On Acceptance — For Sarah

My cell phone rang….

I was in an ice cream shop with my grandchildren and my husband and I didn’t recognize the number so I ignored it.

10 minutes later…on the way back home in the car…my brother called.

“Where are you?”

“In Chesterton on the way home with the kids. Why? What’s up?”

“Sarah’s dead.”

“Wait! What?!! Our Sarah?!!!” a punch to my gut and rising fear and pictures and reality and disbelief all converging in some visceral way.

“Yes. She was killed in an accident.” tears poring through the waves that carried his voice to me.

“What happened!!!”……

Details as known were given and the ride home was flooded with the deep silence of all knowing that something of significance and depth and ‘not good’ had happened

I called Sarah’s father … (my middle brother) when I arrived home. Now my own tears and grief were floating through waves of cell signals….

I said: “I have no words! I do not know what to say…..If there is ANYTHING….ANYTHING that I can do to help… PLEASE!!!” I pleaded “Please let me know.”

I played a silent horror film in my mind and fear and pain and a deep emptiness ensued for me.

For me….

Then pain for my brother and sister in law and nephew and her fiancé and the soon to be step son who was in the car with her but safe and now unable to un-see what had happened and I was in their shoes and in so much despair…….

It’s this:

Someone dies

We say ‘tragedy…awful…horrific….so sad…devastating…cruel…unfair…terrible…’

We invoke God…or Buddha or Mohammed or Ganesha or Kuan Yin….or….

We cry…we feel sadness…loss…we ache in our hearts and bones….

We tell ourselves stories in our own minds…and those stories are painful…full of imagined or real pictures of what we experienced.

(I can still see my mother frail and barely breathing….dying….and remember….washing her lifeless body…..giving her that last attention….the weight of limbs when ‘essential life force’ is gone.)

We ‘dramatize’ our loss. We call attention to the pain…sometimes in explanation of our divided attention…sometimes to seek comfort from others…sometimes just to seek attention.

(‘Can’t you see my heart is broken and I’m in pain?! Don’t expect much of me! Tell me how sorry you are for me…”)

We want to avoid our sense of loss… so we try to push the fear and loss away….

We are brought closer to our own fear of death…fear of loss….and sometimes we drown in that fear…

We sleep walk in reality…something strange and otherworldly in our contact with all that we see and touch….

I went to ‘Byron Katie’ — one of my sources and tools for connecting with reality….. The “Four Questions”.

I tried to tap into my experience of a few years ago that brought me to a depth of acceptance that I had not known before.

But… we trip…. we fall… we become self-absorbed again and lessons learned are forgotten…maybe not totally…but we haven’t yet learned how to apply them to the most recent reality.

So here I go:

Know that in NO way is this meant to be cruel or insulting or insensitive to anyone……

When something happens that shocks us….we contract.

It is instinctual. It is preservation on a biological, reflexive level.

Then the mind comes in.

Interpretations…stories…..fantasies spun out into the Universe of our own minds and egos.

Fear is no longer the visceral experience of survival….it becomes the haunted house of horrors that we wander into…or rather…dash into with abandon.

We know that the way out is to stop the thoughts….but they seem to come out of nowhere…out of mirrors and walls, ghostly and unbidden….

We know where the door is…but some part of us feels we are abandoning reality if we don’t keep our ‘thought soup’ stirred!

We keep stirring it….

We worry it like a dog with a bone…..

And we wonder why we feel so depressed, sad, fearful, uncomfortable in our own skins….

We can walk out of that house of terror any time we want…..

We just need to question our thoughts….and no matter the answer……we can find our way out of the pain when we are willing to be honest with ourselves…

AND don’t tell me you are always being honest with yourself…. you KNOW when you are not… you KNOW because you feel it… a little pin prick or a flash of discomfort…. a gnawing that you ignore because you give in to whatever you think will save your face or your ass….

Let’s face it

We are afraid.

We are afraid that it could be us.

We are afraid of loss.

We are afraid of the ‘unknown’

BUT — the ‘unknown’ is just that…unknown…and that could be just as loving and delightful as the known…especially since the ‘known’ is often fraught with pain and fear anyway…so why are we afraid of the next moment?….the ‘unknown’ moment….?

Right now….. I am ok…I am typing on my computer….drinking coffee….feeling a little tired and achey in some places in my body…and I am ok…

Even when my imaginary world in my head exploded into pieces three years ago…I was ok…..

Even when my knees were replaced and I was daily in pain both before and during recovery… I was ok….

Even when my mind exploded into stories when the phone call came…I was ok…

Even if I were myself dying right this moment…. I would be ok….

BECAUSE…..

whatever is happening is the right thing to happen…..

Do you know how I know that?

Because that IS what is happening…..

NO amount of arguing with that reality will change it.

NO amount of stories and mental videos will change it.

NO restructuring of reality in my mind to MY desires will change it.

NO amount of prayers to God or whoever will change it. (btw….God or whoever is NOT your personal Santa just waiting to hear what you want ‘him’ to do for you next to make your life comfortable for you…and if you think that is not the case…use your ability to think deep enough to grasp that you are ok and a kind universe or god means that everything is fine whether we agree or not)

So….

What I know is this….

Whatever happened is the only thing that could have happened….

Because that IS what happened.

If I say I don’t like it…I’m arguing with it.

Then I feel stressed….sad….worried…fearful…..etc.

BUT……

and here is the sweetness in all this….

I AM human….

So are you…or I assume you would not be reading…

So…

I am God…..(or whatever, whoever…ineffable essence)

So are you…..(yup…truth)

My favorite quote from the Christian Mystic Meister Eckhardt is “The eye with which is I see God is the eye with which God sees me.”

The profundity of that has rattled around in me for years……occasionally sinking into one of the slots in the pinball machine that is my mind.

In that quote is, for me…the essential truth of existence.

Even the most abhorrent experience is God knowing God.

So…anything that I experience is Sacred and Good…..and I can experience it fully….and know that I have just tasted a bit of Heaven ( a concept that has been made into a fairy-tale by far too many ‘faiths’ for my taste — but then — who am I to argue with the perception of others? Of course…if I don’t want to eat that cake…then I don’t have to….cause I have my own…right….paradox? )

If I am indeed here to be part of the puzzle…then the only way I can remember my connection to the whole is to experience it and then free myself from the contractions that keep me away from that connection.

So… let go…and let God. (isn’t that one of the ‘slogans’?)

When I felt the most lost…I was most certainly the most ‘found’

When thoughts would come… I noticed them.

I opened my heart and my mind….

I let them be there…and if I became too attached….I felt the emotions and sensations that went with them.

Then….I opened the window…I let them pass through…visitors…not permanent residents.

None of our thoughts and feelings are permanent….even the ones we ‘try’ to hold onto by calling them back again and again.

“Come back! I wasn’t finished feeling blissful!”

“Come back! I wasn’t finished feeling lost and alone!”

“Come back! What if I can blame someone and feel relieved!”

“Come back! What if I forget this person and just keep living! I’ll be a ‘bad’ person!”

Etc…etc….etc…..

Then…

We laugh for a moment at something….

We forget our fear and longing and rumination for a moment or moments….

We stand up, sit down, lie down and walk around….go to work….eat a meal…talk to someone….

We go on….

Life…goes on…

We are not abandoning our loved ones….our emotions…our thoughts….(that, I suspect, would be impossible)

We ARE…being.

In our hearts and minds the ones lost to our physical world are still quite alive….

Think of them…and there they are….

Love them….and our memories animate them again…..and while we cannot touch their flesh….we can still hear them laugh….watch them dance…and live and be with them again….and if tears fall when they are with you in that way…realize that they are tears of joy and bliss…..

Go toward joy….

Go toward life….

Go toward the God that you are.