” with Terik’s energy, through the wind and the rustling of trees, and the birds, and my pages and pages of writing, and the many tears of sorrow… In all of this, I healed.
I made peace.
I forgave suicide.
I felt a little less empty.
I let strangers with mud-encrusted boots in, who quickly went from stranger to dear friend as we talked of the shared human experience.
And, I was ok.
New Zealand was an insane experience of discovery. Both of the outside world, and the complex intricacies of one’s inner self. It was an experience of jumping two feet forward, into a perceived abyss of the unknown. It was loss. It was discomfort. It was pain. It was fear. It was losing the definition of who I was, and what life “meant,” to discover what I am.
The time eventually came to return home, and I smiled daily, and my Aunt and I held each other and cried, and I laughed with my family, and I found myself falling head over heels in love with the most amazing man, and I forgave my past partner, and I forgave my past self. I basked in the desert sun, and put flowers on Terik’s grave. I had juice and sandwiches with my Grandmother, and I sold the house I had created with my ex-husband, I sold everything I owned, and I sobbed for hours as I threw out smiling photos and pink wedding shoes and our New Years Eve “Goals for 2014.” I began to develop my community, I made commitments, I made mistakes, I apologized, and just when I finally felt full, I lost one of my best friends.
Earth. Soil. Rawness.
Because “none of this is real. There is no possible way this could be real.”
Speaking on the phone with my dear Heather, Jenna’s amazing Mother, in the early morning hours, rocking back and forth in the darkness of a bed not mine, eyes streaming with tears not unlike the stinging salt waters of New Zealand, hand over mouth to keep from screaming, I felt as though I were in a dream.
Once again, a rush of self- loathing overtook me. The last time I had spoken with my darling best friend and younger sister had been the day before I left for New Zealand. Nearly 6 months ago. How?! A screenshot of our gun-supervised Skype session, her in her orange prison jumpsuit, radiant smiling face, was all I had left of our last moments together.
In the days following the news of Jenna’s passing, I took on a robotic eminence. I had attached myself to an idea. A requirement. That life was going to get easier from where I previously stood. This attachment kept me tethered to a pole of denial and regret. Digging through boxes in my Grandmother’s basement, I found our memory books full of crinkled photos and incoherent notes written back and forth to one another. Snapshots of young faces, so full of youth and light. The bond formed so intimately years ago in the desert sun and sand seemed to reach up from the pages, as my tears of recognizing the “givens of existence” streaked colorful rainbows across the printed ink.
As the day of Jenna’s celebration of life rolled around, I faced a nightmarish hell I had hoped I would never face again. I found myself doing anything I could to not feel the pain, the exact opposite of what I counsel my clients to do every day. I recognized my humanness, and once again stood face to face with my mirror. Searching the two blue eyes staring back at me for any ounce of strength to get me through the day.
Humans are so talented at forgetting history. I had disregarded so quickly the essential lesson learned in the wild mountains of New Zealand. That human pain and suffering is not special. It is not unique. It does not favor nor pick out any one person to teach and expand. Pain is a universal human experience. Our moments of feeling most alone, are when we are truly the least. We bond with humanity when we experience an emotion, so familiar to every being whom has ever breathed, for millions of years. At the moment of recognition of my beautiful imperfection, I laughed at myself. In laughing at myself, I expanded. In expanding, I opened up space in my heart for others to enter in. And in doing this, I connected with so many previous friends of mine and Jenna’s, who were sharing a similar experience.
The support at Jenna’s celebration of life was overwhelming. I busily ran around picking up friends from other states who wanted to fly in for emotional encouragement. We reconnected and caught up on what life had been like the last 10 years since all of us had shared a home. We held each other at the funeral, and we ran our fingers across Jenna’s photographed smile, as if she were there with us. We shared family hugs with Heather, Jenna’s Mom, and Ashton and Shelby, Jenna’s siblings. We held Lily, and Max, Jenna’s two beautiful children, and cried tears of disbelief at how similar her children are to her. We laughed at Lily’s sass, and delicately touched the locket, with a photo of her Mom, that hung around her neck. Before Jenna’s ashes were lowered into the ground, I was asked to speak. I recall the surety I felt in the moment that I would be unable to speak. I had dreaded the day for 10 years when I would have to say goodbye to my precious friend and little sis.
As I stood at the flowers and photos of my Jenna, I looked out into the sea of black cloth and pained faces staring back at me. In that moment, I was reminded again that I was not alone. That through pain we create space for joy. In the words of poet Kahlil Gibran: "When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
The song lyrics flowed effortlessly from my mouth. "Shine On You Crazy Diamond” by Pink Floyd. Our favorite band. Memories of sitting cross-legged on the concrete porches of treatments, trying to teach ourselves to play the guitar… And I smiled.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught in the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!
Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Pile on many more layers and I'll be joining you there.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
And we'll bask in the shadow of yesterday's triumph,
sail on the steel breeze.
Come on you boy child, you winner and loser,
come on you miner for truth and delusion, and shine.”
- Roger Waters, David Gilmour
and Richard Wright. Pink Floyd.
I write.
"Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, "Joy is greater thar sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall."