The facility did hold off on the spraying at that time, and my mom did celebrate her birthday with all of us (momma grit!). My brother and his kids arrived for it after mom was out of the hospital, and other good friends were there from out of town too. (But the lawns were sprayed during her party.) Our ceiling did eventually get fixed. But other problems remained chronic and very painful.
People say:
- God never gives us more than we can handle.
- We come into this world having already made contracts for what we go through in order to do our soul’s work here in this life.
- Everything happens for a reason.
- Why didn’t you do X, X, or X to avoid going through it or do X to fix it?
- What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
- Everything you go through has a silver lining. You just have to find it.
- Through pain and suffering you find your deeper self, your true self, and your soul’s purpose.
Frankly, people who have easy answers to the question of suffering scare and offend me. You can’t say the truth of someone else’s life for them. People who do are not living their own experiences and questions as human beings. Can you really say these things about a child being horrifically murdered or to a 15-year-old sex slave or the few survivors of a near genocide or the lead-poisoned kids of Flint, Michigan?
The more gates I have passed through, the more I see how few people face themselves or the difficult questions of life. Avoidance. Denial. Projection. All the goodies come out to play when you yourself go through tough times and look to others for help and understanding. Yours may have been a different journey, but this has been mine. I’m not saying I have this beat, I’m a work in progress as much as anyone, but here are my tracks.
Because at the center of the labyrinth, after having paid in blood at each of these gates, I went in search of my own answers. I luckily found guides worth my time skilled and wise enough to support me in this wilderness—who have helped me make my own heroine’s journey in search of my own truths and wisdom, meaning, and healing.
WTF??
It's December 2015 and I re-read my journal from May-August 2011 (see Part I: Bone and Air): I hold my hands cupped, hoping something of substance will be poured into them.
What comes are tears pouring out of my eyes like a flash flood crashing into my curled fingers and tumbling onto my shirt and belt, releasing even as they shock and scour me with their intensity.
So my first effort is compassion—to feel the pain and suffering, the onslaught of these two perfect storms crashing into one another. There was no way around it, looking back. Shit just kept happening. I weep, bend in pain remembering those days, especially of watching my mom suffer and not being able to prevent it, but also for what I was trying to do, all I was trying to fix, to hold, to protect and defend, to recover.
My second effort: I throw my gloves to the ground and curse and slam my ski poles against a Doug fir tree. I am alone in the woods and am damn fucking mad. (Not only about all that happened but about today: my ’88 4Runner on its last legs, financial stress, bills, a need to move into more work/my career but feeling burned out. And I’m one of the lucky ones…)
My third effort: I cup the question in my palm like a small candle. Okay, why do we go through all this suffering? What is all this about? We come here, we have good and bad times, sometimes a lot of bad, and then we die. WTF?? I hold this question out into the sheer blackness of night, clouds blocking stars, hoping something will find its way to this flame before the winds snuff it out.
My fourth effort is to go to my spiritual help. We sit. We have tea.
Why do we go through all this suffering?
It is so painful for you because you are not using the right tool.
What?
See with your heart.
They obviously don’t know what they’re talking about, or they don’t understand what I mean. At least the tea tasted pretty good.
There’s so much shit that goes on. We just have to deal with it. I don’t see anything else. There’s no meaning in it. It just happens. So much suffering. What do you mean: see with my heart?
Little sparks fly. I am a bit lost. I take another sip of tea, put the cup down onto the saucer. Breathe. Something has touched me, and I relax a little. I don’t understand, but I feel something.
My fifth effort: back to the woods. What the hell does it mean to see with my heart? And what do we do about all the harm and violence, the suffering, the pain? After days of snowshoeing and skiing in the dusky woods, I am muscle weary and the skin around my eyes is rashy from tears splaying across my face.
- My mom called me.
- I never hesitated to go to her.
- Jeff came up with the perfect fix for our off-gassing ceiling, and it did get done. He gave and did it for me.
- I am still here. I survived.
- I am not alone.
I chisel off the pesticide spraying notice and let it fall to the ground.
I pound the blade in and break off a monstrous chunk—my mom’s suffering. I let it land. It shatters and the pieces scatter for miles.
I carve off the scent of Tide, the menstrual cramps, ducking under scaffolding, the exhaustion, our arguments, our stress, the snowstorm, my asthma attacks, the roof failure, the light bulb shattering. They are now at my feet, powder.
What’s underneath all this shit is our love. It’s both fire and gemstone, Light and Matter.
What I see is this fire being stoked and fed, this gemstone being carved in each moment we gave and received love. The point isn’t the poison, the fracture. Yes, those had to be dealt with, and they were significant and all encompassing for a while.
The point is what we fed, what we carved. That’s the point. That’s what lasts.
No, it’s no silver lining; it’s no panacea. There’s no ‘take away’ here. It doesn’t make it all worth it. Don’t be cheap.
My mom did die from the myeloma. Jeff and I did come to the end of our marriage and get divorced. The pain and grief and suffering did not end in 2011.
But, we gave and received love, however mixed up in stress and arguments and burnout it was at times.
The pain has run its course. Echoes of it are still running through and out of me as I write, do Tai Chi, do yoga, ski, weep.
But I see now, what remains is this love—glowing, burning, casting beautiful rainbows on the wall when the light hits it right. It has survived death. It has survived divorce.
I know because I burn with it; I am alive in it. Nothing will ever be the same.