Saturday, April 22, 2023

• 5th anniversary of Wil’s final day. She died early in the morning, bringing her suffering and mine to an end. Well, mine continued for a while, another 2-3 years at least as I adjusted to a new existence without my life’s companion. We met in the fall of 1968 at a party. I moved into an apartment she shared with Julie and another roommate after a couple of months of sleeping over and spending more and more time together. 

We lived together about two years before getting married on June 20 of 1970, and in the fifty years we knew each other, we’d only been apart for two weeks at the longest, and that only once. 

I haven’t known quite how to mark the day. Weather to mark the day. So I turned to my journal and wrote these words.

I’m not going to say much to anyone who knew us both back then, because I’m not very sentimental in the socially acceptable ways about these things, especially after all the changes I’ve put myself through since. I just got tired of having to explain things to people who just wanted to look sad, and expect me to, too.

I’ve made my peace, but am afraid our old friends, or my sons, might not understand what it’s like for me. 

I’ve described the grieving years as being like a brutal house gutting and restoration, of “stripping my life back to the studs.” I had a lot of trouble coping early on, where every day was a series of waves of pain and hopelessness that left me almost catatonic for weeks. 

I learned the best I could do was to turn and face the dragon, time after time after time, embrace the moment and squeeze whatever meaning or growth I could, and turn for the next. 

And now, after 5 years? 

I don’t really feel the loss as pain any more. I really don’t.

And I don’t feel guilty, either. It’s almost as if it happened to another person. I have memories, and many good ones (and the bad, too of course), but emotionally I don’t live back then any more. Still, anniversaries have a way of sneaking up on you.

Some of this is due to the honest grieving I forced myself to do. I didn’t run from anything, and in the long run, that was how I healed. I’ve always been a scholar of religions and beliefs, too, and read widely in most traditions other than Islam (I carry some prejudices after Bin Laden). But I found enough richness elsewhere to satisfy my questions. 

And I had the experience of meeting what I’ve always called an angel at that retreat at Quaker Hill in Richmond in the early 70s that shook me to my core. (Despite the decade, no pharmaceuticals were involved, either.)

I came away with a revelation that no organized religion of any persuasion—none of them—got more than a few pieces right here and there. That they were human edifices built for the most part with good intentions, and with plenty of inspirational hints and prophets, but generally created flawed structures that may have done some good, but were incapable of seeing into the heart of things. Jung said once that “religion is a defense against the direct experience of God.” And after one brief direct encounter with the Holy, I can believe it. I could barely handle it; most people can’t. We want to, but we can’t. 

I looked for answers and comforts where I could, but was almost repelled by what I heard from believers.

Disappointing. No comfort or insight, only efforts to sell me on their particular brand of used car. 

I kept looking.

I had two dreams about Wil after she died, on two successive nights about 7 months later. Nothing before, which bothered me. In both, the scene was at a cemetery and I saw her riding in the back seat of a big black hearse. I sensed that she was only there for a moment, but was dressed in a summer dress and looked young and healthy again. I felt a message from her in my mind, which only said “You have to let me go.” If felt as if she had made this one great effort to come from a great distance, and did not want to stay. I knew I would not hear from her again. She was enthralled by wherever she was, and wanted to get back. She just made two last efforts to help. And that was it.

I’ve come to believe —with a dose of skepticism, in that anything I think is shot through with all kinds of biases and ego— that the idea of reincarnation is what’s most appealing to me. I’ve had dreams of me in previous lives over the years, and they had the feeling of a memory, rather than just the unreality of most dreams. Some quite vivid and harsh. 

So, it gives me comfort, to think I’ve been through this before; we all have ridden the Great Wheel many times, is my guess. I also have come to believe in the Buddhist idea: reality only exists in the here and now, that the past is unchangeable and that the future is merely a swirling quantum cloud of near infinite probabilities. And that to try to live in anything but the present is a way to choose suffering over peace. 

I even had trouble deciding to work with my sister to put flowers on Wil’s grave and our parents this year, because I really don’t believe Wil’s there. It’s just a stone marker to me. I’m glad it’s there to mark the fact that she was here once, though. And that wherever she is, she knows I still think of her. 

But our pilgrimages have taken radically different roads now. (We even might meet again. Who knows. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t make the rules. And I can certainly be wrong, so I’ve dropped worrying about it.) 

But I don’t need to constantly mourn her anymore, because I have done the work already. I have seen and am at peace with the idea that she has moved on from this old life and became part again of the great mystery of a living universe. Became one with it again, if you will. I’m still plodding through this old reality, and she got back on the Wheel again for another ride in time and space. It’s out of my control. Letting go of the fantasy that any of this is in my hands is a relief. 

There’s nothing more to say. I loved you, my dear. Bon Voyage. Until we meet again.

I’m happy.