Bliss

Life: The Movie January 16, 2010


Pictures move before our eyes,

Dwarfing us –

Monster magnets drawing us

Into Intensity, adventure,

Thrilling heartsongs of all modes and keys.

We step into the picture,

Two dimensions turning multiple.

We are the actors and the story;

Our hearts and minds enlarge

With passion and with joy

Till we unite with all that is,

Dissolve in bliss --

Become pure ecstasy

And love.

Reflections:

Although we live in our own movie, we do not control how the plot develops. Our story lives us. We move forward in time, like a ribbon of polymer imprinted with pictures. Every moment contains surprises -- pains, fears, and delights. Each moment presents us with gifts of learning and growing to unwrap and savor – new insights, new dimensions, new awareness of what it means to be a “spiritual being having a human experience” -- new ways in which body and soul together teach us about God and love. Each moment brings us closer to the movie’s end – our return to life in spirit – when we leave the earth theatre. May we, at that point, leave our bodies as tools that have served us well in growing as souls – growing in awareness, kindness, and the knowledge of true happiness, as we help each other become the best we are capable of being.

Ellen Big "C" Part II

Ellen: Reflections:


Why does the thought “cancer” squeeze my heart in terror? I know that I have metastatic breast cancer and that if I do not die of something else I'll die of it. I try to keep in my consciousness the burning shimmering truth that we must all die of something.
Ellen Scheiner 2007


"Shortly after I finished chemotherapy, I had a kind of epiphany. I have been studying meditation with a Buddhist trained teacher for some years and have been meditating for 17 years. One day I realized that I would die. Not necessarily of cancer, but of something- since we all will die. My experience as a physician and my meditation training have removed a great deal of fear about dying. When I had this experience, I realized in the most visceral sense, that there was nothing that I could count on and that nothing was permanent. For several weeks I was in a state of free fall. I knew in the deepest sense that all of our plans are tentative. Sometimes we make them to fill the future to assure ourselves that we will still be here then. Gradually I felt more and more freedom. I began to differentiate between made up plans and real goals-those acts which truly are right for me. What a release that was! Many cerebrally concocted schemes fell by the wayside. I began to live more and more in the now and to treat each breath as precious. My meditation training had taught me that each birth ultimately results in a death, and so the end of my life as I know it seems less important. I now strive to live. When I make a toast I now drink to aliveness, not to health, which is quite slippery. Having stared into the abyss I am no longer afraid of looking at anything. I know on the deepest level that I do not know what will happen and that I never did know."
Ellen Scheiner, shared by Musa Mayer, NYC


Rosemary: Reflections:

What you refer to, Ellen -- the confrontation with our inevitable mortality, is certainly one of the elements in the fear that grips the patient and also those who love her or him when a diagnosis of cancer is handed down. But we do finally accept that we will die, sooner or later if not right now, and know that this is the natural order.

Personally, however, I found it very hard to reach that point as we lived with your cancer throughout our relationship. It was only after your death that I realized death is not fearsome – that it is a joyous homecoming for the soul, despite the sadness experienced by those who remain in this life.

I remember your routine physical in July 2002. We received the blood test report online from your new California oncologist, and printed it out. I remember standing in the kitchen at the moveable island, the setting sun painting the room pink, poring over the report. Everything looked great – normal-normal-normal-normal. Then we came to this one value that was slightly elevated – 38, with a normal value up to 32. Generally, a slightly elevated value on a lab test report isn’t a big deal. Everyone occasionally blips outside normal ranges on something, sooner or later. But what WAS this? CA15-3? I’d never heard of it. You shrugged your shoulders. Looking back, I suspect you knew – although it was a different blood marker than the one your old oncologist in New York had used since your cancer diagnosis in 1992, ten years before. It was too late to call the doctor that day to get an explanation. The next morning, we called. It was a marker for metastatic breast cancer, saying that the cancer had returned, and was now metastatic.

We were devastated. We stood there, in shock, looking at each other. My mind was in a flurry. In three weeks, we were about to celebrate our commitment ceremony. Everything was arranged – over 100 people were coming from all over the country, the caterer and minister were finalized; your nephew and niece from Albuquerque were set to photograph the event, and we’d chosen the beverages, the cost of which your former practice partner at Sloan- Kettering had bequeathed to us as a parting gift. She had just died from the side-effects of treatment for her own metastatic breast cancer. We were all set for a glorious celebration, complete with everyone dancing Hava Nagila at the end, accompanied by the Irish musicians from the corner pub and by my daughter, who was playing her fiddle for the great occasion.

We decided to go forth with the celebration. We told no one what we had just learned. We felt fogged in by uncertainty. What was going to happen? In 2002, the hormonal drugs for metastatic cancer were still in clinical trials, and the only treatment available was harsh chemotherapy, which promised no assurance of cure or even remission. You had already come close to death on several occasions during your original chemotherapy – a severe protocol designed to test how close patients could be brought to dying from treatment, and whether that would offer any better success rate in killing the cancer cells. You had already decided you were not going to go through chemotherapy again, after that experience. You had no reserves left. You felt drained and aged by that first round of treatment.

We did institute treatment with classical homeopathic remedies. I was still an advanced homeopathy student, just starting out in practice, and since helping cancer patients had been my motivation for becoming a trained homeopath, my graduate instructor was the acknowledged world expert in treating cancer homeopathically. He mentored me as, together, we treated you homeopathically. Your cancer grew and spread slowly, but since we weren’t aware of the ways lobular breast cancer (the kind you had) spread differently than ductal breast cancer, we didn’t recognize the symptoms – nor did anyone else. You basically did well, and were able to continue living normally and to remain engaged in life till late 2005 and early 2006 – already longer than the mean survival time in 2002 of 2.5 years from diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer.

Dancing “La Guillonnee,” Ellen, Officiant Harriett, Rosemary, Commitment Ceremony, August 31, 2002, Berkeley CA

The Other Shoe January 12 2010

It felt like waiting for the “other shoe” to drop

Upon our heads.

We lived in darkness, not knowing what you’d feel

Or how the cancer would become apparent.

We watched the cancer marker numbers climb, inexorable,

Month by month – from 32 when we began

To 800 and still rising, when we stopped that vigil.

It was just too agonizing –

It felt like counting up for some unknown, explosive “Blast-off.”

Though absolutely no one knew the meaning of those numbers,

They didn’t feel good.

We tried imagining what might be going to happen.

We learned futility in looking to the future

When trying to find answers.

All we can know is here -- now – present:

The aching of uncertainty in sorrow’s waiting room.

Big "C"

It Takes a Village January 11 2010


Today, I’ve spent time twice with people meeting to support community.

We know we need each other –

That, alone, we stumble weakly, wander wearily,

Starved of love and touch and caring.



We need a village –

Minds that work together,

Hearts that synchronize,

Hands reached out in loving help.

We belong together.

We like to think we’re independent, proudly standing up alone.

In fact, we’re each a part of all, deeply linked.

The human unit is a group – not a frail, lonely person.



Reflections:

Rosemary: I just got off the phone with my sister, who told me she’s been diagnosed this past week with breast cancer. The “Big C.” It really does have a weight – an urgency and power -- far beyond any other diagnosis. She’s terrified, understandably. She’s an experienced, well educated nurse. She knows the vital questions, the assorted risks. She’s well aware that for as long as she lives, this will hang over her head with every blip in her health – is it the cancer?

Ellen: When I was initially diagnosed with my cancer, it was as if I had been sitting with others at a table, and then, instantaneously, I was on the other side, at the other end, alone. I was no longer a part of the community of others, no longer with them. I was in a bubble -- marked, singled out, condemned.

Rosemary: It’s hard for me to believe this is real – and I’m not even the one who received the diagnosis. Already, though, it is as if “the other shoe” has dropped. I’ve been very mindful that Grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer in her late 60s. I’ve wondered if any of us – our generation – would also suffer this illness. They always say the risk rises if other “first degree” relatives have had the disease. Grandma was not a first degree relative, genetically – just in our minds and hearts. But my sister is a first degree relative to me. One of us being diagnosed with breast cancer means that the risk for all of us is higher than we had thought – especially since one of our first cousins, also in the same family line, has already been diagnosed and died from the disease. We were 10 grandchildren, and now two have turned out to have that form of cancer.

Ellen: Today, though, breast cancer caught fairly early can be put into long-term remission, and can also be managed as a chronic disease if it returns.

Rosemary: I know that’s true. I tried to reassure her with those facts. But I know that she’s still in that place of terror, where she feels like a deer caught in headlights, where her whole life prospect has changed in a millisecond. As she goes through treatment, she’ll begin to realize that she’s strong, and that she’s dealing with the stress, and isn’t threatened with immediate death. For her, the present moment will return, and will again be able to exert its considerable power. Thank God that we have that resilience in ourselves, that ability to adapt and to find our inner strength. I think that a big part of the terror we feel with a cancer diagnosis is that we temporarily lose our ability to stay in the present. We move totally to the future, to “what will happen to me?”

Ellen: A diagnosis of cancer often brings an immediately helpless feeling. That feeling leads to the term “cancer victim.” “Victim” implies that one indeed has no power to change one’s destiny. It always made me furious when I heard that phrase, “cancer victim.” Although I had cancer, I was not its victim. It was not an outside attacker. It was my own body expressing its physical vulnerability, becoming overwhelmed. It was a part of myself, and I felt it crucial to make peace with that aspect of me, to bring myself into one harmonious expression. Susan will regain her balance. She is a strong woman.

Rosemary: Cancer seems everywhere. So many people in my life have sickened with it, and it has brought death to quite a few. I often feel it surrounds me. It affects everyone’s life multiple times. Susan and two of my friends have recently been diagnosed and my brother-in-law is in the final stages of dying from it. Grandma, Dad, my cousin Laura, my cousin Tom, and Fred – not to mention animal friends I’ve had, have all died of cancer. Many other friends, of course, have had cancer and survived. It's a change in life's course, but of itself, it predicts nothing.

 Of course, in my work as a homeopath, I also spend a lot of time and energy helping people with cancer and people whose relatives and dear friends have cancer.

Ellen, all during your and my life together, cancer hung over our head, menacing us with your imminent death. We talked about this often, trying ineffectually to prepare ourselves for what we knew would be a deeply sad and disturbing moment. Of course, I ultimately learned that trying to prepare is futile. There’s no way we can predict what will happen. Imagining many different scenarios and rehearsing them - as I did --  only keeps attention on a negative future that probably will never happen as we imagine and fear.

The important thing is to live each present moment fully, as a gift that life has handed to us. Each blessed present moment lights itself and us. It is glorious. It is enough. Susan is a strong woman in excellent health. She is whole and her life is in perfect order. That’s the truth as it is right now, and as we can affirm in each moment as it arrives. There is a healthy Susan present in the universe right now. We need to switch to seeing the truth of her.


WHITE STONES, JANUARY 3 2009

Three years ago, first of the year,

At a church in Berkeley,

Everyone chose a white stone

And inscribed on it one word,

Our hope for 2006.

I wrote “Joy.” I wanted to be more open, to feel blessed,

To stop fearing your cancer’s growth,

To staunch my anger at confines of disability --

To answer grace with thanks.

You wrote “Is.” You resolved to be present in the Now and

Accept its gifts -- to find its bliss.

We were already pilgrims seeking peace together, come what may,

Sharing the rough road of illness, walking wearily, leaning on each other.


Housebound with your pain and suffering, we never got to church again.


Tomorrow, alone, I will write another word on another stone,

Expressing my dream for the year to come,

Holding your memory gently in my heart.



CAREGIVING WITH CANCER January 18, 2009

My friend wrote about caregiving

Before her husband’s father died of cancer.

How she’d seen the cancer as the enemy, the captor.

How she’d felt imprisoned by its whims,

Its power to destroy.

How she’d felt helpless.



Her words brought back to me those years

In which we sought aliveness

Even when your cancer ruled.

Dictator, Cancer bowed us down in weariness and fear,

Caged us in the house, inflicted pain capriciously.

We fled before its wrath like refugees, afraid.

I remember weeping with a counselor, and she,

Unaware of how we shared this road, scolding me

For “acting as if I was the one with cancer.”

I’m glad the cancer is now gone,

But even in its frightful, icy grasp,

I treasured every moment spent with you.

Playing

Playtime January 9 2010


Fun. Doing something just because we want to.

Laughing. Acting silly. Enjoying.

Being and becoming, fully present in the moment.

Time’s curtain parts and lets us float along

As in eternity – our spirit’s native land.

To play, we must let go –

Open to what is,

Soar untethered into joy.


Reflection

A day of play brings such joy to my heart. I've been getting clear messages in the last few months that it's my time to learn playfulness, fun.  How strange to experience this, after a lifetime of responsibility, of serious earnestness, of struggling to be on time and do things right in the eyes of others.  What a gift! Didn't I play as a child? Of course I did, to some extent.  But I was responsible, the oldest of five, and a girl. It was my job to help make sure that the house got cleaned, meals cooked, clothes laundered, faces and hands washed, teeth brushed, bedtimes observed, children dressed, washed, fed, and out the door on time for school, even as I went to school myself.  School was a relief.  I only had to be a student.

Today, I played, with my best friend.  I had fun, laughed, giggled, didn't worry about the time or what chores I was supposed to do.  I was in the beautiful present moment -- delighted. I loved and felt loved, cared and felt cared for. We could have been smiling cherubs, flitting through blue skies fluttering our adorable wings

Is this not a little taste of Heaven, a promise of how joy and light are possible?        

Wedding cake

Winter Scene January 6 2010


A surprise – a fountain that’s been left to run

Despite the winter cold.

Its graceful, slender plume of water

Flows exuberantly up and cascades down –

As icicles preserve the water’s dance;

The ice has mounded up;

The tiered fountain now reminds me of

A tall and sparkling wedding cake –

The tiny accumulated crystals like

The layer upon layer of caring

That build a couple’s love

Moment by glistening moment --

Molecular uniting.



Reflection:

What builds love and makes relationship possible? It’s definitely an accumulation of layers that, like this iced over fountain, create something beautiful from the repeated opportunities to express love, kindness, understanding, and concern for the partner while also taking care of oneself. . I’d never thought before of wedding cakes as a symbol for relationship, but their complexity, each tier supporting the one above, does provide a metaphor for a relationship solidly built over time. Coming upon this surprising winter artifact made me think about the extravagant cake constructions that it resembled – glittering, white, complex, and many-layered.

Body and Soul

Body and Soul January 5 2009


A birthday makes me wonder

How we manage to evolve

Within a body.

Our spirit self feels ageless,

Follows its own fiddler,

Thrums to its connections, its intuition,

Its understanding of what’s going on;

Our body marches to the ticking clock

Of hours and of years,

Wrinkling, stiffening, twinging here and there ,

Reshaping itself constantly – cytoplasmic riddle

With its own reasons, its own rhythms, its order and its disarray.

How do such disparate parts

Remain merged as one person for a life?



Reflection:

I remember Grandma. She was my mother’s mother, the only one of my grandparents whose life overlapped with mine. I remember her as a sturdy, ageless woman, although she aged very quickly in her late 60s and died before reaching 70. She seemed ancient, as I suppose grandparents are obliged to appear to their grandchildren. But I’ve seen pictures of her when she must have been in her 50s, and I was a very tiny child. To me now, she actually looks old in those photos. As one of my sisters said to me a couple of days ago when wishing me a “Happy 71st birthday,” “Grandma died when she was 69, but she was OLD!”

Grandma lived in a third floor flat – which we called a “tenement” when I was little. The house was frame, with a three story bay window, a flat roof, and a pleasant double wide lot with grass and trees surrounded by a chain link fence. It was in Pawtucket, RI, the city where we had also lived during my early childhood. The house was on a corner. Across the street in one direction lay a city playground with a shallow wading pool, swings, and a dirt play area. The playground pulsed with raucous children during summer days when I was often at Grandma’s house. We were not allowed to use the pool, because of the polio scares in the middle and late 40s. It was a terrible disease, often causing paralysis and dramatic disability, and no one really understood how it was transmitted. One important theory was that children caught it from each other at swimming pools.

I spent hours sitting in the third floor bay window of Grandma’s house, next to the open, screenless windows, looking down wistfully at those happy children screaming and splashing in the pool. It was fascinating to watch them, to see who were siblings and who playmates, and how the boys and the girls behaved differently toward each other. When they left to go home, I pictured where they might be going, what their houses might look like, and how they were greeted when they arrived home, still wearing their woolen bathing suits or trunks -- the girls with rubber bathing caps -- all of them refreshed from hours playing in the water. There was no air conditioning at that time. I was sweating and limply hot as I looked at the splashing kids across the street. I envied them.

Across the side street from Grandma’s house, what sounded like hundreds of looms in a brick textile factory clicked and clacked in synch, 60 times a minute, 24 hours a day. The noise was loud – a “racket,” a din. We learned to sleep to its cadence, windows open in summer to let in any breath of cool air that might arise during the night. That brisk rhythm paced our breaths and heartbeats during every second we spent at Grandma’s.

A pulley clothesline stretched across the large back yard from Grandma’s third floor kitchen window to an enormous tree. Every morning, Grandma put out peanuts in their shells, caching them neatly in the metal pulley cover. At the same time every day, her “pet” squirrel would scamper across the yard, a clothesline tightrope runner; it would gratefully seek out its daily ration of peanuts, sitting on its haunches on the windowsill, devouring the nuts, as Grandma sat less than two feet away, watching it with a smile. Later in the morning, her “pet” blue jay would also come by for its own stash of peanuts, which it would take, one by one, through the open window, from her hand.

Grandma grew the peanuts in one section of the grassy yard. We were fascinated to watch the peanut life cycle, helping her scratch the seed nuts into the thin, sandy soil, and happily helping to reap the harvest several weeks later, when the legumes had ripened attached to the roots of the plants.

When we stayed over at Grandma’s, we slept on a “Morris chair.” This was a classic piece of turn of the 20th century furniture, a mission style wooden invention with a shiny, hard, slippery leather seat and back cover. A metal bar across the back could be removed from metal brackets, to allow the seat back to lie flat so someone could recline on it as if on a bed. It was hard, with a gap between the seat and the back when it was reclined – a dramatically uncomfortable place to sleep, even for a child.

On summer evenings, Grandma would sit at one open window, rocking in her rocking chair. I would stand and look out the window with her, or sit cross legged on the floor while she told from memory (or made up) Victorian stories of young girls struggling through blizzards and cold winds, responding to some duty, and being lured off the path to their deaths by eerie, disembodied, evil ghosts. There were always morals to these gruesome tales, but I’m afraid I was too terrorized by the brutal ways in which the stories ended to pay attention or remember the cautionary admonitions they were supposed to illustrate.



Although the original gas jets for lights still protruded from the walls in all the rooms, and gas radiators stood before the windows, the apartment had not been modernized. There was no heat, aside from the coal stove that was also the cooking stove in the kitchen. The gas jets had been replaced by a single 20 watt bulb hanging down on a long wire from the middie of the ceilings in the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, dining room and living room. There was no other electricity. Grandma had an ice box on the landing outside the kitchen, and it was always fascinating to watch the debilitated state in which the ice man arrived, red faced and puffing, after hauling a 30 or 40 pound block of ice on his back up the three flights of stairs. Grandma herself slid the large melt tray out from under the ice box daily, and teetered across the kitchen with it sloshing, to dump it into the tub in her bathroom. That was the only use that the tub received, as there was no hot water in the flat. There was a flush toilet, however, a true “throne.” The porcelain base sat on a platform. The seat was made of oak. The porcelain tank was suspended over the toilet, just under the ceiling, with a long pull chain serving as the “flush” mechanism. Grandma had been extremely frugal, and there was no reason to covet “modern” conveniences. She seemed unreflectingly content with things as they had always been, and as they remained until her death in 1957.

Grandma had raised her daughters in this house, a single mother whose husband, an alcoholic, had been banned from the family forever after just a few years of marriage. She remained staunchly single till her death. Her friends were all women – coupled with other women, spinsters, or widows. She visited often with these friends, and often went off on bus tours to various places with one of another of them. If she had a sex life, it was successfully hidden from us children.

Grandma worked in stores as a bookkeeper or accounting clerk. For a while, she was employed at a jewelry store. What I heard was that she turned 60 and was supposed to retire. So she retired, turned back the odometer, as it were – telling the next prospective employer that she was 55. Her last job was working at a department store in the “cage,” the locked wire enclosure in the basement where all payments were shuttled via pneumatic tubes, and change returned pneumatically to the station from which the payments had originated.

As a child, I found it fascinating to arrive early to meet Grandma after work, and then sit outside the cage, gaping up at the clanking network of tubes transporting, disgorging, and resorbing the shuttle containers. Grandma and her colleagues in the cage functioned as a single human cash register for the whole three story department store. These women flew around the cage, retrieving canisters, making instant change, and sending the shuttles back to their place of origin. I wondered how they could keep track of the multiple tubes and where they went, never mind how they could make change so quickly that it seemed like only a second or two. They prided themselves on their unerring arithmetic accuracy, and Grandma was reputed to be the fastest and best of them all.

Grandma walked both ways to and from work, a distance of about two miles. It was hard for me to keep up with her when accompanying her. I had to run to stay abreast of her rapid pace.

I admired Grandma for her willingness to be bold and to do the unexpected. In her closet was a large framed picture of about 100 women at an organization’s meeting around 1900. The women were dressed in long dark dresses, and were wearing dark stockings with high-topped leather shoes, broad brimmed, elaborately trimmed hats and white gloves. Except for Charlie Chaplin, that is. There “he” was, in his bowler hat, his little mustache, his turned out toes, his ill-fitting swallow-tail coat. That was Grandma. At the other end of her life, the last photo we have of her is a lovely studio portrait of Grandma, in her 60s, with her dyed black hair rolled into a bun, wearing a big smile – as she sits on Santa’s lap in the department store where she worked.

I remember lying in bed, watching Grandma get ready for bed, dressed in her modest ankle length nightgown, letting her long hair down and brushing it out precisely 100 times, folding her rimless glasses to put them on the dresser; I wondered how anyone could be so old – what that could possibly feel like. Yet I’m two years older now than she lived to be. That makes me ancient, I guess. But although the birthday number awes me, I – like everyone else – am not conscious of age in my inner life. I just am, timeless. Only my body suffers the effect of accumulating years. My spirit feels young and adventurous, ready for new opportunities to grow and learn.

New Beginnings

A New Beginning January 2010


A new year begins –

My curiosity brims over,

Excitement bubbles up into delight.

I ponder the year’s blank white slate

And wait to learn its invitations

And answer “yes,”

As it beckons to me about becoming.



Reflections:

Ellen’s and my friend, Kara, sent me today a link to her thoughts about the New Year, as she also reflected on the devastating loss of Ellen’s friendship a little over a year ago: “I thought of loss and of gratitude, and of how the light from all the fireworks pushed back all the darkness. I thought of beginnings, and how beginnings are a state of mind, an Innocence that we bring every day to the way we live and what we experience. It was one of my wishes always to look at life with fresh eyes, and always to be humble and grateful when doing so.”

I love the thought of beginnings as a state of mind, as innocence.

Endings inevitably entrain beginnings. Endings create vacuums, dark holes, negative spaces, absence. Light eventually comes to fill in the holes – if and when we can accept it.

A conversation today led me to reconsider one dramatic ending and beginning – with amazing light – that I experienced some time ago. I was 57. I had been teaching at the same college for 32 years, dodging the restraints of bureaucracy as best I could, inventing different ways to fulfill my contract while also remaining alive, vibrant, involved, and creative. My job, as defined, was during each semester teaching 150 students, from the bottom 10% of their high school classes – the least motivated -- how to write a sentence, then a paragraph, in a way that made sense and was grammatically correct. The goal was gradually to raise their literacy to a point where they would be able to take college level classes.

This task involved thirty classroom and mandated office hours a week, and another 20 or so hours a week slogging through dull, repetitive, often plagiarized, pompous, opinionated, ungrammatical, poorly spelled, and illegible student papers. The “Catch 22” was that if I marked the papers with lots of red ink, a job that required hours of tedious repetition, the students paid no attention to what I had written. What I said made no different in any way. On the other hand, if I summarized my critique in a sentence, they protested loudly that I’d given them a lower grade on a paper that I hadn’t marked up. If I hadn’t marked it up, it must have been perfect, so why didn’t they get an “A”? (I roll my eyes….).

I was worn out both from doing as much of this impossible job as I did and from creating other ways to use my time, from involving each class in a group project that involved community service, to supporting public secondary school teachers in providing experiential learning opportunities for their “less academic” students, to serving as the college’s grants coordinator for 10 years. I was exhausted. I felt unable to invent any other ways to let myself out of the impossibility of teaching so many of those students. I felt overwhelmed, beaten down. Also, my daughter had graduated from college and was on her own, and my husband and I had grown in very different directions during our 33 years together. We were unhappy and stressed.

One day, I knew that I had to retire and also to get away from St. Louis and from the marriage, at least for a while, to regain my bearings. If I didn’t, I felt overwhelmingly that I would become seriously ill from the accumulated stress.

I had spent a day with friends who lived in a rural Ozark community, and had told them my decision. As I was driving back to the city from their house, I experienced a “new beginning,” a transcendent experience of awesome, rainbow-hued light into which I entered. I was overwhelmed. The beauty, peace, and love within that light went beyond anything I could have imagined. It was heavenly bliss. I was no longer in the car. I perceived from the midst of the light that my car was stopped, engine turned off, in the middle of the rural road. The experience seemed to last for a long time, but it could also have been a second. Time did not exist in the light. I knew that I had to come back and go on with life on earth. But I also learned at that moment that there was indeed life after life, and that I could stop at any time, and go into that light of love, in meditation.

For years, I wondered why that life-transforming experience had happened at that moment; I finally figured out that it was the experience of a new beginning. I had accepted that my life as it had gone so far had to end, had to change, and I had – finally -- said “yes” to that change.

After taking early retirement and telling my husband I needed to get away, I drove to California, to Berkeley. After being there and seeing and getting to know numerous lesbian couples openly together, I had an epiphany. I realized that although I didn’t want to live alone, I also really didn’t want to remain married, or to try to meet other guys or to marry another one. All my life, I had had crushes and “particular friendships” with women. I’d never been romantically interested in boys – had never understood why the other girls were all so obsessed about boys. As a married woman, I'd always felt that I just didn’t get what all the other wives were interested in. I didn’t feel like one of them, but didn’t understand why not. I tried my best. I desperately wanted to look feminine, to act feminine. But I never felt feminine. I just didn’t seem able to fit in.

In California, I realized that in fact I had been gay all my life, that I was wired differently than most of the women I’d known, that I finally fit in somewhere -- with lesbians. For the first time ever, at age 58, I felt “normal.” I felt as though my being had a reason, that I could be myself and be accepted. It was such an enormous relief! I look back now on photographs of myself as a younger woman, with my family, and recognizing now the look of gay women, I see that woman in the photos – me -- and think, “Oh! She’s definitely gay.”

In California, also, as I served as a caregiver for my friend Fred during his last months of dying from cancer, I also finally found my true professional calling, as a healer and counselor. I had never wanted to be a teacher, never felt that was my true calling.  It was what years in graduate school had prepared me to do. It was also what I was trying to avoid by staying in graduate school as long as possible! Now, I decided to become a homeopath.  In Berkeley, I went through the full seven years of training, apprenticeship, student clinics, writing an original research thesis, taking a two day long written national examination, passing an oral exam, being interviewed about my practice principles and grasp of the profession’s ethics, and finally, at age 65,  becoming internationally certified as a professional classical homeopath.

At last, I was living authentically, being who I was meant to be and following my calling, and it felt wonderful. The experience in the light had predicted the “rightness” that would ensue after I had finally accepted how my life wasn’t working, and had opened to perceiving and following what seemed right.

Losing Ellen meant, of course, another dramatic ending to a period of my life, and the next vacuum that would lead to a new beginning. 2009 was the vacuum. I feel now, as 2010 begins, that I am open to the next new period in my life.


Saying “NO” December 27 2009

As children, we first learn “I”,

Closely followed by “No!”

“No” becomes our favorite word.

We love the role of despot, the sense of power.

We feel important making life step back from us.

We’ll say “no” to anything! --

“Do you want a cookie?” -- “No!!”

“I think you’ll like this.” – No!!

“Maybe if you started over here.” -- No!!!

“Can I help you?” – No!!

We say “no” most of our lives.

We refuse to surrender, we don’t want to appear weak,

We know we’re right, we’re meant to do everything ourselves,

We fear we’ll have to give back or do more:

We resist. We suffer.



But when we finally say “Yes” to life, things change.

A door opens and emits the rainbow light of a new world.

Our life begins anew.

We know our name, our nature, and our worth.