This Mama’s Dharma

… the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego — your need to possess and control — and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous — large souled.
- Sam Keen

I think that when each of us are born, we contract to learn certain things in our lifetime. I can only surmise that among the things I contracted to learn about are death and loss, since I have experienced so much death in my 31 years.

What I have learned from my father’s death is to be grateful for life, to be crazily grateful for the big things and the little things and everything in between. I used to think gratitude was a hokey thing, something saccharine-sweet and pablum-pukey. But I no longer feel that way. I think that gratitude is the foundation for a happy and meaningful life, no matter what the circumstances.

I think about gratitude and my 84 year old grandmother. She raised me from the age of four and half, and so I guess we have all the baggage that a mother and daughter would. I love her deeply, but for most of my life, my love for her has been mixed with everything from distaste to moments of out-and-out hate. I have been anything but grateful for her. But with my father’s death, that changed profoundly. I see her in a much different light.

Before his death, I had scheduled a trip to bring the baby to go see her. Those trips have usually been made out of a sense of obligation, but this time it was different. I really wanted to go.

When I first saw her, I broke down in tears. “I don’t want to lose you,” I sobbed. “You are all the family I have left.” And it’s true, that when she dies, I won’t have any family left that I am really close to.

All the while, I knew that I was speaking the impossible. No one and nothing is ours to keep. She gently echoed these sentiments. She told me that she lived a good life, that she would try to be around for as long as she could, but of course we both knew that this could very possibly be the last time we see each other.

That got me thinking. When someone is eighty-four, you expect that this person will die sometime in the relatively near future, so you treat each visit with him or her as your last. Treating each visit with my grandmother as a final visit imbues the visits with an element of sacredness that I don’t quite have with my other relationships. There is an aspect of taking people for granted. And how I understand now that you can’t ever do that, no matter how young and well and healthy someone may be.

I’d like to treat each visit with a friend as my final visit. Not to dwell on morbidness or live in fear of death, but to tell a friend each time I see her how much I love and appreciate her friendship. Not to treat anything in this life casually.

When I saw my grandmother this time, I saw the sacred in her, the sacred essence of her, when all I used to see were her faults. I laid down the burden of my need to be right, and we just were, together. We laughed at Sami’s antics, and we watched TV, and we ate dinner together, and we kissed each other on the cheek and hugged and held hands. We said “I love you” frequently and sincerely.

“This was the best visit we’ve ever had,” she said as I left. And I felt so good about it. If I never saw her again, I will have had no regrets about my conduct. I was not perfect, not a saint, but I didn’t do or say anything that was majorly unskillful. I’ve never been able to hold my tongue like that. Gratitude gave me the strength to be more of a mensch.

To live in gratitude is to see everything as sacred, everything as meaningful. It gives life color, flavor, and substance. When you live in gratitude, you can never be bored, and it’s hard to stay depressed for very long.

Is it possible to be grateful for the challenges life brings — even for something like the loss of a parent? I can only pose such a question hypothetically. I am not there but I see how in theory it could be so. For me, the loss is still too raw, too painful, too gaping of a hole. But I can be grateful for the lessons I have learned from death, for they have made my life all the richer.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what my father left behind, especially the empty journal that I started to write in yesterday. I wonder what he was thinking when he bought the journal. Was he intending to write his private thoughts in it, but never got around to it? Or did he think that his thoughts were not important enough to record? I’ll never know.

I had a dream this morning — that I was talking to my creativity coach (we did indeed have a session scheduled). I was telling her how my dad left behind this empty journal, and all this blank paper and legal pads and resume paper and envelopes, and while I was talking in the dream I was thinking, “I don’t want to die without leaving any writing behind.”

Well, I guess that’s already not an issue. If I died tomorrow there would be at least a dozen journals of mine left behind. But it also got me thinking about what else we leave behind in this life. We may leave behind lots and lots of stuff, or just a few simple belongings. But we do not live on in our stuff, not really. When we die, we live on in memories of the people who loved us, in our children, in the deeds that we’ve done. My father lives on in me as I write in the notebook that once was his and remember him, and love him.

I couldn’t have saved him, couldn’t have taken away his pain, couldn’t have realized his hopes and dreams for him. But I write down my own hopes and dreams and memories and fears and sorrows — the stuff of a life. And maybe someday, on the top of my stack of journals, I’ll leave behind a blank journal for Sami to write down the stuff of his life.

Six weeks ago, I signed up for an internet course on Awakening Joy, offered by Vipassana teacher James Baraz. The first class started last week, right around the time that my dad died. There was a twinge of feeling strange about taking the class at this time. But I know that it is a worthy intention to awaken joy in my life, regardless of life’s changing conditions and circumstances. I can feel joy and I can grieve at the same time. One does not negate the other. That has become very clear to me in the past week and a half as I grieve the loss of my father, and rejoice in Sami, the beautiful new life that came through me into this world eight months ago.

Today I spent some time formally setting my intention to awaken more joy in my life. I hope to renew the intention every day. It feels like a concrete and beautiful way to honor my dad’s life and his struggle with depression.

On long retreats, I have touched into deep states of well-being, peace, and joy. I know that these states are possible for me. I also know that all mind-states are transient, and that it is not possible to sustain that deep sense of well-being and OKness, but I can set an intention to touch into them as often as I can. I can intend to remember happiness. Because it is not something that is outside of me or that I am seeking to become. It is always and already here.

It’s hard to know if what I am feeling today is numbness or equanimity. There’s probably something of both. I feel sadness, but not like yesterday. Yesterday there was a lot of horror, a lot of horrified tears. I kept seeing images of my dad dead in his apartment, and I was so terrified of these unbidden images.

Today it’s different. My dad has passed on, and I feel I have no choice but to let go. There is nothing but suffering in holding on, in longing for things to be different. Of course I can miss him. It’s perfectly natural to miss him. I guess every day, this grief is going to feel different. From hour to hour it will differ. Sometimes I want to cry and my eyes stay dry. Sometimes I will be crying and all I want is to be numb. The common denominator is that when I fight being with what is, I heap suffering onto the grief.

Sami has discovered a new skill in the last few days– climbing. When he first wakes up in the morning, he attempts to scale Mt. Mommy laying next to him in the bed. And he keeps on climbing throughout the day. He clamors and scrambles and seeks to conquer every object in his path. His curiosity is something to behold. I really admire his persistence, energy, and diligence. He is working so hard at mastery over his environment.

My son is no longer a docile baby. Not that he ever really was. But now, even diaper changes are becoming a challenge. He is not at all interested in lying still for me as I change his diaper. He rolls diabolically to the side, and keeps on rolling. He tries to climb over the blankets. I frantically dangle a toy in front of his face, but he is not interested.

This scenario happened today and I began to get frustrated. I was on a single-minded diaper-changing mission. Then something wonderful happened: my mindfulness kicked in and I saw that I was getting frustrated because I was not getting my way. I became aware of my upset, and decided to let go and just be with my experience. What I noticed was that I was getting a huge kick out of seeing my naked-from-the-waist-down baby scrambling around on the bed, his cute little butt-cheeks sticking out from under his onesie. My frustration evaporated into humor. Why was I in such a big hurry? I had nowhere to go. What’s the worst that can happen here? I asked myself. Some poop on the bed? Been there, done that.

I let him play for a while, then attempted to put his diaper on a few minutes later when he was more receptive to the idea. It worked fine. There was no struggle.

Note to self: keep practicing.

Yesterday I spent three hours going through my dad’s things — a very grim task, to be sure. I wrote down some notes from that visit, but am too tired to type them up just now. Let’s just say it was the hardest things I’ve ever done, sitting alone in his apartment that smelled horribly of death, but it felt right to be a witness to my father’s things — to sift through the things that compose a life. Some of them have meaning, and some are meaningless. But they were his things, and I wanted to lay my hands on all of them. I didn’t keep everything, I didn’t keep most things, but I catalogued them in aqua pen on a legal pad.

I returned today to help my Aunt Joan go through the rest of his things. It just didn’t feel right to take the things I wanted, and to leave her with the rest of the work. I wanted to help. We worked together for two hours — we packed up the smaller pieces of his furniture, folded up his shirts, and took them to the Goodwill. We threw away his stained shirts and sheets.

For a long time, we did not mention the sour scent of my father’s death permeating the apartment. My aunt told me that she did not have a very good sense of smell. But my olfactory nerves took it all in. I inhaled one of his dirty shirts out of the laundry basket and it smelled of him, of stale cigarettes and sweat and skin. That’s how I want to remember his smell, not this heavy rotting blood.

I also found some new things today — the last Father’s Day card I ever sent him, from this year, which thanks him for being a kind and sensitive father. I also found a fortune from a long-ago-eaten fortune cookie on his floor — it said, “You are very fortunate in your personal affairs.”

“He was,” my aunt said. “He had you, and he had me. He could have been an only child, or had no children. Then what would have happened to him?”

“He had people who loved him,” I mused. “That is the most important thing.”

My aunt agreed.

My aunt reassured me once again that there is nothing we could have done to prevent his death. We went over and over it, talking and trying to figure out what could have caused the internal bleeding that led to his death. He might have had a hernia, but can that cause someone to die? We just didn’t know enough about medical stuff to say. He had that ongoing pain in his leg, but could that have caused his death? It didn’t seem likely.

My aunt suspected that he might have had blood in his stool, since she spotted small amounts of blood on his sheets, but he never complained of any abdominal pain. He was getting good medical care. My aunt is going to call his primary care physician to try to get to the bottom of what happened, or what could have happened to cause his death.

“Do you wish we had done an autopsy after all?” she asked.

No, I didn’t. It might have been helpful to determine the exact cause of death, but I’m glad we did not cut his body open. Sometimes there are things you will never know. And you have to somehow accept the not-knowing.

We threw out his only pair of shoes– an old, worn pair of black leather slip-ons. “I tried to take him to go get new shoes, but he didn’t want to go,” my aunt said. “And I’m not the kind of person to force anything on anyone.”

We gave away his garbage cans, his grocery cart, his laundry basket, his sweaters, his lamps. On Monday, my aunt is taking all his office supplies to On Our Own, a recovery-oriented mental health support organization. I feel really good about that. His bed will have to be thrown away, as thrift stores don’t take mattresses.

His refrigerator contained just four items: peanut butter, grape jelly, a brand-new gallon of milk, and Entemann’s chocolate-glazed doughnuts.

My aunt gave me a video that the funeral home gave her on recovering from a sudden death in the family. It will be interesting to see what it says.

I kept many things of my father’s: his books, his stamp collection, his leftover toilet paper and paper towels. I kept his glasses, fondly remembering the last time he came over to the house: he held Sami, who kept trying to yank the glasses off his face.

On my way home, I did not take the closest exit. I dropped off the last batch of his things at the Goodwill, and I drove past the diner where we had our last meal together just 10 days ago. I thought of the woman I met in the bathroom while changing Sami, who told me about her only son, all grown up now. “It all goes by so fast,” she warned me. “Enjoy it.” I thought about my dad, standing outside smoking, while Sami sat beside him in the stroller while I went to the bathroom again before we left. I thought about the Goodwill, and how I told my dad the last time I saw him that I wanted to check it out sometime. Little did I know that a short while later, I would be donating his things to it.

I did not cry today as I drove home. I just remembered my father, fondly and with love. He led a hard life, a life full of mental suffering and broken dreams. He had many disappointments, but in his own way, he was fortunate. He was loved, and he was cared for. He died alone, but he has me and Sami to carry on his bloodline. He will live on through us, through our memories of him.

There is nothing
Nothing
But the 19-pound heft of your body
Draped across my arms.
There is nothing
Nothing
But the smooth round swell of your cheeks
Against my lips.
There is nothing
Nothing
But the rise and fall of your little chest
The sweet breath that moves through your lungs.
There is nothing
Nothing
But the fragrant smell of your freshly shampooed scalp,
The softness of the gossamer hair that covers your head.
There is nothing
Nothing
But the love that flows from me to you,
Seeping through my hands that
Hold your precious little sleeping body
Warm and close to mine,
Now.

On Wednesday, I had people over for a memorial service for my dad and in recognition of my 31st birthday. It was so wonderful — from 4 pm - 10 pm, there were people with me at all times. First came the wave of moms and babies — Abby and Gus, Mary and Ezra, Debbie and Sylvia, Nicole and Sev. We cracked up at the babies’ hilarious antics. Those babies really do keep me laughing, even in spite of the grief. Gus was so cute — trying to give Sami big, wide-open-mouthed kisses!

So many people came, and they kept coming. By the evening, my living room was full of my friends, my family. Rabbi Ben led an amazing, incredible memorial service — Sarah and Debbie Sobeloff read beautiful poems, and I read a poem about my dad. The service had so much meaning for me. It was my way of saying goodbye to my dad.

Big thanks to Shira for encouraging me to have some kind of gathering. I felt so loved, so surrounded with kindness and sympathy. I think how far I’ve come in the 10 years since my mom passed. I have a wonderful marriage, an astoundingly beautiful son, a comfortable home, good friends. I am so blessed. My life is so full, even in the face of loss.

It’s hard to hold so much grief and so much joy simultaneously. My heart breaks, I look at my son, and it fuses back together and opens. I’m trying to reconcile the coexistence of such vastly different emotions, but it’s something new for me. I think my dad would have approved of this. He sought joy for his whole life, and it pretty much eluded him.

I mourn his passing, I mourn for myself and I mourn for Sami… but I also celebrate my father’s journey to a new place, hopefully a place of peace and beauty.

I seek a way to ground in the groundlessness of this life, and love is the anchor. Love is the best companion to grief and loss.

I want to write, but words feel so small and futile against the enormity of losing my father. I feel cut off, “without anchor” as a fellow orphan put it. I want words to heal this pain and they can’t. Nothing can touch the rawness of this grief. All I can do is offer compassion and loving-kindness to myself.

I mourn for the shortness and sadness of my parents’ lives. I’m angry that they were both taken from me without warning. I want to be angry at God, but I can’t. I believe that these things are part of a larger design that I can’t necessarily understand. My father’s spirit made a decision to leave this earth at this time, and I must trust that cosmic timing. I must trust that he is where he needs to be right now.

My mistake was clinging to unfounded beliefs. I trusted and believed without basis that if I lost my mother suddenly, that this would not happen to me again. I forgot that there are no guarantees in this life — no guarantees of tomorrow, ever. The ground we think so steady under our feet can crumble at any time. We have nothing but now, this moment, the clicking of the keys on this keyboard as I type this, the tears gathering in my eyes, my son stirring in his sleep besides me, the steady beating of my broken heart in my chest.

I mourn not just for myself but for my son, that he will never know his grandparents. I hope his father and I will be enough for him. I wanted him to have more family in his life to love him. I am so afraid he will not have enough love. But somehow I have to trust that he will receive all the love he needs. I like to think that he is watched over and protected by so many guardian angels, too.

My father’s funeral was today. It was the hottest day on record in Washington, DC — with weather in the triple digits. Today, my father’s body was lowered into the cool earth, and I hope his spirit has found peace and refuge from the torments of his life on this earth.

I’m so grateful for the love and support I’ve received from my friends. They are my family, too. I feel wrapped in the protective cloak of their love and compassion. So much kindness I have been given. I breathe it in, and it feels so good. I remember how much my father loved me, how much he loved my son, and it comforts me. Nothing else matters but love.

I don’t know what to write. He will be missed. Will write more later…