
Look back:
Mark Liebenow
As part of our "Look Back" series, we're sharing some of our favorite pieces from previous Chautauqua contributors. In this edtion, we're sharing three essays from Mark Liebenow. Be sure to check out our interview with him to learn about the craft and expereinces that inspired these essays.
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Table Of Contents:
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"Hiking over the Edge," originally published in issue 8
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"Broken Hallelujah," originally published in issue 16
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"Speaking of That," originally published in issue 21.2
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If you want to read the full issues, you can purchase them here.
"Hiking Over the Edge"
by Mark Liebenow
When we try to pick out anything by itself,
we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
—John Muir
1 It’s the beginning of intentionally getting lost. All the geological and
botanical facts about the valley, and all the books written by people who have lived in Yosemite over the centuries, are like dried raisins and nuts. They’re interesting to chew as trail food, but I can’t use their experiences to get close to nature. I have to use my own eyes and feet. It’s the beginning steps of my journey, moving beyond the facts I’ve read and experiencing the wild unknown.
The wilderness is not just the beautiful, inspiring scenery I thought it was. It’s also not the heart of chaos that Joseph Conrad wrote about, where wild creatures are waiting behind trees to spring out and kill me, although thoughts like this come to mind when I’m hiking by myself and something large goes crashing through the forest. It’s also not the Christ revelation of God that others would have it be, as preachers across the nation proclaimed in the early 1800s, and as German artists like Caspar David Friedrich painted in the late 1800s, with crucifixes and ethereal cathedrals appearing in the mountains of their European landscapes, as if nature had no spirituality of its own.
Early Christian leaders like Justin Martyr and Athanasius had to deal with questions about nature from those who believed the Gnostic teachings that said the spirit was good, while the senses and all matter, including nature and apple pie, were evil. Justin and Athanasius believed that creation was good because it came from God, so it was proper to use our senses to enjoy its beauty. It was in Yosemite that John Muir found his Creator, and in nature that Hildegard of Bingen saw her mystical revelations. It was only after he settled into his hermitage in the Kentucky woods that Thomas Merton finally relaxed into the grace of faith.
It’s not that I want to see spirituality in the trees like the pantheists, or decode messages left by Druidic elves in stones piled under gnarled oak trees on the talus behind Yosemite Village, although I entertain this possibility with an impish fantasy. I want to appreciate the wonders of nature on the grand scale so evident here, and watch the ordinary movements of nature back home in the city, seeing in them the sparks of creation that continue to flame, thrust, and find expression in everything that lives. I want the experience of the Native Americans who regarded the coyote and bear as kin, who heard wisdom in the running streams, and saw the Great Spirit walking by in thunderstorms. I want to reclaim the sense of enchantment I used to feel as a child, and touch the primordial powers spoken about in the myths that guided primitive cultures. I seek the mystery beneath the surface of the unkempt wilderness because I need to know that the chaos of my life is rooted in something solid underneath. I want to experience the whole of life, the holy now, with all of its tasty side dishes.
2. Early one morning in may, I step aboard a Greyhound bus in Oakland. A Mexican nun clothed in white and a bald monk from Thailand wrapped in a saffron robe have already settled in. It seems we are all on journeys seeking what we have yet to find. When John Muir first made this trip in 1868, he walked the two hundred miles from Oakland across California and followed the river in. I don’t have that kind of time, and the walk is no longer that scenic. The miles of colorful wildflowers that once flourished in the great Central Valley and so impressed Muir have been parceled into huge single-crop farms. Yet the eight-hour bus ride will force me to slow down and move at nature’s more leisurely, sauntering pace. The time will also help me set aside the thoughts of deadlines at work that continue to rush through my head like a freight train without brakes.
This trip, instead of packing the car with something to handle every weather condition that might arise, I’m carrying only what is definitely needed—tent, sleeping bag, and backpack of gear. There is nothing for just in case, and nothing that will distract me from paying attention to the valley, not even guidebooks. I want to move from the pleasant and predictable middle earth where I live to where I wake up each day excited about the unknown that will happen.
Arriving in the afternoon, I find Yosemite dissolving. What was frozen over winter is turning into mush—the meadows, ice-caked mounds of leaves, and deer tracks preserved in hardened mud. Heavy rains are melting the snowpack in prodigious amounts and streams are rushing down the canyons. Cascades pour over canyon walls every quarter mile, and waterfalls roar as they shoot a hundred feet into space before crashing down on the boulders four thousand feet below, sending hikers scrambling for safety. New creeks form every hour and run over the trails, soaking me up to my knees in icy water as I hike around to see the wild displays. Rivers and creeks surge over their banks and push into low-lying areas, expanding ponds into small lakes and leaving trees surrounded by water, wondering where on earth the earth went. Redwing blackbirds trill “ok-ka-lay” over the newly sodden meadows, perhaps reviving ancestral memories from a thousand years ago when this was a wetter place. Mist climbs slowly like koala bears through the branches of trees clinging to the steep valley walls. Rain finds an opening under my hat and drips down my back, but as I slop and slog along the muddy paths, I smell the light, sweet scent of dogwood blossoms and think that this isn’t so bad.
New leaves are responding to nature’s drive, too, and push through the hard, brown plugs on the end of branches. The yellow-green tips of alders, mountain hemlocks, and willows lighten winter’s subdued brown and gray motif. Seeds buried last year in the fall begin to rise from the earth. As another shower tapers off, the rain turns to fog above seven thousand feet and rings the valley in a halo of white. The dark, flat clouds that have dropped so much water move over the horizon, leaving scattered cumuli behind.
3. After a long Winter, and with all the melting snow from April, the valley’s tiny chloroplast engines cough into high gear. Shoots and tendrils push through the dark earth from some blind clue to unfurl in the air, creating a springtime carpet of tender green that radiates with the sun’s warmth. Plants rise with moustaches of dirt, fling swatches of colors out like Salvador Dali with happy brushes. Even pine trees look fresh in their new shades of green. The small flowers on Western Azalea spot the landscape with thousands of white dots. On the far side of Leidig Meadow, near an intense patch of blue lupine, three purple irises stand regal on long stalks. In the wetter areas, I bend down and see the new leaves of milkweed plants all balled up like tiny geodesic domes ready to pop and unfold. A mile above me, Yosemite Falls thunders as if a sudden influx of water is going over the top, or a bundle of logs or a gaggle of boulders, yet nothing comes down but more water.
I wait for Yosemite to show me what it wants, finding it hard to set my plans aside and stop hiking so fast in my drive to see everything. I’m still full of questions, still wandering around wondering why the river scene at Happy Isles moves me more than the meadow at Mirror Lake, and still trying to perceive the valley’s different personalities.
On a bend of the Merced River near Rixon’s Pinnacle with a view up the river, North Dome and Half Dome reflect on the smooth water. I sit in the quiet of the glen wondering when something is going to happen, some insight, some breakthrough. The Merced River surges by in a continuous flow as it goes on to the farmlands of the Central Valley. In Mesopotamia, life was seen as a journey down a river, moving from life to death. In India, water comes from God’s temple in the mountains and flows through Benares in the Ganges River, carrying the dead home. I toss a leaf onto the river for my expectations and watch them float away.
The Sierra Nevada surround the valley protectively. For the ancient Greeks and Chinese, the tops of mountains were the places where the pantheon of gods and the immortals lived. The Japanese honored their gods by hiking up mountains and paying their respects to the nature spirits along the way. In the Alps, people for a long time didn’t know whether the mountains were filled with dragons or were the artwork of an Almighty Designer. It’s not recorded what the mountains thought of them. The taiga forests in Siberia hold fears of vicious wild beasts. In the traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, mountain peaks like Horeb, Carmel, Moriah, and later the Sangre de Christo Mountains of New Mexico were places of epiphany where humans met God and lives were transformed. I toss a stick into the water with my questions, and the river carries them away.
The Ahwahnechee loved this valley and believed that holy beings lived in the mountains, spirits like Tissiack whose home was in Half Dome and who was responsible for bringing the rains that filled the rivers and nurtured the fish and oak trees crucial to the tribe’s survival. Into the river, I toss a stone that sinks to the bottom. Like it, I’m not leaving here until I taste life’s marrow. A mallard paddles just fast enough on the moving river to hold its position, eating bugs that float down to it on the surface of the water, and I realize that the river not only carries away what has died, it also brings life to those who wait.
Along these banks there’s a deep sense of peace, yet it coexists with terror. No matter how sedate the river may appear, it’s as wild as the other creatures of the valley. Strong currents run underneath the surface. If I were to jump in, its snowmelt cold would induce hypothermia within minutes and, with a little more volume, this calm-looking river would sweep me to my death. People have drowned when it’s looked quiet like this, trying to wade across. Someone did last year, and Sadie Schaeffer, who’s buried in the pioneer cemetery, died doing that more than a hundred years ago just a short ways downriver towards El Capitan. Nature doesn’t stop and make exceptions for people who get in its way.
People die tragically all the time in the valley. Every year climbers are seriously injured and some of them die. But this is a risk that climbers know about ahead of time and accept. Sometimes I think that only the naked fool is alive, the one who dances away at the top of a waterfall while the storm rages about, with lightning flashing through the sky and thunder booming and rattling its presence through the bones of every living thing. Yet how long can the fool last before being zapped in the course of nature’s events or blown into oblivion by a lightning strike? Maybe how long doesn’t matter because the goal is to connect to the Spirit of life. People like the fool and the rock climbers understand this and risk all they have for a chance to participate in the adventure. They accept death as part of life, and this frees them to balance on the edge between calculated risk and logic-defying actions as they seek visions of the meaning that lies beyond and within. They are the ones who are alive.
Thinking about this on the way to Degnan’s store to replenish hiking supplies, I hear the sound of beaver tails slapping a river. At a table outside, a wild discussion in sign language is flying between four people. What is it like not being able to hear nature? For me, the auditory experience of Yosemite is important—the roaring of waterfalls, creeks trickling over rocks, birds and squirrels chirping away, and the wind brushing past and twisting millions of sugar-pine needles, making them hum. The shriek of a Steller’s jay, though, is one sound that wouldn’t be missed. The sound I value the most is Yosemite’s quietness, its lack of noise. It’s a refuge from life in the city, where every sound crowds in upon the next, demanding to be heard. The resulting din numbs my ear and trains me not to listen to what’s going on around me. After arriving in the valley, it takes a day or two for my hearing to calm before I can hear the valley’s softer sounds.
A world of quiet is what the deaf always hear. This shifts Yosemite to being a land of the other senses. The deaf do not hear the edges of words that provide clues to understanding the message beneath what is said. They do not hear the emotion in a robin’s song or waterfalls echoing off the valley walls. Without hearing, they have to pay more attention to what is visually going on around them because there are no auditory clues to tell them that a bird is singing nearby or someone is walking behind them. They become attuned to tiny movements in the trees that turn out to be birds, movements perhaps invisible to those who rely on their hearing to help interpret the environment. They see subtle shadings to colors that everyone but artists miss. And if the eyes of animals and simple organisms can pick up wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye, then who’s to say that the sharpening of sight in the deaf doesn’t also widen the range of light they see?
Also heightened is an appreciation of touch. No, I think it’s more than this. It’s a need to touch in order to learn, a desire to know how things feel. Those who walk around barefooted know what the earth feels like, while I, who wear shoes, know what my shoes feel like. The Ahwahnechee were wise to this. If I valued my touch more, I would learn how to tell grasses apart and identify the makeup of soil by the grit. I would be running up to trees and feeling their bark, learning through my hands that this tree not only has rough skin while another is as smooth as a beloved’s cheek, but perhaps why. Smell would become more than icing on the cake of my visual experience. It could become the experience, as when my nose lingers an inch from the trunk of a Jeffrey pine and discovers a vanilla scent, although some people are convinced a pineapple’s hiding in there. Besides looking at their cones, whose points either prick me or don’t, smelling is one of the few ways to tell a Jeffrey pine apart from its close cousin, the Ponderosa, which has no distinctive scent. By tasting some things, and touching, smelling, and looking at everything else, I uncover more dimensions of the natural world and come to appreciate the sensory differences between smooth granite and staghorn lichen, horsetail tips and wet bark chips, green fern moss and the shiny gloss on newly hatched acorns.
The American dipper, known as the ouzel to Muir, and a bird that he loved, encounters its world as one who is deaf, wanting to stay in physical contact with the river by diving, tossing water on its back, swimming with its wings under water, and bouncing up and down in the rapids to take full measure of its buoyancy. Birds are tactile creatures, anyway, flying through streams of air, immersed in the water of the sky’s river and surfing waves of convection that flow over the Sierra Nevada. Climbers hear the rock talk through their bodies, see the stories told in flakes and blocks of granite, perceive its moods and feelings through their legs and knees, and trace the genealogy of the rock’s ancestors with fingertips inserted into the stone’s cracks and veins. The gear piled around their table indicates that these deaf people are climbers, but how do they tell if the climber coming up last is in trouble?
4. One of the aspects I like about Yosemite is that it’s a self-sustaining ecosystem. Everything it needs to survive is here. Every creature in the valley has found a place to exist, not in harmony, perhaps, because everything has to eat, but in balance. There is death happening all around me, but there is also the ongoing renewal of life.
Manzanita bushes illustrate the intricacy of this balance of interdependence. Manzanita has long fascinated me by the way its red branches grow alongside seemingly dead, gray wood. The Ahwahnechee made tea from its berries, and bears ate them in the fall. There are seven varieties of manzanita in Yosemite, each growing at a different elevation. The greenleaf variety lives on the valley floor, often as a companion to Ponderosa pines. The pinemat manzanita is found at a higher elevation and prefers the company of Lodgepole pines. The Ione manzanita has an extremely narrow range, growing only on the few spots that have ancient and acidic clay soil, as in the high Sierra by Carson Pass. In an odd twist of synchronicity, there also happens to be seven species of warblers in Yosemite. Each lives in its own particular territory and eats its own kind of food.
The oak tree provides a detailed example of how closely life in the valley is interconnected, not just as checks and balances, but also as support. At the root level live fungi and termites. Beetles eat the fungi. Moles eat the termites. Lizards eat the beetles, and gopher snakes eat the moles. They might eat the lizards, too, if they are hungry enough. Acorn woodpeckers and squirrels eat the acorns. In the trunk and branches live insects. Red-shafted flickers and Steller’s jays eat them, while owls and hawks eat the squirrels, birds, and snakes. Mistletoe lives off the tree, and fleas and ticks nibble on the birds and squirrels.
At sunset, after a day of walking around listening to chickadees, waterfalls, and creeks, enjoying the rich, earthy musk of wet land and damp leaves, I lean back against a tree and watch Sentinel Rock’s face change from yellow to red, trying not to think of all the animal and insect activity going on behind, below, and above me. Birds close out the day by singing their evening songs. Before my wife, Evelyn, died, she sang Compline, the evening office, in Grace Cathedral, slipping her shoes off so she would feel grounded. She also slowed the pace of her singing and waited for the echo in the rafters to respond before she sang the next line.
As evening settles over the mountains, climbers and hikers return home from their adventures, light fires in their campsites around the valley like votives in a sanctuary, and offer thanks for what today has been. Sometimes I long for night to come because then I have to stop hiking. During the day, the continual discovery of new sights and sounds impels me to keep moving and squeeze in another short hike so I won’t miss any stunning scenery or pivotal encounters with nature, even though blisters develop on my feet and my city legs cramp, not used to walking up and down mountains all day. Without darkness I’d probably keep hiking until I fell asleep on the trail, waking up to find a coyote sitting next to me, watching with curiosity. Tonight’s no different as I stiffly get up from my tree, and with a slight limp, join the line of weary, happy people trudging back across the meadow to camp.
In the middle of the night, the roof of my tent lights up as if a forest fire is sweeping through the valley. I throw the tent flaps open and look outside. No fire is visible, but the ferns are glowing and odd shadows are slipping through the forest. I bundle up, head for the meadow, and discover that the full moon is lighting up the entire valley, making it look like the negative of a photograph by Ansel Adams. Everything is reversed, familiar, yet different, as if I had been set down twenty-five miles away in Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite’s twin valley. The moon’s light illuminates every ridge of stone, every rocky point and arch, while the crevices between them stay hidden in the dark.
During the day every part of the valley wall is lit up in bright sunlight and its distinctions are flattened out. In moonlight like this, the complexity of the rock can be seen. The walls become massive 3-D swirls of emotions, the anguish and tensions of aeons ago that were caught in this pose when the hot magma suddenly cooled after being in the warm, dark belly of Mother Earth. The black-and-white scratchboard prints of the mountains done by Jane Gyer, a valley artist, have the same feeling in them, of the earth in flux and being shoved against rocks of different minerals and densities, of melting together, breaking down and reforming. Yet with all of this physical turmoil, the joy of creation is also here, the ecstasy of the Creator discovering new possibilities and shouting, “Yes!”
A cool, barren moonscape, the valley has been recast by the moon’s light into gray and black tones, and the sheath of physical reality dissolves. Water in Yosemite Falls stops falling midair. Oak trees crouch and tell stories of archaic days to the young ferns at their feet. Mountain lions, bears, and owls prowl the edges of the meadows, keeping to the shadows. This is their prime hunting time, and the thought unsettles me. I stay put for as long as I can handle the growing tension, not knowing if they will lunge and bite my thigh or the back of my neck, unable to distinguish me from deer. When I head back to camp, I talk out loud so that they know I’m here. I still fear the terror of the prime- val that lingers in the genes of animals, of savagery barely held in check by passing familiarity with humans.
5. In the morning I gird up my belt and mental loins and leave camp at 5:30 am, aiming to hike the North Rim Trail and immerse myself in the highlands, a twelve-hour, twenty-mile trip that will climb to an elevation of 8,500 feet. I leave camp in the dark so the journey will start out as cool as possible. Temperatures are expected to rise to the eighties in the valley, which is as high as I want it to go on any hike. At the trailhead, I discover that it’s too dark to see which way the trail is going and return to my tent for a flashlight. Back on the trail, my nose begins to hurt. One of the nose rests on my glasses has fallen off and the metal frame is poking me. I head back to my tent, checking the ground with the flashlight.
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Inside the tent, I carefully examine the top of everything, hoping the nose rest has simply fallen off. It hasn’t. I look around where I assembled my backpack, and in my backpack, then everywhere else. The light in the sky begins to get brighter. Now I’m throwing things around the tent hoping to knock the pad loose and to the floor, trying not to curse or make any noise because I don’t want to wake the climbers in the tent next door. Still nothing. I sit for a moment to calm down, then clear one corner of the tent and systematically look through each item as I move it from one side to the other. Still nothing. I either have to start the hike now or give it up for the day because there won’t be enough daylight to complete it. Maybe something can function as a replacement. I find a Band-Aid, cut around the soft pad so that the sticky part will hold it to the frame of the glasses, and start off on the hike for a third time. Now it’s light enough that I no longer need the flashlight and I leave it behind.
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An hour along the trail that winds up the steep canyon wall, my shirt begins moving to the beat of my heart. This can’t be a good thing. I stop to rest on a bend with an overview of the valley, bracing myself against a tree so I don’t tumble down the wall. Sitting here, I feel a stirring that I don’t recognize, something that finds expression in this outdoor setting, something that feels whole. Taking out my notepad to write about this awareness, there in its pages, is my nose rest. The day is instantly brighter. But forgotten is what I was going to write and I simply jot down, “Something important happened on the bend.”
The valley floor is visible between my feet, and the buildings and trees look so tiny, two thousand feet away, that I feel like reaching down and moving them around as if they were children’s toys. I begin to have additional silly thoughts, but remembering that wisdom often begins with folly, I follow them to see where they lead. “What is the meaning of these trees?” “Why are they here?” Then the revelation comes, after years of searching. The trees are not the question. They were never the question. They are the answer, and I am humbled by my blindness to the obvious. The trees are here because they are part of an evolutionary process. The questions I’ve really been asking are, “Why am I here?” and “Why do I feel so at home in nature?” I just do. One day I may understand more. Yet I may not, and that will be okay because I’m beginning to understand that life is to be lived like an adventure, experiencing everything I can on the journey, with mystery and heart-shaking challenges stirred in to keep me humble.
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Because of the early start, and with the cool air keeping me from overheating, I make it to the rim of the valley in two hours and feel in decent shape. If I don’t feel good at this point, I need to stop because there will be no turning back further on. There is no other trail down, no shortcut home. One hundred yards upstream from the Upper Fall, the trail crosses Yosemite Creek on a thick-hewn brown wooden bridge. A small valley cradles the creek in a scene of loosely spaced green trees, and the gray granite stonework of the trail leading out of the basin is detailed and exquisite. Hiking up the steep canyon toward the ridge on the other side, I stop at Yosemite Point and look down at the top of the Lost Arrow. It doesn’t quite come up to the edge, its top having eroded away over the centuries, and no climbers are doing a Tyrolean traverse to it today.
Once over the ridge, the trail slopes down toward Lehamite Creek near the top of Indian Canyon. The Ahwahnechee made the shafts of their arrows from the mock orange bush in this area. The second year’s growth grew straight, with a lightweight center that allowed arrows to fly great distances. Indian Canyon is how the natives made it to the rim of the valley, hence its name. It’s also how Muir and the early settlers first hiked up. There was no Yosemite Falls Trail then.
On the rolling trail between Lehamite and Royal Arch creeks, after hours of strenuous hiking, I slide into a steady saunter through the idyllic shade beneath white firs and Jeffrey pines, warming up on the gentle ascents and cooling down on descents that are gradual. The mid-sixty-degree temperature is perfect. I’m cruising over the trail, throwing my legs ahead of me, swinging my arms, and pushing off with my toes, exhilarated by the aerobic exercise. After ten minutes of flowing along the trail, I begin to wonder why I haven’t seen any other hikers. This makes me think that wild animals are prowling around and I shouldn’t be hiking here alone. I feel a presence and slow down. Then I stop, and look around to see what is causing this sensation.
This area is completely in the shade and under a thick canopy of trees, spacious with no brush underneath. Overhead a roof of illuminated green leaves is providing a diffused light on the trunks of hundreds of trees standing like pillars holding up a great roof. It’s a natural sanctuary. On the far side is a great stone wall and the chancel. I’m standing in the narthex looking in. It has a spacious feel, filled with cool, forest smells and the hushed sounds of a protected glen.
After ten minutes, the urge to resume hiking begins. I don’t want to leave this cathedral of the wild, but I’m five hours along on the hike with at least seven hours to go, and I don’t even know if I’m physically able to finish a trip this demanding. The margin for error seems slim, especially if I twist an ankle or wander off on a wrong trail. Reluctantly, I leave.
Approaching North Dome, I emerge from the cool protection of the trees onto the bare rock of Indian Ridge, into the hot bright sun and the thin air of 7,500 feet. I climb down the unstable spur trail and walk out on top of imposing North Dome. The entire valley opens up around me. North Dome sits on the middle bend of the Y shape of the valley. Tenaya Canyon comes in on the left. The Merced Canyon is across the way, and the main Yosemite Valley stretches off to the right.
I look for trails I’ve hiked and notice how well they follow the contours of the terrain. This was one of Muir’s favorite places to sit and reflect. Under my shoes I feel the massive power that pushed this dome thou- sands of feet through the earth’s layers and into the sky, and imagine Muir standing beside me, looking fondly at his glaciers in the distance. I imagine the Ahwahnechee standing here, too, watching their beloved eagles soar over the land, as well as all the hikers who have stood here over the years and felt the glory of nature rise up and pierce their hearts with wonder.
Although glaciers took away the softer rock from the sides of North Dome, the dome doesn’t seem less because of it. The stripping away of the excess revealed its strengths, its muscles and sinews, which may be why I feel so alive in the park. It’s as if there were a glacier at the El Portal entrance to the valley that scrapes off everyday concerns when I enter, leaving me feeling naked and exposed. This renews an idea that started when I was watching the deaf group yesterday, one that I probably wouldn’t do if I thought about it. Taking off my clothes, I sit cross-legged on the summit, close my eyes and let the sun warm my skin, feeling the spirituality of the place. There are no sounds except the wind guiding my thoughts. I am Lizard, baking on the rock, touching the warm stone with the skin of my legs until I am the same temperature. I am Bird, flying high in the breeze, sweeping over North Dome and down into the valley, up to Glacier Point and banking left on the current flowing over Half Dome, feeling the texture of the air as it flows over my wings, breathing it into the hollow of my bones. I let my senses flow.
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Then grit kicked up by the wind gets in my mouth, a cloud moving in front of the sun turns the air cold, and the thought that a mother mountain lion is training her cub to attack a human sitting alone makes me turn around. The feeling of connection ends.
As I’m putting my clothes back on, the luscious scent of an unknown flower floats by. I hop down the left side of the dome seeking its source, wishing I had pulled my pants up, or at least tied my shoes. The side of North Dome is scattered with pebbles and there is nothing to save me if I trip on a shoelace or slip on a piece of gravel. I stop moving and try to steady my balance in the stiff wind. Muir once slipped on Mt. Watkins, a little further back in this canyon, hit his head and knocked himself out. When he came to, only a few small bushes were holding his body from rolling over a thousand-foot drop. There are no bushes here for me to grab, no rocky ledge or tree that would stop a rolling body. I’m on a rounded dome that is on the edge of a canyon wall. Yet since I’m this far forward, I hold my pause a moment longer and look for a way down to Washington Column. It’s a long, rocky slide. More importantly, I see no way of scrambling back up a thousand feet of smooth granite.
Backing away from the edge carefully, I finish dressing and begin the climb up the long, steep grade of Indian Ridge that rises a thousand feet higher than North Dome. Under a pine tree near the top of the ridge, I take a much-needed break to catch my breath, hiding from the sun in the tree’s shade and taking my backpack off. The welcome breeze cools the wet shirt on my heated back.
I continue up a more gradual incline, make a side trip to the Indian Arch, and start on a long downslope until I reach Snow Creek and the cool air of the forest. This section of the river looks like the Fallingwater design of Frank Lloyd Wright, with large, rectangular stone slabs running horizontally across. Under the deep green shade of the mature forest, I pull my shoes off and submerge abused, hot feet in the house’s sparkling cascade, eating a belated lunch on its veranda. John Muir took only flour and tea on his jaunts through the mountains as he connected with the spirit of the land, sleeping on pine boughs he cut down. He wouldn’t do that anymore, knowing that if millions of hikers did that each year, the forests would be destroyed. Sunlight filters through the trees onto boulders the size of houses lining the brown riverbank, the water having worn away the softer earth between.
On the far side of the dark forest, the silvery, glacier-polished eastern wall of Tenaya Canyon rises up in front of me and a shining wave of heat blasts me in the face. The afternoon sun is using the opposite wall, from Half Dome past Clouds Rest, as a reflector oven that is baking my side of the valley. I begin hiking down the switchbacks into Tenaya Canyon, wiping away the sweat running into my eyes, swishing flies that want to buzz inside my nose, and trying to use my awe of the earth’s geology, exposed in swirls of stone six thousand feet high and miles wide, to distract from the trauma my body is going through. A couple of times I lose focus, forget where I am, and trip on loose rocks and tree roots growing over the steep trail and almost stumble over the edge. I make one quick stop to place Band-Aids over blisters that are forming on the tips of my toes from the hours of downward hiking. Near the end, I concentrate on moving as quickly as possible to reach the valley floor behind Mirror Lake before it gets dark. I vow never to hike this trail again. Yet the views have left me mute with awe, and there’s no other way to see them, so I’ll probably come back.
Three hours later, after jogging by Mirror Lake on the flat valley trail at dusk, I viscerally know why I love nature so much. In twilight like this, as well as in the half-light of dawn, the eternity of the rocks and the presence of a unifying force can be felt. I also feel this when storms clear and sunlight dances with the departing clouds, and when fog lingers in the crevices of the valley walls. These scenes move into my heart like the corner of a piece of paper put to a pool of ink, drawing the feared darkness of the wilderness into the light where its mystery adds richness to life. I realized today that when I go into the mountains to hike, I take my struggles with me, and what I encounter on the trail helps loosen their knots.
"Broken Hallelujah" by Mark Liebenow
Parents never die as we hope or imagine. I thought mom would pass quietly in her sleep at home because she had spent her life taking care of other people, and this would be her reward.
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She was a progressive thinker in a small, conservative town in Wisconsin, but if people were suffering, she didn’t care who they were. She wanted to ease their burden. She was also feisty. When she retired from nursing, mom returned to painting, her first love, and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin to study for a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Some of her friends counseled against it because of the academic work. That only made her more determined.
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Several years ago, mom stopped painting completely. She also had trouble recalling recent events. “Criminy, why can’t I remember that?” We suspected she was beginning to develop dementia.
1
Alzheimer’s is a disease that attacks the brain and is the cause of 60-80 % of the cases of dementia. It generally starts slowly and gets worse over time. The most common early symptom is short-term memory loss. As the disease advances, people withdraw and body functions are lost. There is no treatment or cure. The average life expectancy following diagnosis is four to eight years.
At the family gathering for Thanksgiving and her eighty-eighth birthday, mom was smiling and joking. While she couldn’t remember what she had just done, her long-term memory was still good and we could talk about when we were growing up, like how her whistle was so loud that we could hear it two blocks away telling us to come home for dinner. She reminded me of when I climbed an enormous tree but was scared to come down because the distance between branches was too great. She said, “You climbed up. You should have figured out a way down.” It was good training for when I began hiking mountains in Yosemite.
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In December I came up to take care of dad after cataract surgery. He needed to sit still for a week and let his eye heal. I was there to give him eye drops throughout the day, cook meals, clean the house, and check mom’s blood sugar levels.
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Mom smiled when I walked through the door and said, “Well, look who’s here!” and offered a back rub with fingers that, although weaker, still knew how. She recognized me as one of her sons, but I’m not sure she remembered which one or that I lived in a different state. Then she went over to a chair, sat down, and her face went blank.
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I sat beside her and tried to engage her in conversation about past events, but she no longer wanted to talk about them. Frustrated, I began talking nonsense, and her eyes lit up. Fantasy was more interesting to her than reality. I made up stories to entertain her, like how the wrens at the feeder were all cousins, how the one on the left didn’t get along with the rest, and how the number of stripes on their wings indicated who was older.
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She had become alarmingly thin. At dinner, Dad tried to get her to eat something, knowing that she needed to because of her diabetes. He started out encouragingly and built up to yelling. With that, mom dug in her heels because no one was going to tell her what to do. At breakfast I tried a different tack and played a game with her food, trying to convince her to eat more of her omelet before the red peppers and purple onions ate them all. She liked this game. However, she had forgotten to put in her partial denture. Reminded, she swung it around like an airplane before successfully landing it in her mouth. The next morning, I used the same ruse because she didn’t remember.
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On most afternoons, mom sat in a chair and stared out the back window as if waiting for something to arrive. Rather than identify the cardinals, goldfinches, and black-capped chickadees at the feeder like she used to do, when I asked what she was looking at, she said, “Nothing.” In the evenings she wouldn’t read her books or do the daily Cryptoquotes. She watched TV until she decided it was time for bed and headed off looking determined to get somewhere, even if it was only 7 p.m.
2
Dementia has been known about for a long time. Physicians and philosophers in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome noticed that people of advanced age sometimes had problems recalling events. In 1776, Scottish physician William Cullen referred to dementia as a medical ailment and said it was a “decay of perception and memory.” In the 1970s, Dr. Robert Katzman, a neurologist, went further and said that Alzheimer’s was not a normal part of aging because many older people do not lose their memory. In 1993, the first gene associated with a risk for Alzheimer’s was identified — APOE4.
To get out of the house when she was growing up, mom both played high school basketball and was a cheerleader. We didn’t find out about the cheerleading part until a few years ago. She also learned to paint from her mother. Being practical and knowing that she didn’t want to be a commercial artist, she set her painting aside and went to nursing school near Philadelphia where, on the sly, she also learned to smoke. After graduation, she traveled around the country with another nurse, worked in different hospitals, met dad, and began raising a family.
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For the last thirty years her paintings have been her focus, yet most were abstracts and she wouldn’t tell us what they were about. One series of paintings, “Life’s Boundaries,” gave us an insight. She felt that in order for us to fulfill our purpose in life, we had to overcome the boundaries in our way. Some were physical like dealing with cancer or diabetes. Some were social like living in an environment of sexism, racism, and oppression. Some were personal like struggling with anger, pride, or lust.
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One three by four foot painting has a row of turquoise blue petals unfolding against a poppy-red background. It has Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensuality, but I’m hesitant to say what I think I’m staring at. In an acrylic painting of a spring shower, she swirled red, blue, and yellow together for the dancing of the young, rambunctious clouds, and glued flecks of mica to the canvas that sparkle in sunlight as falling rain.
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Mom’s confusion is growing worse. Dad says mom keeps asking when they are going home, and he has to remind her that they are home. She also keeps taking photographs off the walls and putting them in the trunk of the car because she thinks they’re moving, and then looks hurt when dad puts them back. At night, mom doesn’t always make it to the bathroom in time. Dad helps her clean up and changes the sheets.
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Sometimes when dad is busy writing another article on the history of our small town for the newspaper, mom goes out to refill the bird feeders, but she isn’t steady on her feet, and knows she’s not supposed to do this. Yet the chore needs to be done, she is bored, so off she goes, wanting to be helpful. Earlier this winter she slipped and lay in the snow without a coat for half an hour before he noticed she was gone and tracked her down.
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Mom was 5’ 9”, had white hair, and looked elegant dressed up in her black dress, silk turquoise scarf with gold threads, and crimson red earrings. But she hadn’t dressed up in some time and was no longer interested in her nightly gin and tonics. The only thing she wants is to get in the car and go somewhere. After dad retired and before her dementia blossomed, they sometimes drove around the country just to drive. A couple of times they traveled 2,000 miles to California to visit when I lived there, stayed a few days, and went back home. They drove out after my wife died and helped me move.
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As mom has more problems getting through each day, dad takes on more of her care. He is ninety-three and has his own health problems. Aware of dad’s exhaustion from having to do everything at home, Kurt, Linda and I, the three children, have been encouraging him to move mom into assisted living where others could take care of her and he could get his rest.
3
Approximately 44 million people worldwide have Alzheimer’s disease, and nearly half a million will die from it each year. It most often begins in people over sixty-five years of age and will affect about 6% of them. Because people are living longer, one person in six over the age of eighty will develop some form of dementia.
In early March, Linda calls to say that mom was incoherent this morning and dad couldn’t get her out of bed. They took her to a hospital in Madison where the doctors discover she has a fulminating staph infection and put her on antibiotics.
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Not knowing if she will survive, I drive four hours to Wisconsin from my home in Illinois, and shuttle dad back and forth to the hospital. With treatment, mom regains the spark in her eyes and begins responding to family conversations with “Whoop dee do!” instead of real answers. I’m not sure this is a good thing, but at least she’s interacting with us. Because the infection isn’t completely gone after a week, mom is transferred to a nursing rehab facility in Jefferson.
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When she finishes treatment there, dad finally agrees to move her into assisted living at Marquardt Village in Watertown, with the intent of her going into the memory care unit when a room becomes available. I begin driving up every two weeks.
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In April, I take dad to visit mom in the morning. She’s unsettled and wants to go somewhere. Anywhere. When we won’t take her, she yells, “What good are you! Now I understand why people commit suicide.” Dad doesn’t react, but I’m shocked. Has she said this before? Being part of the neighborhood community brought mom joy, and she loved gathering with friends over coffee. Now cut off from them, and sensing that she is never going home, she sees no point in hanging around. She’s ready to go and is irritated that God is taking so long. The nurse says mom is mellow in the afternoon and works on jigsaw puzzles in the sun.
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They celebrate their sixty-sixth wedding anniversary there. In a photo, they are sitting next to each other, but mom looks like she’s wondering who this old man is that’s holding her hand. When I congratulate dad about the milestone, he says that it isn’t anything significant because he felt the marriage ended a couple of years ago when mom’s personality disappeared.
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In 1987, Mom graduated from UW-Madison with honors, exhibited her work in a number of galleries, and was invited to juried shows. Her large painting of the bones of the human shoulder, painted in cyan blue and white against a burnt umber background, hangs in the UW Medical School.
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When she painted, she wore a light blue shirt and blue jeans and worked in the basement where a row of shoulder-high windows provided light during the day. At night, with a lone spotlight on her canvas, she’d sit in the darkness until an image came, then lean into the light and give the image form.
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Cultures around the world inspired her. In several of her works she used a Japanese technique to create distance. During her year in Japan, she probably encountered the Japanese art of kintsugi, where the cracks in broken pottery are repaired with gold or silver to honor the pottery’s life history. Either we mended our cracks and became stronger, or we stay broken. It was in the cracks, the liminal space between what had been and what might be, that mom saw the fire of creativity burning. The French Impressionism of Monet influenced one set of paintings, and around her home are books like Women, Art, and Power by Linda Nochlin and Mexican Muralists by Rochfort Desmond.
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The natural world left her in awe. From photographs I took in Yosemite, she sketched a dozen ink drawings. Her mystical watercolor of the Mist Trail along the Merced River, painted in magenta, azure blue, phthalo green and several shades of gray, hangs on my wall.
Growing up Christian, mom felt that faith required her to deal with the injustice going on in society. Her focus was reinforced when she took a course from Rabbi Swarsensky at Edgewood College. He had been in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp during World War II and spoke of the need to think about how our everyday actions affected others. She visited fellowship groups in prison and worked with several inner-city youth from Milwaukee.
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In 1990, mom volunteered to help at a medical clinic in the jungle of Honduras, setting aside our fears of her running into paramilitary groups, drug cartels, and poisonous snakes like the green palm pit viper. While she would later create a series of colorful paintings of the river, the village and its people, when she was there she painted blue fish, red turtles, yellow ducks, and green palm trees on the walls of the children’s ward, knowing that art can heal invisible wounds that medicine can’t touch.
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Does mom know she has Alzheimer’s? Does she think about anything specific, or is she unable to hold any thought long enough to mull it over? Perhaps mom feels she’s standing in a meadow somewhere surrounded by fog, hearing familiar voices in the distance, but unable to find them. To make her room more familiar, we put several of her drawings on the wall. She knows she created them, but she doesn’t seem to take any pride in them.
Where does the core of a person reside? Is it in the heart as the ancient Egyptians believed? They preserved the heart, but the brain they diced up and pulled out through the nose. Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C., also thought it was the heart. Seven hundred years later, Augustine disagreed and said that rational thought happened in the brain.
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Descartes postulated that we were real because we could think. Mom would say, like the Velveteen Rabbit, that we become real when we love others.
We don’t know what drove mom to paint. Piet Mondrian spoke of the artist’s communion with something greater than the individual self. Rumi said the artist sees through the veil of illusions to how things really are.
While it’s hard to pinpoint when mom’s dementia began, we know when she stopped painting–2003. Some switch turned off, and even though we kept encouraging her to start a new painting, or at least a preliminary sketch, she wasn’t interested. For the last thirteen years, a dusty folder of ideas for new paintings has sat on her desk. My guess is that the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s made it too frustrating for her to paint, specifically those involving images, spatial relationships, colors, and the contrasts between light and dark.
Shortly after we realized that her long-term memory was also disappearing, it was gone. Time was running out. She was disappearing over a horizon we could neither see nor keep her from.
4
Besides genetics, dementia can be caused by brain damage from an injury, particularly contact sports like football. Vascular dementia makes up around 10% of dementia cases, and is caused by disease or injury to blood vessels that damage the brain. Strokes are included here.
In May, mom’s white blood count is high. Tests are inconclusive, antibiotics are ineffective, and the doctors have nothing left to try. She is put on hospice care to keep her comfortable until she dies. After months of suspending our dread, the sentence is spoken.
As I drive to Wisconsin, I play my favorite road trip CDs. They were made by San Francisco radio station KKSF to raise money for social services when the AIDS epidemic was out of control. My wife Evelyn gave me one each year before she died in her 40s of an unknown heart problem. One of the songs is Jim Chappell’s “Gone.” When it comes on, I cry because mom’s beauty, grace, and feistiness are going to end.
When I arrive, mom is perky and sitting in her chair, interacting with us better than she has in a long time. As Kurt, Linda and I gather around for a photo, I see the fierce determination in her face, as well as her pride in her children. All mom wanted for us was to follow our dreams and she would be supportive. I could be a writer, gardener, or retail worker and she would be happy. She was a fan of the mythologist Joseph Campbell and his counsel to “follow your bliss.”
Later in May, Kurt and Linda say that mom is fading, isn’t talking much, but does comes back for brief moments. I drive up again. When I enter her room, the drapes are closed, and mom is tucked under the covers. In the diffused gray light, her face looks like a chiaroscuro pencil drawing shaded with shadows of light and darkness. Mom doesn’t wake to my voice or the gentle nudge on her shoulder, which makes me fear that she has crossed over. Then I notice her shallow breathing.
Sitting beside her on her shifting boundary, I wonder if mom is seeing her sister Mary, who died when mom was a teenager, or her parents holding a lantern for her. Larissa MacFarquhar, in an essay in The New Yorker called “The Threshold,” said this period is a time of quieting, of preparing to die.
Softly, trying to grasp what she is seeing in the shadows, I speak to her as she sleeps. Mom, do you feel the darkness approaching? How far have you drifted from us? Do your fingers long to hold a paintbrush again? Do you remember how you loved to watch the green light in the backyard disappear into the woods every afternoon? Do you remember the birds at the feeder?
I wonder if any of her paintings are about death or her fear of dying. She probably did because she looked at other hard realities that unsettle most of us, and she had seen death up close when she worked as a nurse.
For half an hour I wait, watching her face at peace, hoping to see the glimmer of a smile return. I speak again. She does not open her eyes, but this time she answers my questions with two murmurs for “yes,” and one for “no.” She may not know I’m her son, only that I’m familiar. I thank her for going back to school to explore painting because that’s what she wanted to do, for not being afraid of doing silly things like letting granddaughter Katie gel her hair into Billy Idol’s spikes that she wore for the rest of the day, and for teaching me to follow my heart. Finally, I ask if she wants to go back to sleep, and she murmurs “yes.”
Touching my fingers to my heart, I rest my hand on mom’s head. Holding back the sorrow rising in my chest, I say, May you feel courage for your coming journey, and peacefulness for the parting from all you have known. May you see an invitation for the new life that awaits, and follow the winding river path home. May the shadow of death upon your face give way to light. Sleep, dear mother, in the calm of all calm.
Kissing her on the cheek, I say goodbye, knowing that this might be the last time I see her alive, because tomorrow I leave for a conference in Montana.
5
Doctors have identified the hippocampus as one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage in dementia. The hippocampus plays a key role in the storage of short-term memories and the formation of new ones. Long-term memories are stored in the cerebral cortex. Researchers are hoping that detection of shrinkage in the hippocampus will help in making an early diagnosis and lead to an effective treatment.
When I have Internet access in the mountains, I follow updates from the family. In one photo, mom is hanging on to granddaughter Mandy’s arm with both hands as if she desperately doesn’t want to let go. On another day, Linda says mom raised her left arm and hugged her, then looked into her eyes for a long time without speaking.
Two weeks later, the day before I’m scheduled to return, Linda calls and says that sometime before dawn on June 13th, mom died in her sleep. Looking into the vastness of Montana’s night sky, I watch the stars burn with the lights of my dead. Mom has gone on to where she wanted to be. She believed all things were possible, if not in this lifetime, then in the next.
As the family talks about funeral details, I mention a conversation I had with mom twenty years ago. The pastor in her church had everyone write down what they wanted for their funeral. Mom wanted celebration, not mourning, with New Orleans jazz and dozens of bright red, yellow, and blue wooden parrots. I may have brought up the parrots, but she thought that would be fun.
Looking for her instructions, Kurt finds envelopes with her last words to us. We don’t know when she wrote them, nor do I know what she said, because I haven’t opened my envelope. She stays alive until I read it.
Before mom’s funeral, dad sits in the front pew, and finally lets himself cry as friends tell him how sorry they are. While we are dressed in bright colors, per mom’s instructions, the funeral service is a standard one. There are no parrots, jazz trombones, or parasols. Mom would be upset. “You could have done something fun!”
At the cemetery, as the other family members reverently add symbolic handfuls of dirt, I pick a bunch of yellow wildflowers growing nearby and place them on the top of mom’s crimson red box of ashes to honor her unconventional spirit.
Few of us die peacefully, it seems. Yet to die after the sparkle has gone from your eyes, no longer knowing who you are, unable to paint, and unable to remember who we are, isn’t much better. That mom died in her sleep is a grace, but I do not count her as one of the lucky ones.
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Back home, as I’m paging through the book of her art work that dad put together, depressed that I will never know what mom was trying to express through them, one painting stops me: “Reaching Up.” The painting is simple, yet there is something going on. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? In it, a weary-looking, yellow-green stalk of grass stands in front of a mottled gray background with smears of cobalt blue. The head of the grass is in seed, and it’s unusually taut and dark for mom.
I check the date. It was created in the last year she painted, and it might be her final one. I call Linda to see what she knows. She says that mom saw the grass through the basement window, but doesn’t know anything more than that.
At night, the grass would have been lit by the spotlight reflecting off a blank canvas, with the blackness of night behind it. Then I notice the grass is luminous. I may be reading too much in, but the painting could be mom’s expression of how broken she felt by dementia, and this was her final gift of light before the darkness closed in.
"Speaking of That" by Mark Liebenow
We weren’t because people don’t like to talk about grief. It’s not particularly pleasant or easy to deal with, even though there are moments of beauty and grace that take our breath away. Yet, grief can be shared in words, even though it cannot be summarized in a paragraph, essay, or an entire book.
I thought I had a basic understanding of grief’s landscape because I’d been exposed to a variety of deaths—my grandparents first, as expected. Then the family dog was run over. A high school classmate bounced out of the back of a pickup speeding down a country road. A neighborhood teenager’s suicide by shotgun. The sister of my best friend hit by a car, abandoned by her husband because her recovery took too long, and died. A Chautauqua college friend hit by a car while riding her bike. A roommate in grad school hit by a car running a red light in San Francisco. A friend in his forties of AIDS. A friend stabbed in Greece for his passport, leaving his son an orphan. My mother’s long descent into dementia and death. A father-in-law whose brain dissolved in the spongiform prions of Creutzfeldt-Jakob after eating infected beef, the Mad Cow disease, and died in agony.
Then my wife died out of the blue in her forties from an unknown heart problem and dragged me to the edge of an inarticulate abyss and left me there tottering. People said, “There are no words” when she died, but there was still the compassion they held in their hearts. I was struggling and needed their help. Can I survive grief on my own?
Evelyn’s death unveiled the periodic chart of grief’s elements. If grief were a letter, it would be F— fragile, fractured, fatigue, forever, fucked. Is grief a noun or a verb? Grief is a drawerful of adjectives.
It’s a shade of blue that changes through the day. Sometimes it’s cobalt, azure, or cerulean. Even Prussian blue with its button-down, hard-soled formality. The blue lips of death. It’s the wistful blue glaze above the ocean as the last light of the setting sun fades, and a life that I loved disappeared forever. Grief is the deep, eternal blue of the cosmos at midnight when sleep won’t come and I drift like deadwood against the shores of distant constellations.
The notion that grief is blue feels right, no matter its shade, although in the beginning it was red. Blood red. Prussian red. Raging out-of-control red. The deep magenta bruise of a battered heart.
When grief’s Darkness came, I pushed it away, afraid of crossing over its border and getting lost in a place that had no familiar landmarks. No North Star to fix my position. A place set apart. A place far away. A place with fewer answers and more questions. The Far Territories. My hours were abandoned to staring out the window and listening to the hollow acoustics of an empty house. Slowly I began to discern what existed before words could surface, and what I felt most was longing.
In the beginning, there was the word unspoken. Without a useful vocabulary, I searched for words that could corral the wild horses of what I was experiencing. Words of anger and rage. Of intimacy and commitment. Of interment. Her first words, and her last. I searched for words because they created pathways through the wilderness, and words that rise out of affliction are true. I chanted the words with the mountains as evensong to the night and listened for its antiphonal response.
The articulation of sorrow. Is it possible to say what grief is and be precise? Disarticulation—pulling grief apart to examine its pieces. Perambulation—walking around grief to get a feel for the whole of the thing. Rearticulation—taking what I’m experiencing and translating this into something that makes sense to others. Misarticulation—when people repeat easy answers and platitudes that smile but ignore the trauma rumbling beneath, phrases like “there, there, it’ll be okay.” No, I don’t think that it will. We should not seek to understand grief with our heads, but only with our hearts.
The sound of grief is the ping of sonar in the silent depths of the ocean that doesn’t echo back. It’s the steeple bell in an abandoned church ringing softly as an afterthought in the breeze calling the dead home. It’s the cool, blue solitude of night when the machines of the city power down, and I can hear the creek gurgling nearby on its journey through the darkness to the Pacific Ocean. There it will evaporate, return as rain, and gurgle past me again. Grief is cyclical as rain.
Words are shadows of what is already gone.
How does grief feel? I once likened it to being hit by a Mack truck, the one with the chrome bulldog hood ornament, because every part of my body ached, and I had been run over. But lying on the couch and doing nothing became boring, so I moved a little and cried from the pain. This ache was replaced by dead-calm numbness, which was boring, too. My choice was either to suffer the arrows of death stoically, or push back against inertia and despair, and rage against the dying of her light.
Grief tastes like lemon juice on aluminum.
Grief is a mirage in the desert. A phantom. A shadow that leans against the red brick wall in the corner of my eye. It didn’t physically exist, yet I couldn’t shake its presence. It had no face, but I could smell the cedar scent of its skin, feel the cool of its fingers touch my arm, and the winter-coat weight of its embrace on my shoulders.
Were grief’s shadows black or blue? I became a shadow. While the passage of time continued for the rest of the world, time stopped for me because all of my plans for the future were tied to Evelyn, and without her I had nothing to look forward to, so the future ceased to exist. I existed only in the thin now, twiddling my fingers, and trying to generate the impulse to do something. From the sidelines I watched people rush by like freight trains in their frenzied push to fill their days with distractions and matters that didn’t matter that much in the long run, just tasks to take up the empty hours until they felt they had done enough to be worthy of going to bed, as if the measure of an honorable life is in the quantity of what we do but not in how we have taken care of others.
Friends sent cards of condolence and brought casseroles, but many of them didn’t know what to say, and I learned to protect my grief from those who said they cared but didn’t want to listen, saving my insights and questions for those who did. “I’m fine,” I said to most. For the few who came to listen, I wanted to find the words that were capable of expressing the terror and the emptiness, the chaos and the despair, the lingering hope and the remembrance of joy. Perhaps most of them were wounded, too, and hadn’t yet dealt with their own losses. Was this a place of transformation like a cocoon, or was I refusing to accept Ev’s death?
Grief’s emotions have the uncertainty of freckles. How many are too much; how few too little?
Nothing was normal anymore. Ordinary days no longer existed because I knew that death could intrude at any time without needing a reason. I had an urgent desire to tell friends that the barrier between life and death wasn’t as solid as we had hoped, so we needed to do what we thought was the most important, because tomorrow one of us might not be here. A rift had been torn in the fabric of my childhood expectation that most people lived into old age. Too many friends had died young for me to still believe this.
Ev flowed away with the restless movement of the river and into the past, to be preserved in photographs and the stories I knew. But the boulder of grief remained sitting in the water in front of me. I want to believe that my memories of her are accurate, but how will I know if there are holes in the narrative, or if wishful thinking has already filled in some of the gaps, and she isn’t here to correct me? Even if I knew everything about Ev, her memories would not add up to someone who breathes. Will her personality disappear when the edges to her stories are sanded away into generalities by time? The one thing I do not want to forget is how the light in her eyes shone with hope.
When a loved one dies, time divides into before and after, with the wilderness of grief shouldered between them. Old dreams become deficient, and the past insufficient to support a present that does not want to move. Months are spent swirling like driftwood in an eddy as the river flows on. The happily forever after I had been counting on was gone. What do I dream about now? If it’s our dreams that make us, then without dreams, am I unmade?
As long as I was here, I thought that I might as well explore grief’s landscape and try to understand its place in life. I probably lingered longer than I needed to because all the emotions made me feel alive, which seems ironic for someone focused on death.
Grief was a physical place. There was a there, in that I knew I was somewhere, wherever I was. Perhaps I am echoing Gertrude Stein that her house, her there, was gone, although both our Oaklands remained, there was a there here, just not the there I expected. Not that anyone ever expects the darkness that grief brings because it feels nowhere.
The longer I stayed in this place set apart, the more tempting it was to remain. I felt the allure of the forever. No one from the world bothered me here, and I could live in the past with my loved one. It was being in a private theater and watching the different movies of Evelyn’s life play over and over. I thought of becoming a hermit who lived alone in a cabin in the woods communing with nature and the spirits of my dead, because I figured that I had had my one great love, and that part of my life was over.
Much of what I believed about life turned out to be illusions, taught to me by my parents and grandparents to soften the hard edges of reality because they needed to believe that the dream was still possible. Society also worked to keep me in line and repeating what others had always done, instead of creating something new. Did my community even remember how to grieve honestly or how to take care of the grieving in nurturing ways? Whom could I trust? People who didn’t understand tried to place arbitrary deadlines on my grief, which wasn’t helpful, so I chose to grieve in the way that felt right.
The Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) of painters in Europe in the early 1900s, rejected the artificial rules of painting and did their own thing. They focused on being spontaneous, used bright colors to express emotions, and painted by intuition instead of trying to stuff their visions into the stilted boxes of overused conventions. Wassily Kandinsky belonged to this group along with Franz Marc and others. Marc painted his “Blue Horses” to express harmony and balance in the midst of society’s unsettledness that would lead to the First World War. For Kandinsky, the darker the blue, the more it awakened the desire in people for the eternal. Influenced by Cubist and Fauvist ideas, the Blue Riders moved beyond Impressionism towards abstraction. They erased the artificial lines between physical image and inner meaning, and tried to visually express what was hidden and had no form.
Can I do this with grief? I open my Crayola box of 96 colors and make swaths across the paper until I find the one that I’m feeling today. Sometimes my emotions feel purple or moss green, sometimes it’s gray with a tinge of blue. Is grief limited to what I color inside the lines drawn by others, or how I try to express them? Ev’s death has revealed that I’m not one emotion at a time, but dozens. My face may be calm, but I am a swirling, mottled rainbow of complexity underneath.
Our inner world is as real as our outer one, the one we can see, hear, and touch, because thoughts, feelings, and dreams are inside. Stimulus and response go both ways. Why shouldn’t there be a valley of wonder and light inside us that we can explore like the Grand Canyon?
I want today to mean something to myself or someone else. If what I did today doesn’t matter to anyone, then it was a wasted day. While small talk passes the time, it’s of no great importance, although it can lead to talking about the struggles where people’s lives are coming apart.
Grief has few linguistic handholds in its hard rock face to grasp or climbing ropes and pitons to tether me safely to its El Capitan. Yet risks have to be taken if I am to make my way through grief. Looking up at the mountain, I can see nooks and cracks where my fingers could go and begin climbing. Grief provides a chalk bag of metaphors that I can dip my hands into to improve my grip.
Other nature metaphors work, too, take your pick—Mountain. Forest. Ocean. Desert. Jungle. Places wild and untamed. Places stormy and cold. Places quiet and reflective where I could hear the chipmunks of thought scurrying through the leaves, the wrens of emotions singing today’s blues, and coyotes of wisdom padding by my tent in the middle of night calling to loneliness. Grief was the wilderness I had to cross that required more patience and courage than I thought I had.
I was hoping that grief’s darkness would be the cinematic version of being thrown into an alternative reality with colorful fractals and kaleidoscope images zooming past, like in Doctor Strange, but the place was just dark. Dark hours when little was visible, only fleeting images. Eternity came down with the stars to pause almost within touching distance, waiting for me to take a step towards it with a future that had yet to be imagined. I lingered in this peaceful silence that asked nothing of me, except everything.
My shadows held hard-won nuggets of wisdom, and I carry them in a pouch.
For a time, even my last place of refuge, the mountains and forests of Yosemite, were empty of beauty and joy because Evelyn’s death took them away. The ground I camped on was hard, thunderstorms were violent and wet, and Steller’s jays complained about everything. Yet, hiking alone in the otherness of the wilderness on backcountry trails gave me the time and space I needed to heal the rupture and find my way back. Over the months, staying a few days or a week at a time, my steps on the path lightened and nature’s wonder and awe returned. The sun rose, and set. The moon with its light rose from the dark side of the earth, illuminated the hidden places in the mountains, and set. They rose again, and set, and light gradually eased its way into the darkness that had filled my life.
A few brave friends came and sat with me in the silence knowing that they would not be able to take away my pain or fill the empty place within me. Yet, their simple presence and their hugs kept me connected to my community. I no longer felt alone.
In the beginning, I thought that grief was the enemy because it had knocked me down, so I fought back. That didn’t help. Then it seemed like a problem to figure out, but there were no solutions that took the pain away or brought Ev back. It became a therapist who kept asking questions and pushing me to go deeper, until the pressure became too much, the appendix of my emotions burst, and I finally understood what grief was trying to do.
Is grief necessary? Isn’t it an obsolete remnant, like the appendix, of a time from before scientific understanding enlightened us, and it no longer served a purpose? A vestigial organ that today doesn’t do anything? It may be superfluous, but if we ignore our appendix when it becomes inflamed, we die.
Is grief a wooden totem pole that stands in the center of town, with a raven on top to remind us of the gift of light, but also of death? And below this, a bear for courage. Then a carved frown of shame for our community’s failure to care for the grieving as we should. Or is grief a talisman, an amulet that we wear around our neck for protection, or a ring that we place on our finger to remind us that we have journeyed through fearful places and found the strength and wisdom to survive? Or is it a token we carry in our pocket that we flip every morning to decide which direction to head, each direction now being equal because we no longer fear death and because we desire to live?
Wild, wilder, a wild man in the wild West. The land west of longing. Desolate land, wasteland, the land of no return. I set the bones of my loved ones on the shelf and walk into the wilderness.
Grief is the blue shadow of things past. I think about this as I cook dinner for one, then wash my dishes at the sink, dry, and put them away, pausing now and then to remember what had been: warm sunny days, Ev’s cute little toes, her laughter, also the arguments, and the weariness of holding life together as it constantly threatened to pull apart. The struggle with low-paying jobs and bosses with limited imaginations. Her aches that came and went away, and one that didn’t. I lost more than my best friend when she died. I lost how the rumble of our days tumbled together into an eloquent life. I lost the one person who would always be there if I needed help. I lost the dreams we held in front of us to draw us through disappointments and doubts. We folded and refolded our lives together like origami for 18 years until her hands went limp. Now a flat sheet of paper lies on the table before me.
Is there any redemption in death? Perhaps for Evelyn who died young, full of compassion for every living creature, the reputed litmus test for heaven, before the bitterness, anger, and despair of old age seeped in and muddled her up. Any redemption for me? That I survived? Her death broke me apart, but her love salvaged my heart, so there’s that.
Salvage, savage. Salve in the fathomless dark. Time spools in the unmarked terrain of midnight when there are no hours. Time weightless and forever. I have come to trust the darkness, set aside what I once believed, and exist in the heart’s perpetual night. Everything is possible in a place that is not a place yet penetrates the illusions of ambition, pride, greed, and the curled smoke of regret and sorrow. All are let go. I stand in the water of a dark planet, under the stars and their birthing, in solitude’s long remembering, in an ocean that sways my body with its gathering swells and ebbing, its unhurried reflections, and the caress of sleepless waves. I listen to the distant buoy, and the soft dinging of its bell.
The desire to go on living remains, and I do not want to let it go because my dead wouldn’t want me to, and Ev would want to live, too, if she had the choice. A good life still seems possible, even one that has tattooed me with the emblems of death. And because the joy of living is strong enough to balance the sorrow that the deaths of loved ones bring. Grief has become an old friend who occasionally stops by for tea. I have grown fond of Celtic music with its twining melodies of sorrow and happiness, and I dance with grief in one hand and joy in the other.
In the blue hour of twilight, wild horses graze in the prairies of my heart. Sometimes they gallop in the stillness of night.