Veronica had Alzheimer's and was mostly bed-ridden, getting onto her feet only weekly with the help of physical therapists. Every time I visited her, she smiled a most genuine smile that I didn't often get from people who had their wits about them. There was a raw vulnerability and openness to her smile that revealed it as utterly genuine. She no longer had the capacity for pretense. She remembered who I was, though not always my name. She remembered I was there to lay my hands on her, not that I called this practice Reiki. She lifted her shirt and pushed down the blanket, revealing her belly, which was always bloated and fluid filled. I removed my rings and made the symbol on my palms then placed them on her. Soon after, my hands warmed up and my arms began to ache and the ache spread through my body. That ache, I imagined, was a physical manifestation of what was happening in her organism — within her body and mind.
"What do you think happens after we die?" I asked her, moved in that moment by a strong curiosity of what her answer might be, as though, in her perpetually confused state, she had access to greater-than-human wisdom from the beyond. Her mouth bent into a slight smile and she said, “I imagine it’s most likely a new beginning.”
This might be my favorite answer to a question I’ve asked many times to many people. Death is not a topic often broached in our culture. Instead, it is feared and fought against. I have always been afraid of death. I came face to face with death and I panicked, clinging to life with all my will and strength. The few times I interrogated that fear closely, I came up with nothing beyond the obvious: loss, the unknown.
What occurs to me now, with the help of Veronica’s wise answer, is that reaction was perhaps inconsistent with my personality. One of my greatest skills is starting over. I have walked through the ending of many romantic relationships. Despite the heartbreak and pain that attends such times, I also found in them a hidden gift of childlike excitement about what would come next. Those moments where the texture and tone of my everyday disintegrates and I have nothing familiar to hold onto — they are pure potential. I can feel the myriad possible futures branching out from it like a tree from a trunk that has had one diseased branch pruned.
There was the time I moved into my own apartment in Chicago after leaving a 4-year relationship. I remember unpacking all my books. The apartment was in my favorite Chicago neighborhood, Andersonville, and it was the attic of an old house. It contained no right angles, had beautiful hardwood floors, and I felt right at home. I wasn’t there long at all. I ended up getting a job in Phoenix and moving to Arizona, where my new beginning involved a new relationship and all new friends. The ending there came a mere two years later when I left for a job in San Francisco.
My girlfriend had left me and broken my heart to the extent it hadn’t been broken since the loss of my very first love. I packed up the car and our two adopted daughters — the female mutts we got from a rescue place in Prescott and named Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde — rented out my house and drove north. I still remember the feeling I had while driving. It was like driving away from the wreckage of a war scene toward the promise of a new land, a new beginning.
It’s the inability to predict what’s next that I simultaneously fear and adore. What I realize is that my baseline mood around it is optimism — I trust that whatever is ahead will be good. Perhaps this comes from living most of my adult life sober and practicing principles of recovery, a way of living that consistently yields pleasant surprises. In the wake of every devastating ending I can harness the excitement about what’s next and ride it right up and out of the broken remains of what’s past.
Endings, yes. New beginnings, yes. What I haven’t been so great with is the middle. Now, and for the past 13 years, I have been a parent. Kids need structure and a routine. This has caused me to stay in one place longer than I ever have before. It has also resulted in my longest relationship, the one I have with the co-parents I live with, and they, too, have stayed in one place. This staying business, it’s not always easy. It reminds me of my childhood growing up in a house with two brothers and two sisters and two parents and several pets — a full house. And like all childhoods, there is some darkness and much light around that home and its memories. These are moments that stand in stark contrast to all the change that came after.
Standing here, as a parent and a grown up and a person who stays, gazing back at the childhood I had and the rapid series of major changes that came after — all the endings and new beginnings — I can see them more clearly. I see that yes, change is loss but it also, always, is new beginning. And death is but another change. Energy, after all, is neither created nor destroyed. It changes form.
I think I wrote it best in the beginning, in the novel I worked on and finished when I was pregnant with my son: “I have planted myself here and am growing roots. I will walk through the inevitable change of linear time and accept its gifts and its removal of gifts. I will be gentle and graceful with loss. All our lives are practice for this.”
That’s it. All of our lives are practice for this
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