To celebrate the first day of a month long vacation from his job as the Cheese Department Manager at the first WholeFoods Market in California, thirty-seven year old Kirby took his new shorter, faster windsurfing rig and went with a couple of buddies to windsurf in the San Francisco Bay from the 3rd Avenue input just north of the San Mateo Bridge. Even when the wind was high and swells were exceptionally choppy, windsurfing the bay was Kirby’s favorite way to unwind after work for a few hours. That day, he and his buddies were photographing each other and they had time to cross the bay toward Hayward many times.
That day, I wanted to borrow some camping equipment from Kirby, it was Friday, October 1st, 1993. I nearly took my camera to go watch him windsurf early that afternoon. However I got delayed and instead stopped on the way, to visit a girlfriend with my eight year old daughter and stayed there a couple of hours.
Two days before, while I was on the phone with him arranging to borrow the equipment Kirby teased me,
“Did you just call to tell me you love me?”
The out of character bold manner with which he asked shocked me to pause and assess; it leveled my awareness to my heart and all the love I had for this precious man.
“Yes” I said, “I did just call to tell you how much you mean to me and to let you know... just how much I love you.” I sighed, “I love you very much.” A long pause followed. And Kirby replied very purposely in such a way I really felt the meaning of his words,
“I love you too.” he said with obvious warmth.
Five years of bonding with Kirby, led up to an epiphany in that moment. The ecstatic moment of truth zinged me. I suddenly felt a solid, definite “Yes I will!” waiting to jump out of my chest as a response to when this beautiful Texas gentleman when he finally pops the invitational question for us to wed. Though we did not live together, my daughter and I adored him; we were family for each other. He had also nearly a year before given me a gorgeous ring without the awaited question, only a comment,
“I want you to know I am serious.” he had said, when he gave me a lovely princess setting ring; a ring that took him fifteen years to purchase for a woman who no longer was in his life by the time he paid it off.
I wore that ring and waited. I loved him deeply. He showed up well as a step parent and my daughter and I deeply trusted and adored him. I finally, clearly felt the pleasure of my desire to spend the rest of my life with him. I pondered hopefully, silently asking the universe, “Will he ask? Will we get married?”
The Friday he went windsurfing, while I visited my girlfriend that afternoon, I suddenly felt dizzy, too tired to do anything. I forgot about getting the camping gear, drove back home, skipped dinner and went to bed. Both my daughter and I fell into a deep coma-like sleep early that evening and slept for many hours. My daughter slept through the night to the morning. However my sleep got rudely interrupted about 10:30 pm by persistent loud knocking on my front door, twelve feet from my bed. I tried to sleep through it, but the sound would not quit. I arose very groggy from my bed in the living room of our tiny one-bedroom apartment. I stepped out of bed in my floor-length flannel nightgown and walked the few steps to the door, unbolted the chain lock to find Jamie and Karla at the door with long sad faces loaded with concern. Kirby’s best buddy let me know, in a weak, breathy voice,
“Kirby passed away this afternoon, he drowned in the bay and we couldn’t revive him. I am so sorry.”
My knees buckled at his first few words and I melted towards the ground just as Jamie’s tall heroic stature reached out to grab me, to lift me up, to rescue me and hold me up, to keep me alive in ways he could not do earlier that day for Kirby.
“No! No! No! No!” Repeated screams tore out of me as I attempted to escape this information. Jamie’s hold on me firmly insisting I not drown.
“No! Nooo! Nooo! Nooooooo!” I wailed as if I could vehemently chase Jamie’s words back through time, back into the throat of the man who said them, in hopes to make the reasons he said them disappear! I wanted to make the man who knew more intimately exactly why Kirby was not with him or me that night, not know this anymore, to undo the truth. I wanted to chase those words off this plane and into a looking glass world where no one ever dies. Uncontrollable weeping exploded out of me as if I were possessed, awaiting an exorcism. Karla stood near me with her hand sadly on my back, while howling wounded animal sounds, escaped my control. My daughter, asleep in her bedroom just on the other side of the wall opposite the front door strangely and luckily slept through these loud and troubling sounds.
No part of me wanted to process this information of Kirby’s absence in my life, nor all it would mean in the coming weeks, months, or years. Something more devastating than getting divorced happened and my cells could not process the depth of this sadness, so they contained the grief and rebelled; they refused to cooperate with each other. Each cell contained a tiny piece of the pain and refused to put the whole puzzle together. They had shifted just enough in orientation to become unknown and unfriendly to each other to disallow communication with neighboring cells. My body no longer worked as a co-operative unit. I got scrambled.
In the weeks and long troubling months of repeated weeping to come, nothing worked in my body or mind. My coordination was off, I missed the glass when I poured milk, cups of hot tea hit the table with a loud clunk sooner than I expected. I knocked over and spilled things I did not expect to encounter; my perceptions of the world did not match my surroundings and I repeatedly discovered that discrepancy in awkward contact with hard surfaces. I could not sequence basic activities, habitual actions like using the toilet did not go well. Even when I imagined each step of the way, I repeatedly sat down on a closed toilet lid, just after I flushed the handle, only knowing once I sat bare fanny on the lid, that I needed to refrain from relieving myself – something was not right. Stress does a number on brain function. Death of loved ones creates a lot of stress.
My speech and ability to process any information melted and slid away. I could think of words, but not speak them in a timely manner, and when I did, words tumbles out, out of order or in place of the ones I really meant but sounded similar. When I had to deal with numbers, money, my check book or receipts I stared at them without really seeing what was written there. When I could see the information, I couldn’t tell what it meant. The slightest tasks were no longer automatic, they required full concentration and focussed effort. I cried incessantly for about six to eight hours a day. I do not recommend letting grief go that far before getting support on some level; exhaustion took its toll.
Even ten years after Kirby’s died, I might not have had the distance and awareness to reveal to you, “That is what grief can do to you; scramble your brain and perceptions”. Now, I have nearly twenty years of experience with the rearranging impact of losing someone so dear. It left my heart feeling like half a torn, dingy-grey, recycled towel – one used to mop the floor.
Loss wrung out my heart and left it hanging on the edge of a utility sink. My rag of a heart dripped murky water down the drain while it waited to be washed. I had no clue how to revive my vitality. Nothing meant anything to me. Life was flat, there was no relief to this terrain; colors were dull, flavors were bland, nothing amused or tickled my fancy; sexuality evaporated... and I could not access my creative inclinations.
When loss hits hard, the only saving grace is joy. After a long period of suffering, I scratched my way out of the pain-snake-pit with such fierce desperation to see, know and feel something better, that scary deities feared me and got out of my way.
My determination to breathe in new life led me to healers, in particular a third-generation Japanese acupuncturist, Hideshiro Minami, whose first two hour treatment on me four months after Kirby died, oddly, instantly helped me discern people’s faces from dull linear surfaces of streets and sidewalks and cement buildings that had no meaning. He also helped me sleep through the night and to not hurt everywhere. That treatment allowed feelings and sensations other than pain about loss to flow through my nervous system. I began to write more, and to paint, to move and dance.
It is said that, “Time heals”, yet nothing about that statement makes sense nor did it help me have faith that I would in time get over the worst of this loss and learn and grow into being someone whose identity was not just shaped by a death. A good friend who survived loss just six months prior, offered a more helpful comment. She assured me,
“Grief might kick your ass, and make you feel really awful – but it will not kill you; you will not die from it”.
I learned to live with loss... and have since suffered further losses over and over, and learn to live with each new loss a little better when I let go of the fearful thoughts my mind tells me. Eventually the urges to explore, to live, breathe, dance, move, play and feel, are much higher than the surges of pain and anger over what is no longer. It is really not ‘time’ that helps us grieve less intensely. We eventually fill our lives with newer, more persistently engaging events and people which makes the pain over what we miss is less prominent. We must open our hearts to allow newness in. We learn to live with loss, from relearning how to live. Loss is part of life. Death happens at the end. Death happens to those who die. Grief is the death-like reaction we have about death, about losing those we love. Grief is part of life, it is what happens to the living. To feel more alive than dead, I noticed what makes me feel alive and aimed towards doing more activities that bring me joy!
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