Fairfax Journey

(December 8, 2013)

Five years ago, this was how my house looked at Christmas. In fact, I have a blog post exactly five years ago tonight, with the same photo. Nancy and I moved into our new home in July 2008, and our first holiday season was an opportunity to put some lights up. This was one of the first and best photos of my house as landscaping was being installed, and we were relaxing into our new home. You can see the tree through the windows in the middle of the second floor.

Fast forward to now, and it has been four full years since any holiday decorations have been up in my home. I’m a little shocked, I just realized this today. Three years ago, Nancy was very weak and we were trying to figure out what was wrong…there was no room for tree or house decoration. Two years ago, she was in the ICU, and Christmas was the last thing on my mind. To be honest, I don’t even remember Christmas two years ago, although I know I got together with her family. Last year, I couldn’t deal with the intensity of my feelings, and did no decorations.

But now it’s different. This is my house, and I will be here through the holidays. I’ve been digging into the boxes of Christmas stuff, and found the lights we put on the decks four years ago. They are up again as of tonight. I am now decorating my home.

(October 18, 2014)

I have kept these lights on every night since last December, and few see them, as the street traffic after dark on my dead-end street is almost nonexistent. But I see them. I’ve kept the lights on all year, without really knowing why. As I go back into my journal, and read this unposted entry from last December, now I know. It’s like lighting a candle in memory of someone, in celebration. Every night the lights go on and remind me this is my home, the one Nancy and I created together, that is mine now. Let the lights illuminate the setbacks, the cedar siding we so carefully finished together in the spring of 2011, the railings we drilled and installed, the beautiful architecture that Art Chartock designed and Rich Dowd and Bob Hartwell implemented.

I often light the candle in the entry way and burn incense when I get home. At 7pm it’s dark, but the marble buddha that dominates the entry space gets honored as often as I am capable. Anyone walking by can see it. I love my home so much. I may not live here the rest of my life – Marin property taxes are so high – but I do so enjoy being here while I can afford it. Let the light shine every night.

I had a heart-opening, delightful and perfect moment this morning, one that I’m sure I will relish for a long time. I found the missing candle holder.

On some level we all live amidst chaos, and I often feel like I have an extra dose of it because I am sorting through boxes and boxes of stuff that belonged to Nancy, my mother, my stepfathers, and some from grandparents as well. As these people have fallen away from my life, I’ve ended up with all the material goods, some treasures, a lot of junk. I tackle it a little at a time, perhaps a box each weekend, and little by little my garages are emptying. It is such a long process, it’s taken a lot of fortitude to keep going. This morning, I dove into a box of Nancy’s that came from under her father’s house last spring, a box that she threw down there more than twenty years ago, with books and junk from her life in LA long before I met her. There is a Kodak camera with film in it, and I wonder about the five ancient photos locked inside on a partial roll of film. There is a dead telephone, more architecture and design books, and a copy of “The Bridges of Madison County” with a photo of her dad from WW II, and a photo of her somewhere in Asia, sometime in the ’90’s, with a Buddha. And Holy Grail of Grails, tucked in a corner of the box next to the phone, coated in a layer of grime and cardboard dust, there is The Candle Holder. The Candle Holder I Knew I Would Find One Day.

The back story is that I encountered one of these, a lovely 2-inch cube of rough glass, almost two years ago. I remember looking at it, holding it, loving it’s beauty and heft and utility and symmetry, and knowing in my heart that it had a mate somewhere in the universe. Nancy had a habit of tossing stuff into random corners – she was a walking embodiment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in her personal life – so I carefully tucked it away in a cabinet with other candle and incense holders, with the strange certainty that I would find it’s partner. (Nancy would never have bought just one, unless it was a unique item.)

So the thrill of discovery was long-anticipated, completely surprising, and has dropped me into this reverie that you have joined. What is that moment, that thrill, that joy and satisfaction when I pulled this thing out of a small morass of dusty junk?

My first cut comes from my ego, who cheerfully gloats “I knew I would find it!” But there is feeling underneath, something about holding an intention for years, and feeling it come to fruition. I have a deep desire to create perfection in my own ways, making things neat and aligned and symmetrical, so some primordial part of me is gratified by the joining of long separated mates. Ah, there they sit, together again, just as they were always intended to be. There. Now I’m getting closer to the fountain of joy inside.

I’m feeling our separation again. In fact, I’m feeling how life is full of splitting apart and coming together. I kiss Jen goodbye as we go off to work, and kiss her hello as we greet each other after hours or days apart. Divergence creates the possibility of joy and union in the future. My loss of Nancy creates the possibility of reunification. Incarnation into human form creates the possibility of divine union in the future. Perhaps I can feel how we are never really separated, just displaced in space and time.

Or perhaps I’m just happy to have a matched pair of beautiful, well designed candle holders. Whatever, it is, I love them.

So much has been going on inside over the last month, it’s hard to articulate. I tried to start writing earlier tonight, and couldn’t find the words, so I did an unconscious thing, and watched one of my favorite Star Trek – The Next Generation episodes, “The Inner Light”. This one always brings me to tears, and now I understand a lot more about why. Yes, there is loss, and I can completely relate to it. But I’m also projecting my feelings on the story of incarnation.

In this episode, Picard gets to experience a whole different incarnation, an entire life. It’s like a microcosm of our existence, a deep reminder that our life is transient, and that some part of us is bigger than this lifetime. Picard goes on a twenty-minute journey where he loves a woman, has children, lets go of the past life that he knew, loses his wife, finds a fulfilling existence, then finally returns to the larger, outer life. He also learns to play the flute, and the skill carries with him as he returns to his place as the captain of a starship. Symbolically, this is the cycle of samsara, of incarnation over and over. Roger Ebert wrote about this very well.

This is still a very current topic in my awareness. I’m swimming in an ongoing pool of Nancy’s stuff, sorting and distributing, and she continues to unfold. It’s a strange process; she is becoming more intimate, and also less of a force. I feel less of the drama of our life and her death, instead of a wave of grief, I feel a burst of sadness and thoughtfulness, smiling at the memory and returning to what is here and now…it’s all settling in. I have a fresh truckload of her stuff from under her father’s house, some of it is still boxed and sealed, and it’s not difficult, any more, just time-consuming. But I do have a bunch of photos that I’ve never seen, and they’ve been touching my heart. Her high school prom, watching sunrise from a temple in Indonesia (from around the time we first met, doing workshops together), touching images from her twenties and thirties and her childhood.

I get to see the totality of her incarnation now, through pictures, journals, artwork, interior design plans for huge beautiful projects. It’s a lot, she was a prolific woman. And along with the intimacy of seeing and feeling so much of her, she is also settling into my heart in a different way. She’s just there, like a treasured experience, but no longer dominating my feelings.

Her altar has changed. I’ve removed her ashes from the great room of my home, and created a new place for her inside the altar cabinet in my practice room. Now when I go down there each morning, and light a candle, I can open the cabinet and see her new sacred area, the photos and some of her favorite things, an altar within an altar. It seems so appropriate, as my buddhist practice would never have grown like this if I hadn’t lost her. And it also seems perfect that she is held within the Buddha, just as she is held within my heart, and her spirit is held within something greater now.

My life with her is now so much like the journey of Picard in this program. It’s like a whole reality that brought me new experience and learning. And both the memory and the learning stay with me, like Picard and his ability to play the flute.

Since late October, I’ve been re-living the same time last year, the final fifty-six days of Nancy’s life, in the ICU at UCSF. When I went through the experience, I just had to show up each day, fully present, in the parts of me that could function while seeing my beloved on full life support, completely self-aware. Now I’m remembering the horror of it, how I had to negotiate with all my internal scared and young parts that could not deal with the challenge, tucking them away safely before walking into the hospital. It was the most difficult period in my life.

December 4th was the day that we found out that Nancy’s spinal abscess had returned, and that it could not be operated on. It was a decisive day, we all knew somewhere in our hearts that she would not recover without some kind of miracle. I wrote:

We are now facing the biggest mountain of all. Her two-month infection has turned into an abscess that seems to span most of her cervical and thoracic vertebrae, half of her back. It’s inoperable, it’s too big. Medical treatment is limited. The team of doctors switched antibiotics Friday, to meropenem and vancomycin, the big guns. The immunosuppressive drugs that prevent graft/host disease are dialed down to minimums, tachrolimus is below the therapeutic level, and prednisone is down to 10mg today. They will reduce the prednisone again in a day or two, but 5mg is pretty much the minimum to avoid an adrenal system crash that would also cripple her immune system. It’s a tightrope. Her immune system must rally to beat this.

The odds of Nancy beating this are not good. Nancy doesn’t want to die, she’s scared, I’m scared, and we’re digging deep. Her brother, sister and I all had extensive talks with her ICU attending and oncology attending today, and we’re putting together a meeting in a couple of days with the whole team.

That being said, some other parts of the journey are going well, and I believe in the power of all of our intention and prayer. There are a lot of us petitioning for her recovery, I’m giving her reiki each day, and lighting our altars each night. Her kidneys are working well, putting out something over four liters of urine each day. I didn’t even know they could do that. She’s been breathing on her own all day today, although she’ll get some breathing assistance tonight to help her rest. Her lungs have cleared of fluid, and she hasn’t been coughing up anything at all today. Her secondary inflection has cleared, and she has no more indication of any stomach problems. All her vital signs look good, though her pulse has been consistently high, around 100-105. She has almost no fever. She’s resting comfortably, and sleeping more than half the time since 3am this morning.

She’s sleeping now, in a quiet darkened room, as the chaos of the daily nursing shift change swirls outside. Mozart has been on the iPod player all day, as Janet, Jim and I take turns being with her. Her nephew Andrew and sister-in-law Kathy were here this morning also. As a side note, her dad came home from his week in the Novato hospital today, which helps ease the collective stress in the Jones clan.

Settle in, this is going to take days or weeks to resolve. I’ve learned that love is not a transient sensation of the body, love is a state of being, as durable as a galaxy.

As I approach the anniversary of her death, I’m contemplating all of what I have learned and developed because of her, and thinking about what I want to do on the anniversary to memorialize her, celebrate her, and release her. I’m also remembering all my love, encouragement, devotion, fear and pain.