Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Post #3323: Endings
Are any of us good at endings? Goodbyes? Departures from the gate?
I am currently in the throes of both a long goodbye (work/retirement), and the grief of an abrupt one (,y friends Jennefer and David two friends in an accident last Thursday) and I can say that I am good at neither kind of ending. The long one has had me in liminal space for weeks, and I am not a fan of liminal space. On the other hand, the sudden loss of my close friends has had me walking around these last few days like my brain and body are disconnected from one another. Both situations have me in tears several times a day.
As much as these losses seem separate from one another on the outside, they are intertwined, as so much of life is. One of the things I looked forward to in retirement was spending time with these friends, and in particular collaborating on some art projects with my friend David, who was just beginning to make paper and wanted to do some book-making projects together. He had purchased all sorts of equipment and told me that I was free to use any of it – and I anticipated that when they returned from the holiday on which they died (in a snorkeling accident, the details of which are unclear) I would get a tour of his finally-set up studio.
Instead, I will spend the first month of my retirement planning their memorial service on Gabriola which will take place in the middle of November. I will kneel at my altar every day until then (and for some days after) and make an offering and a dedication to the liberation of my two friends. I will chant the Dai Hi Shin Dharani. I will work, bit by bit, to reel my soul back into my body so my energetic presence stabilizes again.
As much as we love people, and some of them never leave our hearts, I know we do get beyond this point of crisis to the spot where we can remember and cherish without feeling sad and angry. And as much as work has provided a framework for the rest of my life, I will find ways to replace the structure and the daily interactions with something else that is more rooted in my community.
Last weekend, Brian and I drove across Vancouver Island to Botanical Beach – an excursion on an old logging road that has been paved in the last few years and made the trip much easier than it once was. We wanted to get away from home and and avoid having conversations with anyone that day, we wanted some time alone to feel our grief together.
Just over 23 years ago, I broke my ankle hiking the Juan De Fuca Marine trail about 10 km away from Botanical Beach, which was to be the final night of camping on the trail. Instead of completing, I was carried off by paramedics (and my friend Aaron) at the Parkinson Creek trailhead and spent the next several weeks healing from the accident and surgery that followed it. Since that time, I have been back to the beach below the Parkinson trailhead junction once, but until last weekend I had never made it out to Botanical Beach even though it really is only a couple hours of driving from where we live now that the road is paved.
In any case, that accident in my life was an abrupt ending to what had been a beautiful trail experience with one of my closest friends. Afterwards I grieved not only the end of the trip, but the whole body which changed following the accident — I will forever have swelling around the titanium plates keeping my ankle intact whenever I hike. As I get older, I can also see how that accident may further impact my mobility as I continue on — though I have learned to work with the break by taking extra care, using hiking poles at all times, and paying attention to what my body needs rather than simply pressing on. I will never forget the accident, nor the injury which has impacts to this day, but I have absorbed them both into my daily reality and they have made me wiser than I would be otherwise.
One of the choices we have to make with loss is whether it is going to shrink our world, or get integrated so we can move forward with new insight into our lives. My immediate reaction to the death of Jennefer and David is to want to close my heart to the world. No new friendships. Too painful. No more of this. Likewise, retirement could become a refuge into which I disappear as it is for some people who retire to pottering around house and garden.
But of course, that’s not me. And simultaneous to the end of my career in the federal government, I am stepping into my life’s work — for that is how I’ve come to see community-based chaplaincy and where it fits for me. I am 53, and grieving my career identity and my dear friends, but the spiritual formation process I am in encourages me forward. Not in spite, but because of.
This returns me to the question of whether anyone is good at endings. Do we have to be? Do we have to find the right words? Make peace with what has happened? Discover the deep meaning? Are we allowed to take the next step without having “come to terms with” the loss in our lives? Or can we simply show up to the altar, in our community, and to our work with the faith that each step will move us further away from the pain and retraction of loss.
I don’t know yet how to carry the grief for Jennefer and David’s passing. I don’t know what retirement will feel like when the shock has passed and the days no longer have the familiar shape of a working life. I know only that I am standing at the threshold of both, and cannot see very far ahead.
But if I’ve learned anything from Zen practice, being present in what is right now allows the heart to stay open even when every instinct tells us to close it. And “what is” right now is more than the loss, more than the grief. It is also the unfolding of community all around me – the great glittering jewels of my Gabriola people, my Zen sangha, and my oldest friends in Victoria who I will spend time with next weekend in celebration of my retirement. I am blessed to have the kind of friendships that I grieve when they are gone. I am wiser for the experience of these endings as I step forward into the unknown.
But until this time passes, until the fresh grief has dulled so that it becomes harder to recall among the good memories of my life — I will keep making offerings and chanting. I will help my community say goodbye to two people we loved so much. I will finish work and continue my new studies. And I will continue to make things with my hands, hike all the trails, arrange shows at Birdsong, and play all the fiddle tunes I know.
One Comment on “Post #3323: Endings”
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Thinking of you my friend. It’s so dizzying how all things change as we pass through life and/or as life passes through us. So grateful for your generosity in writing and sharing your thoughts, and neverending gratitude for you in my life. đź’•