Fall, Brian's death, and back in black...

Hello Broken Hearts Club Band, it's been awhile.

Well, it's really Fall in Portlandia. It's a time of hard transitions, challenging anniversaries, layers of grief, emotional pain, increasing darkness, and challenging myself to be more open to the love and support of my community, as well as asking for that love and support. It's also a time of receiving all sorts of signs for me; signs of support from friends and support from Spirit. Some of those signs are pretty obvious. I made a pilgrimage to Ravenna Ravine park in Seattle and picked up litter to honor the Goddess. While doing so I found a silver ring that fits my pinky and says in Chinese characters on the front, "I Love You" and inscribed inside, it says the word "LOVE". Thanks for that Spirit.

I started this blog as sort of a record for myself, as a resource for myself, and as a way for me to process my own grief and broken, rebroken, healing heart. I realize now, even more than ever, that "this", the writing and sharing of this process, is a part of my process. What a web we weave. There are soooo many spiders in the garden this time of year. Every morning I walk through a web when I leave the stairs to my house. The veil is thin and the web is thick.

I'm going to the memorial for a beloved friend this weekend. He was an amazing man, loved, admired, and appreciated by thousands and the best barista on Capitol Hill. He died in a bike crash at age 51. I don't know why, but for some reason, having born witness and felt the social and cultural impact over the past 30 years from the premature deaths of 300,000+ gay men in this country from the plague, I feel especially challenged by the "normal" early, premature, tragic, unfortunate, deaths of other gay men I know. I want a "get out of grief" free card, or I want "frequent griever flyer miles" or something. I don't just feel my own grief when these tragic events happen, I feel the grief of the community. A community that already deals with such layers of "complicated grief," "unresolved grief," "anticipatory grief," "survivor guilt," and untold cases of undiagnosed, unrecognized PTSD. I don't even ever really try and talk about this with my heterosexual friends and if I talk about it with queers under 40 it feels like I have to make it a "teachable moment."

If you want to know more about my friend, the fabulous Brian Fairbrother, here is a link to his obituary in the Seattle Gay News. The picture above is from the early 90's when Ti and I were having a big "Chroma" party where everyone was supposed to dress up colorfully. Brian was always colorful, and loved being contrary, so he work black of course.

I'm off to the cutting wheels to spend an hour shaping some lingam shaped jet mourning pendants. That's a part of the process too. I guess living our lives in spite of the process is also part of the process.

Warm regards on this windy day, Leo Sunshine

Genuine Jet Broken Heart Tasbih Prayer Beads

This is the third set of prayers beads I've made. Stella has the first set and Wallowa has the second set. Prayer beads have been on my mind and heart a lot ever since I used Jamshed's altar tasbih to say 99 prayers for him as he lay dying last October. I'm making them with a lot of intention and it's been pretty challenging work. I use each set for awhile before I let them go...

Here's the link to the eBay listing for

DVH Real Jet Tasbih Prayer Beads Broken Heart Necklace

REGRETS OF THE DYING

A great post from Inspiration and Chai

It's about the regrets that the dying have by Bronnie Ware....

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone's capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

Grief, Unedited

New research on how most who are widowed recover relatively quickly from their acute grief. My heart goes out to folks with complicated grief or chronic grief or grief from multiple losses, all of which pose unique challenges.

From the New York Times Op-Ed page.... here's the link...

Grief, Unedited By RUTH DAVIS KONIGSBERG

Published: February 14, 2011 and here's the article itself...

EVER since Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” began its long run as a best seller in 2005, a number of first-person accounts of losing a husband have been published. Among them are Kate Braestrup’s “Here If You Need Me,” Anne Roiphe’s “Epilogue” and Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Nothing Was the Same.” This week, they are being joined by Joyce Carol Oates’s memoir “A Widow’s Story,” which recounts the death of her 77-year-old husband, Raymond Smith, from complications of pneumonia in 2008. While these memoirs are often moving, they are also highly subjective snapshots that don’t teach us much about how we typically grieve, nor more important, for how long.

In the past decade, social scientists with unprecedented access to large groups of widows and widowers have learned that, as individual an experience as grief may be, there are specific patterns to its intensity and duration that are arguably more helpful in guiding the bereaved in what to expect. They have found that most older people who lose spouses from natural causes recover much more quickly than we have come to expect. In fact, for many, acute grief tends to lift well within six months after the loss.

This discovery and subsequent work in the field has been driven primarily by George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia. Before he began his research, few bereavement studies had looked at what percentage of widows and widowers recovered quickly, and what percentage were still mired in sadness years later. And none had managed to evaluate the respondents before their loss to get a sense of their overall emotional well-being.

But by tapping into an existing, long-term survey called the Changing Lives of Older Couples Study, done at the University of Michigan, Professor Bonanno was able to obtain baseline measurements of more than 1,000 married individuals. Participants in the study who subsequently lost a spouse were then invited for follow-up interviews at intervals of 6, 18 and 48 months after the death.

The single largest group — about 50 percent — showed very little sign of shock, despair, anxiety or intrusive thoughts (the hallmark symptoms of acute grief) even six months after their loss. Those subjects were also screened for lethargy, sleeplessness, inability to experience pleasure and problems in appetite — the classic symptoms of clinical depression — and came up clean on those as well. That didn’t mean that they didn’t still miss their spouses, but that they had returned to somewhat normal functioning, contradicting the popular maxim of widowhood that “the second year is harder than the first.”

Professor Bonanno summarized the surprising phenomenon in a 2004 article in the journal American Psychologist: “Resilience to the unsettling effects of interpersonal loss is not rare but relatively common, does not appear to indicate pathology but rather healthy adjustment, and does not lead to delayed grief reactions.”

As for the remaining participants, about 15 percent exhibited grief symptoms that were moderately high at 6 months but almost completely gone by 18 months. For an additional 10 percent, those who were still having problems at 18 and 48 months, grief had become chronic.

There were two additional groups that had never been considered in the literature: people who were depressed before and after their loss whose troubles seemed to be a pre-existing condition (about 10 percent), and people whose depression improved after the loss (also about 10 percent), suggesting that the death of a spouse actually alleviated stress.

Loss is forever, but thankfully, acute grief is not. Yet we rarely come across books (or plays or movies) about women who begin to stabilize after six months and start dating after a year or so because, perhaps, that narrative conflicts with our romantic fantasies that each of us is meant to spend our time on earth with only one soul mate. Ms. Didion’s situation was highly unusual, with her husband’s death compounded by her daughter’s fatal illness, but Ms. Oates’s followed the more common trajectory, and in 2009, she remarried, although that event is not mentioned in her book.

When Professor Bonanno published his findings, they were initially met with disbelief, along with criticism that his sample had simply not included the worst cases. But he has since replicated the results in other data sets of bereaved individuals and gradually, his trajectories have become the standard among clinical researchers who measure how people respond to loss compared with the statistical norms. Perhaps we will begin to update our own popular notions about grief as well.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is the author of “The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss.”