Spring 2021
Newsletter
Does Life Ever Get Easy?
Dear friends,
I began this newsletter way back in mid-February. Time to finish it -- finally.
Why the delay?
A month ago, a month to this very day, my mother died. Later this afternoon, I’ll mark this early anniversary by transplanting a young rose bush into a large pot using soil that contains some of her ashes.
This newsletter also marks this anniversary day: a somber, yet joyful day. Joyful? Yes, I loved my mother dearly and I still love her dearly. A reason for real joy.
I began this newsletter way back in mid-February. Time to finish it -- finally.
Why the delay?
A month ago, a month to this very day, my mother died. Later this afternoon, I’ll mark this early anniversary by transplanting a young rose bush into a large pot using soil that contains some of her ashes.
This newsletter also marks this anniversary day: a somber, yet joyful day. Joyful? Yes, I loved my mother dearly and I still love her dearly. A reason for real joy.
I return now to what I return now to what I wrote a month ago.
A wilderness fast will not make your life easier.
It will make it more authentic.
I’m not sure where I first heard that line, or from whom. But I’ve repeated it often in the many years since. A few years ago I began adding a second line:
But if you do this work long enough, your life will get easier.
To be clear, life is never easy. Illness and death. Relationship trouble. The struggle to find meaningful work — or any work. Great political upheaval. Freezing cold weather in winter and wildfires in summer.
And on and on.
This life is never "easy".
Here, I intentionally get personal. The more I’ve done this kind of spiritual work -- work I first learned to do during a desert fast twenty years ago -- the easier it has become to navigate all of life’s inevitable struggles. Why? Because if I do the work, then what I think and feel and say and do are much more in alignment with my core values.
Life never gets "easy." It can get "easier."
And then my mother died.
My mother had a serious stroke and was hospitalized. At first, the doctors said that she likely would go home on hospice: that meant she would be coming to my house and get admitted by my hospice. Instead, she made a remarkable rally and plans were made to send her to a rehab center before she would go back to her own home (or mine, if need be). And then, suddenly, she died. Another stroke? A heart attack? Who knows?
The month since has been anything but “easy.” But because of all I've learned these past many years, it definitely has been “easier.”
My mother had a serious stroke and was hospitalized. At first, the doctors said that she likely would go home on hospice: that meant she would be coming to my house and get admitted by my hospice. Instead, she made a remarkable rally and plans were made to send her to a rehab center before she would go back to her own home (or mine, if need be). And then, suddenly, she died. Another stroke? A heart attack? Who knows?
The month since has been anything but “easy.” But because of all I've learned these past many years, it definitely has been “easier.”
Here are a few lessons I've learned over the years. After this last month, I see them all with much more clarity . . .
Follow the feelings.
First came the shock — the total disbelief that my mother was dead. The day after, I wrote to a circle of friends: “What do you do the day after your mother died?” The answer came in waves: waves of grief with torrents of tears. That’s what you do the day after.
You cry. Of course. You cry. Only that could make this surreal time oh so real.
A few days after my mother's death, I was at a loss about what then to do. The tears weren't coming, and yet I new a cauldron of feeling was bubbling inside. I then thought of one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned during years of desert work: I've often encouraged people not to force whatever is wanting to unfold. If you’re not feeling resolution of grief, or forgiveness, or healing, or recovery — or whatever it is you're seeking — then stay with where you are. Where you are, right now.
That led me to this: Make a new CD of music to help evoke what's inside. Use this music to help follow the feelings.
Over the last twenty years I’ve made ten different "Practice of Living and Dying" music compilations: CDs I hand out at the end of each desert program I co-guide. I went back to those ten CDs and made a compilation of the compilations. The title of this new collection, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," came from two versions of that same song: one by the Blind Boys of Alabama; one by Van Morrison. For the next ten days, I listened to that CD, over and over.
Each time I went to just one part of the collection, whichever was summoning me:
The most frequently played track was the first one: “Here’s to Life” by the jazz singer Shirley Horn. This served as a lushly orchestrated testimony to my mother’s life -- as I heard it, anyway.
Sometimes I would continue on to the next batch: love songs meant to evoke the outpouring of love that came while my mother's life was hanging in the balance.
Other times, I was drawn to the next few songs that captured her actual death and the time of her crossing over.
Most often, though, I listened to the "motherless child" section of the CD: five songs bookended by the two by the Blind Boys and Van.
Follow the feelings.
Tell your stories in a circle of trusted people.
The School of Lost Border's spring Ballcourt fast got cancelled this year due to COVID. With an open space in my calendar in early March, I dreamed instead of a gathering of close friends — many, but not all, wilderness guides — that would happen in the very same Death Valley basecamp that the Ballcourt would have used. Together we made plans in early February for a gathering of nine to happen in March, a month later. Turns out, our scheduled time came ten days after my mother died. How perfect was that?
Even more perfect: someone suggested we hold a mother’s council during our time together. After the others took turns telling stories about their mothers — some still living, some long passed — I got to speak last. Blubbering all the way, I was able to tell a story so full of truth and feeling -- much deeper than what would be possible during my biological family’s memorial gathering days after I returned home.
I closed both of those circles with the Shirley Horn song, and then a toast:
“Here’s to life, here’s to love, here’s to you . . . here's to Mom.”
Listen deeply for the ceremony that is wanting to happen.
A co-guide of mine often says to groups: "Some people do ceremony in a simple way and some are more complex in what they create."
Me? My way is simple.
On a central table in the heart of our house, my partner and I created an altar of photos and flowers, with one of my mother's rings resting on a red heart stone that I found during that trip to Death Valley. Every day, usually three or four times each day, I have returned to re-light a votive candle that sits before all the photos. This simple act, this compulsive act, has had me pausing long enough to look, yet again, at pictures of my mother. Each time I've brought her memory back fresh and alive.
A simple ceremony. An essential ceremony.
Mark the threshold crossings.
At the start of this week, the earliest urges to return to a more normal life started to arise. “Following the feelings” then led me to this thought: Soon it will be time to let her rest. To rest both more gently in my heart and more quietly on a side altar that's not so prominent.
Time soon to mark this threshold crossing, I decided. Do it on the month anniversary of her death.
This is how I've chosen to mark that crossing:
Sending out this memorial letter.
Moving a simpler altar to a more private place.
Putting my mother’s ring on a chain that I'll wear around my neck.
And last: Transplanting that rose bush into soil with my mother’s ashes.
“The color of those roses?” you might ask.
Red, of course. Red for love.
Rachel Frances Carr
October 3, 1929 - February 26, 2021
In Memoriam
Life is never easy. But love makes it all possible.