Matters of life & death

Last week during the full moon, I watched the sunset from a bluff near my home, then walked the dog toward the full, rising moon. That night, lying in bed, the bright face of the moon illuminated my pillow, shining on my face as I lie there. By closing one eye, I could watch the crystal pendant hanging in my window perform a full lunar eclipse, just the halo of the light shinng around the pendant. In the crystal, I could see brilliant color prisms twinkling like stars.

Lying there in that moonglow, I felt a sense of peacefulness that has stuck with me. I didn't know why I felt it, but I sensed the beginning of something new, something promising.

I have no clue what that is, but I'm personally hoping it's a new phase of life. I'm overdue.

Yesterday, visiting The Good Witch, she told me about a ritual she and the members of her coven had done during the full moon. I won't go into explicit detail -- they burned things, waved their arms around in the air, said things and cast some spells -- but I was interested to hear the significants of that particular moon.

It was a full moon in Aries during the Libra sun. In the astrology of my birth, that is my moon. And it seems that, with my birthday just around the corner, this moon wasn't just mine, it was particularly apt and timely.

As The Good Witch explained to me, the full Aries moon during Libra is a time of letting go of old and unhealthy ways and an opportunity to begin anew without dragging along so much of our old and nasty baggage. I guess they believe it's easier during this full moon to put down pain and fear and to begin enacting new intentions. Which is interesting to me, because that's a nice articulation of what I was feeling as I lie there in the light of that moon.

Over the past year, I have felt the fits and starts of things changing within me. Or perhaps I should say starts and fits. Because even as I have had my brain rather forcibly opened to new ideas at the hands of some peculiar experiences, I have been resistant. Reluctant. Skeptical. Questioning. Sometimes, to a point that it's a bit maddening.

Not just for myself, but for some of the compassionate and altogether human souls around me.

But when I look at my life -- in terms of both how it has been in the past couple of years and what's going on in the larger story arc -- it's no wonder I would be wary and resistant, while at the same time yearning for something new with an earnest openness. In some respects, I have been searching for decades. But I have been in a phase -- one lasting 10 years, almost to the day -- during which everything I thought I understood about life, about consciousness, about meaning and about ... myself ... has come into question. It's as if I were a piece of iron, half-crafted into something useful, that was thrown back into the forge to be heated again and then pounded into something completely different.

And I mean completely different.

Ten years ago, this coming Thursday, I had a birthday joint birthday party with my friend Lesha. Our birthdays were just a few days apart -- although I was several years younger -- and we had so many mutual friends that we decided to celebrate our birthdays together.

Although I have a rather tragic history when it comes to the birthdays of my childhood, I know a good party when I attend one. And this party? It was GREAT. In the town where we lived, both of us had an extensive social network, and as a result, the house was packed to the point that the party spilled out on the front lawn. The music was going and people were dancing like crazy. When Lesha's partner and two friends lit up the fire hazard that was our two birthday cakes, the chorus of "Happy Birthday" was deafening. Lesha and I both were moved to tears of joy and laughter from the whole scene.

At midnight, when my actual birthday rolled around, a smaller group of close friends toasted me again. I had never had a birthday like it. I was 29.

Three nights later, on the evening of October 7, I got a phone call that drained me of the lingering joy. Everything in my life changed.

My youngest brother, who was 21, had been hit head-on by a pickup truck that suddenly veered into his lane on a two-lane country road in the rain just as night was falling. The speed limit was 70 mph, and the driver was speeding. The engine block of my brother's car ended up in the front seat.

The extent of my brother's injuries: Numerous broken bones, including one femur shattered into more than 10 pieces; damaged liver; destroyed spleen; clot in his brain; severely damaged left eye; several severe skin wounds that will require plastic surgery. And, two weeks into his "recovery," doctors were shocked to discover he had suffered an aneurism in his heart. It's usually fatal, but JAWs 2 was somehow still alive. His sixth surgery in two weeks was to repair his heart.

What we didn't know when we permitted doctors to do that heart surgery -- one so unusual it was likely fodder for the medical journals -- is that we were consigning my brother to a slow death as a human "vegetable." Two days before he got that surgery, he had suffered severe anoxia when, during a procedure to give him a tracheostomy and to clean some of his wounds, his heart had "slowed to zero," as one of the doctors later described it. It stayed at "zero" for 15 minutes.

They managed to "bring him back," but the oxygen deprivation to his brain was so great that he never regained any significant level of consciousness. Over the next four years, the contracture of his muscles would cause him to curl up into a taut fetal position, his body would refuse nutrients and this young man of 6-foot, 2-inches would be whittled down to a mere 87 pounds.

His death in the summer of 2001 was the first experience of mercy I believe I'd ever known.

Throughout the heinous affair, my divorced parents re-enacted some rather bitter and demoralizing scenes from their marriage, and I came to understand quite clearly that my biological "family" was no family at all. My sister described our particular collection of biological entities as "a loose confederation of unaffiliated Gypsies." Because I'm the optimist in my family, it would take a while for the meaning of the situation to come fully into focus for me. And when that finally happened, it was devastating.

But in those final months of 1997 and the beginning of 1998, I was lost. All the warmth and community I had experienced at that birthday party could not abate the grief that took up residence within me the first time I wiped up the drool that was pooling in my brother's already-emaciated collarbone.

Even before this happened, I had been thinking about leaving my job. A few months after the wreck, I began looking more seriously. I got several job offers, all of which I turned down. For many reasons, I had lost my passion for journalism. I needed to do something else but wasn't sure what.

So one day the following summer, I moved to Portland.

Things settled down. I adjusted, as much as I possibly could, to my brother's earthbound Limbo. I found work as a graphic designer and later put my writing skills back to work, as well. I got involved with XGF. We got a house. We got dogs. We entertained friends, but what's better, we entertained each other. (The other day, XGF said to me, "We had so much fun together, didn't we?" We did, indeed.) We traveled.

All along, I was engaged in some soul-searching. I missed the robust human interaction I had as a newspaper reporter, but I also wanted to do something that would help make the world a better place. I also sought a career that would hold my interest, allow me to work with a great deal of autonomy and perhaps be self-employed. What's more, I hoped for something that would stoke my passion in some way.

In the end, it boiled down to my desire to do something meaningful. Meaningful for myself and for others.

That's what swum in my head every time I visited my brother in the ICU, in the "restorative care center," and later, in the nursing home. Meaning. Meaning. Meaning.

What if that were me? It was easy to look at him -- this young man who was more like me in many respects than anyone else on the planet -- and to wonder that. What have I give my life meaning? What am I putting into the world that might survive me? What seeds am I planting?

After he died, my searching process accelerated. Although I experienced his death as a form of mercy, it turned up the heat on my own quest to do something different. If we return to the metaphor of the iron being returned to the forge, I was fired up by my search.

Somewhere, all my questioning resulted in action: I decided to become a psychotherapist. I applied to graduate school. And then, most unexpectedly, my life became about transformation. I would be pounded into something new whether I wanted it or not -- not just by graduate school but by a relentless assault of losses.

Shortly after I submitted my application for graduate school, my grandfather died. He was my last grandparent -- also my favorite -- and his death caught me by surprise. I learned about it in an e-mail sent to my work address. Two months later, I was in Hawaii visiting family when it became obvious that something was amiss with the health of my aunt, who was very much like a mother to me. Two months after that, I learned she had a terminal form of lymphoma.

Added to that mix was the loss of my career. Although I had planned to leave come August, I learned in April that I would be laid off in mid-June. This was like a gift from the universe, in my book, because it came with a nice severance check and unemployment benefits. I had a very fine summer indeed. But it was still a greater loss of "identity" than I had anticipated.

In August, I had a strange experience in Peru in which I believed I was dying. Although I was making a lot of conscious changes in my life, this moment rattled me to the core. I feel certain that it played a role the end of my relationship with XGF, which came six months later.

And then, as if Death itself had picked me for a lay-away plan with quarterly payments, I felt the pain of losing four people who were dear to me in different ways.

The first to go was Lesha, with whom I had shared that lovely birthday party. She died in her sleep from congestive heart failure that had been misdiagnosed as asthma. A few months later, I received an e-mail that my friend Sharon had shot and killed herself in the little cabin she had in Alaska -- an event that, in retrospect, I felt I should have seen coming but didn't. Three months on from that, I learned via e-mail (again!) that my old friend Nick, for whom my heart had a very tender spot, had died when the cancer he battled years ago returned with a fury.

The death of my aunt at the end of January was like a repeated kick in the gut. I lost my mind and fell into profound grief.

Wounds I was still licking from the loss of my brother reopened. And graduate school -- with all of its focus on self-awareness -- was doing its own number on me. While the divorce from XGF had been gut-wrenching and sad, my aunt's death left me feeling like my life was a trapeze act conducted high up in the Big Top without a safety net. She had been the last connection I felt to having a "family," and her death in many respects rendered me an orphan.

In and out of the forge. Pounded on again and again. Reshaped. Heated. Pounded. Heated. Pounded.

That has been these 10 years. That and more.

It is a story of living with loss and death. There are people who have sustained far greater casualties in this world, of that I'm sure. But it has been profoundly painful for me nonetheless. At times, the wounds of my grief have festered and demanded attention. Other times, they have scabbed over and looked as if they would heal -- only to be reopened by another change, another death.

Along the way, the self-reflection demanded by my graduate program has ensured that the need for things I did not have in childhood -- namely love and support and even a false sense of security -- found their way to the front of the line. Where these two forms of grief -- the old and the more recent -- have collided, my personal anguish has sometimes become painfully apparent to those around me.

I have told myself repeatedly, This too shall pass. This shit storm is going to come to an end. Things will settle down. I have been desperate to believe it -- but never really have. Rather, I have in the past year or so often wondered not just when the next shoe will drop but just how many fucking feet there are. It has seemed endless both to me and to some of those around me.

It's obvious that I can't actually give myself a respite. I can't make sure no one else dies for a while. I don't get to take a vacation from graduate school. Life goes on for better or worse.

I keep facing it.

And for whatever reason, staring into the brightness of that full Aries moon, I had the feeling a new phase of my life is on the horizon. Intuition tells me it will be a better one. One thing I'm trying to do more is to trust my intuition and to develop some notion of faith, which I have never possessed.

When doing life as a trapeze act without a net, faith seems essential. It's the thing I imagine allows one to let go and fly through the air with grace.

And of all the things I want most for myself, it's living more artfully and intentionally. Death is obviously waiting one way or another. Might as well let go and fly with grace. Chances are that I'll catch ahold of the next trapeze, but flying gracefully will make it easier to do a fabulous swan dive when I inevitably fall.