Loving the Wound of Emptiness

Barely touched down in Santa Fe after 28 years in Vermont, the phone in my heart rings.  

My beloved.  Time to rest her ashes on sacred ground overlooking the Pacific––an agreement we made long before she considered ending her life two years ago.  

I’m on it, I say.  Though I wonder: Why now, all of a sudden?  

She laughs.

First off, the clock is ticking she reminds me.  While I may dream of leaping tall buildings in a single bound in my 78th year, Divine Mother is tapping Her wristwatch.  

(Dear’s only request of me regarding her death was that I settle the dust of her physical being on our favorite land permeated with the vibration of saints.)

Plus, the mission will nourish my commitment to continually learn from her; to never put behind me anything related to her; to be perpetually open to the gifts of her influence. 

One of which is a particular heartache: not being able to experience what she experienced that led her to conclude that ending this incarnation was her healthiest choice.  

I’m not talking about despair.  That wasn’t her feeling.  I’m talking about emptiness.  

One month to the day before she took her life, Dear wrote a note to God enumerating many of the precious familiars no longer a part of her:

Of me as the me I was

Of me in feeling You

Of feeling Kriya [a form of meditation]

Of hearing Your voice

Of feeling the changes in my body and mind with meditation

Of feeling my love for You

Of feeling the beauty of birdsong & the caress of the wind

Of being dynamically alive with gardens

Of being with family

Of being able to travel to see friends

Of being able to plan & be engaged

Of me as a horsewoman

Of Gemi [her horse] & my barn life

Of feeling the beauty in the creeks & woods

Of laughter

That emptiness, vast hardly captures it, is foreign to me.

Exhaustion, loss, depression, mayhem, rage, fear, shame, not to mention just plain nuts––I’ve known lots of disorientation.  

The closest I come to feeling Dear’s emptiness is my lack of familiarity with that emptiness.  

Yet I smile as I make its acquaintance, this new doorway to self-understanding.  Another request to swim against the addiction to know.  To remember that I am the cause of my feelings.  Every mosquito bite and sunset being an intentional gift of the universe to help me awaken to the divinity of existence.  

My acceptance and love for every bit of my beloved’s living and dying will, I trust, grow to include the acceptance and love of this wound of emptiness that, in this incarnation, may never heal.

Postscript:
My beloved’s cremated remains, after traveling with me by air from Santa Fe to California, having been so respectfully examined by airport security, are now nested precisely where she wanted to be: within the sound and breeze of the ocean on land sanctified for decades by thousands of lovers of God.  In this time of Covid lockdown, it took a little sneakiness on my part (or more likely a tad of divine intervention) to pull off, which only added to my beloved’s joy, the defining quality of her spirit, palpable to me for the first time since her death.