The Chapter of Karen is Over

To know you’re loved in this lifetime is a launching pad into eternal love.

January 9: Turning the Page

“You've completed everything you could for her,” Bhagwan explained by phone from India. “Now you have to turn the page and let that be; let that go. It's over. The chapter of Karen is over.”

This wasn't the message I expected. I hoped for some solace and a dash of meaning. Four weeks into the grieving process, I wasn’t ready to flip that switch.

I learned to take Bhagwan’s words to heart because nine years ago, while Karen was undergoing brain surgery, I sent a fearful message to India. Despite his flip phone and the creaky connection, Bhagwan managed to peck out the words:

“Tell Karen everything will be okay.”

I sat utterly alone, awaiting the results in the late-night hospital lobby, leaning on every word, every syllable, praying that Karen and I would have a future.

Fast forward nine miraculous years. I emailed Bhagwan a complete rundown of Karen’s medical saga. Bhagwan’s words came back:

 Thanks for the update.

  What great suffering.

  I hope she recovers fast.

  Wishing her all the best & speedy recovery

  Love from Maya & Bhagwan

Hmm. The lack of conviction did not go unnoticed.

Two days before Karen died…

I called Bhagwan again and placed the phone next to her ear. “Karen, it’s Bhagwan. Can you hear him?

“I feel Bhagwan in my heart,” Karen whispered sweetly, using some of her last words on this earth.

Four weeks later, I called India again. Bhagwan told me straight up:

“So now that she's gone and all the ceremonies are over, your children have left, and now you are in an empty house alone. Now, your work is to find yourself. There's nothing more you can do for Karen. You've done the limit to everything. You've completed everything that you could for her. Now you must turn the page and let that be, let that go. It's over. The chapter of Karen is over.”

I’m a writer, so I see life in chapters. Sometimes, you don’t want a chapter to end, especially as the messages poured in:

“We have a candle lit for her.” “I hold her in my prayers.” “ I am forever indebted to Karen.” And from her colleagues at work, “We would like to plan a time of honoring and celebrating Karen in March and to dedicate her office with a plaque to carry her name forward.”

I wasn’t so clear about a Karen plaque. Every stretch of highway in Georgia is named for some local Bubba. My favorite is the section of I-285 named for the Southern Baptist leader who promised to resign if he ever divorced — until he didn’t.

Someday, I can take the grandkids to the Rev. Karen S. Miller Memorial Chaplain Office, which is confusingly adorned with Islamic calligraphy and dervishes.

Death shoves you into a weird time lag as people process their grief at different stages in the timeline. When I called Karen’s broker, the church people, or placed my order with the Mexican waiter (who served shrimp fajitas to us for seven years), I always had to explain Karen’s absence, process their shock, and absorb their grief.

I was told it takes a year to move through the big chunks of grief, while the deeper parts might haunt me forever. I’m naturally impatient, plus an obligatory year seemed like a luxury at my age. Hoping to get ahead of the game, I tackled it head-on by “actively engaging” grief.

When I shared this strategy, my friends rolled their eyes at my self-deception. “Just wait,” they warned.

Bhagwan continued:

“I can tell you that the purpose of this situation is now to focus on finding yourself and being content and complete in yourself.”

“How can I feel complete in myself?” I complained, stating the obvious.

“No, no, you, no, you don't. But that's the goal. That's the work to be done. You can't feel complete now because this thing has just happened. But, as you begin to let go and find your inner direction, you'll find this completeness and this perfection.”

“Bhagwan, that seems possible. When I watched Karen go through the layers  of pain, regret, anguish, and everything else, I also found myself going through a transformation.”

Bhagwan became gentle. “There was transformation in your work with her for sure. There was an education; there was devotion; there was love. And it was a transformative process serving her. And, as you said, she is still with you.”

“Okay.”

“She can be with you forever, but not in body and mind, not in thought. If you have a thought of her, then she's not with you. She's separate from you if you have a thought. But if you don't have a thought of her and you find yourself, you'll find she's there too.”

“Bhagwan, the first several nights, being alone in bed were difficult. I couldn't sleep.”

“I can imagine,” Bhagwan said gently.

“And when I realized that she was still with me, everything changed. It wasn't in a thought. I was feeling her radiance.”

“Exactly,” Bhagwan said. “Her radiance can always be with you, but not in thought.”

“Hmm.”

“The moment you think of her, have a longing, or try to recollect memories, the radiance is gone. But if you let go, the radiance might still be felt.”

“That’s profound.”

“It's profound,” Bhagwan continued. “But the fact remains — everyone comes to this earth alone. And will leave alone.”

I felt my aloneness as we sat in silence. Until now, death seemed abstract or the focus of a spiritual mission. But now I was alone and would be leaving this world alone.

---

January 13 — The Chapter of Karen is Open

“So what is it?” Amy pressed. “You miss that pat on the butt while you’re cooking?”

This was the emotional support I could do without.

“Amy, I don’t do single. I find it… uhm.” I struggled to share the intense gravity of my state but couldn’t find the word. “I find it… boring.”

Let’s pause. Boring? I’m a writer, but I couldn’t find the right word: existential funk, perplexity, despair? The poet Robert Bly used the Greek word katabasis, meaning a sudden fall from grace, extreme reversal of fortune, or a descent into the underworld.

Katabasis

Katabasis was the perfect word because Amy literally called me at my lowest point. I was in the subterranean Walmart parking garage buying paint supplies at 10 p.m. to remove the loathsome bordello red from our marital bedroom. Do you remember faux treatments like sponging and ragging off? Yes, that. I can’t remember if Karen chose the color to spice up our sex life or mimic something she saw on a home tour. After 30 years of red, I hoped to shift my fortunes with greige.

I kept the engine running while I talked to Amy, which meant a stream of pallid late-night shoppers kept peering into the car. “Go away,” I gestured. “Can’t you see I’m in katabasis?”

“Amy, ninety-five percent of the people I know who divorced or lost a spouse are still single. So, my chances don’t look great!”

“What do you expect?” Amy countered. “The five percent you wish to join end up seeing me for couples therapy.”

“Thanks for calling,” I grimaced, hoping to end the descent.

I thought to myself: Katabasis? How about limbo? I was in a free-floating limbo — at the mercy of the universe. Maybe I could Limbo Rock under the cover of grief and catapult back to my feet.

Earlier that day, my friend Jill called to go on a dog walk. Jill is among the miraculous five percent who found love and happiness after unplanned singlehood.

Miko asked to be included in this chapter. Shameless self-promotion.

“My friends suggested I create a ‘Man List,’” Jill explained, “a list of attributes I sought in a partner. My initial instinct was, ‘Are you crazy?’ But when I got home, I realized I’M DEFINITELY CREATING A MAN LIST!! And that’s what happened. We met. He’s romantic, musical, intimate, cooks for me, likes deep conversation – everything on the list, except I didn’t want to be taller than him.”

“That’s a long list,” I said, astonished. “My list would have just one item.”

“What’s that?”

“To feel deeply connected.”

Jill seemed surprised that one item could cover all the bases.

“Karen and I met on a blind date. She matched nothing on my list, but I found her residing in my heart.”

“That’s so beautiful,” Jill gushed.

We paused for a dog poop.

“I’ve always bragged that we found an unlikely but perfect match,” I continued as I tied up Miko’s business. “Karen’s sun is in Scorpio and moon in Sag, and I’m the mirror opposite — sun in Sagittarius and moon in Scorpio. We fit hand-in-glove — like having the right plug in a European hotel. But I gotta give up this idea of finding a replacement part.”

Jill looked at me quizzically. “A plug?”

This plug bit was a huge revelation for my thick brain. Grief is about loss — abandoning the attempt to fill the hole. But I will never find that particular Sag/Scorpio plug—nor should I want to.

This takes me to the sticky wicket: Is the chapter of Karen, as Bhagwan suggested, indeed CLOSED?

Marybeth wrote: “I am skeptical of embracing the end of the chapter; it seems like some level of discounting."

Shana wrote: "I agree with Marybeth: Embracing the end of the chapter seems premature. Why? Why not let it evolve naturally as you interact with the world, with yourself, and with Karen's spirit? What is the value in declaring something so integral to your life for so many years to be "closed"?

My friend Elizabeth sent me a talk by author and shaman Martín Prechtel. He connects grief with praise – and specifically praise of the spirits:

“What is [this grief?],” Prechtel asks. “It's a form of praise of life because it means you miss it. If you don't love the thing you lost, what use is it? You gotta love the thing you lost. Just like you gotta love the thing you got. Grieving for the thing you got is praise, and praising for the thing you lost is called grief.”

So, maybe the Rev. Karen S. Miller Memorial Office is not such a bad idea. We can all visit and praise her spirit. The question is not whether the chapter is open or closed but whether I can have a relationship with Karen (in some immaterial form), or is that just in my mind?

Nothing happens by chance. Love is Stronger than Death by Cynthia Bourgeault appeared on my iPad this week, a Kindle gift from my friend Sarah. Bourgeault faced a similar question when she became romantically and erotically (yet platonically) involved with a Trappist hermit monk named Rafe after he died. From the book review:

Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault was a 50-year-old priest when she met her soul mate, a hermit named Brother Raphael Robin (Rafe). They had only three years on earth together before Rafe died suddenly of a heart attack. Weeping outdoors on a snowy night, she felt certain that Rafe's spirit was beside her. "Although I was still crying, the emotional sting started to lose its force, and a new and tingling presence began to work its way up in me, literally starting from the tips of my toes," she recalls. "I knew in that moment I was sustained by an invisible and intensely joyous partner."

Bourgeault DID NOT CLOSE THE CHAPTER and continued her love affair — a conviction that grew stronger as the months passed and her grief did not diminish.

Cynthia’s teacher and spiritual partner, Rafe.

Cynthia Bourgeault

I don’t discount Bourgeault’s tingles (safe sex in the monastic sense). The more interesting question has to do with the necessity of sexual consummation for a soul to be complete — even between a female priest and a dead hermit monk. (I bet you didn’t expect to start in the Walmart garage and end here.)

Bourgeault is a Christian mystic with Fourth Way leanings. She backs up the tingling presence from the hereafter by quoting German Christian mystic Jakob Böhme:

“If during the time of bodily life,” Böhme writes, “the soul has earnestly pledged itself to another and has not forsworn that promise, then the pledge itself [like a wedding vow] comprehends it. Otherwise, that soul stands in its own principle, whether it be the kingdom of hell or heaven.”

In other words, a solemn vow between beloveds is like a down payment in eternal love. Bourgeault calls it “a matrix in which their love can continue to grow after one has died and which forestalls the inevitable encounter with heaven or hell.”

To know you’re loved in this lifetime is a launching pad into eternal love. I prefer the more prosaic statement of  Alan Arkin in the The Kominsky Method. After Arkin loses his wife, Eileen, to cancer, Arkin continues to seek her counsel as though she never left. At the funeral, Arkin addresses Eileen directly:

“I honestly don’t know how I will carry on without you, but I will because you told me to in no uncertain terms.”

Susan Sullivan and Alan Arkin in the Kominsky Method

Eileen did not tell her surviving husband, “No hanky-panky after I’m gone.” She told Arkin to get on with the business of living.

In the 1970s, Gloria Steinem popularized the feminist slogan, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Is there also a cynical logic to support the reverse, meaning Amy is right? Get over this need for an occasional tap on the butt while cooking.

One of the most misunderstood words is “muse,” defined as “a person, or an imaginary being or force that gives someone ideas and helps them to write, paint, or make music.”

The most famous of all muses was Françoise Gilot, 40 years younger than Picasso and an artist in her own right. Picasso called Gilot “the woman who says no,” According to the New Yorker, “their courtship was a playful battle for dominance.” More than a pat on the butt, she established herself by firing her soul in the alchemical kiln of Picasso’s artistic temperament.

“Pablo had told me, that first afternoon I visited him alone, in February 1944, that he felt our relationship would bring light into both our lives. My coming to him, he said, seemed like a window that was opening up and he wanted it to remain open. I did, too, as long as it let in the light. When it no longer did, I closed it, much against my own desire. From that moment on, he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful for him for that.” — Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

Françoise Gilot and Picasso

After ten years and two children with Picasso, Gilot left him on her own accord and married Dr. Jonas Salk, who saved the world from polio. You go girl!

Muse rhymes with fuse, and a fusion reactor makes more energy than what goes into it. Reshad called this “the alchemical marriage,” and even though he couldn’t remain in the reactor beyond four short stints of matrimony, he understood it conceptually and dragged a succession of muses to Maui to help spawn his books.

My philosophic mentor, J.G. Bennett had one less marriage than Reshad. In his book, “Sex,” Bennett described how the fusion process grows a soul (rewritten gender neutral):

“The fusion of natures [in the union of wills of a man and woman] is a new creation. It is the true soul of man and woman through which they can fulfill their destinies and become free of the conditions of perishing in time and space.” “The normal formation of the human soul is through the union of the sexes.”

According to Bennett, a spiritual practice can take you only so far because without such a union, “we remain incomplete beings.”

Provocative, yes? But how does Gilot, a 21-year-old artist sitting alone in a Left Bank restaurant, rise into the pantheon of the gods without a “fusion of natures?”

My favorite line from the New Yorker article:

“A friend warned [Gilot] that she was headed for catastrophe.” Gilot recollected: “I told her she was probably right, but I felt it was the kind of catastrophe I didn’t want to avoid.”

If you study nuclear fusion, in a chance catastrophe, hydrogen particles in the Sun collide and fuse under enormous heat and pressure to power all Life.

After the chapter of Karen was over, I suddenly faced unexpected choices – and no choices: 1) I could hope for disembodied tingles from my beloved Karen. 2) I could chuck this fantasy like a fish wanting a bicycle, or 3) go all in, like Gilot, and head for catastrophe — never boring.

A man needs a muse to build a soul – one like Gilot, one who knows to say no

     -----

I leave you with Françoise Gilot’s 1946 work, painted three years after meeting Picasso: “Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple.”

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