Arts and Crafts for the Griever

"Saddened as I am by loss, my heart lifts in gratitude for the richness Lueza has brought to my life"

This is a quote from Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief by Martha Whitmore Hickman. She came to this work after losing her daughter in a riding accident many years ago. I ripped out the piece of paper and added it to my collage on a wooden shingle. A laminated card of the Virgin Mary. Lueza loved Catholic prayers for some reason. Catholic prayers and holy water from a Russian spring that a friend had brought us. I'm an agnostic in search of deep ritual. My closet is filled with rosaries and buddhas. Small religious medals that I found in a California Mission town antique store. An image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on a piece of tin. I think I'm making icons to Lueza now. It's peaceful. This photograph of her was taken when she woke up from her tracheotomy. Calm and happy to see us. Breathing freely for the first time in months. 

Her Pulmonologist was impressed. He told stories about her.

I've become my own art therapist.

Jizo

A Day With Jizo

Jizo was a Bodhisattva. A Buddhist saint who would remain on earth until all the creatures were out of hell. Something like that. Jizo was also the protector of mothers in labor and aborted and miscarried fetuses. He was the protector and guide of children that had died. He would help them cross through the scary after-death realms and reach the good place. I was unclear about some of the details. I had thought that Buddhism was without heaven and hell but I didn’t care. I was glad that Jizo might have been there when Lueza had died alone in her bed.

The Jizo ceremony for Children That Had Died was held in a yurt at the Zen Center in Marin County. I wasn’t a Buddhist but I had read bookshelves full of the modern American Buddhist writers. I had been reading about meditation for thirty years knowing that someday when I could calm down I would meditate. I had been collecting Buddhas ever since my grandfather died in the early eighties and when asked what I wanted from his office of things that had been spread out in the family dining room I took the hollow clay glassy green glazed Buddha. After contacting the Zen center to RSVP for the event, I received an email about bringing red fabric and scissors and thread. I wanted the red fabric to be meaningful so I found a pair of Lulu’s stretchy red leggings and cut out a square. I found a spool of red thread and a pair of scissors and placed them in a plastic baggie. The day before the ceremony there was a street fair in our town and a vendor was giving away free fabric swatches and I found the perfect red square and wasn’t it synchronistic.

The center of the yurt was filled with flowers and scissors and more fabrics and bits of parchment paper. The edge of the yurt was covered in candles and there was a bowl of water and rose petals and a black figure of a Buddha. The Jizo statue was standing with a staff in his hand and the stylized face of a calm monk. A relaxed baby monk. Also in the center of the yurt were large bunches of rosemary which were for remembrance we were told by the Buddhist helper priests. We learned about Jizo and his guiding of the children past the hell realms and into nirvana. We would be making offerings for him. We would be writing prayers and sewing them up into other fabrics to hang on the special tree in the Green Gulch garden. I wrote love messages to Lulu and rolled them up and stuffed them into the red pouch that I had sewed out of Lulu’s leggings. I placed some bunches of rosemary inside and sewed the pouch shut with a tiny branch of the piney rosemary sticking out and then sewed the little pouch onto the red square of fabric from the street fair. I wrote messages to Lu and rolled them into a tube shape and wrapped twine around them. We walked in a circle and read the words of a Pali chant about impermanence. Ga te ga te para ga te Parasam ga te Bodhi Svaha. Gone Gone, Gone Beyond, Gone Completely Beyond! Awakened Spirit Aaaaah!

We placed our red fabric offerings next to Jizo in the yurt and walked outside through the grounds to the garden to hang the rolls of paper prayers on the tree in the Garden of Remembrance. Coastal Redwoods and Douglas fir, Monterey Pine and California Bay Laurels. Somewhere was the famed Green Gulch organic garden that fed the Buddhist visitors and tenants and a famous vegetarian restaurant in Fort Mason. Fog from Muir beach was heading up from the lower meadow. Dwellings for meditators were tucked everywhere on the property.

Driving home through Marin County I was holding my belly fat with my left hand as I drove. I had an entire handful of lipid-filled soft flesh that could be grabbed and pulled outwards toward the steering wheel. I tried stuffing it into my pants. Maybe the waist was too low and that’s why everything was hanging over. It was the clothing. How had this happened? I estimated the weight of the fat as low. It was just a fluffy kind of fat. A couple of pounds in my left hand. If I could walk up more rattlesnakey California ridges it would disappear.

Racing down the freeway towards the Golden Gate Bridge and the invisible jumpers I dreamed of life without clutter. I imagined rows of baskets holding gently folded sheets that had been rinsed with lavender water. Everything had labels. Drawers full of supplies. Tape and scissors and paper clips and pens and postage stamps, batteries and glue and rubber stamps with ink pads. Ribbons and paper for wrapping gifts. Beads and strings. Jars of white buttons and baskets of thread. A life of order. I wished I was a devout Catholic. I loved rosaries. Prayer beads. Late at night I would Google  ‘rosary’ and read about its history. I loved the Hail Mary. I had to learn the words once for an Irish play and it was as if I had always known it. I’d say it in the super fast way of an Irish woman with mud-covered rubber boots who prayed special prayers throughout the day. HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththeeblessedartthouamongwomanandblessedisthefruitofthywombJesus, said in a thick Irish accent. I imagined tea parties. Plates covered in yellow cakes and buns. I loved the English use of the word bun. Treats and dainties. Buns had nothing to do with hamburgers. I thought of starting a phone-tea company. Instead of phone-sex there would be conversations about tea. Darjeeling and Nepalese black. The smoky Russian teas for samovars. Teapots. Cambric tea and red-lipped children in nurseries speaking in English accents with powdered nannies who would live with them forever. On the freeway south of San Francisco I passed a billboard that said: Sedation Dentistry. I considered other possibilities. Sedation marriage. Sedation grief.

I laid my hand on the Jizo offering. Foresty rosemary sprigs poking through the stitches. A lumpy velour pouch sewn onto another square of soft red velvety material. The car raced south out of San Francisco on the 280. Near Millbrae the fog became visible. Pacifica would be in a whiteout by now. My town would still be sunny. If the winds came up I could sleep under down with the windows wide open and everything too bright from the moon. I would grill zucchini, red peppers and onions until they were black and caramelized and lay them on top of whole wheat spaghetti and shake a pile of Parmesan cheese on top. I pinched off a piece of the rosemary that poked out of the red velour Jizo offering and held it under my nose. It smelled of Christmas.

She May Be Lying Down But She may Be Very Happy

This is what my husband Jacek (yat-sek) said to me when Lueza was a baby and we didn't know how severe her birth injury would be. Would she have a limp? When would she walk? Would she be like Daniel Day-Lewis in 'My Left Foot'? I was starting to get hysterical as I contemplated all possible scenarios and I whined to him: Will she always be lying down???????
To use the word 'whining' is not friendly to myself, I was terrified for our baby, but my hysteria was a problem at times…….
Jacek was calm.
He doesn't even remember this moment.
She may be lying down but she may be very happy.
Everything shifted.
I could breathe.
We would be okay.

How can you write about this?

Lueza always wanted to know "what happened" when her friends from school died suddenly. What happened? People want to know how we knew that she wanted to hear about these stories but it was very clear. She had a very clear way of expressing 'no' and 'yes'. A turn of the head and a loud utterance of 'aye' or a very gentle turn of the head with the eyes a bit down. We could even go through the alphabet. Sound out each letter and eventually we would hit it. She would scream or after she got the 'trach' and couldn't vocalize she would still go whacko and turn her head and show extreme excitement that we had hit it. So there were long periods where we would talk about her 'friend' who had suddenly died. She wanted to know: 'why', 'how', 'when', 'where' and I would tell her the stories over and over again.
She never seemed upset to hear any of it. We didn't understand why she wanted to hear the stories endlessly. Eventually it would stop being an obsession. It drifted off or we would not think of presenting it as an option for discussion. Sometimes a new obsession would take over like being doused in the holy water that a friend's wife had brought from Russia. Holy water and then all the prayers that I knew from childhood and from roles I had played in the theatre.

In her last year, after a long break from death stories she became very agitated one night and in frustration at not being able to figure out what she was wanting to express I went to the recitation of the alphabet. We eventually got to 'R' and a certain vowel sound following it and that was the thing. I had hit it. But I had no idea what 'it' was. It took me another day and the next evening until I realized what 'Ray' meant to her. She wanted to hear about her friend from years ago whose name began with that syllable. After trying all the different why where how words it turned out that she wanted to know 'who told me'. Who told me about this child being near death because this precious child had become ill very quickly and very quickly was on life support near death as the family and friends gathered around at the hospital to say goodbye.
The story for Lueza was simple. I told her that I drove to school on a beautiful May day and that when I pulled into the parking lot one of the teacher's aides was clearly waiting for me. Immediately I knew that something was very wrong. She came to the window of the wheelchair van and told me that this child was going to die that night and the mom, who was my friend and connected to me through a strange coincidence, wanted me to know. This was the story that I told Lu over and over again in 2010. Who told me? Miss Laura told me. And I picked up Lu and took her home and asked our caregiver to stay a bit longer so that I could go into the hospital in San Francisco and join the vigil and say goodbye.

Who told me? My husband called me where I was working 400 miles away and about to load the car to come home. My cell phone buzzed because the ringer was off and he probably paused and made a strange sound and I probably started shouting 'WHAT.....WHAT?????' and then he told me. 'Luezie died'. Just that. She was alone in her room. She was about to get taken to see 2 doctors but she died in her bed. On her futon in front of the giant flat-screen television where she watched her favorite movies.
I remember screaming. And then. Don't call anyone. I don't want her moved. I'll get on a plane.

Lueza would be obsessed with this story. How did it happen? Who told me?

She must have had a massive infection that overwhelmed her body. Sepsis. Something fast and furious swept her away.

Do you see? How can you write this stuff?
Something fast and furious.
I don't know what the fuck happened.
I don't like to use the word 'fuck' in print but I do not have words.
She was swept away by a massive wave.
The doctors said not to bring her to the emergency room because there were too many sick kids and she was so vulnerable.
They knew her well. They loved her. She had been through it all. They just kept saving her.

We all knew that she would have a short life.
Everybody knew.

Lueza loved life.
I have no idea if she was able to think about any of this.
Did she know how delicate she was?
Did she know that her parents were terrified for 9 years?

She never seemed afraid at the hospital. It was like a big social event for her.
She kept me calm.

So now I'm like Lueza, obsessively asking 'what happened?'

Burning Man

My daughter is going to Burning Man.
A friend emailed me that she would like to bring photographs of my daughter Lu to the Temple of Transition.
I have never been to Burning Man.
I have never heard of the Temple of Transition.
 I have always wanted to go ever since I first read about it after moving to California but being that it is in the heart of the Nevada desert and seems so far-out and druggy (I know nothing about the actual experience) I haven't quite figured out how to accomplish this trek.
My friend is the opposite of far-out and druggy. She's raising children and running a business. She wears high heels and lovely lady suits. When I had one of my first hot flashes at a school function she magically appeared with a popsicle.
She is a "burner".
One who goes to Burning Man.

The Temple of Transition consists of 6 towers.
This information is the result of my Googling.
Each tower is named to honor a stage of life.
Birth, Union, Growth, Death, Decay.
The center tower is Gratitude.

I am filled with enormous gratitude to my friend Jennifer.
I wish I could be there.
Next year.

Burning Man.