On loss, grief, and love

October 31, 5:45 PMLA Religion & Spirituality ExaminerKurt Barstow

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My father and me at my commitment ceremony to Chris Hughes, June 1999.

My father, Thomas Barstow, died unexpectedly on October 19. We were to some extent prepared for this because he had been treating bladder cancer metastasis for the past couple years and had periods in which he was greatly weakened. In the end, it was a reaction to the chemotherapy--the treatment rather than the disease--that caused his death. Part of the reason it shocked us all is that he had just begun to feel better, stronger, more lively. Everyone commented on it. I had a message on my voicemail from him in which his voice seemed filled again with his natural enthusiasm for life and sense of humor. But then on the fourth round of chemo his body wasn’t strong enough to fight off...something. At the very least, this causes one to wonder about how aggressive chemotherapy treatment should be and how well it is coordinated with careful review of a patient’s lab work as well as those factors more difficult to calculate in medicine, like intuition and a personal sense of how the patient is doing. Could he have lived longer without that last chemotherapy treatment? Certainly. Was it better that he passed away this way rather than going through a lot of pain and a protracted decline? Certainly. On the other hand, who can say how much longer he might have lived and enjoyed life had he not had that final treatment. It’s an obvious question that one comes to.

I always thought that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief--denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance--happened in some kind of neat succession, but it seems more like they simultaneously cycle around to varying degrees at different times when one is even being mindful of them at all. I obviously have some anger that is being worked through still in the questioning of the treatment or the timing of labs and treatment. Denial I have felt in full force. First, by keeping both feeling and cognition at a distance, before going back for the visitation and funeral in Michigan.  Then by creating a kind of fantasy in which the death is all a hoax--not something I believe (I spent six hours with the corpse; I attended the funeral) but rather something that plays out in my head. There is a bit of bargaining along with that fantasy because it goes along with the idea that if I just do the right thing somehow, the curtains will go up and all the dramatis personae--including my dad--will come marching out onstage to take their bow.   I can’t figure out whether this means that I need to wake up to reality or is itself a kind of metaphor for reality--the reality, that is, of the non-separation between life and death, the interconnection of all things, even things unknown to us. At the same time, moving toward complete acceptance makes all of these other reactions less significant. Acceptance is sort of the big picture reaction. I can feel it happening. It makes one feel more spacious and open. It deals with the larger reality of what is rather than the way we would have liked things to have gone. It respects the unique trajectory of an individual life. It is nonjudgmental, forgiving, grateful, unconditional love. Then another feeling. A memory of looking at the body. The disjunction between its silence and inertness and both the vivid memories that I picture in my mind and living connection that I still feel. A sharp pain in the chest that travels down the stomach. Sadness. Loss. You mean, I’ll never experience that again! I guess I am not processing this as thoroughly as I had thought. But then back again to the overwhelming mystery of continuous and discontinuous existence happening at the same time. The central paradox of the seen and the unseen. It is almost like a joke. Yet it’s more serious than anything.
 

Sven Muller, Eternity.

Emotions at death seem to revolve around both the intimate and familiar, on the one hand, and the awe-inspiring largeness of the unknown, on the other hand. The most comforting thing, in a way that I wasn’t prepared for, was to see the way family and community come together around a life, each person in some respect a trace of that life. Because I couldn’t afford it, my mother bought me a plane ticket so I could get to the funeral. My first night there, with my sisters, I pored over pictures and a memento book my grandmother had made for my father. The next morning I saw my stepmother and realized that I now have a new, different relationship with her--as an individual. With the loss of a parent one’s relationship to everything and to everyone seems to change somehow. I felt closer to my nieces and nephews, found a real solace in being with them and watching them play. I saw aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends of the family that I hadn’t seen in years. I met for the first time other members of my father’s community, people from work, from AA, from church (oh, so he did have a life that didn’t revolve around me). Other family and friends sent cards or expressed sympathy. My mother and stepfather, my former stepfather, his sister and her husband, and my other sister who was not the daughter of my father all came to the funeral. It made me so happy. As an adult I saw love, interconnection, and shared history as forces so much stronger than what seemed to a child like divisiveness probably greater than it actually was. I felt really grateful to have all the people in my extended family around. The living coming together, one half of the equation, all helping to move one forward, towards...acceptance, not even just of the acceptance of death but the acceptance of all of it.
 

I think this was also the first funeral I have ever been to where the ritual made sense to me both as an accompaniment to psychological facts and as an expression of eternal truths. Each word of the Prayer of Confession, for example, was intensely filled with personal meaning:

“Good and gracious God, all of our life begins and ends with you. You accompany us our whole life long. Today we celebrate that though death can end a life, it cannot end a relationship. Forgive us for things we should have done or said, but did not. Forgive us also those things we did and said but should not have. As you have given peace to Tom, so also give us peace. Grant that we may remember and heal, forgive and embrace forgiveness, through Jesus Christ your Son. Amen”

Even during the “Passing the Peace,” where you take the hand of those around you and say, “The peace of Christ be with you,” I felt, I think, the appropriate connection of the eternal part within all of us, the God with whom our life begins and ends, that which holds everything together. Previously, I had always felt a bit of a phony, uttering words that made no sense to me in empty ritual, evoking an external God that I couldn’t be entirely sure wanted to have anything to do with me in the first place. What is interesting is that it really took some years of immersion in other traditions and practices and reading within different traditions (including Christianity) for me to get a sense of the enduring truth behind the particularity of expression. For me, I guess, cognition, intuition, and faith are all components of acceptance, and I needed to see the case about life and death, the temporal and eternal from the point of view of converging viewpoints.
 

Hiawatha Sportsman's Club, Michigan (U.P.)

I had been reading over the past several months Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, partly in relation to my father’s illness. When I came back to California I picked it up and noticed that I had stopped on Chapter 19, “Helping After Death.” I think I must not have wanted to go that far in the imagination. The Tibetans, of course, have death and the aftermath of death charted down to the milliseconds and often very specific time measurements are given. For example, the most important time to do spiritual practice for the dead is within the first 49 days after death, and within that the first 21 days are even more important because the dead have a stronger link with this life. Within those days, the most important time is at the week’s anniversary of a death. The most important Tibetan practice for the dead, the phowa, is especially vital on that anniversary when the dead are said to re-experience their death. The practice goes like this:

“Imagine tremendous rays of light emanating from the buddhas or divine beings [of your choice], pouring down all their compassion and blessing. Imagine this light streaming down onto the dead person, purifying them totally and freeing them from the confusion and pain of death, granting them profound, lasting peace. Imagine then, with all your heart and mind, that the dead person dissolves into light and his or her consciousness, healed now and free of all suffering, soars up to merge indissolubly, and forever, with the wisdom mind of the buddhas.” (p. 302)

It seems that healing is more than just a lifelong activity. In another practice, reminiscent of the Prayer of Confession, you “visualize the person who is dead looking at you with greater love and understanding than he or she ever had while alive.” (p. 317). You know that they want you to understand that they forgive you for anything you may have done and also want to ask your forgiveness. You then “allow your heart to open and put into words any anger, any feelings of hurt, you may have been harboring, and let go of them completely.” (p. 317) Then you let your forgiveness go toward the person and feel his or her forgiveness streaming toward you and let your grief dissolve. The recognition in both the Christian and Buddhist practices that there are probably few close human relationships that don’t involve pain and regret but that love and forgiveness win out in the eternal sense is both deeply moving and can have the power to strengthen current relationships with the living.

Other important things that can be done for the dead are donating to charities, taking on some form of pilgrimage in their name, finding new meaning in your own life, or carrying out a special project in remembrance of them. For my father, for example, we will make a special trip to the Hiawatha Sportsman’s Club in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (a place in which he spent almost all of his life and where he was perhaps happiest) to have a memorial. For my own part, I would like to rededicate myself to working with The Heart Touch Project, an organization providing compassionate touch to people at the end stages of life. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our own lives are always intimately connected to the dead and the dying and they can be an inspiration to us all to love more fully. As Sogyal Rinpoche says in closing his chapter on helping the dead:

“So my heartfelt advice to those in the depths of grief and despair after losing someone they dearly loved is to pray for help and strength and grace. Pray you will survive and discover the richest possible meaning to the new life you now find yourself in. Be vulnerable and receptive, be courageous, and be patient. Above all, look into your life to find ways of sharing your love more deeply with others now.” (p. 318)