Honoring Virginia

Virginia Helen Iverson

March 12, 1946 – November 18, 2017

She departed early afternoon Saturday 

The presence and spirit surrounding Virginia has filled me with awe and love. As I move small step by small step into this unfamiliar landscape, I want to offer some of what is bubbling up in this process. Opening to this grieving is ultimately a commitment to life itself and that we can do it in community and communion feels like the heart of living.

But first, to honor the last dance…

And thus you will dance to your death here, on this hilltop, at the end of the day. And in your last dance you will tell of your struggle, of the battles you have won and of those you have lost; you will tell of your joys and bewilderments…Your dance will tell about the secrets and about the marvels you have stored, and your death will sit here and watch. The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow, and your hilltop will tremble. Ay you reach the end of your dance, you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness.       Don Juan

Alone with mother

Friday evening, 17 November

“Finding the power of the sacred, not despite suffering, but in the midst of it. This is the alchemy of the dark emotions. Through this alchemy, grief moves us from sorrow for what we have lost to gratitude for what remains. Fear of life’s fragility is transformed to the joy of living fully, with openness. And even despair becomes the ground of a resilient faith – not just an opiate for our pain, but a profound commitment to life as it is.”

Miriam Greenspan, Healing Through the Dark Emotions                                  

The raspy stretches of breath are regular, and somehow I am now used to them. Her hands remain warm and her skin so supple, daily baths and rub downs for so many years. Though the essence of my mother seems not to be here, this physical body remains, breathing and being breathed, the last connection and thread of her to this world. One of the nurses put her hair in a braid, and I want to snip it off and offer back to the earth, to her garden, the trails, and the sea, along with her eventual ashes.

            Alone with mother…on the 7^th floor of mgh in icu. Acronyms abound. The DAIs are the damage in her brain. I have been alone with mother for as long as I can remember…since we moved to the vineyard in 1978.  Then, at times, it felt lonely – without my father, my brother. We felt small and diminished somehow. But over the years, with rough spots and smooth, alone with mother represented such sweet joy and laughter. Splitting a beer over an August dinner, seated at the dining room table I made in 8^th grade wood shop that she had kept far too long; walking the trails arm and arm at dusk; in detailed conversations from Rome to Vineyard Haven about what lotions might be on sale for her monthly coop order or the never ending search for comfortable dance shoes. Alone with mother meant me giving her facials on the upstairs bed and she massaging my hands and feet with a grey cat attending to all. And conversations through all – about who we have been and who we were becoming. 

Now, in a hospital room, alone with mother we wait. I place her ever warm hand on my head and sob into the pillow on which it rests. I anoint her with oils for this next journey, and then dab myself because I know – not how – that life is now different in all ways.

            I seek guidance and solace in Healing through the Dark Emotions, my bedside book since August though somehow I’d skipped the section on grief until now. Greenspan speaks of the undervaluing of emotion and that often the message around grief is be strong, get back to normal, get your old self back. But this “impedes the flow of grief. If we are in a hurry to dispel grief in order to get back to baseline, we are in danger of wasting the profound opportunity in grief for transformations of consciousness that make baseline appear quite limited.”  I go into the waters of sorrow and sadness, float and soak for a while, and then, somehow step out of them, perhaps for food, a conversation, or a project for class. And then I reconnect with her - I gaze or touch and plunge back into the depths. “The alchemy of the dark emotions most often takes place in life’s valleys: dark nights of the soul when inordinate pain, like a swollen river, breaks through…”

Making my way to the hospital one day I felt the kind of openness that took my breath away and made me pause. It was an odd sense that I could let her go, that we had done what we needed to do in this time together. Greenspan gives language to this paradox: “the alternating or simultaneous experience of a smaller and larger sense of self in grief is not an abstract idea, it is a deeply felt experience. The ego is gripped by its loss but the larger self is actually expanded by it. While the physical connection is broken, the spiritual connection with the beloved attains a greater force precisely because it extends beyond the physical.” 

            Like a wrung out dishrag, sleep calls, and yet with this life clock ticking down I don’t want to miss a breath that she takes. I want to savor her aliveness in body and hold her close and dear to me. I want to climb into her hospital bed. I want to climb back into her womb and be one with her once more, just for a little while.

            “In the alchemy of grief, the shattered ego’s surrender to the inescapable reality of death ushers in a wider perspective – a larger self that can accept death, not as punishment, but as part of the circle of life….this larger self grows, and with it, an awe before the mysteries that lie at the heart of existence, an ability to live fully in the present moment and a gratitude for all things that are born and die.”

            Alone with mother…I suppose we began this way, and now we will end this way. I reach out to and for her hand and its silky smooth heat and plunge back into the depths.