by Sukey Forbes
But the most fundamental thing Margaret had provided was the prospect of being able to move beyond the here and now of grieving and to focus once again on creating some kind of future. It was the Oversoul—the unity—I wanted to find. The here and now reconciled with the hereafter.
One day I overheard a stranger talking about a woman named Alexis who worked not so much as a medium but as an insights and intuitions life coach. With apologies for the interruption, I broke in and asked this stranger if she would be willing to give me Alexis’s contact information. Later I found out that she was a big deal, consulting with movie moguls and the Dalai Lama.
Despite my lack of such lofty status, Alexis agreed to help me, and our first contact was over the phone. I made absolutely no mention of a death in the family. Alexis knew nothing about me. The woman who had put us in touch didn’t even know my name, much less what I’d just been through. And that blank slate was where I wanted to begin.
I opened the conversation by giving her names and asking for whatever came to mind. Michael. “He’s struggling.” Cabot. “He has respiratory issues.” (This was true.) Charlotte. “I see a little girl on a beach. It’s like she’s at the world’s greatest summer camp. She’s very spunky and demanding.”
“That’s my daughter,” I said.
But then there was an odd pause, as if Alexis was having a moment of self-doubt, or trying to avoid saying something hurtful. “But this person is on the other side,” she said.
She had passed the first test. From that moment on, she became my coach in learning to live a new life based on a new, more expansive way of seeing.
My second meeting with Alexis was face-to-face, in Weston. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but she surprised me by looking so youthful, in a California sort of way. Alexis was about five foot four, with fair skin and long, thick red hair. But the most distinctive thing about her was her very large, incredibly vivid blue eyes. There was something luminous about those eyes, a quality I’d seen sometimes in the eyes of the best yoga teachers. It was as if their eyes were literally more open, and certainly more penetrating. It was as if she were looking at you twice as hard, seeing what others couldn’t see, collecting data on a whole other level.
We were at the home of the woman who had put us in touch. It was in October, and we sat on a little sun porch in the slanting light of late afternoon, surrounded by the glow of orange and yellow leaves. I had brought a tape recorder, but otherwise it was as if we were sharing a cup of tea.
“I just want to get a sense of you,” Alexis said, and for a minute or so she took me in with those otherworldly eyes. Then she began to talk, in a stream of consciousness way, and I sat back and absorbed. Sometimes fragments would be unsettling, as in, “I see you crying in the shower” or “I see Michael slamming a door.”
But the most disturbing part of our conversation was when I mentioned wanting to have another child. This was vitally important to me at the time, and my frustration was becoming more and more unbearable. But Alexis’s hesitation meant that she did not see it happening. Now, in retrospect, I realize that another child could have been a disaster. We were still far more emotionally fragile than we realized, and our tolerance and patience were way down. It took all that we had to simply get through the day and to try to be good parents for Cabot and Beatrice.
Still, I persisted in the hope, and Michael and I continued to try for about another year. We briefly considered the high-tech route of fertility treatments. But by then, I think, we were coming to realize that we were simply worn out, and that perhaps it was best if we just accepted what was and moved on.
I continued to talk often with Alexis on the phone and to meet with her in person once a year. To me, the phone sessions were sometimes more powerful because of the way she could pick up on what was going on without any visual cues. “Hi, this is Sukey,” I’d say, and she could respond—accurately—with “You have a stomach bug.”
Alexis was a strong endorsement for the intuitive self, and she actively encouraged me to explore and embrace more of this new, nonlinear universe I’d discovered. Which led me to explore how this acceptance of the “otherworldly” might have been carried down through my ancestors to me. Emerson’s wife, Lidian, was often referred to as a seer or clairvoyant, so I suppose there could have been a trace of that in my DNA. And the more I read Emerson himself, the more I realized that I could give up the academic parsing of his writings and connect to him, and to his own suffering, intuitively. After all, in the face of his own grief as a parent, he’s the one who wrote, “I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge as vacant and vain. Now for the first time seem I to know anything rightly.” To which he added, “The past has baked my loaf, and in the strength of its bread I break up the old oven.”
There was no doubt that I was “breaking up the old oven,” testing the boundaries of convention, letting go of any pretense of belonging in the world of spreadsheets and “rational” analyses, and every day I was becoming more and more confident that this new path was the right one for me. I’ve never been a rigorously logical thinker, but I’ve always had a strong sense of self, which means that even when my emotions were not accessible, I never wanted to be anyone other than me, and I never engaged in much second-guessing as I followed my own internal compass.
But I also knew that until now I’d still hugged the shores. Since Charlotte’s death I’d ventured out into the deep blue, whose waters were not only uncharted but also filled, if not with sharks and sea monsters, then certainly with charlatans. I feared my pain had made me vulnerable, and being exploited by someone under the guise of helping me would be bad enough; what would be truly unbearable would be to find that I’d taken on a gauzy and comforting new belief system only to have it exposed and shattered. I needed more solid facts and validation that the ideas that resonated with me did not just resonate because of magical thinking, consuming desperation, or enduring vulnerability. The steps between curious hopefulness and addressing my quiet desperation were ones that I worried might allow me to be led down the wrong path. And yet I had to have answers in order to absorb the magnitude of the loss of my daughter. Where was my daughter? Who was holding her? Who was tending to her needs? I found too many people willing to gloss over those questions and fast-track to the more ethereal answers: “She’s with God.” “She’s in a better place.” Bullshit—next to her mother was the best place. Who was the cosmic and almighty parent who was now entrusted with her care? I was consumed by those questions.
A protective skepticism rose up from the more customary part of my New England heritage and forced me to wrestle with my doubts as I moved forward. I was ineluctably drawn to these nonmainstream ideas, and at the same time forced myself to test them against all the input from my previous education and life experience.
If a belief system is old enough to have become “established,” the culture shows it a certain respect even when its claims, measured by scientific standards, are ridiculous. The Virgin birth? The Resurrection? God speaking to Moses, or Muhammad, or Joseph Smith? None of these things makes rational sense, and yet millions of otherwise “rational” people confirm their belief in them every day.
Using the term literally, no one can know that “Jesus is their personal savior” or that “God waits in heaven to judge the just and the wicked,” because knowing requires factual evidence—and yet people say they know these things. To get to this point of uncertainty, they’ve made what Loyola called the “sacrifice of reason” and Kierkegaard called the “leap of faith.” (He even went so far as to affirm, Credo quia absurdum—“I believe because it is absurd.”) Much of belief relies on faith and much of faith requires that blind leap. And trust. Faith is a requirement of life. Those who have not been tested perhaps do not know this. But most of the world does know that on some level faith is not elective. We often find faith in our darkest moments, when we have exhausted all other hope and have reached the end o
f the facts. That does not make the leap of faith or the knowing any less true; it just makes it more accessible to us when we most need it. And perhaps this is what it takes. I became willing to take the leap of faith. In so doing I found what to believe. One can factually verify only so much and then very quickly one needs to accept an idea on faith, completely reject it, or dive in more deeply with questions. In my experience, many people, myself included, move open-mindedly partway down that path and then we get stuck on the questions. Really stuck. So we bail out. I am not sure what the recipe is to move beyond that. For me it has required part blind faith, part intuition, more than a dash of curiosity, open-mindedness, healthy skepticism, and trust.
In the years after Charlotte’s death I was presented with enough fact and personal experience to allow my intuitive beliefs and experience of life after death to allow it to settle into a form of knowing. That has been enough for me to rest comfortably with her whereabouts (for lack of a better word). I had to know that she wasn’t totally gone. And that if she was gone I had to find some level of comfort with what her new address was. Even if I couldn’t physically visit her, I craved that level of knowing.
I didn’t want to be absurd. I didn’t want to sacrifice my capacity to reason. And yet I desperately needed to find the “willing suspension of disbelief” that Coleridge talked about in literature. I wanted to move from belief to my own form of knowing.
It has been my experience that when we allow our minds to grow really quiet, we find that most of the answers we seek are inside of us, and they come from that deep space of knowing. It doesn’t matter how we get to the stillness. It can be through prayer, or meditation, or repetitive and fluid activities such as walking, gardening, yoga, or running. But it’s the silence that allows us to hear what the Bible calls “that still small voice.”
Depending on your belief system, that voice could be God, angels, or a spirit guide, the Oversoul, or your personal intuition. But when you hear it, you know.
In this way, I think my search incorporated both aspects of my family traditions: the artistic and seeking (transcendent?) side, as well as the restrained and proper side that has sent generations of young men to Harvard.
Having confidence in the power of what “felt right” to me was much harder when I was young and worried that I didn’t belong because I didn’t live up to the family’s lofty academic traditions. I remember telling Grampa Salt, “I’m just not Harvard material,” and his replying rather sweetly, “That’s okay. After Harvard I went to business school at Stanford and I thought it was a fine school. You should just go to Stanford, then.” My small liberal arts college was clearly not on his radar.
But there were plenty of other rites of passage that had allowed me to feel embraced. In the Forbes family it was not so much about love but about being worthy, which meant being invited to do a task side by side, or being trusted to use the chain saw on your own. In the Forbes family, Emersonian self-reliance meant getting your hands dirty.
In terms of what I believed, then, I was being self-reliant, and self-sufficient. I wasn’t asking anyone for money to build a church. And I would freely admit that what I’d come to know would not stand up to the rational scrutiny that measured ideas at places like Harvard or Stanford. After the Age of Enlightenment, magic, blind faith, and anything that could not be touched and proved in the objective physical world was tossed out on the compost heap. Science and faith became adversaries of each other and seem to remain so to this day. This Euro-American way of thinking and reasoning has clouded us all such that God and miracles play a diminished role in our day-to-day lives. Hard science and theology are certainly not my strong suits, but I have been shown much since my daughter died that leads me to believe, to know, that there is much more out there that cannot be explained by science. But even tempered by the modesty of my own as well as scientific limitations, my new, emerging beliefs felt right to me. I became comfortable with my own form of divinity. It was a hybrid of God and Nature and Humanity. And even with those limitations, they brought me through the worst experience a person can endure.
I was now feeling confident enough to go ahead and submit our blood samples so that our DNA could be tested for malignant hyperthermia. We needed to do this for Cabot’s and Beatrice’s sakes, but we also needed to help researchers learn more about the condition. If anything good could come from Charlotte’s death, we had become committed to pursuing it. In this, certainly, Michael and I were one.
• • •
That summer progressed, and the humidity of July drifted out to sea, and then the sunlight became brighter and clearer each day. End of summer in New England is heaven, and the fact that you know the warmth is fading makes it all the more precious. I’d always loved the slow change from beach days to back-to-school logistics and the excitement of a new year. But Charlotte had died on one of those perfect August days, and this summer—the first after Charlotte’s death—as the weather shifted I could feel my muscles tense again and my jaw tighten as my body remembered. As is often the case with me, I discovered my emotion by tuning in to how my body reacted. I was tense. Sore. Achy. Aha. I must be feeling sad.
Anticipation of the anniversary was the worst part. I wanted to wake up on August 19 and say, “Oh, it was yesterday. Damn . . . I missed it.” But I felt an obligation to mark the occasion for Michael and for the kids, as well as for all the aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents. And I was still concerned about being in denial, even now, so I embraced any opportunity to confront a tough situation and feel all that I could feel.
We held our first “Angel Day,” as we called it, with the Bigham and the Forbes families gathering on Naushon to remember Charlotte. Annie was there with her two girls and we set off on a long horseback ride that mercifully took up most of the afternoon. During the long ride I was aware of the sun on my face and the warmth that spread through me when I smiled. This was the first time I authentically had smiled in a year and, though short-lived, it felt like a gift. At six o’clock everyone gathered in front of Mansion House on the lawn that slopes down to the harbor. There were about twenty of us, everyone wearing pink, along with pink rubber bracelets embossed with Charlotte’s name.
As the sun began to go down, we released twenty pink balloons. I felt very much on display, but this time I made no effort to hold back the tears. A jumble of dark emotions, I somehow couldn’t take my eyes off those balloons rising up toward the heavens. Even after everyone else had gone in, I had to keep staring into the sky until long after the last of them disappeared. Looking into the pale pink sunset sky as the last of the balloons disappeared into the empty distance, I, too, felt empty. My mind went back to the poem of the sail disappearing and then coming back into sight on the other side and I found myself hoping Charlotte was receiving her balloons now as they came into her view. The image of her collecting her bouquet of pink balloons on the other side gave me enough strength to go back into the house and join the rest of the family in the dining room for dinner.
There was only one step left for me to take, and I dreaded it most of all. The next morning, early, I walked over to the Shore House barn, where the Forbes genealogy is documented on the walls with color-coded lines of descent. I found Charlotte’s small card, now with a small red dot in the upper right-hand corner.
Charlotte Saltonstall Bigham.
December 23, 1997–August 18, 2004.
I stood and stared at that label, her recent death confirmed by the red dot, and I felt my throat close up and my lungs collapse. I could not breathe or swallow. Then my knees began to buckle. I staggered outside to the bench nearby that was dedicated to my grandfather, and I lay prone on it so that I could feel the hard wood pressing into my womb, looked out over the water, put my head down, and sobbed.
Staying strong for Charlotte, with temporary tattoos.
We’d passed the one-year mark, and now I assumed I’d been through the worst
of it. We’d been through a full year of life events without Charlotte. Surely getting to the “other side” of grief was just around the corner.
9
Second Autumn
About a week after that twilight balloon release on Naushon, I accidentally ran over Lindy Loo, our beloved Jack Russell, and killed her. Anyone would have been upset, but I became completely unglued. I was hysterical. That’s when I realized I still had more work to do, and that I would not be reaching the other side anytime soon.
It was the middle of the day, the kids were at camp, and I’d been doing some back-to-school shopping, and I guess I was distracted and took the corner into our driveway a little more sharply than usual. I felt a slight thud underneath the car, and as I stopped I had the sinking feeling that I’d just run over my dog.
I jumped out screaming, “Lindy! Lindy!” Then I saw her crawl out from under the car like a GI under fire. One of her eyes was bulging out of the socket.
I kept screaming, running around in circles. Maggie heard me from next door and came to the rescue. We were always the crisis family, and she was always the rock. I scooped up the dog in the crook of my arm, held her facedown like a colicky baby, and got back into the car with Maggie at the wheel. I kept her there cradled in my arm with the weight of her body and her beating chest pressing into the palm of my hand. As we drove along I could feel the little animal’s heartbeat slowing, and by the time we reached the vet’s she was dead.
The vet bandaged her eye so that the kids wouldn’t see the mess I’d made of her. I was sobbing and I couldn’t stop. It took an hour or so before I could compose myself well enough to head home. I agonized over how to tell the children about yet another family loss.
I pulled myself together, but when I told Michael, I came unglued again. My reaction was so out of proportion that obviously there was a large element of transference at play. But while I had been hectoring myself to be more expressive of my grief over Charlotte, now I was telling myself to calm down. With the dog, I was acting like the crazy person I’d always feared I’d become. I’d gone from a catatonic stoic in the emergency room to a shrieking hysteric at the vet.