A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir

by Linda Zercoe

  Be the tree, unwavering, knowing the cycles, accepting all as it is.

  August 13

  I finished reading Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. I want to quote what I found to be the profound passage:

  The fact remains that not everything can be explained in meaningful terms. But what now can be explained is at least the reason why this is necessarily impossible. At least it is impossible on merely intellectual grounds. An irrational rest is left. But what is “unknowable” need not be unbelievable. In fact, where knowledge gives up, the torch is passed on to faith. True, it is not possible to find out intellectually whether everything is ultimately meaningless or whether there is ultimately meaning behind everything. But if we cannot answer the question intellectually we may well do so existentially. Where an intellectual cognition fails an existential decision is due. Vis-à-vis the fact that it is equally conceivable that everything is absolutely meaningful and that everything is absolutely meaningless, in other words, that the scales are equally high. We must throw the weight of our own being into one of the scales.

  And there is the answer. We need to have blind faith to believe that everything is meaningful—not just some things, like we get to choose what is or isn’t meaningful. Everything is meaningful if you have faith. Nothing is meaningful if you don’t. And if you don’t, how do you survive? You believe in luck or science with no God.

  If I didn’t believe in God or in something greater than myself and the ultimate meaningfulness of every person, instant, place, event, good and bad, that drives my sense of purpose when having to face life-changing events, life-threatening illness, living with a chronic disease, losing body parts, putting faith in health care to allow 17 surgeries, knowing I will be OK no matter what, I would have died a long time ago.

  My faith in something more gives me the courage, fortitude, a fighting spirit and hope to look forward to what comes next. I wouldn’t be able to take my next breath. I think this and this alone—faith, grace and grit—is the only reason why I’m still here and have not broken and gone completely insane.

  In the spirit of continually learning to improve our relationship, in the heat of late August Doug and I headed out for another weekend retreat. This time it was at the Tassajara Zen Center for a course called Taming the Jackal: A Retreat for Nurturing Relationships, a “nonviolent communication” workshop that taught the tools pioneered by Marshall Rosenberg.

  For hours we drove in the truck to the Zen Center, famous for its curative hot sulfur springs in the Los Padres National Forest, two hours southeast of Carmel. After passing the turnoff several times, we finally found the dirt road that, according to the printout of the driving instructions, was sixteen miles long with no signs indicating whether we were getting anywhere.

  Doug drove like he was breaking a horse while I was bounced around, almost cracking a molar, and hanging on to the handle above the door like a monkey as we left a large, brown cloud of dust in our wake. Driving over large rocks while skirting the edge of a cliff, I bit my tongue, refusing to yell or scream. I confirmed my determination to keep silent when I squinted at the odometer and saw we were going only fifteen miles per hour. Finally, we arrived at the bottom of the gulch and opened the doors. Once the cloud of dust settled, we were hit with the eau-de-stink from the sulfur springs. As I was adjusting to the aroma, I spent about ten minutes unclenching all my muscles. I had to use my left hand to straighten out my right fingers from their hook shape.

  It was a good thing Doug was enthusiastic about going on this retreat, I thought, as I struggled to wheel my luggage from the parking lot to registration and past the Buddhist temple to our rustic room with no electricity and rationed cold water. I was sweating buckets, wiping the layer of grime from my face, when I looked over at Doug, who was already flopped on the mattress grinning from ear to ear.

  For three and a half days, we braved the heat, the mosquitoes, and the fart-like stink that faded and wafted. The food was gourmet vegan and was actually very good, though I was constipated even on that diet.

  The workshop was held in a yurt—no air conditioning, of course. It was about learning a communication technique that uses empathy and connects with the heart and what is alive in the other person. I learned from the lectures that my language was considered judgmental due to my habit of using qualifiers and adjectives to describe anything that was subjective. The step-by-step process forced me to get in touch with my feelings. I learned that my feelings were a limitless ocean of hurt and sadness.

  Doug seemed to have a very hard time connecting to his feelings. He stated in a very goal-oriented way, “I really want to learn how to do this!”

  Before the end of the weekend, I could hear an argument erupting from the other side of the yurt. Doug’s group was chastising him for talking about how he felt when his “wife yells from across the house” (calling the family for dinner, to answer the telephone, things of that sort). The more vocal people in his group, which included a couple of therapists, told him to “get over it.” The teacher had to get involved and use Doug’s “feelings” around this topic as an instructional tool for the group.

  Doug seemed hurt when he told me about the incident later. “This is something I need to work on,” he said.

  I didn’t tell him that I didn’t need fifty-nine bloody mosquito bites and bad body odor to figure that one out. I did, however, feel empathy for him instead of the usual anger. I gave him a hug.

  I learned more about my need for safety. I learned that beating myself up, “self-jackaling” in the workshop’s parlance, is about expecting too much of myself and feeling bad for even having any feelings or needs. I also learned that the way I communicated brought me exactly what I didn’t want. I decided that in the future I was going to plan on doing many more activities around self-discovery and healing.

  We ascended and then descended the mountains to return home, back through the dust cloud and rocks, seemingly a little closer. We tried for about a week to implement the techniques of mirroring back what each of us was saying, going through the checklist until we each felt heard.

  Then Doug said, “This way of talking doesn’t seem natural to me.”

  I knew that I could continue only to work on changing myself. I signed up to attend another workshop in the fall on “self-jackaling,” or self-nurturing, but a week before the retreat I got a call saying that the workshop was cancelled since I was the only person who had enrolled.

  Brad started his senior year of high school, and in November Doug and I went to Japan for two weeks for my 50th birthday gift. The focus of the trip was on the landscape, particularly all the different species of maple trees dressed out in all the fall colors.

  We also spent considerable time investigating some of the artisanal crafts of Japan, from sake to Japanese woodblock prints. We met with the artist who made the prints and learned how they were made. We went to learn about the artistry in making rice paper. We went to botanical gardens where everything was art, the art of perfection, even in the way the gravel was raked. Everything was so clean and there was such order to even the tiniest detail.

  We toured Buddhist monasteries, and attended a tea ceremony with an abbot at one of them. One of my favorite experiences was our visit to the Japanese watercolor shop, which sold not art prints but paint and brushes. The woman who ran the shop didn’t speak English, but somehow we managed to learn all about the full array and nuanced spectrum of the powdered pigments she sold, the different animal hairs used for the brushes, and the varieties of scroll papers.

  We walked out of there with watercolor pots of paint in every available color, a selection of brushes rolled in a bamboo mat, and a neat stack of rice paper. Everything was carefully wrapped in tissue, then in brown paper, tied with twine, and then stamped with the shop information. Both of us were delighted—we practically skipped down the street. I was excited about my new artist “toys”; Doug was happy to see me happy. The woman waved until we were out of s
ight, also delighted by our large purchase. The entire country was an oasis from a life of chaos. Everything made sense, despite our inability to read signs or understand the language!

  January 21, 2008

  I am the luckiest woman in the world to have been born in 1957. Yesterday I had my car serviced and was given a loaner with XM Satellite Radio, a commercial-free subscription radio service that has been around for a few years. It has channels for just the 1940s, the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and many other specialty channels.

  I had so much fun listening to all these types of music. If I was born at any other time, I don’t think I would have so thoroughly enjoyed all these different decades. I was so happy driving around doing errands and I purposefully took the long way around just to listen to the music. I spent $10 on gas before returning the car. I love music and singing; they are like a happy drug. In the afternoon, I put on some CDs at home and just danced for an hour. What a high—better than any drug I can imagine.

  Music helps me to feel mentally better. I see my life as a soundtrack, so varied and complex. Music is like the recording of life, ongoing no matter what happens. The overriding current of music depicts all of the human emotions—joy, love, love lost, blues, fun, sadness. It is the poetry of the human experience, touching each of us in such a special way. Thank God for these artists, their gifts and talents, and the technology and ears to enjoy it.

  I finally decided that I was going to realize the fantasy and build my own karaoke system. Using the Internet, searching night after night, I decided which equipment to buy. I shopped for the best prices and bid for equipment on eBay and then paced day after day with the anxiety of waiting for someone to give birth. I was crushed when I lost the bid and jumped for joy when I won. As the boxes of speakers, amplifier, microphones, cables, and assorted items I required began arriving, I started bidding on libraries of used karaoke CDGs that contained the music and graphic words for the screen. It didn’t take long for Doug to notice that something was going on.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m building my own karaoke system!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to,” I answered, sounding more like a defiant child than an adult. “And because singing makes me feel better.”

  “Seems like you are spending a lot of money.”

  “Would you rather we spend it on hospital bills or more therapy?”

  I abandoned painting, the picture project, and everything else for a while, and worked day and night until I had installed and created a music book by title and by artist for more than four thousand songs, using special software. Then I started singing. Doug and Brad thought I was crazy. And I was—crazy about having fun.

  At the end of April I went to the Chopra Center for a workshop called Emotional Healing. It was near the ocean, in Carlsbad, California, where the sky was turquoise blue. The air was clean, sparkling with the good ions. In a candlelit room, a beautiful woman named Amanda sang a chant in Sanskrit looking right into my eyes. She had a lovely voice, and I could sense her outpouring of love.

  I was given my unique mediation mantra as if it were a large precious jewel. I met thirty or so people from all over the world, each with a story, each wounded and recovering from something. I learned how to meditate, and we meditated twice a day for thirty minutes. The meditation teacher also taught us about the doshas, the constitution each of us is born with—vata, pitta, and kapha. The doshas are derived from the five elements. Vata is space and air. Pitta is fire and water. Kapha is water and earth. Each of these doshas is associated with specific attributes that are natural tendencies, both psychological and physical, of the individual. When the doshas are out of balance in a person, symptoms emerge. I was mostly a vata with some pitta, based on the quick-and-dirty assessment criteria. The topic of the doshas was entirely new to me. This was my introduction into the ancient field of Ayurvedic medicine. I knew it would take years of study to really understand this field.

  I learned about agni, the internal fire. When it is strong, it converts poison into nectar. Weak agni converts nectar into poison (ama). We learned about emotional ama. We learned about the philosophy of yoga and practiced the “Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga” every day. Individually and with partners we did many exercises that focused on our beliefs and went through a step-by-step process that started with identifying feelings and worked toward eventually releasing the emotion.

  I sat rapt, and for once not crying, in a darkened room decorated in the beautiful and exotic fashion of India. I was amazed by the presentation of a completely different approach to perceiving and living life. I learned that I had a really hard time even recognizing how I felt. I thought others were responsible for how I felt—on those occasions when I did feel. And this was not true. Just as I wasn’t responsible for my mother’s life, I was responsible for mine. I learned that everyone we encounter is a mirror of ourselves. Also we possess all the qualities we see in others that we admire as well as those we dislike.

  Toward the end of retreat, I selected three large rocks on the beach. As a group, we held a ceremony around a bonfire. Then one by one we each peeled off toward the ocean. I put the story of my mother into one rock and then, with forgiveness and love, threw it into the ocean. My second rock was letting go of all the issues around Dave’s death once and for all. The third rock was about forgiving Doug, letting go of blame, and thanking him for being the person who was intricately involved in teaching me how I needed to love myself and others. I left the retreat feeling fifty pounds lighter and signed up for the 200-hour yoga teacher training, which had two other Chopra seminars as prerequisites.

  The first prerequisite, Seduction of the Spirit, was held in Ireland. More than five hundred people from all over the world attended, requiring seven translators. The week included twice daily yoga, meditation, Ayurvedic-based vegetarian meals, and nightly activities. I loved it. I felt energized, physically great and emotionally connected to everyone there—seekers on a similar quest to mine. The concepts I learned changed my life, giving me a new understanding of the intersection of spirituality and science, and consciousness and reality. I was blown away with new insights into who we are, who I was. The experience was incredible.

  One evening, the activity centered on Deepak Chopra’s nonprofit called The Alliance for the New Humanity. We heard the poetry of John O’Donohue, listened to a Celtic singer and harpist, and heard presenters from Ireland tell stories of how, in spite of hardships and obstacles, each was doing something to make the world a better place. After that we broke up into groups of thirty people and one by one went around the circle answering the question “If you could do one thing to change the world, what would you do?”

  I didn’t have to think for more than a second. My answer was that I would do something about cancer, raise awareness, help to find the cause and the cure. Not too big a dream. What really surprised me, however, was that each of the people in the large circle had a different thing they would want to do to change the world. The point of all of this was that if like-minded people could connect through an alliance, critical mass could build momentum to actually change the world. It was exhilarating to imagine going global and that each person could really make a difference—that I could make a difference.

  What I also realized on that trip was how grateful I was for Doug. Because of his support and hard work, I was able to have such an experience. I had the freedom to search for answers, even trot around the globe, in my quest for healing and learning who I was and what I wanted. I realized that we couldn’t be on the same wavelength or growing in the same way. He went to work and held down the fort while I had all of these amazing experiences. I could have never have done these things otherwise. My perspective was changing.

  Brad graduated from high school that year, and I lived to see it, albeit through the usual rivers of tears and relief.

  The same month I thought it was strange that Clara, who never went away, would be calling f
rom a PTA conference in Long Beach.

  “Linda, Don is home and having a really hard time with constipation.”

  The situation was so weird. Don and I were very close, but not on the level of discussing bowel habits. Apparently, in Clara’s absence and Don’s desperation, I had graduated.

  “Don’t worry, Clara, I’ll go to the store and pick up a few things that I think will help, and drop by and see him.”

  When I arrived at their house, Don answered the door in his robe, T-shirt and sweatpants. His six-foot-three figure was contorted a bit, for what reason, I didn’t know. His usual joviality was still evident as he hobbled to the sofa in their family room and I followed behind him, but I could tell something was really wrong. As he sat down gingerly, a faint, guarded wince was evident on his face.

  “My back,” he said, “it’s been driving me nuts since the trip to Hong Kong in January. You know those horrible plane seats.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said and paused for a few seconds. “Well you seem really uncomfortable. What are you doing about it?”

  “I went to see an orthopedic doctor. I have an appointment for an MRI in a few weeks.”

  Feeling bold seeing him in such bad shape, I said, “Why are you waiting, suffering in the meantime? Call him back and demand that they do it sooner, or go to the emergency room.” I felt like I was overstepping my bounds, but bowels were the stuff of families.

  After Clara returned home, they called an ambulance. Within a couple of weeks Don, who hadn’t smoked in more than 25 years, had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer with metastasis to his lymph nodes and the sacral region of his back. The cancer had almost completely eaten through his spine. He really could no longer walk.

  I started a Caring Bridge website to update friends and family and allow them to post messages to Don and Clara. Don was in the hospital for more than three weeks while they tried to get his pain under control, gave him ten spinal radiation treatments, surgically placed a port for chemotherapy, started chemo, and fitted him for a brace and corset to stabilize his spine when he could get out of bed.