Zen and the Art of Grief

It’s Easter Sunday 2019. Despite Mayan predictions, 7 years post-apocalypse. 19 years post Y2K.

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking……into the future.

Be here now. Live in the moment. The present is all we have. Mindfulness.

OOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM.

The spirit is tired. The mind races, on and on and on and on, around and around it goes, where it stops, nobody knows.

This is the dance of grief. Past memories, future emptiness. Present loneliness.

Answers and comfort desperately sought, never found. Temporary escape in sleep and the cycle repeats.

Clarity beckons, and facing our own humanity becomes secondary to the pain. More questions, no answers. It remains a mystery.

Since the beginning of time, humans have sought the answer. Depending on where you were born and who your parents were, you may think you have it. Your god is the right god, the only god. The way, the truth, the light. Right.

You follow the rules, you perform the rituals, you teach your children well. you live, you die, you get your just reward or punishment. What happens next? Who really knows?

All we truly know is our human condition, and making sense of that is difficult enough without speculating on the afterlife. Religion can help, or it can hurt, or both.

When John died, I considered myself an atheist. At age 50, I stopped using. Religion. I got clean and sober – from religion. Hi, I’m Margie, and I’m a religion addict. I’ve been clean for 9 years.

I gave up dogma, rules, smells, bells, sacraments, holy days of obligation, saints, stigmata, apparitions. Christmas, Ashes, palms, Easter, Advent. Purple, gold, white, green. Body and blood. Virgin births, 3 kings, angels, loaves, and fishes, silly stories. Gone. The papacy, clergy, canon law, commandments no longer ruled my life. Fear and shame, Satan and all his deceptions, be gone !

Rather than replacing my addiction with another, as addicts do, I reveled in the cloud of unknowing, found peace and harmony in nature, delved into self-discovery and being good without god. Life was good.

Fast forward 6 years to the beast of cancer, death and grief. Uninvited and unrelenting, the pain just refuses to pack up and leave me alone.

Without religion’s crutch, how’s a girl supposed to stand her ground against the tide of tears and uncertainty ?

Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. You had the power all along, you just didn’t know it.

The power is LOVE. Simple yet profound. No need to complicate it. It is what it is. No book required. Just believe.

I’m a believer.

 

 

 

 

 

Grey Area: Either or/Both and

I was well into my thirties before I even heard this phrase.

Not “either/or………….but both/and”

It was spoken by a monsignor teaching a class I was taking for the RCAB (Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston) catechetical certification. The context had to have been theological, and although I don’t remember the topic I am sure his words enraged me.

Because, remember, I used to be a “Super Catholic”, dogmatic, rigid, unbending in my beliefs and sure as hell that’s where anyone who didn’t share them would end up. The sense of moral superiority was a drug – but that’s another post.

Back then I saw everything as black and white. Heaven or hell. Good or evil. Hot or cold.

With eternity at stake, being on the fence about anything religious was risky. Choose sides, follow the leader, whatever the Church says, whatever the Pope says (as long as he’s speaking ex cathedra, that is.) Keep the rules. It never entered my mind that I could be mistaken, and I had the apologetics down pat ready for debate.

My faith, and therefor my life, was black and white. No grey area. I was either all in or all out. If I took on a new project I gave 150%. Addictive personality ? Why, yes ! I believe I have one.  Thankfully  my fiftieth birthday and various life occurrences knocked me off my high horse (that’s another post) and I am now a recovering religion addict.

When John was diagnosed with GBM, the irony of the words “grey area” were front and center. Not only because the brain cancer ribbon color is grey, but the phrase is used to spread awareness of the disease. The brain is grey matter.

 With cancer, nothing is black and white. The tumor’s location, size, type, and growth pattern determine your options. The standard treatment for GBM is surgery, chemo, and radiation. So you do it, right ?

Yes. Or no.  The six hour surgery was necessary to determine what we were dealing with. Once we got the pathology reports, the choices began.

We considered no post operative treatment. Aware of the poisons to be administered, the risk of sacrificing John’s last days to trying to survive treatment was not what we wanted. But without treatment, John’s prognosis was 3 months. He decided to do it, hoping to reach the 12 month average survival rate for GBM victims, and promised if he got sick he would stop.

The oncology nurses were shocked every week when he continued to gain weight on oral chemo. He never got sick from it. The radiation, however, was more risky. Although mathematically engineered to target and shrink the tumor, a stray ray could fry his speech center or other delicate grey matter. Luckily, he never suffered any cognitive impairment from treatment until radiation ended. Then he deteriorated very quickly. Within a week he was dropping items, falling, and was unable to complete a phone call.

And exactly 3 months from his diagnosis, he was dead. So with or without the treatment, 3 months was all we had.

Life is all about grey area. Uncertainty. There are no guarantees. When I was young and stupid I thought it would be great to know the exact date and time of your death. Like and expiration date on a milk carton, you would know exactly how much time you had and use it wisely.

Living with uncertainty is a new challenge for me. With John, I always felt very secure, very safe, had a plan, allowing for slight edits along the way but certain our script would be followed. After all, hadn’t I paid my dues and didn’t I deserve smooth sailing into retirement and old age ? I guess not.

When John rode his bike home from work on the night that changed everything, his speech was strange and he wasn’t making sense. I remember vividly the moments right before he suffered a grand mal seizure,  I asked him “What’s going on ? Is something wrong ? Do you feel okay ?” His answer:

“I’m not sure.”  and then….”I’m not sure of anything anymore”

And those words ring true to me now. I’m not sure of anything anymore, either. The only thing I am sure of is that love never dies, and my John is with me, always and forever.