“It’s as if we had been rolling along, shooting the movie of our life, thinking we were the director of our own show and then suddenly, wham!” Ted slammed his fist into his other palm. “You get to a scene you don’t like and you go, ‘Cut!’” Ted held up his hands in T position. “You try to rewind and reshoot that part, but it’s like the mechanism’s busted. No matter how hard you try, you cannot do that part over and make it come out the way you want it.” He pulled my head against his shoulder. “No fair, huh?”
I took to murmuring self-soothing proclamations whenever I began to spiral into the hell realms: “It’s okay, Mirabai,” or “All will be well,” or “You were a good mom.” I became more adept at sidestepping the train of bargaining when I saw it hurtling toward me. And when I did not manage to intercept the process, I learned to let it play itself out without attaching ultimate truth to my out-of-control thoughts. Eventually I would exhaust myself with masochistic scenarios, and the locomotive would slow to a halt in a cloud of noxious fumes.
That’s when I would collapse into depression. But it wasn’t clinical depression. It was a full-bodied sorrow that took my breath away and dropped me into profound stillness. From this quiet space I could hear the sound of my own heart at last. My vulnerable heart, my big-sky heart, my wise and beautiful heart. Unable to hold myself up any longer, I let myself down into the arms of my groundlessness, and I found refuge there. It was a relief to know nothing, to be simply sad. In the darkness, I could rest at last.
Maybe this is what Saint John of the Cross was talking about: the holy holy holy radiance of the dark night of the soul. This is what Teresa of Avila meant when she praised the beautiful wound of longing for God. “The grief you cry out from draws you toward union,” Rumi said. “Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.” This could be that secret cup. I tipped my head. I drank.
Which is what acceptance looks like. Not like light at the end of the tunnel. Not like, now everything’s going to be all right. It isn’t that Jenny’s death was finally okay with me and I was ready to get on with my life. It was a matter of looking loss straight in the face and not blinking. It was a taking of my own sweet self into my arms and forgiving her. What I accepted was that I could not have Jenny beside me in physical form, but my love for her—and the fire of missing her—was our connection, and she could never ever leave me.
I set about cultivating this new, metaphysical relationship with my daughter. I circled back into every phase of the grief journey a thousand times, and each time that I returned to the garden of acceptance, the trees were taller and the fruits were sweeter and new species were pushing their tender green heads up from the loam.
25
ROWING THROUGH THE UNDERWORLD
A few months after Jenny died, I spent a night at my mother’s studio, trying to write some kind of chronicle of my daughter’s life and death. As I was beginning to fall asleep, the candle flickering beside her picture, I had a vision: I was rowing a small boat upstream through the underworld. I could feel the dark walls towering on either side of me. I could hear the splash of my oars as they dipped into the cold water. I knew I did not belong here, but I was determined to get as far as I could before I was sent back. I wanted to follow my baby to wherever it was she had gone. She had never been this far away from me, and I had to make sure she would be okay.
Of course, she was not okay. She was dead, and there was no way I could follow her on that journey.
And she was completely okay. Nothing could ever hurt her again.
I have never met a bereaved mother who did not, at some point anyway—maybe in a place so secret that it was even a secret from herself—crave death. Part of this could be attributed to suicidal despair. But there is another aspect to the desire to die after your child has died: the allure of the Other World.
You have caught a glimpse of that realm, and it has dazzled you. It is luminous and vast. It is the holiest thing you have ever seen. And your child lives there.
The mystics of all traditions bless the annihilating power of love. The highest calling of the moth is to fly into the heart of the candle flame. “I praise what is truly alive,” Goethe proclaimed, “what longs to be burned to death.” This is why John of the Cross considered a dark night of the soul to be very good news: it is only when night falls on the house of the ordinary faculties that the soul is able to risk slipping away for a secret rendezvous with the Beloved in the garden. This is why when Teresa of Avila had a vision of an angel plunging his flaming arrow into her belly, she never wanted it to end. This is why the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad suggests that you “die before you die.” Once we have died to the false self, we have a hope of getting out of our own way and meeting the Holy One face to face.
Grief strips us. It stripped me. I couldn’t help but notice that this radically naked state resembled what all my favorite mystics had been trying to teach me for decades. You can’t have divine union encumbered by spiritual addictions and cosmic concepts. You can’t make love with your clothes on. Now here I was, disrobed by loss, dipped in fire, pretty much annihilated. What used to make my spirit soar now left me cold, and none of my ideas about ultimate reality made any sense. What I had been trying to accomplish through years of rigorous discipline had happened overnight: a state of no self. I was ready for the holy encounter at last!
But I wasn’t in the mood.
I wanted to want God. But I wanted Jenny more.
26
TIA TERESA
At first I snubbed Saint Teresa of Avila. And then she saved my life.
There is no way to approach Saint John of the Cross without encountering his guru, Saint Teresa. I was attracted to John from the beginning: his quiet passion, his limpid intellect, his formality. I liked that he was a Christian who almost never felt the need to mention Christ. I loved that he loved the night sky. John was understated—like me—a mild exterior, barely containing a blazing heart. Like me, John found and followed the footprints of the Holy One through the emptiness.
Teresa was a drama queen. Everyone knew it, and she freely admitted it. Between her predilection for altered states of consciousness and her hunger to be liked, I found myself a bit embarrassed for her. But if my beloved John loved Teresa, there must be something worthy there. Not to mention the fact that five centuries after her last breath, people of every faith tradition and none still speak of her with awe and affection.
Which is why, after I had submitted my new translation of Dark Night of the Soul to my publisher, I agreed to translate Teresa’s book, The Interior Castle. John was notoriously difficult to get. I figured Teresa might hold a key to John that I could hand to my readers. I was willing to sacrifice my personal tastes for the sake of duty.
Then my daughter died and the ground collapsed beneath me and I was hurtling through space. All plans dissolved in the magma of loss. The train of my life jumped its tracks and crashed in the desert. The things that had felt prodigiously significant the day before Jenny’s death now struck me as ridiculous. Credit card bills. Cellulite. What I was going to be when I grew up.
My editor called to express her condolences.
“We would, of course, understand completely if you needed to be released from your contract for the Teresa book,” she said.
“No, thanks,” I heard myself answer. “I’ll do it.”
What else was I going to do? I could fall backward off the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge and tumble into the abyss, or I could try to render a sixteenth-century Spanish text accessible in English. It was a job, like stripping old key locks off hotel room doors and replacing them with electronic locks, like fixing a toilet or plowing a field. Besides, I had made the decision to observe the one-year Jewish mourning cycle, which meant gathering my attention to a single point—grieving my child—and letting go of all superfluous activities. Writing a book meant I didn’t need to leave the house. Perfect.
I didn’t have the energy to sweep the floor. I couldn’t manage to fix a sand
wich. But every day I could make my way downstairs into Jenny’s old room, which Jeff had helped me convert into an office. I could prop open a copy of The Interior Castle in its original language and a couple of existing English translations for reference, an early Renaissance Spanish dictionary on my right and a complete modern version to my left, and translate what lay before me. When I had finished page seven, I would turn to page eight.
And as I turned the pages, I watched this sacred text unfold beneath my fingers like a treasure map drafted in invisible ink becoming visible when held over a candle flame. Teresa was offering a way home—not only for the readers on whose behalf I had so recently condescended to undertake this task, but also for me, newly shattered and radically disoriented.
Toward the end of her life, when Teresa had lived far longer than anyone (especially she) had imagined she would—given the range of illnesses, heartbreaks, and scandals she had endured—Teresa was ordered by her confessor to write a book about the insights that had unfolded since she submitted her autobiography two decades earlier. The nun and the priest had been traveling by donkey cart across the rugged landscape of northern Spain, on their way to found another new convent of Discalced Carmelites, when they stopped for the night in a roadside inn. After the evening meal, they had one of those spiritual conversations old friends sometimes have that lift them off their chairs and light their hair on fire.
“But they already seized my first book,” she kvetched, “and then used it against me.”
The book she was referring to came to be known as The Book of My Life (which I eventually got around to translating), one of the great coming-of-age stories in the canon of mystical literature. The men who seized it were members of the Spanish Inquisition, who also happened to be the ones who ordered her to write it in the first place, insisting that she document the visions, voices, raptures, and ecstasies they kept hearing about. They then used Teresa’s own account in their investigation, in an effort to determine whether these phenomena were authentic revelations or tricks of the devil. They eventually let Teresa off the hook, but they never gave the manuscript back.
Her friend the priest must have shrugged and smiled, because that night Teresa withdrew to her cell and “beseeched the Lord” to speak for her, since she “couldn’t think of anything to say” and “had no idea how to begin to fulfill this particular vow of obedience.”
The Lord came through with a vision of the soul as a radiant crystal palace, from the center of which the Beloved is beckoning the lover to merge with him.
“What do you think that a place might be like that such a king—so powerful and wise, so pure and filled with all good things—would find so delightful?” Teresa asks us at the beginning of The Interior Castle. “I myself can come up with nothing as magnificent as the beauty and amplitude of a soul.”
As I translated these lines, I was struck by two startling implications: (1) Since the fire of missing Jenny felt uncannily similar to my lifelong yearning for God, maybe the path to an abiding connection with her was the same as the trajectory for divine union: inward. (2) Perhaps I wasn’t a horrible, wretched, evil creature who had let my own child plummet to her death after all, but rather a precious jewel so exquisite that the Beloved himself would rather dwell nowhere else than inside me.
If Teresa’s vision of the soul as the single place in all of creation where God would choose to hang out struck me as revolutionary, imagine how radical it must have sounded to a group of sixteenth-century nuns who had been conditioned to believe that (a) our souls are dirty and flawed, on account of original sin, and (b) any kind of relationship with the Holy One required the recitation of prescribed prayers and the intercession of a priest. But no! As it turned out, they were beautiful and perfect exactly as they were, and if they wanted to be with God, all they had to do was close their eyes and go within.
Profound sorrow closes old doors and opens new ones. Friends I would have expected to stay by my side as I walked through the landscape of loss peeled off and disappeared. Invisible advocates, like a Catholic nun who had lived nearly five hundred years ago, materialized.
Teresa became my companion, my solace, my refuge. Like a favorite Jewish aunt who sat me down across the table and fed me tea and rugelach, Teresa held a sacred space for my brokenness. She patted my hand, she wept with me. She listened to me speak about my daughter—what I loved most about her, what drove me crazy, what I would give anything to do over and do right. And when I confessed that I did not really even believe in God, Teresa did not flinch. She simply chuckled and refreshed my cup of tea. “I know just what you mean, Mi ’jita,” she said.
27
BELIEVING EVERYTHING
I do and I do not believe in God. I believe in a life that transcends this one, and I also believe that when this life ends we cease to exist. I am not preoccupied with logical consistency. I give myself permission to believe everything, and then to stop believing that and believe something else. Any lingering hope for coming up with an ultimate answer to the problem of what happens when we die was obliterated with the death of my child.
This did not stop me from trying to determine what had become of Jenny.
I experimented with various positions:
1.She was gone. She certainly felt gone. For the first few days and weeks after the accident, her presence was still strong, but the connection grew increasingly tenuous until finally, after a month or so, I could not feel her with me anymore. This felt sense coincided with teachings from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Forty-nine days is the turning point; the deceased has finished navigating the bardos and moves on.
2.She was a spirit now. Like a guardian angel, like an ancestor. She guided my steps and made magical things happen, such as a flock of birds exploding from a cottonwood tree exactly as I was remembering the day we hiked to the river and tied friendship bracelets around each other’s wrists to commemorate the anniversary of Jenny’s adoption. I especially noticed her availability to me as my speaking career began to unfold within a couple of years of her death. Whenever I would step out onto the stage, it was as if I were making way for Jenny to step in and speak through me. I took to invoking her outright: Okay, Jen, here we go.
3.Her soul was doing whatever it is that souls do to let go of this life and ready themselves for a new one. In a couple of years, maybe, she would be reincarnated. Maybe even into our family! When some new baby was born to one of us, I would gaze into her eyes and recognize my dead daughter, and then, as the child developed, I would notice many of Jenny’s mannerisms and proclivities.
4.Jenny was dwelling in some kind of beautiful afterlife. All the secrets of the universe were now revealed to her, and all the suffering of her short life—from the early childhood abuse to the explosion of brain chemistry at the end—had been redeemed. She was abiding in a love that had no beginning and would never end. Paradise.
5.She lived on only in our memories. This is what my Jewish forebears believed. And so we are meant to speak of them, and light Yahrtzeit candles for them, and name our offspring after them.
I ended up accepting an assortment of propositions that might seem to be mutually exclusive and yet fit easily into the broken open container of my consciousness. Jenny was no longer alive, and I couldn’t pretend to know exactly what she now was instead of alive. Like a drop of water, she had returned to the sea from which we all arise. She had merged; no individuality remained. And at the same time, Jenny was an ever-living entity who was totally available to me. All I had to do was open to her, and there she would be.
Not long after Jenny died, my sister dreamed that we went to a restaurant, slipped into a booth, and there was Jenny, sitting beside me.
“Hi Jen-Wen!” Amy was thrilled to see her alive and well. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m always here. With my mom.”
“Mirabai! Looks who’s sitting next to you!” said my dream sister.
But I could not see Jenny.
“Tell her, Amy,�
�� Jenny said. “Tell her I am always with her. She just needs to turn around.”
Amy tried, but my dream self could not hear her words. Or could not believe her. I shrugged and opened my dream menu. Amy glanced helplessly at her niece. Jenny smiled reassuringly.
“I’ll tell her when I wake up,” Amy said.
And she did.
I decided to practice tuning in to my invisible child, but I couldn’t hold the focus. Her absence was so much louder than her presence.
One night we went out to dinner with Sean and Tania to celebrate the publication of Sean’s new book, One Bird, One Stone. I was still observing the ritual mourning period and did not want to be in public places if I could avoid it. Besides, I felt like the top layer of skin had been burned off and the new cells had not grown back. I was walking around raw and permeable. The world was a dangerous place.
Tania arranged for us to be seated in a closed-off section at the back of the restaurant. Pedro, the maître d’, personally took care of us.
After he had opened the bottle of sparkling white wine and filled our glasses, he squatted down beside my chair and spoke to me softly, in Spanish.
“I don’t know exactly how to tell you this, but your daughter just came to me with a message for you.”
“Jenny?”
Pedro nodded.
“May I give it to you?”
I smiled. “Sure,” I said. Pedro was not the first person to claim that my dead daughter was speaking through them. I decided to humor him. Even if—as I suspected—this was just Pedro’s way of offering succor, I might as well open my heart and receive it graciously. Maybe it would help.
Caravan of No Despair Page 19