Those Feelings of Abandonment

Sitting with more of the nuances of grief

I’m taking you into some vulnerable stuff here. It’s been useful for me; may it be of use to you, too.

Some of you may know that listening to music that you both loved can be heart-wrenching after a loss of that loved one. Today, as I write, I am pushing myself to listen to exactly that kind of music (Pat Metheny, Tracy Chapman, Manu Chao, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Steve Winwood, Michael Franti, Kirsty MacColl, The Temptations, and and others) to lubricate my angst. Not that angst is in deficit these days. Hopefully this post won’t be too histrionic as a result.

One of my dear friends, who I only know through the Zoom screen of the London Writer’s Salon cabin, was a widow many years ago. She reassured me many months ago that listening to music for the first years of loss is often quite hard. She said that living in that silence of daily life with no music was necessary for a time. It was mine as well, until I realized I needed to go to community dances to move some of the emotions out of my body. Now I’m taking the baby step of listening to the mixes (“chill” and “get up”) that Apple Music offers, while I’m writing rather than moving in a room with others, and I’m ever hopeful that this will be beneficial. Having music playing while I write does help me feel less alone in some ways.

Double rainbow as seen from my brother’s front window on the hill of Anza Vista the day I arrived.

Last Friday, I came back from 7 days away in San Francisco, Oakland, & Berkeley. I split my time between family in the Anza Vista neighborhood of SF, and a good friend who just happily moved back to Oakland for her much-deserved retirement. We ate good food, happily walked everywhere, and saw lots of beauty from rainbows to succulents. I received many hugs and felt loved up in the best ways. I touched into memories that carried some intense emotions, including the physical site where Bob offered me a poem he had written and tucked in his back pack for our Thanksgiving gathering at my brother’s in 1988. We had just met 5 weeks earlier, but it was not totally unexpected. We knew. And revisiting this location, in my brother’s study, was not without a huge ache. Walking the streets filled with lush growth offered some medicine.

Succulents galore in Oakland.

Despite the expected moments of revisiting this loss, the trip to the Bay Area was a grounding one, not unlike my last one in February and early March to New Jersey, Miami Beach, and NYC. After so many years of not traveling by plane, I have felt a bit like a modern Rip Van Winkle, emerging from a deep sleep. Still I was calm as I navigated completely remodeled airports where seemingly simple things, like screens for ordering your food and anything else you might need are ubiquitous, and levels of economic hierarchies are all the more apparent, if you pay attention.

Seeing friends from many different chapters of my life reminded me that I am still here, broken in half for a time, but surviving, if not thriving at times. In my new unleashed state, I found myself curious and delighted by my friends’ successes and their immense generosity. I was also nourished by the landscapes I walked through, the art I viewed, and the foods that I do not normally eat. I was saddened by so many things we discussed: the immense toll that the brutal and unceasing genocide in Gaza is taking on our hearts and a people who do not have any escape from the fascist and racist murderers, how many other forms of ecocidal violence are being thrust upon innocents, including the climate emergency and economic hardships. And health issues have become ever more present for so many. The fatigue of contending with it and confronting it all was and is palpable and overwhelming, riding inside the bones of so many of us.

Witnessing the arrival “Harvey Milk” warship in San Francisco harbor while hiking at the Tunnel Tops near the Presidio on Thursday, March 28th. My friend, L, who watched this display with me and my brother, went onto the ship the following day to protest Pelosi’s talk there and the US involvement in the delivery of weapons to Israel.

My big learning during this period is that you can keep yourself busy, really busy, and distracted, but you still have to show up for yourself eventually. If you do this grieving process in the ways that count (the ways that will help you evolve), it can slam you across the room, and if you don’t feel the discomfort in the myriad ways, your body will teach you a few lessons. I am listening and pacing myself, as best I can, as if one can actually control this process. Pro-tip: we can’t.

I came back to the London Writer’s Salon yesterday morning and today, raring to go. I had not stepped into the zoom room of 8 am writers for a whole week. I had promised a new friend from the “We Will Dance with Mountains” contingent (a group that has convened in the circles surrounding Bayo Akomolafe) that I would be back at my Substack with enthusiasm this week, and he subscribed right away to give me even more incentive. Let me just say here, Greg, that I am grateful for your faith in me, as I am to all the subscribers, despite my regular absences.

I had thought that I would return to one of my unfinished essays, one about my evolving spirituality and the mental health epidemic that we are all enmeshed in, but you are reading the words that were more immediate to me these past two days, and “here we have it,” as my Aussie writer friend, Marian, would say.

As indicated above, and not to sound too clichéd, this grieving process is unpredictable, and sometimes vicious. It peels away thick layers of denial, what I imagine are actually the ego’s protective coatings. You recognize that there are old wounds from childhood that your beloved was the medicine for, and that the band aid that his unconditional love provided has been ripped off, and you are left there bleeding and raw, being pummeled by the winds of the world. So much of your identity is getting shuffled, tossed, revised, and understood in new ways, while you witness the world around you shake and tremble, trying your best not to take it into your nervous system. I am humbled daily, and right now confused by the way I’m shifting pronouns in this particular narrative. Oh, well, without an editor to scold me, you’ll have to accept me as I am.

I am constantly revising my memories, and worried that I am forgetting essential ones, since the person who might have been able to remember better is no longer here. Those memories might be filled with regret that I wasn’t more present for the joy or even the day-to-day routines, or they might be chock full of rage that the sore on his head was not attended to when it hadn’t healed in a timely manner during the pandemic. There’s a big grief that we never got to take those dreamed of journeys to far away places, our plans to age gracefully together as our adult child finally launches, and to more fully collaborate as activist artists working in community in our post-academic life.

Now that our son lives elsewhere, I look around the house to find the shadow of that partner to help fill the space, but instead I find my cat (who is so much needier for attention without Bob’s gentle presence). I am grateful for her company, and that she nestles into my sleeping body at night, but there’s a hole in my heart that this sweet cat, reminding me of all the others we parented over the years, can’t fill.

So my actual work now is to heal as many of those early wounds without my beloved’s encouragement and his tender hugs. I can imagine his spirit cheering me on as he watches me dance, sits with me in meditation, climbs the steps to my studio to see a new piece, or as he reads another piece of my writing. There may be more that his now ancestral energy will offer me, things that the universe has yet to unfold, but, in truth, this work of healing the parts of myself that need comfort IS ALL MY OWN.

My therapist tells me that I know how to mother well, so my job is to mother that part of me that is aching for that very special love. When I do that well, or remember to do it, I don’t feel abandoned. I don’t worry that my friends aren’t checking in on me because they are dealing with their own challenges, and I don’t worry about the future, despite the dire circumstances that surround us. I admit that I have suffered a huge loss, but it’s just what this life had to teach me.

My meditation and gardening practices teach me to stay present, connect with the soil, and plant seeds that have may have beneficial ripples in the world. Losing your loved ones is a strong reminder that we will soon enough become soil. I am not abandoned by that circle of life. The molecules of Bob’s body, his nutrient-rich soil, surround me as I poke through the detritus of last year’s garden, pruning, weeding, and making space for the next season. Perhaps my intermittent attention will welcome miracles of sprouting, beautiful, tasty growth or perhaps things will not manifest as I intend, but the mystery will continue: yet another thing that I cannot control.

A view of the beautiful spring chaos in the garden. The white bag draped over the hammock frame did contain the nutrient-rich soil that Bob’s body made. I finally decided what to do with it a few days ago. I’m going to reshape it into a table cloth for the patio table (currently stored in the basement). I’ll have our meditation group decorate the table cloth with messages and images using waterproof markers on one side and on the other side, I will draw something to honor our love for this garden and each other. In the back of the garden, you can see the raised-bed canoes that we placed on what was a putting green (we are definitely not golfers) where lettuces, herbs, and other veggies grow. The pale green building in the back is our Zendo. The magnolia tree is in full flower now, a bit earlier than last year. We covered Bob’s body with magnolia petals, as we chanted and sang to him, on the day that he died, April 28th (his half-birthday), 2023.

In the midst this churning and composting mess of emotions, I am still alive and much healthier than I was during several chapters of our marriage. Many years of our partnership were clouded, despite our persistent love, by an environmental illness, thyroid cancer, and more, but, in this moment, I am healthier than I have been in years. It seems that I have somehow learned to balance my immune/nervous systems and breathe out the pain of the world rather than holding it in. My reborn good health is one of the reasons that I still foolishly believe in the possibility of healing much of the trauma in the world today - it’s the delusional optimism that my friend, Nichole, speaks about…we need big doses of it to get through this time.

Here’s a book recommendation that speaks to the latter via speculative fiction. I read this book during bouts of insomnia while I was traveling last week. It’s a series of oral histories from many characters who survived the tumult of this time and future decades to build something new in the ashes.

One can only wonder if the words I type today will be gazed upon by some survivor who somehow has access to old internet archives. I find it strangely heartening to know that what I write, speak, or make art about today may only exist as energetic ripples in some future world. I am looking at my mortality and my legacy with more grace than I ever imagined when Bob was still alive.

I am immensely grateful that I can wake and go to sleep when I choose to, establish my own schedule, learn what calls me, and awaken to what is present around me. I am leaving more and more blank spaces in my calendar, curious to see what emerges in that void. Being in this moment is a true gift, even when the intense discomfort of moving through grief and growth throws me into a heap in the corner.

As I continue my identity shuffling, I hope to develop the capacity to be a better friend and a better member of my support groups. I plan to find my way back to a variety of communities engaged in expressions of creative mutual aid, and as I find the bandwidth, I want to collaborate on both disobedient art, as well work that builds bridges (yes, there’s a paradox there) and mostly generate some fun in equal parts. Thanks to friend, Kate, who after a life of public service in education advises us all to read, The Power of Fun (it’s on my list).

Kate, having fun, in her neighborhood in Oakland.

As part of my reawakening to the cultural offerings in my region, I went to see my old mentor from graduate school, Laurie Anderson, last Saturday night at the Benaroya Symphony Hall in Seattle. Laurie came to my NSCAD studio and saw that I was covering the wall with texts. She asked me if I had thought about recording my words. As a child I became obsessed with a discarded dictation machine to record my stories, so I had no hesitation when she asked me. We spent hours in the multi-track audio studio playing around and I was hooked. I am forever grateful for her generous introduction to that chapter of my creative work. It was good to see her in person for the first time in many decades, especially after seeing her perform during the pandemic on Zoom. Sadly her live sound mixes were awful at times, muddying up her narratives so that they were incomprehensible. I did love her tribute piece to her late husband, Lou Reed, the 10-second solicited scream from the audience (it was deafening) in response to the ongoing horrors of our current world, and the encore participatory tai chi exercises.

Tai chi with Laurie Anderson.

Not a particularly good shot of Laurie (but I do love her smudgy drawings).

I also was able to see the last performance of a former colleague’s production of the musical, RENT, at a local theater. It was a very moving rendition with an unusual and talented cast. It catalyzed a fair amount of grief to move through me because of its focus on love, death, and the various challenges of the New York City’s artist life.

I’ll close with a reminder to look for beauty and delight in the midst of the nightmarish times we may be encountering.

One of the first beauties this spring in the Morcom Rose Garden, Oakland, CA.