News of Jenny’s death swiftly permeated the fabric of the community and drenched it with the weight of collective mourning. The house began to fill with close friends and friendly acquaintances. Framed photos of Jenny I didn’t even know existed appeared nestled between pots of soup and armfuls of flowers. Mom assessed each new offering and placed it with care, as if by creating order amid the chaos of loss she might prevent my annihilation. But nothing could save me from that fire. It swept through the landscape of what had been my life and took everything to the ground.
I sat among the wreckage. I rent my garment. I fasted and groaned and stared into space. I let myself burn, melt, distort, and dissolve. Why not? I had nothing more to lose.
Although every one of the religions and spiritual paths I once knew and loved now struck me as ludicrous, Judaism and Buddhism seemed to offer the most robust containers in which to hold this impossible thing. I re-read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and committed myself to accompanying Jenny’s soul through the bardos with forty-nine days of prayer. Just in case there was any such thing as a soul. And just in case there was a metaphysical topography that my daughter’s soul was now navigating. On her own. Without me to guide and protect her.
My friend Annapurna, another of many Jews in our circle of monkey worshippers, had attended rabbinical school, so I asked her about mourning rituals from my ancestral tradition. She opened a sacred toolbox I had not known was there. We draped the mirrors with cloth so that I would not have to see the face of my anguish. I tore the collar of my favorite purple blouse and wore it to remind me of the built-in obsolescence of this material world. I slid from my position on the couch and onto the floor, because all the furniture of the life I knew had been removed, and there was nowhere to sit but in the emptiness.
And so, we sat shiva. Every day for seven days at sunset, visitors arrived in droves, and we chanted the Kaddish together. Then, leaving miso soup (which I could not swallow) or books on grief (which I did not even open), they went away.
At first I was perplexed and eventually relieved by the fact that the traditional Jewish mourner’s prayer does not even mention death. Instead the Kaddish extolls the majesty of the Holy One and kindles awe in Its glorious unknowability. Annapurna made photocopies of the transliterated Aramaic, along with an inclusive English translation, and put out the call for anyone who wanted to join us in the ancient liturgy. Jews and Gentiles, pagans and atheists, sat on the floor with me, praising God in honor of my daughter.
Let the Great Name be blessed forever and ever.
Let the Name of the Source of Life
be glorified, exalted, honored,
though the One is beyond all the praises, songs
and adorations we can utter.
And let us say, Amen.
Meanwhile, the moment our satsang heard that Jenny had died, they gathered at the Hanuman temple and commenced to sing the 108 Hanuman Chaleesas to help her on her spirit journey. Teams of devotees took turns chanting all afternoon and through the night. Mom drove me over to the ashram at dawn that first morning after Jenny’s death. We entered the temple as the last few verses of the chaleesas were being sung and the singers were heading home to bed. Silent hugs, soft sobs, flowers pressed into my hands. I lay my head on Maharaj-ji’s tucket, cursed him and forgave him, told him I thought he was a fraud and threw myself at his invisible feet, begging him to keep my baby safe. Then I went back home and stayed there.
Every once in a while I tipped my head backward against the couch and moaned. “Oh, Jenny, no.” Or “I don’t know how to do this.” Which seemed to cause some of my companions to panic a little.
“You’re not supposed to do anything, Mirabai,” someone would inevitably explain to me.
They didn’t get it. What I meant was that I didn’t know how to live the next minute now that Jenny’s minutes had come to a halt. I didn’t know how I could possibly breathe my next involuntary breath when my daughter had abruptly ceased breathing. I didn’t know if I could continue showing up since I had failed the primal mission: keeping my child alive.
Jeff flew all night from the Islands and met up with Roy at the Albuquerque airport, and they drove home together through the mountains to Taos. When they pulled in around six on the evening of the day after Jenny’s body was found, they were confused by the cars that lined both sides of the driveway and spilled out to the edges of Maestas Road for nearly a block in each direction. It was the mourners—dozens of them—gathered for Kaddish.
Roy and Jeff had to pick their way through the throng of kneeling worshippers to reach me. My brother hugged me and then released me into my lover’s arms, where I finally wept.
May the Source of Life
Who causes peace to reign in the high heavens
Let peace descend upon us,
And on all beings.
And let us say, Amen.
It wasn’t enough to pray and wail and receive condolences. There were funeral arrangements to be made.
While the office of the medical investigator (OMI) was investigating the cause of my daughter’s death down in Albuquerque, and Jeff and Roy were flying over the Mohave, and friends were bustling about the house, arranging flowers and rearranging the contents of the refrigerator, Mom, Amy, Daniela, and I had been meeting with Tim, the director of Rivera’s funeral home.
“This is fucked up,” I declared to Tim. “Making decisions like this. I’m sorry, but this fucking sucks.”
He did not flinch. “I know,” he agreed. “It sucks.”
A circle of seven women met the OMI van when it pulled in from Albuquerque the next day, bearing the body of my little girl. They wheeled her into a little room on the side of the mortuary and closed the door. And there they prepared her body for its final homecoming.
I will never know exactly what unfolded beneath their brave and generous hands. How they rubbed lavender oil into her cold skin and sprinkled her with rosewater. How they combed her brown and purple curls with their fingertips and pressed shut her eyelids and her lips. How they navigated the rough-stitched incision that ran from her clavicle to her pelvis, lifting her new woman hips and adjusting her shoulders as they washed and anointed her. How they sang to her in harmony, in unison, and alone. Hebrew prayers, Arabic. Hindu chants and Buddhist sutras. How they read the psalms and the poems of Emily Dickinson and Shakespearean soliloquies.
Women whose daughters had played with my daughters. Women I did not know well, but who knew well how to prepare a body in the tradition of my ancestors. Women I had been writing with in an intimate group for almost a decade. Who, every week, gathered at one or another of our homes to take turns as our guide for that day: read a poem; pull a line; go. Writing through the surface of our minds to that deeper, quieter, truer place. Never commenting, critiquing, analyzing. Simply thanking each writer after she read her piece aloud, sometimes through tears, and moving on to the next. Just as Natalie Goldberg, our group’s founder, had taught us. Never had I felt so deeply supported than I had in my silent writer’s group. Now these companions were showing up to accomplish the impossible task of preparing my daughter’s dead body.
I needed to bring her home. Anthony stayed up all night carving an open casket of Spanish cedar. Hanuman Das borrowed a low carved table from an antique dealer and set it up in our living room as a pedestal. I did not want her body to be transported to our home in a hearse, so James offered the use of his covered pickup, which he and Roy hosed out and then lined with flowers. Other friends gathered armfuls of juniper boughs and bundles of sage to surround her.
When preparations were complete, I climbed into the back of the truck and rode home with her. I rested my hand on her waxen forehead, and I sang the little song I had made up and sang a thousand nights to help her fall asleep when she was small, a Spanish nursery rhyme I had put to music:
Duérmete, mi niña.
Duérmete, mi sol.
Duérmete, pedazo de mi corazón.
Sleep, my child.
<
br /> Sleep, my sunshine.
Sleep, you piece of my heart.
“It looks like a cradle,” someone said when we lifted Jenny’s casket from the pickup, carried it inside, and laid it on the bier.
And it did.
Jenny Bird handed me a basket of flowers and evergreen branches. “Why don’t you arrange them around her?”
Decorate my daughter? Suddenly this seemed as daunting as identifying her body. I had the urge to run away. Please, someone else, do this beautiful thing. I will watch. I will be grateful. I cannot lift my arm. Let me rest. Make it stop.
I reached into the basket. I spread a blanket of pine boughs and carnations around the base of the cradle. I tucked a bouquet of apricot rose buds into the folds of Jenny’s blue dolphin shroud. I circled her head with baby’s breath and placed marigolds at her feet and hands. When I had used up one armload, another was handed to me, until I had woven a tapestry of color and texture, light and fragrance, around Jenny’s body as she lay in state in front of the west-facing window of the home where we had lived together.
And while I worked, Jenny Bird sang the song Jenny Starr had loved to hear her sing: “Ave Maria.” She sang like an angel, calling on the angels to gather, to be with us, to spread over us a mantel of goodness and lull this child to sleep, to rest, to rest in peace. Hail Mary, full of grace. Calling on the Blessed Mother to be with us in our hour of need, to stay with us forever, because we would never again not need her grace.
My friend Father Bill—who later became one of the closest soul companions I have ever had—came to anoint Jenny’s body, and he wove teachings from Tibet with the sacrament of Rome. “Go toward the light,” he prayed. “Do not be afraid. Merge into the light.”
My sister’s young sons did not leave their cousin’s side. Nick stood over the casket and stared at her, as if watching for signs that she might still be breathing, and, concluding that she would never breathe again, he sobbed. Ian climbed into my lap as I sat on the floor. “I just thought you might need to hold a child right now,” he said and leaned back against me so that I had no choice but to wrap my arms around him and rock.
The phone rang, and I saw “Richard Alpert” flash across the caller ID. I picked it up.
“Mirabai, it’s Ram Dass.”
I did not burst into tears. I was as still as snow. “Thank you for calling.”
“Hanuman Das told me what happened.” His voice was bumpy from his stroke a few years earlier. I softened into the quiet between the words. “About how she . . . the Mother . . . the grace.”
“Yes, it started during Durga Puja. She was acting like a goddess. People were touching her feet.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t like that.”
“No.”
“She was not the Divine Mother, Ram Dass. She was my little girl. She was going crazy.”
“Both,” he said.
“Yes. But still.”
“I know.” Ram Dass told me a story about a time in the early seventies when he was giving a talk at Saint John of the Divine Church in New York City, and hundreds of people had come to listen, and they were all meditating and chanting, and Ram Dass’s father stood in the back with his stepmother. At one point the Jewish business tycoon turned to his wife and said, “I feel like the goddamned Virgin Mary.”
Ram Dass and I both laughed, and the irreverence felt good. And then he said, “Mirabai, the energy that came pouring through Jenny was too much for her body to contain, and she shattered.”
That’s exactly how it had felt to me.
“Look. Jenny was the same age when she died as you were when you started your spiritual path,” Ram Dass said.
He had been there. He remembered.
“And now you will take up the dharma for both of you.”
I thanked him, and we sat in silence for a moment across the miles. “I want to know if she’s all right,” I said.
“She’s under Baba’s blanket, and all is well,” Ram Dass said. “And you are a mother who has lost a child, and that will never be all right.”
Jenny’s friends brought special objects to be burned with her. Poems they had written and watercolors they had painted, Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, the roach of a joint, a tiny carving of Kuan Yin. When they finished making their offerings, they drifted into her room and closed the door. I could hear them in there, playing Jenny’s favorite music on her stereo, going through her clothes and her bumper stickers and her prayer beads.
“Take what you want,” I blurted, and so they did, and then it was gone, and then I wanted it back, but it was too late.
Finally, Kali appeared with her mother. She stood at the foot of Jenny’s casket for a long time, her expression veiled. But when Kali’s father saw her beholding her dead soul sister for the first time, a tortured sob erupted from the ground of his being. He stood behind me, his arms wrapped around my chest, and buried his face in my hair. Everyone paused and held what was left of our family in sacred silence. There was nothing to be said.
Each body that walked through that door belonged to a hand that kept me from drowning. And they continued to gather through the evening. We pushed the living room furniture back against the walls, and my mom had a room-sized Zapotec rug brought over from her gallery so we could sit at Jenny’s feet all night long. I wanted to send her on her way to the next world on the wings of song. We prayed and chanted from sunset to sunrise, in Sanskrit and Tibetan, Hebrew and Arabic and Latin, Lakota and Tiwa and English and Greek. We sat apart, and we wept in each other’s arms. Candles, incense, flowers, pots of tea and boxes of dark chocolate, a bottle of mescal and bowls of guacamole and chips. We passed around the photo album Amy and Daniela had spent all day creating, and we marveled at the incredibly alive pictures of Jenny through every year of her incandescent little incarnation.
By the time the edges of the landscape began to take shape in the early morning light, the last of the mourners who had kept vigil with us all through the night drifted back home, and for a few minutes Jeff and I were alone with Jenny. We took our seats beside her body and sat together in silence. Soon, my mom drove up with Amy and Roy, followed by Daniela. We all sat around her for a little longer, sipping our coffee and prolonging the illusion that she was still with us. Then, with the help of a few strong friends who materialized to help us carry her casket back outside, we loaded her back into the truck to be transported to the crematorium in Española.
In a guttural voice that rose from the chasm of my loins and did not seem to belong to me, I led the funeral procession through the garden, chanting the Buddhist sutra I had learned when I was Jenny’s age:
Gate gate paragate parasamgate
Bodhi Swaha!
Gone. Gone beyond. Gone beyond the beyond.
All hail to the one who goes!
Practicing letting go. Practicing bowing at the feet of the mystery. Practicing saying yes when every cell in my body was screaming NO.
We loaded Jenny’s body into the truck and once again I climbed in and settled beside her. We drove south, dipping down into the Rio Grande Gorge, and winding our way along the river canyon. Jeff sang through the forty-five miles to the crematorium: Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram.
When we arrived, we informed the staff that we would like to accompany Jenny’s body to the point where it was delivered into the furnace. They countered by informing us that this was not usually done, and furthermore they had another cremation scheduled in an hour, so there was no time to linger. We agreed to their terms, and we followed a thin man with a straw hat that darkened a face like the desert.
“Vengan conmigo.”
He led us into a cavernous chamber, where he opened a vault in the wall and slid out a concrete slab. This, apparently, was where we were meant to deposit the sacred flesh of my child. The cremation technician helped us to lift the casket onto the sliding base.
“No cabe,” he said, shaking his head apologetically. “Es muy grande.” He patted the carved end of Jenn
y’s cedar cradle by way of explanation. Then he disappeared for a moment and returned with a bow saw.
“Se puede?” he asked me, and I nodded.
He began to saw off the beautiful arc of Jenny’s beautiful casket, and I began to laugh. The thin man checked to see if I was becoming hysterical, then glanced at my loved ones, who had begun to laugh too. He shrugged and continued to saw. And while he worked, we rubbed each other’s backs and wiped our eyes and collected ourselves.
When he was finished, she fit perfectly.
I took one last look at my child and said, in Spanish, “She looks like the Virgin of Guadalupe, doesn’t she? Draped in blue, surrounded with red roses.”
The cremator nodded, touched his hand to his heart, and began to push her into the empty chamber.
“Espere,” I said, and he paused. I took the mala from around my neck, the string of 108 prayer beads Ram Dass had given me when I was Jenny’s age, a thread of Maharaj-ji’s blanket tucked inside the amber guru-bead, and I placed it around my daughter’s shrouded head.
“Okay,” I said.
“Wait!” Now it was Roy’s turn to halt the process. “Can my sister press the button?” The long-suffering attendant stared at Roy, either not comprehending the question or else utterly perplexed by it. Roy took my hand. “Do you want to, Mirabai? Do you want to . . . start the fire?”
I had identified my daughter’s body at the morgue. I had decorated it with blossoms and greens. I had lain all night beside her. I could do this too. Suddenly I knew that I needed to do this too. Silently, I blessed my brother for suggesting this outrageous and courageous thing, and I stepped up.
Together, as a family, we leaned in and pushed Jenny’s body along the rollers and into the furnace. The thin man closed the door, and I peered through the smudged window.
After looking one by one at the people who loved me most, I turned and pressed the button that ignited the flames, which exploded in an audible rush and turned my daughter’s body into fire, and then to dust.
Caravan of No Despair Page 16