Writings

It is said that you never really know a person until you live with them or work with them. Yes, there are special exceptions, particularly in the encounters that constellate true recollection, but in general, I have found this adage to hold real insight. Publishing and traveling together surely fall into a unique zone. They accelerate and encapsulate much that might otherwise only unfold in the vessel of marriage or during the mantle of employment. Christopher and I had visited one another in our respective homes, and loved one another, to be sure, but we were not partners or each other’s spouse, nor were we fellow employees. We shouldered a mystical project and wanted to have it enter the world while the mystic herself was still alive. That being said, our ideals and choices around Joa ultimately precipitated several pearls, allowing us to share some of the most intimate, paradoxical, unexpected and transformative experiences of adulthood.

Our trip abroad began in a deeply feminine way. We stopped in London to visit the poet Kathleen Raine in the privacy of her home, then went to Zurich to be with Joa, after which we had planned to go to Italy, land of Ficino and resting place of Pythagoras, princes whom each of us revered.

Even though she was our elder, Joa was vigorous, energetic and clear. A female lighthouse! Although private, she spoke movingly about the ways the death of her own son had precipitated her initiation by sorrow and served her cultivation of a much deeper praxis of prayer. On our fourth morning in Zurich, the phone rang to deliver the news that a very dear Montana friend had died of a virulent metastatic cancer. Cherri Newton had been one of the first of the music-thanatology students from the Denver years and after relocating in 1992, she completed the music-thanatology program in Missoula. Of all the students whom I’ve ever had the privilege of mentoring, she was the one most fiercely and radically dedicated to Beauty as a Transcendental. Sometimes we called her our Beauty Cop, for she would say with disarming candor and earnestness that something or other about what we may have done or failed to do or something she or her peers, the student interns, had done that particular day hadn’t been truly beautiful. She inhabited high standards, but of a bold and loving goodness, not metrics or optics.

Cherri’s death was deeply anticipated, so much so that the two of us had said our goodbyes before I left for the airport, but still, the news of her transitus went straight to my heart. None of the four of us (Joa, Christopher, Cherri or I) saw death as an end, but rather as change, metamorphosis, but still, Cherri’s passing was a very strong event. Now Cherri knew and loved Joa’s visionlieder, so she understood why I was leaving for Switzerland, and asked me to bring one very personal and deep question to Joa on her behalf. Before she finished her life in the form known and loved by so many, Cherri gifted me with some of her most beloved books, pointedly, saying how I would need them. The two of us made one another a solemn promise about Chalice, about various possible life choices, and about signs to come. Even so, adjusting to the new terrain without our Beauty Cop would take time. I was able to bring her question to Joa, and Joa, Chris and I offered the reply to her spiritually, in prayer.

Christopher and I worked together with Joa in Zurich for a few more days, and after saying goodbye to her—a second poignant and powerful farewell in a short corridor of time—Chris and I flew from Switzerland to Italy and then drove to Tuscany in a little rented Citroen. We had been carrying some vague idea that time off the clock would be restorative. No doubt it usually is, but these were not “usual” days. I was still very raw from loss, and Chris was still getting new sea legs. Suddenly cut off from the press of non-negotiable deadlines and phone calls for the first time in years, you might imagine things playing out like a Hollywood movie: sweet, lyrical and golden. But that’s not what happened.

When you’ve gone a long time without a break, and then get one or make time for one, you discover various weights and barnacles in both body and in soul. It’s possible to be numb to yourself from having been so dependable for and accountable to many others. For two grieving individuals, each of whom had recently lost their beloveds, each loss a major part of a shared life, further intensified by the loss of a dear friend, “down time” was at that particular intersection foreign if not wholly alien, unknown, rocky and strange.

To land in apparent spaciousness amidst the natural beauty and powerful history of Tuscany triggered in each of us a reversal. This is what good medicine does, and it is referred to as the healing crisis. You appear to become worse before becoming better and in becoming better you become new. But it is messy. Reality disclosed exhaustion and some form of numbness in each of us, at which point, the floodgates so long held in check cracked and opened. Christopher and I stayed in different parts of the villa when the matter broke through, sometimes in the privacy of our rooms, sometimes hidden in the heavily treed growth of the immediate hillside. I am ashamed to admit that there were a few hours when that green hillside echoed with our strange cries and tears.

If allowed to run its healing course, full-body grief is noisy and elemental, even though it emerges in private and may last only a day. Years are concentrated into hours. It is either spouse or first cousin to keening, and like the Irish caointeoireacht, if it is genuine, this sounding begins in silence and solitude, and like a natural spring, emerges, gurgles up, and gradually frees a content once buried in the utmost depths of the human body and memory: blood, bone, muscle, tissue, skin, heart and more. They all sound. Keening also alters time, while bringing past, present and future together into a unified whole.

The sounding disinters unique biographical content, allows it to rise to the surface, where it is perceived and then (especially for the Irish) freely offered in thanksgiving to the Mother of Our Lord, to the communion of saints and to the earth and the sky. Sometimes but not always it is clothed in exquisite melody. When melodic, the sounding can constellate a saeta or sound arrow, sailing far into the cosmos, almost always activating purgation and catharsis in the one risking the healing process, while providing something akin to thanksgiving to the human and angelic spiritual beings populating worlds seen and unseen.

This kind of healing crisis is not to be confused with any phenomena of depression, even clinical depression, nor the performative elements of wailing, social drama, death-bed vigils, memorial services nor funerary processions. These latter are all precious expressions of community rites of transition, but the sacrificial nature of a genuine keening saeta and its relationship to the holy eucharist suggests grieving of a different order.

Unlike the celebration of the mass, seminal keening cannot be scheduled in advance, or announced in a parish bulletin. In a trinity of stages hidden from view, keening discloses the sacred which can only be transmitted, received, and then freely unbound, given away, for the good of all. Until recently, the melodies of keening remained central to the sean nos oral tradition with good reason. Passed from singer to singer, individually, mystical and spiritual-medicinal possibilities required exchange from master to pupil but avoided coin.

Weeping and pacing, or sitting still as a stone, sometimes hiding sheepishly from one another and then apologizing for the exteriorization of pain, neither one of us had seen such lumpy messiness and confusion coming in advance. But it came, to paraphrase Jung, called or uncalled. Chris had been stoic yet even when most nervous, surprised by his own fragility, he was always kind. My grief made Chris weep, too, first for his wife, then for himself, but he was also beside himself in helplessness for me. His compassionate nature allowed him to want to help or fix or do something, anything, which tended to push his own experience of loss underground. Two gimpy people realized that the assignment was, at this point, to simply get out of the way and allow tears to support entrée into the unknown. Any pre-fab ideas people might have gleaned from the movies where the man and woman cook together, share a bottle of wine or bask in the golden days of a Tuscan autumn were obliterated in snot.

The woman from whom we rented the little villa had seen us both swollen and tear stained, and she had the wisdom and love to approach us tenderly. Talk about compassionate courage! She sat down and asked us about what we were going through, so we told her. She listened intently, and then said something that took us by surprise. She asked about our ancestry and origins. Quite sensitive to World War II, she asked pointedly about where each of our fathers had been born. She didn’t ask about our mothers. From whence have you come? You’ve both lost terra firma. You have no solid ground now. Perhaps it will help to retrace your father’s steps in order to enter a rebirth, in order to re-enter the remainder of your lives in new and living ways.

When she heard about my father being from Malta, she lit up and said: That’s it! Rome has many daily fights to Malta, more like a shuttle bus than a flight, you don’t even need reservations, and the tickets are inexpensive. Since it is so close, why don’t you go to your father’s birthplace and retrace your beginnings? Chris and I were speechless and soggy and knew we were in the presence of yet another wise woman. However vulnerable we were, the next morning found us leaving her villa and driving to Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. If the roads of the Tuscan hillsides are achingly beautiful, and the Mediterranean coastline dreamy, it’s not unfair to describe driving in Rome as a feverish gauntlet. Much of the rural drive was quiet, though each of us blew our noses frequently, and Chris drove as I attempted to relay the directions our friend had provided for us.

Several hours later as we approached the airport, the traffic became increasingly chaotic, noisy and aggressive. We were going south on A12, and needed to turn west on A91. As if marauding giants descended into a valley and targeted the two in mourning, we were suddenly surrounded by a roaring convoy of semi-trailer trucks. The forty-ton, two sectioned, 80 foot, 18 wheeler kind. To our immediate right, left, front and rear, we in our tiny Citroen were locked in place between four moving walls, not unlike like a defeathered bird dodging teeth-baring apocalyptic giants. Unable to do anything but continue to move east full speed ahead with them though trapped between their ramparts, I don’t remember either of us breathing. We couldn’t see anything but metal walls. This was a white-knuckle ten mile stretch if ever there was one. It didn’t even accommodate the release of a few good swear words, as the neon visions of catastrophe by failed brake were visceral. Chris must have lost ten pounds in a few moments, but he held the field.

At the first opportunity, we exited the highway only because the convoy movement allowed it. Mind you: no choice had been made. We were locked in survival response and moving with the flow of a massive current making its way around a large bend. We were not two people confidently heading toward a specific destination. No, we were two shaken and shaking creatures, thankfully no longer pinned in and blinded by the wall of trucks. We clung to our first measure of newly won safety and assumed we were somehow in Rome proper or perhaps its outskirts, the urban sprawl. Never having had an intention to go to Rome that day, we had not purchased a city map and resorted to an ad hoc guessing game with the signage. We hadn’t even resumed speaking with one another.

The streets were busy, overflowing with people, many of whom seemed to be wearing colorful costumes. There wasn’t a parking spot to be seen as we passed stores, bistros, restaurants and hotels. Exhausted and spent, there was little to do but keep moving forward. But wait a minute.