living with loss – Susan J Tweit

When Grief Inspires Gratitude

Posted on March 17, 2019 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

I walked across town this morning to attend Santa Fe Friends Meeting with grief on my mind. It seems as if each day brings some new catastrophe, another blow to any sense of reason and stability in these times: The massacre of 50 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on Friday by a young white supremacist. The crash of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing Max 737 jet a week ago, killing all 157 people on board, seemingly due to flawed aircraft control systems. Yesterday's news that a soon-to-be-released UN-backed report shows that we are literally using our planet to death at the risk of widespread species extinction and all-out failure of the living communities that sustain not just nature, but human lives too.

How much can any one of us take? I wondered as I found a seat in the meetinghouse. How do we deal with the grief and anger, the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness? How do we find the strength and courage to continue to walk forward, to contribute to our communities and to this planet in positive ways?

There is no one "right" answer to my questions. The answers will be different for each of us, because we are–thank heavens–diverse people with diverse needs, perspectives, and talents. The world needs that diversity; the global crises that we are dealing cannot be resolved with one single solution, one absolute truth. It will take all of us, each working in our own ways, to bring this earth and humanity back to health.

I've spent a lot of time "sitting" with grief in the past eight years since helping my mother through her death in February of 2011. Then, ten months after Mom died, Richard, the love of my life and my husband for almost 29 years, died in November.

Richard and Molly outside the VA Hospital in September, 2009, during his first hospitalization for the brain cancer that eventually killed him.

Molly, the daughter of my heart, lived with us for the last five weeks of his life, helping to the end, a huge gift for her daddy and me. I don't know if I would have survived those weeks of his hospice care at home, if she hadn't been there offering to support us both.

I thought I had learned my way to living with the hole in my heart that those deaths left. I was feeling pretty confident of my ability to be with grief without letting it bring me to my knees. And then Dad died last October. After which, the state of the climate, this Earth, and human culture seemed to go to farther to heck in a hand-basket. I wondered again why I am here and what is the point of this life, when we seem to have screwed things up so badly.

I had no answers. I busied myself with dealing with Dad's affairs: carrying out his will and seeing to the myriad financial and legal details. And then there was packing and moving, which kept me occupied for some months. Plus I had my climate garden idea to work on, another distraction from the inner gloom–even though I have yet to find a market for the kick-ass commentary I wrote with great feedback from friends and fellow writers.

I thought I had passed the danger point of simply giving way and staying in bed all day curled up in a fetal position, or going on the mother of all shopping sprees and blowing my budget. Until some personal news combined with last week's losses around the world, and I felt despair rising.

Yesterday afternoon on a walk downtown, I saw a flash of yellow out of the corner of my eye. I turned, and there, hugging the warm ground in a just-cleared flower bed near City Hall, was one clump of chrome-bright crocus blooms. Spring! The promise of renewal, and life continuing despite all that is so wrong around the globe.

Yesterday's crocuses, drinking in the sunshine. A lesson in gratitude, and resilience.

Those crocuses and their promise of spring and renewal were enough to lift my mood, and get me to thinking about writing about grief instead of wallowing in it. Then in Meeting for Worship this morning, a man stood up to speak. He was grateful to be here, he said, to not have to worry about finding food for his family, or shelter for the night. He was grateful to be able to live free from fear, he continued. And then, his voice breaking, he said he was grateful simply to be alive, to be able to "be" in this moment, here worshipping with Friends.

Those words reminded me that I too, have much to be grateful for. In the midst of the losses, I have a snug home, family and friends, work that fulfills and challenges me, a landscape and community to live in that while certainly not perfect, bring me joy. Remembering what I am grateful for helped me swim to the surface of the grief that threatens to overtake me in times like these.

This Friend's raw, yet thoughtful litany of gratitude in the face of shared grief also made me realize that for me at least, effective actions come not from denying my grief, nor from wallowing in it. They come out of the feelings of humility and compassion, empathy and love inspired by remembering to be grateful for what I have, the ability to live with grief included.

I believe that of those, love is what inspires the best we are as humans. As I wrote in my book The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes:

What we do best comes not from our heads but our hearts, from an ineffable impulse that resists logic and definitions and calculation: love. Love is what connects us to the rest of the living world, the divine urging from within that guides our best steps in the dance of life.

So even as I grieve for the losses in these difficult times, I will remember to practice gratitude each day, and with it give rise to the love and compassion that are the threads that connect me to all of life, and remind me to act with my heart, as well as my head.

That litany of gratitude includes all of you, the wider community that inspires and informs my days. Thank you for walking this life with me.

Three of the Zuni fetish bears in the collection of beings on my desk who remind me to be grateful for each day…

Waiting: The Practice of Patience

Posted on September 12, 2018 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Patience has never been my virtue. I may spend a long time mulling over a life-decision, researching my options, looking for possibilities I might have missed. But once I decide, I am ready for the results NOW. Or better yet, yesterday. When things don't happen on the schedule I prefer, I fret (inwardly at least), pace about, and do whatever I can to move the process along.

Oh, I can be patient about some things: writing, renovating a house, digging invasive weeds, shaping a garden… Creative stuff, in other words.

For example, I spent almost 20 years restoring the block of degraded creek that bounded one edge of Terraphilia, our rescued industrial property in Salida, Colorado, and never got frustrated with the very slow process. You can't rush ecological restoration–it happens on nature's timetable, not ours–especially when you are doing most of the work yourself in your spare time, and with no recompense other than the satisfaction of healing one small part of this amazing planet.

I also spent the better part of seven years writing and rewriting the memoir I call Bless the Birds, even starting over from the very beginning to get it just right.

I thought I was being patient with restoring this gorgeous mid-Century Modern house and yard too. After all, it's taken a year and nine months to go from grimy and neglected dump to photo-worthy and ready for another 60 years. Only my contractor reminded me that others spread a project like this over decades. Oh. "What if I don't live that long?" I countered. "I want to enjoy it now!"

He looked at me with–dare I say it?–patience, and waited until I heard the irony in my own words. Okay, maybe I wasn't being as patient as I thought.

My back deck on a sunny September morning

Apparently I need more practice in patience, and that's what life is giving me right now.

I am (still) waiting for a publisher to pick up Bless the Birds.

I am waiting for a buyer to snap up my wonderful house and yard.

I am waiting to hear that my friends who are in the way of Hurricane Florence came through okay, waiting for news on Dad's condition, waiting for a check to arrive for a freelance article I wrote, waiting for paperwork for some of Dad's financials, and waiting to hear if a local shoe store can order a pair of boots I need.

Have patience! I tell myself. And sometimes I listen…

Now Mom, who has been dead for more than seven years, is reminding me of the importance of practicing patience, albeit in her own unique way. I have been having dreams of the you-can't-get-there-from-here sort, where what you need to accomplish is impossible and you wake frustrated and sometimes exhausted from the trying.

In my dreams, I am charged with shepherding a group of elders including Mom and Dad onto a small passenger ferry that will carry them across a body of water. Only I can't keep the group together to board the boat: they wander in different directions or go off on their own. Even Mom and Dad, who always held hands, don't stick together. It's like herding cats; I wake tense and discouraged.

And then, about a week before Dad ended up in the hospital were he was eventually diagnosed with terminal lymphoma, I woke from a very different dream: just Mom and me in a hazy dreamscape of puffy clouds, like a Renaissance fresco. Mom is seated (only there is no chair), looking off into the distance and tapping her feet impatiently. She holds out her hand as if to grasp another's hand, turns to me, and says, "He was always slow." I know immediately who "he" is. I start to reply, but she returns to staring into the distance.

A moment later, she turns to me again, blue eyes snapping, and says, "Tell him to hurry up. I can't wait much longer."

I look off in the direction of her gaze and there is Dad, working his way towards us with slow and wobbling steps, tapping with his blind-guy cane. He turns his head toward us and says, "Where is she? I can't find her."

"She's right here next to me, Dad."

He clearly can't see Mom, so I walk over and lead him to her. He reaches out his hand, fumbling for hers, and misses it, so I guide his hand to hers.

The moment their hands touch, they are gone. Just like that.

I woke from that dream with a great sense of relief. I'm not the shepherd after all. Mom, it seems, is waiting for Dad. She'll guide him on this transition.

Mom, waiting for Dad to finish framing the photo, on their honeymoon at Mt Lassen National Park in June, 1952.

Okay, I thought, Mom's telling me to be patient. (There's an irony in that, since she is clearly tired of waiting for Dad to join her wherever spirits go after they leave these bodies. But she's waited eight years–she's entitled to some impatience.) She's reminding me that I don't have to try so hard to make things work; I can trust that all will be well.

I'm working on that.

I'm also working on being patient with myself. Because I've realized that losing Dad brings up the grief of those other two losses, Mom and Richard, both gone in the same year.

Weathering grief takes time, just as love takes time–and patience.

HomeWork: Patio Progress

Posted on August 30, 2015 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

On weekends, I put the creative energy I use for writing into homework: projects around my little house and yard.

This weekend, I was determined to make more progress on the flagstone dining patio I’m laying on the east side of the garage/studio. I had laid the first four flagstones early this summer, when the ground was still moist and workable.

Now after weeks without rain, the rocky, compacted ground is dry and hard. Which means digging a bed for flagstones requires some serious muscle.

My favorite digging tool, a well-used mattock with a pointed blade at one end and a scooping blade at the other. The granite river rock I’m prying out there is about half the size of my head and weighs a good ten pounds.

Fortunately, after the past two-plus years of finish carpenty and construction work, plus landscaping, I’m pretty buff. And I have good tools.

I woke yesterday morning feeling a little cranky and out-of-sorts, unusual for me. I figured that honest manual labor would put me in a better mood, so after I finished my household chores, I got out my mattock, industrial strength rake, flat-bottomed shovel, and the screen Richard made me when he taught me how to lay flagstone.

The screen in use

And I set to work loosening the hard-packed ground, prying out rocks, and screening the rubble. The fine material serves as a bed for the flagstones, the gravel-sized rocks go on a nearby path, and I set aside the larger rocks for other landscaping work.

A couple of sweaty hours later, I had laid three flagstones, and used up all of my energy. But my mood was significantly better.

I felt so good, in fact, that I figured I’d put in another few hours today if I wasn’t too sore. Which I wasn’t, although I woke feeling curiously out-of-sorts again.

This afternoon, I whaled away with the mattock and loosened up another section of ground, raked and screened, and laid two smaller flagstones. (Smaller meaning they weigh less than about 75 pounds and I can move them by myself.)

The flags I laid this weekend are the five on the left side of the photo.

Then I spent measured some of the big flagstones in my stack to find one that was the right size for the gap between the flags I had just laid.

(I don’t cut the flagstones to fit–it’s more fun to use the shapes as I find them, fitting them together like pieces in a puzzle. Sometimes they fit closely, sometimes not so much and I fill in between them with tightly packed gravel. I enjoy the creative process and seeing the pattern emerge.)

I found one that I think will work, and then tried to figure out how I could slide it down the hill from the stack to the patio. But it’s simply too big for me to handle, so I’ll wait until I can get someone to help me move it.

The tape measure marks my chosen stone: It’s almost two feet wide by four feet long, and about three inches thick. I figure it weighs about 150 pounds, or 40 pounds more than I do!

As I was cleaning up and stowing my tools, I had Richard on my mind: except for the screen, which he made for me, the tools are his.

And I realized why my mood was low. Six years ago this very weekend, Richard and I were headed to a joint artist/writer residency in the San Juan Mountains, two weeks of time out that we both badly needed. The Sunday morning we were to drive to the cabin and settle in, he began seeing birds.

Thousands of them. Birds no one else could see; hallucinations that were the only major symptom of the tumor growing in his brain that would eventually kill him.

Oh. That’s a pretty significant anniversary.

The patio-in-progress

As I was writing this post, I thought about why I find it so tremendously satisfying to lay flagstone. Part of that satisfaction comes from knowing that I am capable of the hard physical work. Another part comes from being able to use my muscle and creativity to work with rock and earth, and create sculptural forms.

That love of using muscle and creativity to sculpt stone, steel and wood into abstract forms is part of what motivated Richard’s art; creating pieces that expressed his love for the common materials that speak of the beauty of this earth.

It seems fitting that on this anniversary of the birds, the hallucinations that wrenched apart our life the way a catastrophic earthquake dramatically reshapes solid ground, I would feel compelled to lay flagstones, using the tools and skills taught me by the man who held my hand and my heart for almost 29 years. The man I love still–and always will.

Richard Cabe, his face steroid-puffy, his right brain and vision both impaired, but his hands still sure when they touch the rock, smiling as he demonstrates how to lay flagstones, three months before he died…