A Friend Such as Rob, #LegacyofLove

Rob, surrounded by some of the many women who loved him

Why are we here? Ever ponder that question? My dear friend Rob lived the answer.

It’s hard for me to write about someone so special to me who’s not yet been gone two weeks from this life.

But Rob’s legacy deserves to be shared. And his legacy as my friend and “brother” is something I need to write, to honor one of the most important men in my life. That’s not an exaggerated statement. Although Rob wasn’t my blood brother, he couldn’t have been closer to me if we had been born of the same mother. He knew me so well, and understood and accepted me better than any sibling.

And he taught us all so much.

Of course, if Rob were alive, he’d be reading this rolling his eyes and leaving some sarcastic comment. And he most certainly would be reading it, because Rob read and commented on nearly every post I’ve written since I started this blog 6 1/2 years ago! He only missed in the past couple of months as his beleaguered breathing made even getting up out of bed a chore.

So, why read this post if you didn’t know Rob? Because you’ll learn something about what it means to live with courage and humility, to live your life to its fullest expression, even, and especially, in the face of a disease that you know will take you too soon. Maybe you’ll understand a little more about the true meaning of the words “surrender,” “acceptance,” and “loving presence.”

And if you’re lucky, you’ll encounter someone like Rob whose unique expression of love for you will arrive exactly when you need it. And it will forever impact how you love others going forward.

I met Rob late summer 2008, less than a year before my beloved David died. We’d met at Sevenoaks, months before we were to start the Pathwork program together. Yet, without hesitation, Rob hopped in the car for the 4-hour drive from Raleigh to attend David’s memorial service.

Two weeks later, I was in this terribly painful place. If you’ve experienced the sudden death of a spouse, you know what I’m talking about. All your family and friends have gone home and the shock of what happened sets in. The going to bed every night and waking up every morning alone seems unbearable. You wonder if you’ll get swallowed up in this grief. That’s where I was. So, I picked up the phone early Saturday morning and called Rob, not knowing he wasn’t at home in Raleigh, but visiting friends off the coast of Seattle, where it was 3 hours earlier. Not yet dawn.

It didn’t matter. He got out of bed and stepped outside so as to not disturb anyone else in the house. He listened. He cried with me. And he let his heart stretch as he both stayed with me in my suffering and witnessed an amazing sunrise over Mt. Rainier. Wanting to share that precious moment, he described the beauty unfolding before him, and he helped me recognize that beauty and joy could exist simultaneously with pain and sorrow. That all of it was moving and flowing, and held by a loving God.

Dawn at Mt. Rainier

Rob, being the poet that he was, wrote a beautiful poem about that experience – a powerful moment that solidified our heart connection.

From then on, Rob became my #1 supporter, thoroughly trusted friend, and personal cheerleader.

I grieved. He listened.

I wrote. He read and encouraged me to publish my writing.

I loved to dance. He introduced me to InterPlay – improvisational movement, because he knew I needed this freedom of expression in my life.

I questioned my decisions as a single mother handling a teenage son. He offered his wisdom and experience from raising three sons.

I anguished over what to do with David’s many and varied collections. He helped wherever he could, including hauling shopping bags full of David’s tee shirts – collected from every place we’d visited – to his quilter friend in Raleigh. She made two gorgeous quilts: one for me and one for Davis. And when Rob delivered them, he sat with me as I fingered the material and cried over the memories.

I became passionate about immigration and human rights abuses and moved to El Paso. He sent me links to related articles, financially supported my causes, and connected me to a teacher friend offering a segment on immigration at a private middle school, who then invited me to do a presentation for her classes.

I wondered, with David gone, who would remember my birthday and special dates? Rob kept a record and sent greetings on that morning, letting me know he was thinking of me. Even this April, in the midst of tough nights and sometimes rougher mornings, he sent me a message on the anniversary of David’s death.

My exquisite quilt of David’s tee shirts

All these gifts – and so much more – Rob gave me. I’ve been considering what I possibly gave him in return. Except my love. I hope that was enough.

Rob didn’t need much else. He had an ever-widening circle of friends as his heart opened further and further. He had a devoted and fulfilling relationship with his wife Maureen. She was his confidante, his support, his first and only love for more than 47 years.

All this Rob did while balancing his own journey with death as cancer arrived in his body less than two years after we’d met. Then I, along with Maureen and all his friends, received the gift of watching a transformation happen, as Rob walked, and sometimes crawled, along the spiritual path cancer took him on. Not easy for a man who was used to being in control.

In this “divine dance,” as he called it, he learned to let go of his ego’s attachment to self-importance and self-reliance. He slowly put down his roles as a knowledgeable physician and “fixer.”

And he let the Divine teach him to be astonished by the sacredness of life. To be present to whomever was standing in front of him, from a much softer, vulnerable place. To risk fully expressing all his gifts, with spontaneity and joy.

It was a beautiful dance to observe. Although painful, because we knew the outcome.

Still, as Rob demonstrated, no one can grow or be transformed living in a bubble of comfort. He struggled with painful challenges, with wanting to be alive for his newly arrived grandchildren.

Rob with first grandchild, Nina

But he also recognized graces, small miracles “happening all around us if our eyes are open enough to see and our hearts are soft enough to feel.”

 

To me, this expresses how Rob came to terms with his “powerlessness”:

“Transformation is not about great spiritual experiences but coming to terms with our own human weakness as we experience it. … [P]owerlessness is the greatest power there is because it enables one to simply be more and more a channel of God’s power and love.” (Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable)

If our purpose here is to care for one another, to become fuller expressions of God’s power and love, then, Rob, you definitely accomplished that mission. Yes, my dear friend, I am amazed and grateful for having you in my life. What a gift it’s been to have such a friend!

“To be human

Is to become visible

While carrying

What is hidden

As a gift to others.”

 (From David Whyte’s: “What to Remember When Waking”)

 

 

My Decade After David (AD)

April 18, 2009. It was a Saturday morning. One of those cloudless, vibrant blue-sky spring mornings in Virginia. The kind of morning that sends people outdoors early. To garden, do yardwork, see what’s growing that needs to be cut. And that’s where David was. Outdoors. Mowing the lawn.

It was also Easter week. Less than a week earlier, we’d celebrated the gift of resurrection and new life.

Springtime. Easter. A dying of what had been. Transformation. New life.

The symbolism of all that has not been lost on me.

This being the 10^th anniversary, I wanted to take the entire day to do something special to commemorate this man in my life – a man who appreciated my sense of adventure, even if he didn’t always want to come along.

Can’t you just hear him saying, “You want me to go where?”

He was secure enough to let go and say, “You go, honey.”

And while I went exploring outdoors, he stayed indoors watching “the game.”

So, for today, in honor of David letting me be free to fully be myself, I planned a hike and quiet time in nature, bringing my journal along.

 

But first I had a mammogram. Something I’d scheduled months earlier without thinking about what date it fell on. Funny thing is, as I was filling out the paperwork at the imaging center this morning, I remembered the first mammogram I had done after David died. Only one month had passed. When I got to the line in the paperwork that requested an emergency contact, I stopped. My eyes filled with tears. Who would be my emergency contact now? I couldn’t put Davis. He had just turned 15. I thought of neighbors, friends, my sister in Raleigh. But I didn’t want to put anyone else’s name. I only wanted David to be there for me.

This morning, filling out the paperwork, it all felt quite different. None of that unbearable well of grief threatening me like an undertow. None of that sadness knowing I can’t go back to the way things were.

Instead, I felt happy with my new life. I recognized how blessed I am. How free I am to choose, every day, how I want to live.

That recognition in itself, of how far I’ve come, was worth the discomfort of the mammogram.

I used to think, especially in the beginning, why am I still here? Why did David have to die? Why couldn’t it have been me? In the midst of my grief, I would tell myself that Davis needed his dad more than he did me. It may seem silly now, but I genuinely felt inadequate for the task of raising a teenage son on my own. I felt unprepared – mentally, emotionally, financially. I worried about so many things.

Over time I’ve come to see that, beyond what my insecure ego was telling me, I do have a purpose. And it’s not simply raising Davis well. Although that was certainly extremely important in itself.

I am here to learn how to love. It’s a lesson I’ve been slowly learning. And I have a long way to go.

A rock in the shade – what more could you want?

During my hike I stopped to sit on a rock (what else can you sit on in the desert?) to write in my journal about David and the “deathless beauty” of love, as Jim Finley explains it.  How this love that can never die is pouring itself out as my life and everything around me. How that same love that David and I expressed for each other is alive in other couples I see caring for each other.  I especially recognize it in those who have been married a long time and have these little expressions of familiarity and endearment. The preciousness of it makes me smile. I’m thinking about this love when I get a text from Davis, all the way in Nome, telling me how much he loves me and his dad, and he’ll be thinking about us today.

Yes, love is deathless. No matter what form it takes. No matter how physically distant it seems.

It pours itself out infinitely. Encompassing everything. And 10 years later, I’m still learning to pause and take it in.

View of Organ Mountains on this glorious spring day

Fitted Sheets & the 10-Year Challenge

When Facebook had the 10-year challenge recently, I had to stop and think. Do I want to go there? Because 10 years ago, my husband was alive. To post any pics of myself in 2009 would be to post pics of a different self.

In early 2009 I was still part of a family unit of three, with an identity I could name and be confident in – wife, mother, self-employed writer/editor, active community member.

Months later, those foundations would come crumbling down as I struggled with my grief, feeling the shock of the unspeakable. Years later, I am rediscovering who I am in ways I could not have imagined. In a place I never imagined I’d be.

Sometimes it astonishes me, how much I’ve learned, how far I’ve traveled, all that God has done in my life, in those short 10 years.

For starters, I had to take on all the basic chores David did that I took for granted, like the grocery shopping, cooking, even the laundry. Yes, I was definitely spoiled.
And David liked to do things with precision and care, while I flitted through chores. And sometimes life.

After he died, I’d wished I’d paid more attention. To everything. How he prepared that special Panko-crusted salmon. How he handled a budget. How he folded those blasted fitted sheets.

Honest to God, nobody could fold fitted sheets like David. Not even my neat-freak friend who came over to do the laundry in my first week of grieving. She admitted she couldn’t do it with such precision.

It may seem funny, but every time I fold fitted sheets, I think of him. In this simple act, I remember so much love, care, nurturing, safety, and security. I know that’s a lot to see in a neatly folded sheet.

It’s a memory of a love that has carried and upheld me all these years. And it’s more than just David’s love. It’s a love in which we both exist.

So, I was willing to take that challenge. To go back and look at a picture of us. To reread and reflect on journal entries from that year.

What astonished me was how strong my faith was in the midst of such pain. How I was able to see and write about his death so clearly. How I was already deepening my trust in the Love to which I am being asked to surrender.

As one of my spiritual teachers says, the immediacy of what is is trustworthy. It’s all trustworthy. Because that is where God is, in the immediacy of this moment.

Since this is the 10th anniversary year, I’m going to risk sharing something very personal. It seems right to do so, to honor my love for David, to acknowledge the healing that can happen, and the amazing ways God can use us in the most painful of circumstances.

This entry is dated April 19, 2009, the day after he died:

My dearest David,

I can’t understand, so I won’t waste time trying. I know you wanted to be here for Davis. But although you can’t be here physically, your spirit is with us, and I know I will feel your presence throughout our lives. I know you’re going to help me from where you are. I also know that you are going to finally understand how much you are loved, and that gives me peace. No one loved me and accepted me and supported me as much as you did. You helped me to grow in so many ways. You were so devoted to me and to Davis. I tried to tell you how much I appreciated you, but it wasn’t enough – I know that because I needed to tell you this every day.

I’m going to miss you saying, “Hey, I didn’t get my kiss this morning.” And I’m going to miss you bringing me my coffee and doing all the little things you do to please me. I’m going to miss seeing the pleasure you got from Davis, witnessing how proud you were of him and how you would choke up talking about him sometimes. I’ll miss your generous heart, your bear hugs, your look of disgust at my wild ideas but how you went along with them anyway, your desire to help those in need, your willingness to see things differently, your wisdom in helping me to see things differently, your ability to turn to God under stress.

Everywhere you went, you thought of me and Davis. How could that be any different now? I KNOW this life is not the end of our journey. We were only beginning to deepen our soul’s journey together. It has been a very powerful and beautiful experience to share this life as your wife. I believe this – that I will recognize you in something or someone somewhere in a moment of awareness and my heart will smile because I will know you are with us.

People marvel at how I can be so strong. I am hurting, I cry, I’m deeply pained by the physical loss of you, but I believe we are being upheld in love and strength because both Davis and I know that in God we live and move and have our being. This experience truly solidifies that for me.”

So, I may not have learned how to properly fold fitted sheets in 10 years. But I have learned to discover grace in the painful challenges. And to trust where love wants to take me.

Very little grows on jagged rock.
Be ground. Be crumbled,
so wildflowers will come up
where you are.

You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different. Surrender.  (Rumi)

We Are All Grieving

View from my apartment looking out across Mexico

We are grieving our loss. My fellow volunteers and I – the women and men who worked alongside me at the Nazareth hospitality center.

We know we’ve lost something special.

Several weeks ago, our center for migrants and refugees closed. We were told it was due to staff transitions in the main health center that owns the wing we were using. We thought it was temporary. So far, it hasn’t reopened.

But even before the center closed, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had been bringing us fewer and fewer refugees. In mid-January, our daily numbers began dropping to single digits.

The interesting thing is, all of this happened soon after I’d closed on my house, packed up all my belongings and moved here – lock, stock, and barrel. Suddenly, what I loved doing most and fed me spiritually had disappeared.

You gotta wonder what the Universe has planned.

Still, I know without a doubt this is where I am meant to be. Living close to the border. Living, as I call it, “close to the bone.”

I’m not questioning my heart’s guidance.

But I am grieving. And I’m not the only one.

I realized this last week when I unexpectedly ran into several of my fellow volunteers at a Taize service.

Volunteers like Martha. Every Tuesday, she and her friend Cuki would come to Nazareth to prepare breakfast and lunch for our “guests.” When our daily numbers jumped to well over 100, they enlisted other friends to help.  They spent their entire day there, every Tuesday.

And they’ve been doing this for nearly three years.

Martha and I were so happy to see each other that night. With moist eyes, we shared how much we missed Nazareth and “the people.”

Without really having words to express why, we both knew the fullness of this experience had touched our lives.

Other volunteers joined our conversation. And that’s when I realized, we all were grieving.

Grieving because we missed interacting with the people who had clearly given us a gift by their presence.

Grieving because we know the tragic and violent situations that existed in these people’s lives – the reasons they fled their home countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador – have not changed. They’re still subjected to death threats, extortion, and gang violence. But where are they are fleeing to, we wondered?

Grieving because we know that human rights abuses are increasing – at detention facilities, at ports of entry, and elsewhere. And we don’t expect it to get better soon.

Some Customs and Border Patrol agents are turning away asylum seekers without consideration of their claims. Cases have been documented of people with credible fear being turned away at the border, like the mother who fled Guatemala after gang members killed her two sons and threatened her life. Turned away, even though those who are fleeing violence have a legal right to seek asylum in the U.S.

Or, in some cases, ICE is locking up asylum seekers. Sticking them in detention for the duration of their case, even though they pose no threat to our society. Even though they have passed their “credible fear” interview. Causing them more pain, more harm, more trauma to their children.

Here’s a recent example. Martín Méndez Pineda, a 25-year-old journalist from Acapulco, Guerrero, was detained and denied parole after seeking asylum here in El Paso. Pineda had received death threats and police beatings for his critical reports of the Mexican federal police. Only a week earlier, a female journalist had been murdered in Mexico.  Rather than assist this young man, we threw him in detention like a criminal.

Yes, we are definitely grieving over the direction our country is taking towards migrants and refugees.

Because for us, this is not just a controversial issue on the 6 o’clock news.

We have come to know “the people.” We have listened to their stories. We have accompanied them and been transformed by the encounter.

And we know they are human beings. Worthy of being treated with dignity and compassion.

Please, no matter where you stand on the issue of immigration and refugees, let’s remember that these are human beings. That human rights abuses should not be part of our protocol.

And it is absolutely inhumane to separate mothers from their children as a deterrent to immigration.

All that we will accomplish by such inhumane treatment is more grief. And the loss will be much more extensive and personal than we can anticipate.

For more practical and humane suggestions for curbing the flow of illegal immigration, listen to award-winning journalist and author of Enrique’s Journey, Sonia Nazario’s TED talk at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/sonia+navarro+ted/15ada9caf1939193?projector=1

 

Grief Revisited

Grief.

I’ve been feeling it again lately.

On December 2^nd, David’s birthday, I found myself crying. That’s unusual. Several birthdays have passed since his death and they haven’t caused such a reaction in me.

But that day I missed him.

I was feeling particularly tender and vulnerable. Continuing to live in this uncertain, “in-between” place was affecting me.

And there was something more.

A little over three months ago, in the predawn hours, I awoke to a message on my phone from a good friend from the past. Lisa had reached out to me because her husband had just died. Shocked out of my groggy half-awake state, I texted back that I was here if she wanted to talk.

Lisa and her husband Kevin had been good friends of ours in the early years of our marriages when we lived in Connecticut. We’d stayed in touch after moving away and even wound up living in the neighboring states of Virginia and North Carolina. Occasionally we’d meet halfway for family camping trips.

We had this history together.  We’d begun our marriages around the same time. Had both experienced the years of longing for a child and waiting and hoping and waiting some more. Finally rejoicing in each other’s gift  — a son for me, a daughter for Lisa. Our friendship was comfortable and comforting.

Listening to Lisa that morning, my own grief came back to me just as clearly as if I were reliving it with her. I remembered how I’d felt as if a hole had been ripped through my heart. How else can you describe losing your best friend and most intimate partner? The person you tell everything to, share everything with. The one who knows you better than anyone. The love of your life.

Yes, I understood that pain. I could empathize. But what surprised me is how easily I felt this grief again. I remembered how bottomless and debilitating it had felt. How at times I’d thought I couldn’t possibly heal.

More than anything in that moment, I wanted to take that pain from my friend.  Even if it meant I had to relive it for her.

Because I have crossed over this threshold, I know I can survive it. And much more than that — I know that joy and love and fullness of life exist even in the midst of such pain. I already know this.

But Lisa doesn’t. At least not yet.

I got off the phone that morning asking, why so much pain? Why must we experience so much pain?

I don’t really know the answer to that question.

But I do know that if I close my heart off to feeling as a result of my deep loss, I will close myself off from the greatest adventure and fulfillment of my life.

Here’s what is clear to me:

That grief and the healing power of transformation are connected.

That compassion has grown in me because of my own grief.

That grieving is not a singular event . The door to my heart has been broken open; I can’t go back to allowing myself not to feel.

That all of it is sacred and trustworthy. Even the painful stuff.

And I can trust the One who remained with me through the deepest darkness of my grief.

Many of us are grieving at this time of year. Some of it is due to the upcoming Christmas holiday, which can magnify our loneliness and pain, especially when we’ve lost loved ones.

Some of the grief, I believe, is due to this recent presidential election. I know I have felt anxiety and a real sadness for those who are vulnerable, including Mother Earth. There’s a collective grieving happening. I’ve heard this from others as well.

For me, the call is to live with greater compassion. Even, and especially, if it means feeling the pain of the other.

As insight meditation teacher Tara Brach explained in a recent talk on Bodhisattva for Our Times, going through your personal grief brings you to the universal.

She says, “Let grief transform you. Then make a conscious choice to be a light.”

That in itself is reason enough for me to allow myself to feel the pain of grieving. I want, and I choose, to be a light in the darkness.

“We’re all in it together and we can trust that even in the long, dark nights of winter our hearts are turning toward the light.” (Tara Brach)