Resting with Angels
Natural burials sound romantic, but flinging a shovelful of dirt onto Karen's body was a bridge too far..
I apologize for foisting my dreadful December tale in the merry month of May, but this is the hard work of integration. Staring death in the face is ultimately liberating — or so they say.
DECEMBER 16 – RESTING WITH ANGELS
I dreaded the burial — not the finality but my lack of emotional bandwidth to juggle the moving parts. My friend, Bridget, wisely said, “Karen has been leaning on you for months, even years, and now it’s time to lean on her. She is offering you that.”
Shelly, the Intuitive, underscored, “Karen has been sticking around, guiding you to embrace the subtle worlds.”
I put these together and leaned on Karen as Jacob drove our shrinking family to Honey Creek Woodlands. We planned to gather in a grassy area and drive in a procession along a dirt path through the woods. I watched the mourners arrive and realized that there were no invitations, so every guest would be a surprise — including our yoga teacher, work colleagues, cabin neighbors who drove three hours, two Turkish musicians, and my childhood friends from Chicago. I always believed an invisible thread connects our hearts, but until you face a crisis, you can’t know which hearts are threaded.
The freezing wind whipped mercilessly as I read from Rumi:
“Listen to the story of the reed as it laments the pain of separation — Those ripped away from their beloved know my song.”
After a silence, I invited people to “lean in on Karen’s presence” to underscore that we all need support — even from the other world. I knew that on this day, Karen was running the show.
Years ago, at her Christian ordination, Karen insisted on including rituals from the world’s religions. She had this loving way to stretch the minister’s patience. Finally, after umpteen prayers and songs, he rolled his eyes and remarked, “And now we will invoke the tradition that actually matters today.”
All these religions, all this singing
One song.
Rumi
The ordination loomed in my memory as Cavit, Karen’s Turkish student, chanted the Arabic Call to Prayer. His plaintive notes resonated beyond any musical scale.
Karen’s Buddhist friend, Anahata, next read from Thich Nhat Hanh:
“Our greatest fear is that when we die, we will become nothing. Many of us believe our entire existence is limited to a particular period, our lifespan. We believe it begins when we are born — when, out of being nothing, we become something — and it ends when we die and become nothing again. So, we are filled with a fear of annihilation. But if we look deeply, we can have a very different understanding of our existence. We can see that birth and death are just notions; they’re not real. The Buddha taught that there is no birth and no death. Our belief that these ideas about birth and death are real creates a powerful illusion that causes us a great deal of suffering. When we understand that we can’t be destroyed, we’re liberated from fear. It’s a huge relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.”
I gave an off-the-cuff eulogy, challenging people to learn from the narrative arc of Karen’s story — her unlikely journey from Tennessee girl to Whirling Dervish to chaplain educator, never shying from her growing edge.
My childhood friends huddled with me to recite the Jewish Kaddish. Jane broke the solemnity by announcing, “The three token Jews are here.”
Her brother Rob continued, “I’m not in the printed program, but Bruce and I have been lifelong friends since kindergarten. Our families have been intertwined for decades.”
“I was in a buggy,” Jane butted in. “That's all I remember.”
Rob made a brotherly face and continued. “So again, I didn't crash this. We will attempt to recite the traditional Hebrew prayer recited at all funerals. We will do the best we can with…”
“…what we got,” Jane completed.
Rob finished, “Despite three years of Hebrew school, I cannot pronounce one Hebrew word.”
“Enough with the excuses,” Jane mocked with Yiddish inflection.
“And…if anybody understands Hebrew, please forgive us,” Rob apologized.
“Just do it,” Jane retorted.
After butchering the Kaddish like a Vegas stand-up, we returned to cars and snaked through the woods to the burial site. At the director’s suggestion, I walked alone, maybe 40 steps, one for each year of our lived history. I wish I could convey the shock of rounding the bend and seeing my life partner shrouded in cloth, a saint in a basket adorned with a spray of roses on her heart. The Karen of laughter, stolen kisses, illness, crises, and triumphs lay surrounded by blossoms like a mystic bride.
A natural burial is all about the dirt — a dust-to-dust return to Mother Earth. I knelt down and felt her being — her presence so palpable, I imagined Buñuel calling “Action” and Karen blurting, “Fuck this!” And then the two of us could blow the scene and carry on with our lives.
But that didn’t happen. The earth was ready to receive her. I placed forehead to torso, and then, BOOM — a surge of grace flooded my being. Fully humbled, I knew that Karen was now my teacher, guiding me from the unseen world. What a turn of events.
Cavit chanted the Fatihat:
“In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds...”
We lowered her shrouded body into the shallow excavation while the mourners chanted the Hu in otherworldly harmonies. A lone hawk circled the sky. I felt another surge, so I sneaked off to a golf cart to manage my spill-gate feeling. People saw me disappear to the sidelines but had no clue that I was crushed, like grapes on their journey to wine.
My sons stayed behind to shovel earth onto their mother. Whoa… I’m all for natural burials, but this felt wrong — to desecrate her beautiful body — so I hitched a ride home. Later, my sons reported that only one other family at Honey Creek offered to shovel the final dirt in the last 12 months. The staff was grateful for their full hour of work.
A spread of Middle Eastern food awaited at the house, but most guests had slipped away. They came for Karen, not me. I will have to get used to this.
I have a vivid memory from 1969 at Woodstock when Wavy Gravy, the Merry Prankster impresario, announced to the half million kids in the muddy pasture:
“There’s always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area.”
That night, after the burial, to my utter surprise, I discovered a little bit of heaven — I could cuddle with Karen’s Love and not feel alone.
DECEMBER 18
Don’t get me wrong, I am not immune from grief. I dreaded the loneliness ahead, but for now, the house was alive with family and friends. Harder than the grief was the surreal sense of “Where did she go?” Imagine if the moon suddenly disappeared never to return. More than a gaping hole in the firmament, imagine if our connection to emotions and tides evaporated into negative space.
“Where is she? Where did she go?”
Finality is irreversible. Unlike the digital world of cut-and-paste, undo commands, instant replays, one-click Amazon returns, and AI prestidigitation, finality invokes the hard edge of physics. This sense of finality hit me hard, so I suggested we make Karen’s beloved cranberry relish to provide a little comfort. I had a vague idea of the ingredients but never paid attention. Karen was the relish master. We dug through a file box until Eureka! We found the original handwritten recipe from Karen’s mom emerged from a folder.
“It calls for two cups of sugar,” I read aloud. “I swear we cut it to a half cup.”
“Let me see,” Hillary said, taking the card.
“How much raspberry Jello?” I asked.
“There’s no Jello.” Hillary studied the card again like a forensic cook.
“Whaddya mean, no Jello?” I objected.
“This is Mamaw’s recipe,” Hillary reaffirmed. “I’m telling you, there’s no Jello.”
Suddenly, I felt time and space start to droop like a Dali watch.
“I’m not dreaming this,” I complained. “I can’t tell you how many times I ran to the Kroger for raspberry Jello. I’d be in the aisle, calling, ‘Karen, is it okay to get the Kroger brand?’ You realize I have a visual memory.”
“Yeah, but you can’t remember what Karen put in the relish,” Hillary poked.
Jacob grabbed the card. “I think we should make it exactly like Mamaw’s.” He studied it. “This is like 50 years old.”
The shadow of finality began to darken my heart. The cranberry relish vanished from this world to meet its Maker. More precisely, I would never celebrate the holidays with Karen’s raspberry cranberry relish with orange zest (“Make sure the oranges are organic!” she reminded me). I have the special zesting tool but not the source code. (Or maybe I have it all wrong. She ground the peel in the Cuisinart! Yikes.)
The kids were busy measuring out too much sugar while I contemplated an existential truth: Death sets a boundary of time and space — a finality that cannot be breached.
And then suddenly, everyone started to leave. Julie and Sophia loaded the car to drive back to Asheville, Jacob's soccer buddies left, an Uber picked up my Chicago friends Jainie and Michael, and Melissa and Hillary left for Clemson. In the space of one hour, Karen Fest evaporated to my two guys and the dog. For the first time in two weeks, the house was quiet.
Bone-tired, I climbed into bed and slept nary a wink. The flood of energy overwhelmed my sleeping circuits all night long. Bluntly, our marital bed became a foreboding pyre, a portal to my underworld, and a nightmarish snuggle with my fears, anxiety, and aloneness.
Yesterday, a friend reminded me, "Statistically, the surviving spouse often dies within the year." Thanks for sharing.
But she was right. There was no escaping that everpresent vortex, a siren of descent beckoning like a troll under the bridge.
Castaneda’s Don Juan advised, “Live as if death is just over your left shoulder.”
My only consolation: Karen was hovering to help me get through this.
Epilogue
After posting this chapter, I thought to scan the ill-fated recipe card to include in the story. But it was gone. I dug deeper into the file folders, forced to decide if I was looking for an Appetizer, a Sauce, Miscellaneous, or what?
How about a Salad? And there I found Mamaw’s Cranberr Salad — the original, actual recipe from Rachel Rogers with ground oranges, and RASPBERRY JELLO, and “2 cups sugar — MAYBE MORE!”
My heart sang when I saw the cranberry salad return from the dead. Most importantly, when it comes to FINALITY, nothing is actually FINAL.
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Hi Bonnie,
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. You certainly understand the existential blow to one’s identity that losing a life partner entails.
I wish I could say that you will ride this through and come to a better place, but each person’s journey is so unique. It helped me to embrace the entire narrative arc of my life story and to use the grief journey to build another chapter. I’m impatient and an extrovert, so I’ve been extremely frustrated, but 1.5 years in, I can also say that from the perspective of soul growth, the unfolding has been perfect.
Hang in there, use every encounter as an opportunity for connection, and follow your heart. Bruce.
Thank you for this. I'm navigating these paths, three months now, and desperately afraid. Listening to Madredeus, Tim Buckley, Bruce Cockburn, both afraid and unable to accept the finality. It's as if I could WILL him back. But I can not. Nor can I accept. I haven't reached that point. Every day is harder. I don't know when or if that will reverse. Thank you for writing these missives, epistles, whatever they are. I think of all the supposed truisms about the heart - the heart is a lonely hunter; the heart is deceitful above all things; the heart, the heart. Thank you, Bonnie, under a different name on the TM Facebook boards.