Split Ends

 

Bright spring sunlight

pours into bathroom window - 

revealing split ends.**

Last week Wednesday was the one year anniversary of my last live class before moving entirely online, where I continue to teach to this day. 

Today is the thirty-first anniversary of my father's death.

The pandemic anniversary date snuck up on me fairly quickly; of course I've seen North American and European folks* posting about the year anniversary of many aspects of the pandemic in social media. Of course it's come up in personal conversations and in my classes. And yet, I am deeply affected by anniversaries (as regular readers of this blog know) and this one is striking me quite deeply.

Grief Changes

I’ve been thinking about grief lately, as March 15 marked the 27^th anniversary of my dad’s death. This year, though I was tender – as I often am – I didn’t shut down as strongly. And whenever I do get caught up in the intense pain of the loss, I can finally find relief in Maitri practice (loving-kindness/metta/unconditional friendliness). For many years, the practice made basic sense to me but didn’t seem to budge my most fundamental struggles. Over time, however, my heart has opened up enough to want to be relieved of the suffering of believing I am alone in my loss, and so bringing to mind others who have felt grief like this gives space around my feelings, and a salve of support.

Let Some Shit Lie.

Day 8 of ‪#‎Quest2015‬ - The prompt of the day from Eric Klein:

How will you face your shadow bag and stop the stink, so you can bring forth what is best within you in 2015? What can you claim right now?

What I can claim is that I do this work all the time, constantly. In fact, dragging around the bag tired me out years ago. What wears at me now is actually the work of scooping it up. I am ready to let some shit lie there and let it stink.

I find I am tired now because I have dug a bit deeper recently than usual, and pulled up some plugs that I knew were keeping my drains from flowing freely. Now that the fluids are rolling out again, I need to lay back and let myself go out with the waters.

My only shadow is what I keep from myself, whether out of survival/protection or in some kind of saving face/flying under detection manoeuvre. For awhile now I have had recurring neck issues, and worked through them with Hakomi therapy and also chiropractor work. These have both been useful, but as some recent deep re-configuring of grief over my mother's death has arisen, I had suspected that my neck and my sadness were deeply entangled.

At a meditation instructor training I found incredible palpable energetic evidence that they are. In situations, repeatedly as we practiced and trained, I tracked as my body tensed and mind became righteous, worried because "the person in charge" (not me) was "not doing their job" and so "someone had to do something" and "the only person who could/would do it was me." In these tiny interactions, the teachers detected my aggressions before I did, mirroring back a struggle I didn't realize I was having. My peers, the other students, mirrored back gratitude that I interrupted unhealthy situations. But my body felt exhausted, like it had been climbing uphill all day.

I had to ask myself, once I saw how clearly I was triggered, then reacting to my sense of lost power with incredibly controlling behavior, what was really going on? The answer was clear as day: I was taken back to a place, the place I visited so frequently when my father died (I was 12) and my mother didn't know how to stay alive - the place, the era, the state of mind of unpredictability, drinking, incredibly hostility at home. It only lasted a few years - and in fact, got better in the last few years of her life - but I was so traumatized that for a long time all I would feel was shock, tension and control whenever a situation seemed at all unstable for me.

Cue now.

So this is the current shadow. They get subtler over time - when I told one person what I was wrestling with, after our group meeting, she screwed up her face and looked at me oddly. What? I hadn't been controlling, she said. But my body told me otherwise. I use "controlling" not to be judgmental but to get to the core of what that energy-draining background program has been trying to do, unconsciously, for over half my life now.

I am ready to pull the plug on this shadow beast, but of course that's not how it works.

Instead I am using this darkest time of the year to rest, and to merge a bit, with long moments of deep breaths, with this inner core pain.

Hello in there, dear shadow.
Let's air you out and maybe you won't stink so much.
Let's go for a walk together, get you out and about.
Let's get you more familiar with life so it doesn't freak you out so much.
We are about to do some flying and I need you to be willing to let some shit lie so we can take off together into the huge sky of 2015.

Horror as Consolation

Last week in my weekly, in-person classes, the prompt was about reading. I got so many amazing responses, as I recall was the case the last time I used this prompt, two years ago. In fact, I am going to ask students to share their writings and put together a small book of them - Writers on Reading.

However, one response in particular really hit all of my personal bells.
I wanted to share the part(s) that struck me most here.
The first spot to really shock me awake was her insight about compulsive reading. I often find (and many others wrote about this) that I read mindlessly, intensely, and that's even reading "good literature."

Here's Kara's insight on this that struck home for me:

I grew up as one of those quiet shy girls with my nose in a book. I actually resisted reading at first. I remember in first grade being behind. Then something happened. I know my sister gave me The Little House on the Prairie books in second grade, and the next thing I know, I began tearing through books. I kept reading, and did it a lot. Compulsively. These were my video games.

It's that last set of lines that hit me. That would have been enough. So articulate. But then she went on to describe something I have NEVER heard anyone else describe: assuaging grief with horror. When my father died, I read all of Stephen King, a fair amount of Peter Straub and the like.

Here we go with Kara's passage that blew me out of my seat:

Searching For My Father's Voice

My dad in his office, mid 1980's

Daddy? I ask the tape player,
Is that you?
It is Tom Clark. Not Dad.
The jovial
joking commentator on
NPR
WPR
takes me right back
to my mother's bedside
listening to Chapter a Day
falling into nap.

This man is not my father,
nor the next, a guest on Jean Feraca's show.
I look out the window at the crocuses
just now popping up in my late-blooming
yard. Twenty-four years ago
these bloomed in my mother's shade
mid-March, the day Daddy died.
Now it is late April,
two hours south
and I am still searching for his voice.

I put in another cassette. These are
promising - Maxell from the mid-80's
and the shows are ones I know
they listened to together.
I listen to silence, silence, silence
90 minutes of it on each side. 
I am rapt with anticipation,
dread. The last time I heard Dad's voice
I was in my teens and accidentally found
him yelling at the end
of a radio recording.

Here I am hoping I will find his voice.
Hoping I won't.

Grief and Letting Go

Grief is a tough one for me.

Or is it?

Having lost my parents when I was pretty young, I am prone to moments - on the treadmill, in bed in the morning or late evening, petting the cats, watching a movie - of missing them.

Or am I?

It's spring. My mother died on January 24. My father on March 15. My mom's birthday would be April 10, and my father's March 25. The spring is annually pockmarked with their absences.

For a long time I identified with my grief. Every time I was sad, it was about my parents. A therapist I had in my late twenties, concerned about my repeated, cyclical depression and anxiety, had me map my emotional responses. Sure enough, at the same time each month, I missed my parents. Missed them because they were dead, missed them because they were often absent even when alive. Missed the idea of having parents. Got angry at them for what they did. Wished they'd done otherwise. Regretted disliking my mother so much when she was alive. Rinse. Repeat.

The therapist said:
While I believe you were traumatized as a child and young adult, I think this cycle is chemical.
I was diagnosed with PMDD - pre menstrual dysphoric disorder. It fit the bill perfectly - a very severe emotional response to the normal hormonal fluctuations of PMS.

Ok. Good. I evened out more. Because I understood the chemical component of my sadness/anxiety, I could also see that perhaps I was holding on to something - my parents'/the idea of my parents/my sadness. I got that a bit. I became more able to let it go, meaning: it was already gone, and I could see it was gone. Came, went. Came again, went again.

However, only recently have I noticed that the acute pain of loss, of hurt and grief, 
returns as well.
Yes, it goes. Yes, it comes again.

On one of numerous road trips for a dharma program that I have recently been on, a sangha friend replied that, when I told her that my parents and grandparents were gone by the time I was 22,
You were all alone.
I balked, though I've been known to say things like this, honestly.
I said, No, I still had, still have, my two older brothers.
But you didn't have any - don't have any - aunts or uncles or anything?
That's true.

I felt the acute sadness behind this story - this story I have told so many times, felt sad about so many times. Yes, I am all alone, I have felt so often. Yes, I was abandoned. And yet, what I was feeling then, it feels like now, were the words. I was feeling the stor(ies)y, not the feelings.

Now, now I am feeling the feelings more. Thanks to meds, meditation and more and more practice recently than in a couple of years, I am sensitized, close to the surface, and aware. Aware when the feelings come, and aware enough to really feel them. Then, to really watch them go.

This is what I talked about in a more abstract way in my recent post on elephant journal.
This is what letting go is - letting them go. Permitting, nay, noticing, accepting that what is gone is already gone.

Each time I acknowledge my feelings and let them go away, see that they are already gone, I am actually letting go of my parents. This is something I haven't been doing in the past. Maybe it was extended denial, or shock. It seemed like acceptance, but as I get closer to some feeling of real acceptance, I can see how far off it was.

There's no problem with that. I am not angry at myself, or shocked, hurt that this is 
"still going on."
No, instead I am grateful, most of the time, that I can keep learning to let go, the only way how:
Now.
Now.
And now again. Experiential. Real. Non-conceptual. In the moment. 

That's the only way to let go.

What I Really Really Want

"Hurt Pharmacy Open" Mar Vista, LA January 2013

Around Christmas, I had a series of wonderful conversations with my best friend about what we miss. We both find Christmas - the holidays in general - a lonely time. It's midwinter, dark, and people we love/chosen family, leave town to be with their families of origin. We'd say we miss our families of origin, but spending time with them is never what we hope? expect? it to be. We still feel lonely afterwards, no matter how wonderfully it goes, which sometimes, it actually does.

Grandfathered In

(from a collection of shots of odd/aged "handicap" signs I've taken over the years)

In writing an essay for an upcoming call from Creative Non-Fiction journal, I have been going through my grandfather's writings on his trips to Australia. I have these because I have nearly all of our family files - all the letters, all the paperwork. No bills, I hope, still up there, but at least three generations' worth of photos and other family ephemera. My grandfather - he was the only one I ever met, as the other one died before I was born - visited Australia annually over the course of a few years, for about a month at a time, with often side trips to Fiji or Tahiti or New Zealand. I always wanted to go with him, but never did. In writing this essay, I am addressing a question I never really asked myself. Why?

Lies and Survival

"Did you ever lie to survive when you were younger?" she asked.

We were talking about our families, about our parents in particular: what was hidden, what was shared. I instantly sprang to a part of my life I felt super uncomfortable sharing for decades, but have, in the process of writing my memoir, finally "outed" and been able to talk about without shame. It wasn't lying *to* my family, it was lying *about* my family, sort of.

When my father died we had no funeral. There were many cards from students and co-workers (he was a beloved instructor at a local small tech college). Many calls. But no responses from our family (see: my mother, lost in grief) and certainly no funeral or wake. I didn't really know what those were like - my maternal grandmother had died when I was a little kid, and we had buried her at our cabin, where everyone's ashes got buried. No service, just a burial - maybe we weren't even there when our grandfather put her in the ground.

So it didn't strike me as odd. Didn't strike me as needed or even healthy to have a service. It was normal, you know, what was known, in my family's culture.

Just So

(photo of Michael Amos Hall, 1960's, N. Ireland)

My father was distant, and then, he died.

Of course that is not the whole story. However, that is a big part of the story I have managed to overlook on one level or another for many years. When people ask me, especially if they have recently lost someone close to them, "Will this sadness ever end?" I gently try to say no, but it does lessen somewhat. On weeks like these, I remember what really happens: grief, like everything else, changes. That's all. Just when you think you've figured it out, it changes.

In working on my memoir, Bermuda Triangles, I have slowed down considerably, finely editing the draft to send out to a possible agent. A local friend, wonderful writer and fabulous editor, Lissa, pointed out while helping me to revise that the protagonist (me as a little girl) seems to adore her father and yet, there are no instances, nada, showing WHY. Nothing to make the reader understand why she loved her father so. She said this a few times, but I only got it myself when I began to edit parts about his sickness and death (when I was 12) - finally, it hit home, and even when it hit home, it took me a few weeks of lots of space and getting out of town to finally start to have some memories come back.

This week's class prompt is about "Reading and Writing" - favorite books, how reading relates to writing, etc. I knew it would come eventually - that I would write about reading the Just So Stories to my father when he was sick, and him correcting me repeatedly, without cease, whenever I got the slightest thing wrong.

Remember my post about him as Judge Hawthorne? Yep. So of course I knew this was a part of his personality, but as I explored those memories, I realized the only ones in which I actually think of him fondly, he is silent or speaking to someone else - a bookstore owner or musician. The negative memories? He's either not around or speaking to me - criticizing me, warning me or - yeah, not good.

There's a lot more remembering to do, and likely, some of it will be painful. But today, after writing about the Just So Stories, and then sharing it with my AM class (the first time I have ever cried throughout my whole reading of a piece during a class), I feel cleaner. Clearer. More honest. It never fails, though always feels awful getting there - knowing what is actually causing me pain is less painful than making up something else to hide it. For instance, for years I really hated my mom. Now, suddenly, on a newer level (again, I've known this before - sort of) I realize she gave me, expressed, far more love than my dad did. But I didn't want her love. I wanted his. And it was hard to get.

Without blame or shame, though with tremendous sadness, I softly explore the underbelly of the stories I have told myself for decades in order to survive. As the actual stories appear, they write themselves easily, unlike the parts in my memoir that Lissa noticed as absent, not as strong, lacking and seemingly contradictory. There was plenty that was contradictory in my childhood - my mom and I fighting for my dad's affection, at the top. But I don't need to fight myself anymore. That's a conflict I can relax. I hope. I can try, anyway.

Papa Terma

For many many years, I waited for it, longed for it, imagined it.
A letter, a note, a picture with words; some kind of written confirmation.
Something from my father, who died when I was 12, saying that he loved me
missed me
would miss me
wished me well
with some words of wisdom and gentleness to guide me through the rest of my life
without him.

After searching through banker's box after banker's box, piles of economic journals, graded computer programming papers, receipts copied again and again, after years and years of secretly and not-so-secretly searching, hoping some time in the four years he was sick he thought to write to me, hoping somewhere in all the detritus of our now-sold childhood home, I would find IT. And I would know that was IT - THE letter, THE note, THE missive, THE missing piece.

I never did. Nothing for me, for either of my brothers.
"You should be glad you had a father than loved you" my mother would say on days when she was competitive over grief with me. The implication was at least when I had him he was great, even if I no longer had him in any way. Not many memories, and no notes, persay, not even to me when he was alive from him alive. Much less from him then alive now dead to me alive.

A couple of months ago I finally wrote myself that note. The feeling was one of finding the text in myself - the message mostly derived from Hakomi therapy, asking my inner voices what I need at a fundamental level - the text oriented around being gentle with myself, having perspective for all of life, and not working too hard - basically "do as I say not as I did." The message wasn't from him them, it was from him now - my dead father, as if he has grown this whole time alongside me, and seen how wrong he was in overworking, wrong he was in not being present to much in my life or my family's life, and how much he wanted to make sure I don't make the same mistakes.

For if my father were still alive I am pretty certain he wouldn't be able to see that. My living through his death and long past means I can start to see these things - I think his living through Cancer wouldn't have helped. But who knows. All I know now is that I received it not from me, persay, but from some part of him in me that has been secreted away, grown and opened, and now is blossoming when I need it most.

A Terma. Something buried from him, deep inside his Basic Goodness, his real self, hidden in the mindstream of our genes, coming alive when it is needed most. I am grateful for these teachings on Terma from Tibetan Buddhism - though my literal father would have likely scoffed at them as a skeptic, the inner father who is finally opening, that little voice, deep inside me, he knows it is true. We plant seeds and never know how they will mature, and the way his voice comes to me now, reassuring me I am making the right choices, to in fact do as he is saying now and not as he said or did then, I know he meant the best all along. He never meant to harm. He didn't know better. I can still be angry, and still forgive.

Looking through boxes a few nights ago I found this image of my dad and his mom. No date - I think it must have been just before he got sick. His mom, who was always so gentle and loving with me, was so severe with him (as you can tell in the photo). Ah the irony. He was quite loving with me but also so severe. The tone of the Terma I have received is that of this exact moment - laugh, love, be open. Don't care how you look in a photograph. You are fine. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with you or the world as it is. There are very few photographs of my father, especially later in life, as he was always the photographer, rather than the photographed. So this is a hidden photo, a surprise, as pictures of him always are from this era. And usually, he is not smiling. So a Terma within a Terma. I offer it to you, dear reader, as it was given to me - a quiet gift on a snowy day.

So many forms of Impermanence

My brother Alex got married this weekend. It was a Halloween wedding, resplendent with major crafting done by my now sister-in-law, Patty, and many images of love mixed with impermanence. Bride and Groom skeletons, for instance, held up pumpkins with their names carved out, and a ghoulish butler invited everyone into the reception room.


Witches, goblins, zombies and ghosts attended the wedding, along with, of course, living costumed creatures: Mr and Mrs Potato Head, Masquerading Bridesmaid (that was me), a few devils and belly dancers. Some kind of goliath, a few goths and a secret detective who gave his ID away right away. One baby pumpkin, and so on. But the first list - witches, goblins, ghosts and zombies - struck me in particular because for my brother, sister-in-law and me, another set of ghosts attended the wedding: Alex's and my dead parents, Michael and Tricia. Patty, my sister-in-law, suggested that they place a white rose on each chair for our parents in the front row during the ceremony - and so in the front row at the ceremony (attended by other ghosts, goblins and ghouls) there lay their ghostly traces. Later, I carried the white roses with me everywhere - they sat at Dylan's and my dinner table, and visited the DJ table where Dylan made sure plenty of Thriller and other celebratory scary music was played to dance to. Now they are home with me, where I will dry them and add them to my Dio de las Muertos shrine.

Everywhere I went this weekend, I saw skeletons and skulls, and not just in costumes, in places I wouldn't expect: in art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, on the streets imbedded in concrete. Impermanence, sometimes in a joyful way, other times in complete sadness that overwhelmed me and threatened my careful makeup job, reared its head completely this weekend. Ostensibly we say that the wedding was Halloween themed because Patty is a Mortician - technically, a County Examiner - with a license plate "Morticia" and Halloween stuff all over their house any time of the year. But for me, the theme was perfect and quite healing, actually, considering how much death Alex and I have lived through in our family: our parents, all of our grandparents and great aunts and uncles, and a godparent all gone by our twenties. What better way to invite our whole family - not ever as big as Patty's, but once more sizeable than now - than to invite the dead as well.

And not just the kindly ghosts, but the haunters, spooks and zombies, too.

To invite impermanence itself to one's wedding is to do a brave act of acknowledging this short life. During his speech at the reception, Alex spoke of how our mother had cried for a month after our father's death. Then, he admitted, he thought to himself "Just get on with it," but now that he has so much to lose - Tyler, his son, and Patty, his wife to name the big ones - he understands her grief so much more.

To love is to know what it is to lose, to lose is to know what it is to love. A risk. Life is a risk.
A Halloween wedding acknowledges this. I thank them both more heartily than they could ever imagine for not only throwing the most fun wedding ever, full of bagpipes and dancing sausages and moustache props, but also for letting the sometimes-difficult truth of our existence dance in its skeletal form alongside our joy and laughter.

Michael Amos Hall, d. 3/15/90

Michael Amos Hall, my father, as Judge Hawthorne in the Crucible at MIT, 1955.
Today is the 20th anniversary of his death. He died when I was 12.

I don't remember when I picked up a copy of Born to Win: Transactional Analysis with Gestalt Experiments by Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward. I know at some point, in Florida, early in my Miksang teaching days, a student asked me if Miksang is related to, or could be related to, Gestalt studies. I didn't honestly know what Gestalt was, other than a passing knowledge, so asked for more information. I became fascinated, but at the time just looked at what was on the internet, a mere cursory glance.

Then, somewhere in the intervening years of tons of therapy, ample Buddhist reading and psychology reading, and discussions with friends, Gestalt came up again. I went looking at Half Price Books or Avol's or Frugal Muse for what I could find of it, and Born to Win practically leapt off the shelf. I was quite turned off by the title (Ick, eh?) but it was only a dollar and when I looked inside, this other thing, Transactional Analysis, about which I also knew little, also looked really interesting.

The book was perfect timing and I devoured it. I was struggling with the critic inside that would make a fuss of the simplest messes. An example: coming home from doing errands, hungry, I would pass the last place of tasks (Ace Hardware, for instance) and a stern voice inside would say "Miriam, just one more thing to do. Go do it."
A child-like voice would respond "But I'm hungry and worn out. It can wait."
"But we're already here and it won't take but two seconds."
And so on and so forth, until I either went home guilty and did nothing else all day, or did the errand and let the judge "win," going home hungry and off-balance.

Neither way won, really. I could tell there were different voices, but it wasn't until the book and some work with both TA and Gestalt with my therapist at the time that I recognized the judge voice to be my father, years dead, in my head, and the little girl to be me, frozen when he died in some kind of freaked-out, nothing can change, but I feel awful here, place. Recognizing the voices hasn't entirely eliminated them, of course, but it sure has added space and compassion for both "characters" in me, and made for a lot less suffering.

Just recently I felt an impulse to go into some of the boxes in our attic - all boxes of ephemera, paper goods, from all parts of our family. Both my parents and all of my grandparents are dead, and we have all of their lives packed away in Banker's boxes upstairs. The weight finally got to me, so I poked around. The photo above, of my father acting as a judge, was one of the first I found. I didn't think much of it (other than, damn, he was a handsome devil) at the time, but today when I went to find this one (and others, scanned and posted at www.flickr.com/photos/herspiral) I was struck by his sternness. Even though I hadn't had this image in mind, it's clear that that ROLE is one he played a lot in my life, though certainly not the only one. I also remember him as kind and soft, and vulnerable and loving. But now I have a face for my critic, my judge, my un-budging constant companion who makes things too black-and-white, too concrete for reality. It feels good to see that this was (both literally and metaphorically) a role he played - for himself, and for me - and not HIM, entirely.

RIP daddy: the judge and the loving father, for the day. Every moment that I am alive and you are not, our relationship continues to build and burn and renew. Thank you for all you continue to do for me, wherever you are.

Love,
Miriam