Anniversary Alchemy

Today (August 24th) would have been 13 years of marriage, 18 years of two lives rolled up into one crusty ball of weird love and adventure.

We’re in it now, the deep alchemy.  The time of ashes that descended 2 ½ years ago has been well watered with the tears of anniversaries and is now a proper wallow of acrid decomposition. The wounds and shattered structures that couldn’t be felt in the moment are peeling back their brittle scabs and rotting casts.  A lifetime of two people growing and building a way of being that took a sharp ugly turn into the mystery, whiplash of dimensions, sudden amputation of entire colonies of beings and ways, a sudden extinction event of private languages and looks.

I don’t really know what Jason thought of death, we didn’t have time to discuss it in depth.  We’d had many more ranging conversations about consciousness and the carrying on of that.  He spoke frequently of the “self-limited” nature of being human, that we just could not know certain things, although he did understand that we continue in important ways.  He was so frequently outside of and dissociated from his body though that these conversations never touched the organic process of organs and breath ceasing. 

One stark memory, driving down a small country back road after putting my name on his bank account and notarizing a series of papers describing a transfer of power of various kinds should he be unable to articulate himself; He was deeply ill at this point, 2 days from death, we were already planning on going to the Seattle cancer emergency room first thing the next morning and he could barely speak without extreme effort.  I had been watching him at home for a couple days post-Surgery 1, I’d seen people die before, seen the way their bodies practice it, the way the lungs rattle and there are long pauses before a sort of gasping inhalation, had watched his body "practice this for several long days on the couch.  I asked what he felt about dying, he danced around it, not really answering (I believe he was in deep denial and fear about how ill he was) only clearly stating that he didn’t want to be in pain. 

“Oh honey, there’s a way there’s a way there’s a way. If only ever for the right now, if only ever for today.” (lyric credit Max Garcia Conover)

After that he nodded out again and I took us home, the PNW February sky pummeled black and blue and glowering into a sullen 4pm darkness.  That answer was enough for me two days later, when death came rampaging through his body, with absolute clarity that enough was enough and I would release him from this form with alacrity.

We we’re not the kind of people you might call “preppers”, but we did plan and provision. Often living near the poverty line, we still always had good food and wildcrafted teas and medicines.  We didn’t plan a particular future, but we planned, and provisioned for, a future, a future that was together.  It never even occurred to us that we wouldn’t be getting old at the same time, wouldn’t always be sharing resources and space and time.  There was no pre-nup, no separate accounts or social circles, it wasn’t two lives that became one, it was always just “us”, “Emilie & Jason”, said quick enough to be one word. So, there was no preparation for this, no provisioning for a young death, no conception that it wouldn’t just always be that way.  We even tried to separate for a few months once (shortly before he died no less) and we couldn’t do it, we didn’t exist without the other person, not fully. 

Say what you will about the naivety of this, or the lack of health or what have you but it’s just what it was, and I was not prepared for what has come next.

I guess, foolish novitiate that I am, that maybe I’d have the hang of it by year three, that we’d be well on our way to something new and stable.  That by then I’d know how to be the mother, the father, the nurturer, provider and protector all wrapped up in some super version of myself.  Yes, “I” the initiated priestess of sorrow and loss having upheld my end of the bargain as a “good griever”, having undertaken the rituals and flung myself into the arms of pain, would know the territory and feel as if there was some ground beneath my feet.  That I’d be feeding my dead every day and dancing along with my clients, weeping on appointed anniversaries (and sometimes just for fun), fully alive and in gratitude for my brutal initiation.  That “before” would be a bittersweet view in a rear mirror, vital in its purpose but also, importantly, over.   

over, over, over

Instead, I am slowly picking through what feels like the remains of a strange tornado.  Each room in my (albeit very small) house feels suffocating with things; books, records, artwork, craft projects, small little gifts and accumulations of the type that two overly intelligent curious people in love with beauty and music and creativity might collect. The tools and accouterments meant for a homesteading-type life, the fermentation crocks and canning jars, the freezers and dehydrators, the kind of wholesome self-sustaining life my ancestors would be proud of before being a “tradwife” was a trend.  

It’s the decorator crab variety of a human life, handwritten notes, both profound and as mundane as a grocery list, a tiny box full of even tinier feathers, a bag of small animal bones lovingly collected and passed back and forth, a single tarot card with an owl on it that just says “birds”, a small plastic weasel and, the one thing I cannot find but would trade all the rest for; a small polished wooden sphere, painstakingly shaped and sanded by hand one long winter and unceremoniously offered with a “here, it’s for you”.  I am certain none of it is “worth” anything in a way any typical westerner would recognize as value, but each bit carries the neurological neutron star weight of memory and story.

I find myself feeling envious of those who have lost all in wildfire or sudden floods, this painful deliberation stripped from them by forces out of their control, of what to keep and what to leave and then how to even store the personal flotsam of a dead life. I think of the jungle, a place where moisture and spores reclaim everything in a matter of weeks and the way this environment has allowed me to keep these things from rotting and decay.

My sweet son, whose infancy and very early years, was marked by the incessant bubbling of joy and delight, whose papa came alive in extraordinary ways through fathering and who can argue adults into the ground on spiritual and scientific matters alike, is a raging chaos of behavioral “problems”.  He disturbs almost all he encounters through his insistent fixation on violence and death and his inarguable reasoning for not wanting to live.  His ability to insult me like the most foul-mouthed convict one moment and snuggle up with affirmations the next is breathtaking.  My nervous system has never known such instability and it’s seen a LOT.

I thought I’d have the hang of it now, by year three.

But the trees grow strange and the neighbors take on shadowy unfamiliar forms.  I gather my things in my arms, the weight of a lifetime of effort and learning, the jars of green medicines, the feathers and drums and magic bells, my muscles ache and my feet falter in the darkening. 

A life that turned to ash in my lungs, dust in my mouth, and fire in my heart over one long night of medically induced horrors.  I’ve relived that night so many times, in flashbacks and through intentional storytelling.  It’s another piece too big to articulate, no one was there to witness me witnessing death arrive like a raving lunatic, liquidating his insides and feasting on his pain.  The crash cart interventions and cascading failures of organic systems inside one body that held all the meaning my life ever wanted for or hoped to have.

Just ash and bone dust, moldering in pacific northwest humidity, clogging my lungs with grief and my liver with rage.

The rage is disappointing.  The rage is exhausting.  The rage hurts my son.  A simple request for a glass of water at 3am sets me off because of the unfairness of me being the only one who can fetch it, the only one who can read the bedtime stories night after night and be kicked in the shins and overheated by a traumatized little body that, at 8 years old, still can’t sleep on its own.

But it is there, it must be contended with, felt, moved, processed.  Whatever the fuck that means.  Another one of these therapy speak words that I was so good at speaking that, without even an active license, I was the therapist of the therapists for a long while there. 

“Well you just gotta process it.”

“Have you processed your child hood trauma?”

“Did you process that one time that dumb bitch cut you off in traffic and it reminded you of your mother?”

I have been “processing” the unthinkable, unbearable, unimaginable, for 2 ½ years and I still cannot find the proper articulation to express the bigness of the thing.  How does one express watching yourself die while remaining alive?

My son used to speak of a spirit that lived by our hearth, an old and gnarled man type, he would, apparently, stodder around, petting the cats and teasing the mice.  He liked snacks and alcohol but was not particularly engaged with us on a regular basis.  Perhaps he was just a soft-focused overlay from some other dimension and not “ours” at all.

I am surrounded by four walls but feel bereft of home, my hearth is cold and dusty, old man “house spirit” has not been seen in several moons, seeming to have gone the long way home with many of our friends and relatives, turned to wispy greeting card smiles and occasional text messages.

A short side trip down a river in a boat made of grief.

Another foolhardy notion I thought I was “better” than, or at least insulated from, that silly notion that when a big loss happens people can’t deal and they slowly disappear.  “Not me” I thought, “I have worked too hard to build community, I will be held indefinitely.” 

And here we see the long twisty rivers and estuaries of relationship involved in an extinction event.  When a culture, a language, a species or even just one individual relinquishes their material form, an entire web of relationships and systems blink out with them.  We don’t just lose the one. 

My role was central to what was, for a time, a rich and beautiful tapestry of community, provider of ceremony and space and healing.  Now my songs feel hollow and performative, I nod off listening to others problems and fall into the nasty trap of comparative pain with mine always “winning”.  It has been a hard thing to recognize how much I had come to value myself because others value what I provided for them in my doing.

My relationships were never “mine”, they always were a summation of each other, driven by mysterious intimacies we can only stab vaguely at with our symbols and our wordy diatribes on attachment theory and interpersonal dynamics.  Even our richly decorated mythos can only gesture at the strings of relationship, give us a loose dreamy sense of “oh, ah, yes I can see that in play in my own experience.”

But other relationships have come to be, perhaps it has taken me longer to recognize the ways they hold me due to some form of denial or refusal to accept the totality of the loss and change.

The river and its tributaries wandering as they all do, meandering, creating new S-bends and sand bars, new deep pools and shallow sloughs for young forms of life to mature and flourish.

But back to the work, still in it, there are yet more layers to come undone.

As heavy as the lifting is of packing up old belongings, burning or burying old magic tools and spiritual junk, it is, (because of course it is), freeing and lightening, the color of the ichor is changing slightly, blushing honey-gold with the August sun.

The vessel that used to hold me, the one my son came into, the one I grew into a slightly crooked and cranked simulacrum of an adult, has cracked and the magic solvent leaked out.  Spreading slowly and coating everything in its bitter acid and sweet loving, the kind of reagent that eats everything down to the bone and then, even that too, becomes a kind of glitter dust softly settling, waiting to be used as the catalyst for the next Great Work.

Don’t think to hard, just do the next indicated thing.

Weeping, weeping, weeping for a life I thought I had, a life I cast in the plaster of busyness, of “making a go of it”, of “being normal” or “finding stability”, so many tears, one does not pack up a home of 18 years without experiencing multifarious sensations of loss, dusty decades of memories and pangs of nausea at the intensity of it all.

This is present moment living; just do the next indicated thing.  Not the next planned thing.  Not the next thing on the list.  Absolutely not the next “best” thing.  Just indicated.

Breath, close your eyes, look around and see what is within your own circle of control (not influence, not desire, not goals).  What can I actually effect with my own two hands.

What is the next indicated thing to do.

I do not feel desperate, pressed maybe, kneaded and pushed around by a force I couldn’t even fantasize about resisting.  My usual faculties are somewhere sleeping in a hayloft, and the future is a misty forest from some strange planet that I can feel is true and right and home but also, as yet, fully unknown.

This kind of alchemy wasn’t available to me in the beginning, to many bandages and unguents and lamentations of normalcy had been cast around me, cobwebs of the past sticking things together enough that change seemed like a fever dream of lunatics. 

I would not change! I would carry on, initiated into the depths of grief and pain but somehow without having to undergo the full blackening, the actual death of a life, my life (no not of my organism you silly people who fear suicide and death so much) but the actual death of my living life and all of my relationships.  This is what it means to lose a soul-bonded spouse.  It was not only his organism which died.  I have been watching through confounded eyes my own life dying along with his.

Hospicing an entire life (and really knowing that means so much more than just the organic body) is scary and dark and full of salty salty tears and hollow chests and furrowed brows and tired like I’ve never known before.  There is comfort in the completeness of it though, a steadiness of time and change and what a god damn relief that I am not in control.

I can feel the fat rendering, the bones giving up their marrow, the blood draining and curdling into whimsical patterns in the dusty Earth and the whole thing churning churning churning, the washing machine of death.

After the third school “emergency removal” the thought crept in to leave, a need gestured at through the angry postures of a little body, to face more directly the full implications of the extinction event that our lives went through.  To continue the process of dissolution and transformation.

A new vessel has been taking shape, it’s more flexible than a house, smaller too and mobile.  It’s built for comfort but also unknown terrain and location and it’s meant to be a womb of sorts; built out with love and laughter, packed with medicines and music; two angry, joyful, very weird and very lonely humans rearranging themselves around each other in 8 small feet of space and the entire West as the staging ground.  

My relationship to the land here has been one of reluctant admiration, drug from the Midwest by divorce I have never felt at home in the cold and damp, no matter how much I have come to marvel at the beauty and learn from the deep relationships available to those who listen.  A friend more versed in the relational ways of this place taught me that a gift must be offered three times, the recipient refuses the first two before finally accepting.  A way of being in reciprocity far older than the systems of alchemy favored by the bearded white men who eventually crashed these shores in their festering wooden ships although reminiscent of so many practices of three by three by three.  

I begin to suspect some gift has been offered twice before, almost by happenstance my refusal being in touch with a greater order of time that allows acceptance when it is truly possible, and we all know, deep in our bones, in the grit that makes us, what to do with a gift:

receive, receive, receive.

Here, then, stands the fool midway through the third year shedding skin and scraping scabs, diligently doing the “next indicated thing” as a practice of maintaining sanity.

Sometimes I can feel the anxiety creeping in that I didn’t fill my freezer with berries this summer, that I have no canned peaches or smoked fish, no pressed flowers or dried herbs or teas or medicines safely tucked away for the coming winter.  I still can’t find that little wooden ball, just a piece of cedar sanded to perfection, oiled by years of absent-minded pocket fondling, maybe it’s a final offering to the house spirit, I hope it is well received.

Photo credit: FrankyFromGermany