Caravan of No Despair

by Mirabai Starr

  In that moment, standing in our quiet kitchen, my fury drained, and I felt fully blessed. I closed my eyes and reached out to my invisible daughter. “Thanks, Jen,” I whispered.

  “Oh, Mom,” I felt her reply.

  22

  YAHRTZEIT

  On the day of the unveiling it was snowing. Heavy, wet flakes had been falling on and off for days, melting the minute they landed, turning the high desert into a bayou. We pushed Jenny’s headstone in a wheelbarrow from the parking lot to the Lama burial gardens, where Jeff had excavated a small hole to bury the box that contained the remaining half of Jenny’s ashes on the first anniversary of her death.

  The other half had been scattered all over the earth—in places Jenny had always wanted to visit. Ram Rani had taken the first packet to India where, with the blessing of Siddhi Ma and the ritual support of a team of Brahmin priests, they released them into the little river that borders Maharaj-ji’s ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. Daniela and her children had climbed with me to the top of the John Dunn Bridge overlooking the spot where Jenny first began to slip away from this world, and we each took turns dropping a handful of Jenny-dust into the swirling confluence. Fernando had rented us a boat in Puerto Morelos so we could toss Jenny’s remains into the Caribbean along with armfuls of hibiscus blossoms. My mom, Ramón, and Mom’s new partner, John, accompanied us to a quiet cove on Laguna Bacalar, where Mallina and Atzin conducted a Mesoamerican ceremony, burning copal in an earthenware bowl, and, punctuated with blasts of a conch shell, called upon the spirits of the ancestors to receive our precious child. Jeff and Kali planted an aspen tree outside the window of Kali’s old room and sprinkled a handful of ashes into the soil as they spaded and patted the earth around it. Lama was to be the final sacred space.

  I had chosen a spot beneath a half-burnt ponderosa pine at the far northwestern edge of the Lama property. I wanted a remote place where I could escape and grieve and remember my daughter in solitude over the remaining years of my life. But on this late October afternoon, high in the mountains, surrounded by a band of loyal friends and relatives, I realized how impractical this spot was. If it weren’t for Jeff, I might never have even found it again. Plus, the fresh snow had transfigured any familiar landmarks.

  Our little group trudged alongside me as we bushwhacked through the scrub oak. Some carried musical instruments—drums and bells and a tanpura—and others brought stones and shells to encircle the new grave. Almost none of Jenny’s friends were there; no girls—just a couple of boys I hardly knew, plus Jenny’s friend Sam, who played the piano like a reincarnation of Mozart crossed with Keith Jarrett. Everyone else was connected to me personally or to us as a family. Once again I was struck by how all the kids who had grown up around my kitchen table had seemingly evaporated in the firestorm of Jenny’s death.

  We gathered at the gravesite and stood in spontaneous silence for a few minutes. My sister placed the handmade paper urn in my hands, and I lowered it into the opening. Then, while chanting Hebrew prayers and drumming for Mother Earth, we all took turns throwing handfuls of soil on top. When the tomb was filled, Jeff lifted the headstone and wedged it into the earth. It had been exactly one year since Jenny lost her mind and raced over the mountain to her death. Now, amid diagonal snowfall shot with sunlight, our improvised Yahrtzeit was complete.

  I bowed at the foot of the grave and inhaled. Then I sat on my knees, and I tried to sing my daughter her final lullaby, the song my own mother had sung to us throughout our childhood. “I gave my love a cherry without a stone . . .” But I began to quaver on the second verse: “How can there be a story that has no end?” And by the time I got to the last verse, I could not finish:

  “A baby when she’s sleeping, there’s no cryin’.” A strong wind gusted as we packed up our tools and instruments. Jeff patted a few loose clods around our daughter’s gravestone. Then he held my gloved hand in his gloved hand, and we headed down to Lama central to warm up with the bowls of soup and loaves of fresh bread the community had prepared for us.

  Our decision to get married had been an effort to give me something wonderful so that I could survive the first anniversary. Jeff thinks it was his idea. I know it was mine. One day I was talking with my therapist, who was trying to help me navigate the wilderness into which Jenny’s death had plunged me.

  “What do you really want?” he asked. “Besides getting your daughter back.”

  “To get married,” I whispered, my head bowed. I might as well have confessed a desire to conquer Mexico for the shame I felt in admitting this.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Dr. Sargent asked.

  “Jeff feels like we’re already married, and he doesn’t need the approval of the government.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’m drowning in fire and being married to Jeff would be a cool island where I could find refuge.”

  “Then go home and tell him.”

  That evening, when Jeff returned from a job out of town, I was making dinner.

  “Hi, Honey. I’d like to get married in the fall,” I blurted out, before he had even had a chance to wash his hands and get down the salad bowl from the high cupboard.

  “Okay,” Jeff said and promptly dropped to his knees at my feet. He removed the avocado and the knife from my hand and set them on the cutting board beside me. Then he wrapped his arms around my waist and looked up into my eyes. “Mirabai, will you marry me?”

  Just like that. We were engaged. I was still bobbing on waves of flame, but in the distance a boat was sailing toward me, and the captain was calling my name.

  At the same time that we were planning our wedding, we were picking out our child’s gravestone. I searched the classified section of the newspaper and found someone advertising hand-carved memorial markers. Mr. Martinez agreed to drop by my house the following afternoon with his portfolio.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, as we shook hands. “Me and my wife lost our baby back in sixty-nine. That’s how I got into this line of work.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, too,” I said.

  “That’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

  I tried to visualize myself at eighty, Jenny’s death four decades behind me, a tender ember of melancholy, rather than a raging bonfire of anguish. I couldn’t do it.

  We looked through photographs of ornate stone memorials, bordered by carved angels and crosses and curlicues. I hated them all. They had nothing to do with my quirky, iconoclastic girl.

  “Can’t I do something simple?” I asked. “Something more . . . contemporary?”

  “Sure enough!” Mr. Martinez showed me a list of fonts, inviting me to pick one and compose my own inscription. “You could say, ‘In loving memory of our dearly departed Jennifer Nicole Starr,’” he suggested. “Or how about, ‘She has gone home to God.’ My customers love that one.”

  “Just ‘Beloved Jenny,’” I said. “With the dates of her birth and her . . . her death.”

  “Not ‘Our beloved daughter . . .’?”

  “No,” I said. “She was everyone’s Jenny.”

  Which she was.

  The wedding took place in a late-summer garden with Taos Mountain towering behind us. Sun and storm clouds, rain and a double rainbow, and wind blowing our hair against our lips. Still fragile as a low-fired clay jug, I invited only the people I was sure loved me. And our families. My mother arranged everything and paid for it all—the flowers, the food, the photographer. With the same loving care with which I decorated my daughter’s coffin, my mother decorated me. Jeff and I made an altar with photographs of our two fathers and Jenny, calling upon them to bear witness and bless us.

  My daughter had become my ancestor.

  Charlene officiated the service, weaving Jenny like a thread of light throughout. We constructed a chuppah, the traditional Jewish wedding canopy, from aspen saplings. My sister held up one corner; my brother another; Jeff’s sister, Linda, the third; and his brother Lance th
e fourth. We chanted an invocation in Sanskrit, read scriptures from the gospels of Jesus. Jeff shattered a wine glass beneath his sandaled foot, symbolizing the impermanence of life and the imperative to hold it precious.

  The entire ceremony was a testament to that exquisite fragility.

  When I pushed Jeff’s ring onto his finger, a look of astonishment crossed his face. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I feel like Frodo, receiving the ring of power.”

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.

  “It’s a good thing,” he said. “A very, very good thing. It means I am worthy.”

  Only then did I begin to cry.

  23

  HEARTFULNESS PRACTICE

  With reticence at first, and then with mounting courage, I dared to mourn my child. From the very beginning I suspected that something holy was happening and that if I were to push it away, I would regret it for the rest of my life. There was this sense of urgency, as if turning from death meant turning from my child. I wanted to offer Jenny the gift of my commitment to accompany her on her journey away from me, even if to do so simply meant dedicating my heartbeat and my breath to her and paying attention.

  And so I showed up.

  When a feeling I did not think I could survive would threaten to engulf me, I practiced turning toward it with the arms of my soul outstretched, and then my heart would unclench a little and make space for the pain. Years of contemplative practice had taught me just enough to know better than to believe everything I think—how to shift from regretting the past and fearing the future to abiding with what is. In this case, a totally fucked up thing. The ultimate fucked up thing. I sat with that.

  I did not engage in this practice to prove something to myself or anyone else. I was not interested in flexing my spiritual muscles. I did it for Jenny. My willingness to stay present through this process was an act of devotion. By leaning into the horror and yielding to the sorrow, by standing in the fire of emptiness and saying yes to the mystery, I was honoring my child and expressing my ongoing love for her. It was not mere mindfulness practice; it was heartfulness practice.

  Our first Thanksgiving without Jenny was only a few weeks after her death, and Jeff and I were still in Hawaii. I was relieved to avoid a holiday dinner with my family. I didn’t think I would have been able to bear the empty place at the table. I was already making plans to skip Christmas.

  We went out to a restaurant on the beach and ordered fish and pretended it was any other day. But my rebellion was hollow. I couldn’t maintain the façade of apathy.

  “Let’s write down everything we’re grateful for,” I abruptly suggested. You’ve got to be kidding me, my embittered self said to my hopeful self.

  “Good idea.” Jeff handed me a white paper napkin. I unfolded it and drew a line down the middle with a ballpoint pen. I wrote “J” on the left-hand column and “M” on the right, as if we were about to play a game of rummy.

  “You first,” I said.

  “Having had the chance to be Jenny’s stepfather,” he said, and I jotted that down.

  “The community that’s holding me,” I wrote.

  And our gratitude came tumbling out like rolling melons from a basket. The sunset over the South Pacific. Kirtan. My mother, and Jeff’s mother, and Mother Mary. Every one of Jenny’s idiosyncrasies, from the cackling sound of her laugh to the way she would wash her money and paperclip the bills on a string to dry. I wanted to collect everything about her and weave it into the fabric of my own life. I wanted to embody the best of Jenny—her fearlessness in the face of other people’s opinions, her joyful exuberance, and her deep quietude—and let these things make me a better human. Her legacy would live in me.

  24

  THE LANDSCAPE OF LOSS

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, pioneer of the conscious dying movement, lived to regret having described the common features of the grief journey as stages. She came to see that everyone grieves differently and that science collapses in the face of the mysteries of the heart. There is no map for the landscape of loss, no established itinerary, no cosmic checklist, where each item ticked off gets you closer to success. You cannot succeed in mourning your loved ones. You cannot fail. Nor is grief a malady, like the flu. You will not get over it. You will only come to integrate your loss, like the girl who learned to surf again after her arm was bitten off by a shark. The death of a beloved is an amputation. You find a new center of gravity, but the limb does not grow back.

  When someone you love very much dies, the sky falls. And so you walk around under a fallen sky.

  I became intimate with the topography of Kübler-Ross’s grief world: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I dipped in and out of denial at first. This did not mean that I didn’t get what had happened. I was brutally aware that my daughter had stopped breathing, her heart had ceased to beat, her body had grown cold and stiff and then been cut open and examined, and then it had been burned and scattered and buried. But sometimes I could not take it all the way in. “Really, Jenny? Dead? What?” It was a nightmare from which I could not shake myself awake, but I could drift into a liminal space where the edges of trauma were softened a little, insulating me from shock and preventing me from going insane.

  And then sometimes—especially when the loss was fresh—denial didn’t feel like delusion at all, but like grace. It was as if angels came swooping into the burned-out chamber of my soul, scooping me up and rocking me in their wings. Like spring water filling a redwood trunk that had been hollowed out by a forest fire. As if the storm of loss had parted the veil that’s meant to separate us from some kind of heavenly realm, and for a moment I could see it, even step through and dwell there a little. At these times—usually when my people surrounded me to chant and pray, to bring me chocolate and scented bath oils, to praise my daughter’s beauty and wisdom and tell me a story of a time she made them laugh—a palpable holiness broke through the clouds of lamentation and exalted me. I could not deny the beauty. Maybe this is merely brain chemistry masquerading as mystical experience. But these two realities are not mutually exclusive. This biochemical phenomenon is in itself a divine gift. I say thank you.

  Surrounded by loved ones anticipating my every wish, I spent most of those early days yearning to be left alone. I needed to focus. It took all my energy and attention to hold what had happened. Like a hedgehog protecting herself against the world, I curled in on myself and stuck out my quills. It may have looked like I was isolating, but I was only tending the broken boat of my soul. It was not pathological; it was spiritual. It was exhausting work, but it was imperative.

  Then there was anger. Some people rage against God for snatching their loved ones from their lives. Others blame the dead for doing whatever self-destructive thing took them over that edge. For me, it was insufferable irritability. Everything got on my nerves, from the way my mother chewed her food to acquaintances trying to make small talk while I was pumping gas. On the way home from a trip to New York I could have bitten my sister’s head off for stirring the sugar into my coffee at the airport as if I could not handle such mundane matters myself and then treating me like a mental patient when I overreacted.

  “I’ve always been this way!” I wailed in Amy’s forgiving arms much later, when I had stopped shrieking and my fury had shifted into remorse. “This is how I would get with Jenny. Out of control. A goddamn lunatic.”

  “It’s grief, Honey.”

  “I wish I could use that excuse. But I can’t. This is who I am.”

  I prayed Amy would not believe me.

  There was a movable boundary in my psyche between anger and anxiety, and I oscillated from one to the other. In the opening line of A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis says, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” My fear lasted for years. Sometimes it was a fist of dread I carried in the pit of my stomach. Other times it was a free-floating apprehensiveness that accompanied me like a cloud of gnats around my face. Long past the age when it would ha
ve been my responsibility to monitor Jenny’s whereabouts, the maternal part of me had not yet relinquished that psychic vigilance. Every time I unplugged from my regular life and went away on a trip, those primal antennae would scan for my offspring, until I became conscious of the impulse and willed myself to let go.

  As hard as I tried to talk myself down, a deeper part of me was convinced that I had failed the most essential human mission: to keep my children safe at all costs, even at the cost of my own life. To find myself alive while my child was dead scrambled the program beyond repair. No matter how much healing I had done over the years, something inside would be forever damaged. Every so often, my psyche would default and try to reestablish that basic connection, and when it failed to, I became anxious and confused.

  The most vexing flavor on the grief menu was bargaining. Around 2:00 in the morning I would be roused from sleep by the clanging symbols of regret: I should have, she could have, if only he would have. I would replay those final moments in the darkened street when Jenny slipped into the driver’s seat and sped away in my car. I would picture her lying on the metal table in the morgue, her hands up as if shielding her body against the fatal impact. I would relive all the moments when we fought and I said stupid, mean things I could never take back. I love you, Jen, I would whisper into space and then strain to hear her say it back: I love you, Mom. But the only sound was the roaring of my own ragged breath.

  I was trying to think my way through the problem of death using the wrong tool. By going around and around the same stories, my mind short-circuited, leaving me beaten and bruised. I failed again and again to resolve the predicament. Jenny remained dead.

  “No, you’re not going crazy,” my friend Ted chuckled. “You’re just grieving.” Ted could get away with laughing at me. His wife, Leslie—his high school sweetheart and mother of his two daughters—had died of a brain tumor when their girls were three and five. Then both children were killed in a car crash with their grandmother, Leslie’s mom, when Amy was six and Keri was nine. Ted had survived his impossible losses by dedicating himself to being of service and training as an interfaith minister. Now he led the grief support group that had become a narrow ledge on a wall of rock where I could sometimes hold on with my toes and rest for a moment.