10 notes from griefland.

a place of holy unwholeness

Dear friends. These are truly notes. Gathered from my notes app on my phone. Written over a few months and a couple continents.

There is nothing here that is a whole. Fragments are my gods these days. Fragments are all I got.

I don’t have it in me to be thorough or put together. My prayer is that small parts, from all of us, can become a basket of something or other.

I just read somewhere, wisdom of a native nation, that said
those who are grieving are the ones to turn to for your prayers. They are considered the most awaken and holy. Threshold standers. That it is proper for others to ask them for their help. I am not sure about it. I feel soft. I feel holy. But my capacity to be a helper is low. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I am the most awake I have ever been, so feel free to ask for prayers.

…

note 1. I am full of holes. or maybe not. Maybe I there are just chunks of me gone now, buried, cremated first, then put in a drawer with him, closed. I walk around these village streets exposing massive of parts of me gone. Like cheesecloth. But the wholes are bigger and less perfectly round. And other people can float right through me as I pass them, they don’t see me. I greet them and I can feel myself like a ghost with them. Willowy. Blown open. Transparent.

I am working here. Holding space and containers for pilgrims. This is my job and yet I don’t know what I am doing right now or how I got here or who allowed me to do this work this soon after my dad’s death. Pretending to be alive. Pretending I have not been dragged by death into another world. It’s not suffering. No. Don’t get me wrong. It’s almost my most natural state of being, but I am trying to remember it. Trying not to fight it away. I am soft. I am more in Earth than in Air. I am more underwater than just skimming as a rock above it.

I hope they can see in my eyes I am present with them. Even if I am only partially here, even if they can move through me, maybe not even see me fully, maybe I am only half visible to them as they are only half visible to me, too. I hope that somehow makes this a whole and real experience for us all. Somehow I think the showing up in grief no matter where you are, like a mourning cloak butterfly, a perfect creature and always in the right place at the right now.

I am actually not entirely invisible. I am being seen more than usual by Adonis-type way-too-young men on this Island. I am getting propositioned, bought drinks, asked to go on bike rides. Grief must make you one sexy, pheromone-secreting mother*lover.

note 2. I am meant to be here, I can feel that. I was meant to bury him and then the next day get on a plane to go be with this land. But sorting out the parts of me that are him and the parts that are me are getting confusing, or risk being confused.

I get into the water any moment I have and pray to be held as myself, that I am held and can be fully me, that I can be held and remember the other side of this process. when someone you love dies, the parts of you alive with them die, too. I do not see how to avoid this. the water weaves me back together, or renews me. I cannot stay away. The salt allows me not to do anything at all but lean back, be carried, be rocked. I pray to the water that I come out as a better person.

note 3. to travel to the underworld with a dead parent seems as normal and true and as right as when your mother is born again as soon as their baby is born. how can we not die with our parents. as parents how can we not be born again when our children are born? how can we not be born again when our parents die? how can we not die when our babies are born? everything is everything. I am not sure I know any difference between being born and dying, but thus far, to my recollection, I have only done one.

note 4. I grieve my father but I also grieve all the parts of me that went to the chthonic realms with him. it is an artful thing to practice grieving the death of yourself.

note 5. our threads are tangled, him and i. for many lives, I think. when he died, the next night, as I was sleeping on his couch, I could feel him, or something of him, try to push into my sacrum. I told him we are not the same and I cannot hold him there. it’s hard. but it’s true. I do not want to be him. I don’t want him to haunt me. I don’t want to take on the heavy weight of who he was, or fill up the space he left behind. I certainly don’t want him dwelling in my sacrum. my lower back carries enough.

we were the hot coals under each others feet. we were the edge of the cliff that we both risked leaning over and threatening to jump off. we were the green felt for the lucky die to roll on in very bad decisions. we were the pulp of each others bloody beatings. we were the same vein in our foreheads that bulged and made people run for cover. we shared an original mother volcano.

note 6. i’m laying under his portrait. on an air mattress. in his apartment. he has been dead for 4 months. my brother is on the couch. where the fuck is dad, I ask my brother.

he’s in the box, he said.

I know, but where is he.

in the box, in the fucking box.

I look at him and am like, no, where is he.

oh, you mean like him, like if he is something other than a body? I don’t know, isn’t that is the greatest mystery of being alive? as soon as we are born we have no idea. it’s kind of the point of life. I just hope that in the end it’s not some boring ass movie of our lives that flashes through us reminding us what a joke we all were. like our mind plays it all back. and the buddhists were right. we should have no mind by the time we die.

note 6. when I got arrested in 1998 in Hollywood it was my father that came out from NY to be with me. Not my mother.

He flew out after my brother bailed me out, took me grocery shopping, and sat me at the kitchen table and started to cry. His hands were clasped together. His face was a red-brown berry from being outside golfing all summer. His combover was impeccable and a perfect salt and pepper. He wore a pinky ring, a black onyx. He was crying and I was not shocked. My father cried. He cried a lot. He cried, he laughed, he yelled, he sang. I was not surprised because this was normal— for him to cry. “Is this my fault” he asked me through his tears. Shaking his clasped hands at me. “Mary, is this because of me?”

I shook my head. No, no dad, it’s not your fault. I was just being stupid. “Your mother says it’s my fault because of who I am." I reached out for his hands, each finger woven into the next, and put my hand on top of them, cupped over them. They were thick fingers, warm, smooth. “It’s not your fault.”

I didn’t know it then, but see it now. In that moment I witnessed my father’s greatest fear. Which was that he was a horrible father that had no business being a father. That everything about who he was, was the anti-father. But really, he was more like a mother. Wild, chaotic, emotional, ever-changing. Every day, every night, my father never forgot to say “I love you”.

note 7. the nurse said he died relatively peacefully. I knew that might be partially true. But partially not true. When they called me at 2am to ask me if he had a DNR, without telling me he was dying, I could hear him in the background yelling. I thought he was having another outburst, like he had been having every night in the hospital, waking up and not knowing where he was and trying to get up and leave. (*Let me write that again, the hospital called at 2am asking about his DNR without saying to me “your dad is dying”— but this is another note for another time).

When we got to the hospital 15 minutes after he actually died, the nurse there told us he died relatively peaceful.

And that he had a smile on his face. And that before he died, he called out someone’s name. That he smiled. That his eyes got bright. And then he died.

We asked the nurse what the name was.

She couldn’t remember. A long name.

An Italian sounding name?

Possibly, yes.

Salvatrice?

No.

Josephine?

No.

Paulina?

No.

Dolores?

No.

Then she snapped her fingers: something Beth.

MaryBeth, my sister asked?

Yes! That was the name. MaryBeth.

what the fuck does it mean when a dying man calls out your name before he dies and you aren’t there but speaking down the 86 west trying to get to him as fast as you can?

what does it mean to be the one on the edge of someone’s death, on the edge of someone’s last breath, on their tongue as their brain is downloading every last memory of their life before the data goes blank? To be the last living sound from a person before there is no-sound?

note 8: I don’t know what it means.

note 9: it all feels really normal. I feel better when grief is holding me and allowing me to change. the great transformer. the dark mouth of love. eat me, eat me, birth me back out.

note 10: what is grief anyway if not the mother of us all

…………..

Next week I will be sharing a casual and in the moment recorded medicina collettiva conversation I had with my friend Kara (Cimarutaremedies.com) about grief, dying, and the spirit of it all — born from these notes I wrote here. This is for paid subscribers - for $5/month membership you can hear this convo, and others, plus access mini-courses, workshops, recipes, etc. Whatever I feel like doing, I put there.

Otherwise, thank you for tuning in to my words. I am trying to come back to the page in practice.

xx

MB.