“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”

It is officially the first day of summer. The sun is shining brightly, the humid air is sticky with moisture, clothing is getting looser, bodies are moving more slowly under the oppression of summer’s heat, and I am fatigued by grief. A week and a half ago, without warning, someone I love shook off her earthly suit. The suddenness of this event rocked me on a cellular level, and fractured the last vestiges of the flimsy barriers I had constructed to push back pains I didn’t want to feel. For a moment I cracked and went completely dead inside, numb at the shock of this loss, stunned by its swift blow. Then my senses began to return, and the numbness was replaced by sorrow, and something magical happened, I began to wake up. For the first time in a long time, a little over an entire year, maybe even longer, I began to truly wake up.

My friend was HUGE. Her life force was magnificent and she was incredibly tall with a head full of massive curls that were constantly unrestrained. She had an insatiable curiosity for experiences and people and life. When she was with you she was present, often gesticulating wildly or leaning in more closely and pronouncing with greater articulation to make her point. She travelled and she explored, both the world and the inner workings of her spirit. She sought experiential knowledge, and found it over and over and over. In short, she lived. This is why, even in the earliest expressions of my despair, it never occurred to me that she hadn’t had enough time. I hadn’t had enough time with her, but she had been making the most of her days, and that has had a more profound effect on me than the greatest self help manual yet to be written.

In the midst of our friendship I didn’t see the impact she was having on me. Maybe it was the slow burn of someone you see regularly, but probably more so than anything else the simple fact that I hadn’t actually ever thought about it. I only knew that she was my friend and she was wonderful…doesn’t that so very often seem like it’s enough? And it was. But in retrospect, over the course of  years and many hundreds of moments, I was listening and learning and getting to know her. Her life was making its mark on my soul, and luckily I was paying attention, because with the swift kick in the stomach of her death it all came flooding in.

TINA gave time and attention to the aspects of life that were important to her. She loved her art and textiles and creating, so she found a workshop (which she ended up ditching recently because it had a rodent problem, BUT she sought space for her creativity). She loved the Texas Playboys baseball club, so she became the supreme Nut (the name of their booster club), and attended almost every game, supported the team, and cheered them on with unmitigated enthusiasm. She loved her family, so she scheduled time with her sisters and nieces who lived out of state, flew to them on a seconds notice when needed, and prioritized them in her life. They knew without doubt they were loved. She sought knowledge of herself and believed strongly in our connection to the Absolute, and so she studied and wrote and read and devoted time to her personal development. She cherished her friends, old and new, and so she created time for us. She carved out hours, or sometimes minutes, to nurture the relationships that she held dear, and there were a lot of them. She LOVED to travel, and so she did. She made this happen even when finances and time were tight, and these experiences enriched her in countless ways.

My friend struggled against the same mortal coil that affects us all. She wasn’t magically immune or inoculated against the stresses of daily life, but she believed in abundance and had felt its presence in her life. In general, she truly believed that the universe was conspiring in her favor, and even in the moments when life wasn’t easy, as it so often isn’t, she believed. If something is important, you do it. If something vexes you, express it and move on. If you are called, answer. She showed up for her life, and she didn’t hesitate to say yes. So many of us are plagued by second guessing. Is this the right thing to do? Does it make sense? Can I make this work instead of will I make this work? So many questions when what we usually need is to simply say “yes,” and then show up for what we said yes to. She was expert at this.

I take away from her life that being present brings a treasure trove of riches, developing new and real friendships is never a bad idea, and that jumping in with both feet is only scary for approximately the first 5 seconds. I got cancer and lived. TINA got poison ivy and died. This is a supremely fucked up truth. The most beautiful part of her death is that she did not leave behind a lifetime of regret. If she was conscious in her final moments and knew what was happening, I sincerely doubt that she thought about the trip she should have taken, the adventures she should have said yes to, the friends she could have met, or the conversations she might have had. If she had a thought, I imagine it was more along the lines of what a glorious ride life had been.

I am fatigued by grief. I have struggled against low grade sadness for too long. Her death shook the foundation of that sadness and woke me up to potential. I am horrified by the idea of dragging out the sorrow of the last year for another second. It’s passed. It’s past. Today I am alive, and there are things I want to do. My friend had many lives in her 53 years on this planet. She started fresh multiple times, and was dedicated to action. First things first, live. Be in the world. Learn. Dive in and see what happens. Don’t be afraid of what will happen, be terrified of what won’t happen. “Who am I [not] to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” The best way I have to celebrate her life is not to have regrets about mine, the risks I was afraid to take, the challenges I didn’t accept, the brilliance I turned my back on. She was part of my life and that meant something. Her life and beauty and presence affected me. It mattered and it was real.

I love you, TINA Pumilia. I am grateful every moment for the years I spent knowing you and for the knowledge of you that gets to be mine forever. I am better for your presence in my life, and I will live in such a way that the cosmos will shake with your laughter and delight. Cheers to your glorious, raucous, vibrant life! Cheers to you!

“No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn’t bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn’t teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. If you won’t take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

 

 

 

 

 

Note to self, there will be shadows. The physical wounds are healed, CT scans reveal no signs of metastasis, and the chemo drugs are long out of my system. By all accounts, I’m well, and not only well, but surprisingly vigorous apparently, because according to most I’m vibrating health. 8 hours of sleep each night, loads of water, and a diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables tends to have this affect. But there are shadows, an underlying current of heaviness that I wasn’t quite expecting.

It’s impossible and unrealistic to believe you will go through something like this and not be changed. As much as I thought I lost my innocence many, many moons ago, I was wrong. I had a million experiences, placed myself in ridiculous situations, and always played on the edge, pulling back just in time to never face real consequences. Almost every pain I had ever known I inflicted on myself. Who knows, I might have even inflicted this cancer on myself, as rectal cancer is linked to heavy alcohol consumption, a diet high in animal proteins (my past love of bbq and foie gras is no secret), and a diet high in fat, but there’s no way to know that, so I choose not to assign blame. What I do know is that the lightness, perhaps we could call it whimsy, glee, merriment, that I once felt on a mostly daily basis is gone. I held on to mine longer than most, and for that I’m grateful, but I now truly know what the term lost innocence means, and I think I’m mourning.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am delighted that the experience is past, I survived, and my outcomes have been so, so good. I am on my knees appreciative of this, but like a dear friend of mine often says, you can’t unknow what you know. There’s no going back to a time when my body appeared to have countless, mysterious fail-safe mechanisms, my brother-in-law thought my liver was sprinkled with fairy dust, and I bragged about my iron clad constitution. There is no going back to a time when being tired simply meant I might need rest. Although I know it’s irrational as I’m only 6 short weeks past my last surgery, which was piled on top of a year worth of physical assaults meant to preserve my life, but I still feel tired, so I scan my body for signs of cancer. Am I tired or am I fatigued? I got it so fucking wrong last time.

It’s time to return to work, but the idea of going back into physical therapy inspires dread. Please, goddess, please don’t make me be around sick people, right now. I don’t have it in me. The coffers are empty, and, for now, I have so little to offer. Therefore, I’m searching for something different, a way to wake up the light that feels dormant, not gone because I feel that, too, but needs to be aroused, stimulated, and nurtured much the same way I’m trying with full commitment to nudge my physical body back to health. I feel shadows, and at times I think they are so present that I can almost see them. They are not the heavy weight of depression, or the feeling of helplessness in a dark night. My shadows are sheer black, almost imperceptible, but ever present in the periphery. In the daily effort to make something new happen, hoist myself up and start fresh, believing that anything and everything is possible by simply acquiring momentum in a single or multiple directions, I am with my shadows. The shadows tell me that I can’t unknow what I know, there is no certainty in this life I used to live so flippantly, that I’m grieving the harshness of the last year. What I previously only knew in theory, and thought I was comfortable with, I now know in practice. Theory and practice are very different things.

My shadows are not comprised of fear, they are comprised of knowledge. I imagine that these shadows are the seeds of wisdom, and that one day they will fade and integrate, becoming part of me, inherent in my functioning. For now, though, I feel like I woke up one day and was middle aged, and can feel the years everywhere, not that my body feels old or even my mind, but that all of the knowledge I gained over time and with experience suddenly jelled into something tangible and real, and I feel the weight of it. I often find myself wanting to remind my friends that I used to be a helluva good time, a walking disaster, but a whole lot of fun. Probably because life doesn’t feel fun, right now, and to be absolutely truthful, that kind of sucks. I actually struggled with the thought of publishing this post, but then realized that without it I was painting an incomplete portrait of this experience. The physical and mental bodies are intimately, inseparably linked, and trauma to one causes trauma to the other. In being so forthcoming with the physical experience, it seems unfair to gloss over the emotional one. There are no hall passes here, no get out of jail free cards. My emotional body has been wounded, too.

But, you know what they say, life is short but it’s wide, and this too shall pass. A time will come when I can’t see the shadows anymore, and then they will slowly melt away into my consciousness, where we will only meet in dreams or memory. Life will take on it’s glow again, and my cracks won’t feel so wide, but until then I experience this healing for what it is: unsullied, pure, physical and emotional healing. The kind of stuff that makes you human.

I truly thought that I would come out of this final recovery period like a rocket, launching straight up with speed and power, but now I’m beginning to realize it’s more like the butterfly coming out of it’s chrysalis:

When the butterfly first emerges from the chrysalis, its wings are soft and crumpled. The tired butterfly rests, and then slowly unfolds its wings to dry. After a few hours, the butterfly will be ready to fly.  Lifecycle of a Butterfly

If you compare the life span of a butterfly (about 1 year) to that of a human (about 71 years), you get my drift. Right now, my wings are soft and crumpled and I need to rest, and over time I believe my shadows will evolve into something beautiful and kind and compassionate. I believe that my life will be more important to me because I came through a metamorphosis that left permanent scars on my body and psyche, and for now I just need to be at peace until I’m ready to fly.