continuing bonds

Continuing Bonds II

~ Mimi Ray ~ 1 Comment

“I paint flowers so they will not die.” -Frida Kahlo

I love that Frida painted flowers as a way to memorialize their existence and as an act of preservation for something that lives so beautifully and briefly. In the act of painting them, she remained connected to a part of the natural world that she loved, and we can do the same with our dear ones who have died by actions that demonstrate our ongoing bond.

I blogged about the concept and practice of “continuing bonds” not long after my sister Christine died, and 10 years later I find that the things I do to uphold and strengthen our bond are just as meaningful to me, even more so with the passage of time. My conscious actions to maintain our connection feel natural and good to do. A continuing bond can be anything that feels like a sustaining connection between the two of you, just as it does with someone who’s living. Each day, for example, I ring a chime for her and say good morning, upon waking. You can include others to expand the community bond. For instance on May 1, a family member and I texted about this being the beginning of “Kissie’s month” because of her upcoming birthday and today I shared a photo of my tulips with a long-time friend of hers who thinks of her fondly and frequently.

It’s been 28 years since the groundbreaking book on continuing bonds by Klass, Silverman & Nickman was published, and it’s heartening to see that it’s become a more normalized and encouraged grief practice. Let’s keep that trend going because deep cultural shifts take time. There are countless ways to continue a bond — reading the books or watching the films they loved, listening to their favorite music, traveling to places they visited or lived in, writing letters to them, creating poetry, music, or art about them, getting a symbolic tattoo, taking up a cause they believed in, praying for them — the possibilities are as varied and multi-faceted as the people themselves and they change over time. What are some of the ways that you continue your bonds?

It is said that Frida always signed her correspondence with “Remember me.” Maybe she instinctively knew that connections can be sustained with acts of remembrance.

Memory II

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

In pondering more about revisiting memories and allowing my mind and heart to be open, I find it helpful to differentiate it from rumination. Rumination is more of a closed loop recollection of an event, as I alluded to in my last post. It relies on the mind replaying the same details and outcomes over and over without an opening. So what exactly do I mean by that? If something happened a certain way and I allow for something else to now be a part of that previous memory, I am not just rewriting history?

Rewriting history would mean a deliberate distortion for a particular aim. To make myself feel better, justify behavior I chose in the moment, etc. That’s not what I mean. By an opening, or an open loop, in regard to a grief related memory, I mean the attitude of mind and heart that there may have been more that took place than I was able to comprehend at the time. It’s an attitude that allows that I cannot at any given time, see and hear and digest all the details around me. It is accepting that my memory of something is not the complete picture – not that it isn’t important or accurate or insightful – just that it might be incomplete. That there could be more and finer detail and perspective than my mind was able to perceive at the time. That attitude allows the opening in which the “memory of a memory” that I missed can bubble up into my consciousness. I didn’t see it at the time or remember it because I wasn’t able to. Maybe the circumstances were just too painful or overwhelming. So it must be looked at again in the mind, almost as if with “the eye of the heart,” like the ear of the heart is to the benedictine practice of lectio divina.

Allowing memory visitation is dedication to a belief that some previously unknown insights are waiting for me to catch up. Their existence and emergence can happen with my willingness and openness. Memories can and do ossify, but who decides when and how? As I shared last time, it’s daunting and lonely to show up for a grief practice that has no social or cultural etiquette. I do it because the revelations and communiqués I’ve received have been sustenance to me and also from some urging to continue that I can’t explain. It feels a little dangerous, too, because of all that’s out there about grief from the field of psychology, especially in the last 10 years. Not that I don’t think psychology can be hugely helpful when it comes to grief, it can and has been vital for me. But it also feels very limiting and outcome driven and overly rational to the point of diminishment. Death and grief can be approached and perhaps understood and integrated more without stripping away all vestiges of mystery.

Memory

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

Is memory a thing to be chosen? Are recollections deemed inappropriate or unhelpful, ones that we should banish? And when they visit us unguarded we should distract from them for the sake of our mental “health?”

I ask these questions because of course I prefer to visit my happy memories. Yet, the even the favored ones of my life come with a certain sadness simply because they are no more. A long time ago I learned to call that bittersweet.

If I’ve visited with my happy memories enough to allow them to just be there and allow that it might include some melancholy for awhile, and to stay with that, sometimes the sadness shape shifts. What I mean is that it doesn’t always lead to the same emotional place or to the same conclusions. Many times it does, and that’s what I mean about allowing it to keep coming back for awhile over time. And then sometimes it shifts – not away from melancholy but to another “memory of the memory” that brings an unnoticed nuance into view, like seeing some amazing detail in a photo that you missed before, even though you’ve looked at it many many times. How did I not see that? How did I not remember it?

You can’t get there by not revisiting, though, and you can keep going over the same happy details the memory has always relied on – same characters, places, sequence of events, and outcomes. After awhile I think that lack of an opening for “something else” to show up starts to shrink the memory until it becomes maybe a little trite? Not worth wasting a lot of attention on anymore? I’m starting to think the story is told and the memory revisited so that unseen (and unforeseen) details have a chance to emerge. As though they were hiding before. Waiting for me to catch up. Maybe waiting for recollecting in a group so others can contribute their threads of memory and allowing space for what may always have been there so it can bubble up. Or waiting for questions to be asked that weren’t asked before and for communiqués to come through to our consciousness that we wouldn’t or couldn’t let in before.

So if I apply that practice to the grief-filled memories I’d rather gloss over, distract from, and even forget? Same thing. But it’s harder, hurts more, and is lonelier. Because there’s not much (any) sweet to offset the bitter in the beginning. The other details haven’t had a chance to emerge because it hurts so much and we turn away. And staying with this kind of “memory practice” (grief practice) might even be looked upon as detrimental or abnormal (it most certainly is by our culture) and I’m not suggesting that it’s for everyone. And to make it all the more daunting, there is no formality to it or training or teachers. So why do it? Well, there’s a chance for the shape shifting, some revelation, and maybe communiqués. And I don’t think these are promised or guaranteed. It’s a practice that has no precedent in my memory, but there seems to be hints of it around from people who lived and died before me. I’m listening and I hear them.

Acts of commemoration

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

It’s January again and our last family hours together, as we were, are what I think about most intently in the quiet moments from Christmas to January 5th, the day you died. The sun has broken through the dense and days long winter clouds as I write this — one of my special ways of knowing you are thinking of me, too.

The morning you died was bright and warm, and you had woken early, as you liked to, and asked Jeff to get you a cookie while on his coffee run. We marvel about that now, it’s one of our stories. How your nonexistent appetite suddenly turned and you wanted, of all things, a cookie! It’s a funny sort of comfort, to know about that little conversation in the kitchen with Jeff and your request. That you had the strength to get out of bed and share a little moment when the time was nigh. Then, shortly after 9:00 a.m., the cookie unprocured, you died, with us gathered around your bed.

I like to mark these days, the 4th and 5th especially, with little commemorations and rituals in your memory. Like a birthday’s welcome and hello, a deathday’s goodbye and thank you. 2020 is the sixth anniversary of your death, and also a Sunday, which it was when you died. And, significantly, it is Mom’s birthday — hello and goodbye, celebration and gratitude — always together now.

I also relish knowing what other family members and friends are doing in remembrance and celebration of you, when we can’t be together. These are a few of the ways I’m commemorating this year:

  • a votive candle by your photo
  • this blog post
  • writing about this time in my journal
  • asking family who were there to share a memory with me of the last day of your life
  • conversing with family and friends who want to reminisce
  • watching the video Jeff made for your memorial
  • attending Epiphany mass, as we did on January 5, 2014
  • going for a meditative walk, weather permitting
  • drinking tea in a china teacup
  • watching one of your favorite movies
  • eating oranges, as we did the day you died
  • burning a fire in the hearth and reading your handwritten words.

Eyes Wide Open

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

Many of my wonderings about grief lately have been bound up with the idea of full experience and its effects. It’s a very different concept from “moving on” or “moving past” that we generally hear in one form or another after someone’s death. What does it mean to become a grief practitioner? Sounds a bit frightening at first. Will I be sad all the time? My observations of grievers vary widely and for some it’s not possible or even advisable to go all in, especially at first. Yet for those who do endeavor and have the capacity to enter the experience with eyes open, to grieve like there’s nothing “wrong” with it and breath it in like the air, is there some kind of transformation that gradually takes place?

Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life…is death.

I was introduced to the countercultural notion that being a “practitioner of grief” is the pathway to the love of life. My somewhat obscure instructor, Stephen Jenkinson, is the author of Die Wise (a book I reviewed for the Minnesota Coalition for Death Education and Support) and the former director of palliative care counseling at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. His distilled and revolutionary proclamation about a grief practice is this: ‘Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life…is death.’  He not only believes it’s possible to have an inner life whose joy is rooted in “knowing well” that it will end, but that it may be the antidote to much of the fear and anxiety the dying have about what will become of them and what we will do with them after they die. Will we be able to live as if they never lived? He posits that grief in action is the ‘willingness to remember great sorrow, unsuspected loss, blank pages in the story of who we are.’

Nothing since Kissie’s death has been more real, more equal to the prospect of the rest of my life with her physical absence, than this lived and felt attitude about my grief — that death has always been the cord of connection to my love of life. And that my practice of grief is my continuing cord of connection with her. 

“Grief is a way of loving. Love is a way of grieving.” – Stephen Jenkinson

 

Each grief a reflection of relationship

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

My elderly mother-in-law died seven weeks ago. It was a long decline spanning the last 18 months and punctuated by numerous and increasing health issues, notably dementia and cancer. The end of her life brought a level of care-giving and involvement for which neither my husband nor I were adequately prepared. For me, taking on such huge, additional responsibilities, though shared, was overwhelming, especially while grieving my sister.

What has stuck me most in these intervening weeks since her death, is the nature of my husband’s grief and how intrinsically their distinct relationship has determined the character and nuance of it. This has, in turn, brought my own grief into sharper relief. Each grief for someone is so very personal. It is marked by all that we were and meant to each other, how we interacted, what was shared and withheld, and how — over time — we grew emotionally closer, or apart, and how we therefore arrived at the time of parting. It all comes to bear at last on how and why we grieve, and how we will face our own deaths.

We also bring these very personal experiences to our expressions of condolence and sympathy. So much is framed by our unique relationships and circumstances, that drawing too much on assumed similarities can, at the very least, render the expression less meaningful. I’ve noticed how my condolences to others reflect my own grief and relationships. Though there are many parallels to be drawn and unities to be embraced as I contemplate death and mourning, my awareness of others’ discrete relationships gives me a richer understanding of my own grief, and hopefully, a more mindful appreciation of theirs.

To Yearn for You

~ Mimi Ray ~ 4 Comments

Is it okay to yearn, to long for, to pine? And for how long? Some grief research has characterized prolonged yearning as “complicated grief,” which is imbued with negative connotations for social and psychological functioning.  I can’t fathom not yearning for Kissie. I do it everyday, and expect to for the rest of my life. My yearning is a mixed emotional bag, and the extent of it varies from day to day, month to month, season to season. Sometimes my longing for her is a vast and wordless comfort, and, sometimes, it’s a huddled ball of second thoughts and bone-tiredness. My yearning has taken me on hours-long email reading expeditions as I devour our mundane and exultant exchanges, and fueled excavations of long-forgotten photos and the hoped for, glistening memories. My longing for her is part of my ongoing connection to her. And just as I hunger for the company of those I love who live far away, I ache for those who have died, knowing full well that our time as it once was has ended. I find it nourishing to openly acknowledge my longing, and to feel its many facets as fully and honestly as I can.

Is love itself not yearning? Grief, you are all the love I’ve yearned for, and found, and yearn for still.

 

 

Echo

~ Mimi Ray ~ 2 Comments

‘”What causes an echo?” she once quizzed me. The persistence of sound after the source has stopped. “When can you hear an echo?” When it’s quiet and other sounds are absorbed.’
– Mitch Albom, from For One More Day

These are my favorite lines from a short, sentimental novel the author calls a “family ghost story.” Not long after you died, I mentioned to a musician friend that it was so quiet.  Your “sound” seemed to have left the world – the sound of your exuberance, your laughter, the literal vibration of your life. I could no longer identify it in my audible field. Without realizing it consciously, I started then to listen for an echo of sorts – the persistence of you. And I find I can somehow perceive the “persistence of you” most clearly when it’s quiet, or perhaps more aptly, when I’m quiet inside. But not always! Sometimes, in the noisiest of family gatherings, that echo punctuates the party. Just like you did.

Recently, an old friend of ours, cried with me about how terrible those last months were for you. It was such relief to know she grasped some of the enormity of what you endured, and to share the anguish of that knowledge together meant so much to me. Then, she apologized for bringing it up! I’m not sure she fully understood when I explained that I welcomed it, was grateful beyond words that she had spoken of those life-altering events. I think somehow we quiet the echoes of our deceased loved ones when we avoid painful memories – and even joyous ones – in well-meaning attempts to spare each other more sadness. We also stifle an opportunity for grief to be expressed in community, and the easing of sorrow, however temporary, that it brings.

This week I’ll be reunited with several of our long-time friends. With a few, it will be the first time since your memorial. Your name will be spoken freely, and your photo will be prominently displayed on the mantle. We’ll use some of your serving dishes on the table, and your favorite music will be played. Stories will be told. Echoes will be heard.

 

 

Future Shock

~ Mimi Ray ~ Leave a comment

2016 is kicking my emotional ass – and that’s a massive understatement. A realistic summation of it simply fails me.

It’s nearly 29 months since you died, Kissie. January 5th was two years. It has been unlike any two years of my previous 53, and I have by turns crawled, trudged, sleep-walked, and literally slept, my way through it. I’ve also wept, laughed, raged, hugged, and tried to love my way through it, but my experience of time has irrevocably changed. From the outside it must seem I’m just aimlessly adrift. Acquaintances and friends inquire about my interests and pursuits, which appear to be abandoned. I am not what I once was.

One of the ongoing difficulties is trying to find (or create) the right language to convey what’s happened, and how I’m adjusting (or not). I’m really not adjusting, though I must be adapting to some extent. I keep going – that’s what I do. When I open my eyes, I try to remember to give thanks for another day, and for the ability itself to weep for you.

I sometimes call this time and space I now occupy “future shock,” which is to say it feels neither here, nor there. It’s an in-between, disorienting, ambiguous-feeling time. And something I don’t recall experiencing before, though maybe I was not as conscious of it as I am now. Is it because I’m grieving deliberately? It’s future shock because I’m here two plus years later in a future I never imagined or wanted. It’s a liminal place because it feels transitory and unmoored, but not aimless, to me. It feels necessary.

We just celebrated your birthday for the third time since your death, Kissie.  It’s the happiest day of my life, especially the ones we shared in person. Looking at every single birthday card I ever gave you, each a tiny paper monument to our love, that liminal sweet-sadness wells up, and an old, bones deep longing I’ve always felt whenever we’ve been apart.

Autumn, Particularly

~ Mimi Ray ~ 3 Comments

It’s hard to believe I could miss her more than I do, every. single. day. Then fall comes. It’s autumn, particularly, that embodies her brilliance, her joie de vivre, her way of bursting into a room and charging the energy with color and light.

Kissie embraced and celebrated each season’s idiosyncrasies, but none captivated her, or crystallized her sense of wonder and awe, like fall. She reveled in the midwestern pleasures: the crisp air, a crackling fire, apples and pumpkins, Halloween, and of course, the trees. She’d unabashedly jump into a pile of maple leaves and toss them like confetti.

These are the liminal days when I long for her with a heightened intensity – memories swirl and I can almost hear her voice in the quiet morning air. Maybe that’s why she loved this time so much – these transitory, fluid days do feel like a threshold, a beginning as much as an end. There is a penetrating sense of her presence, and countless reminders of the life and people she loved so much. I miss her more.