A Communion of Saints

This is more of a prayer than an essay -so you don’t have to read it. Really, feel free to skip this one – but I need to release it to the ether.

Maybe it’s just a weird thing I do where I chat every day with a good handful of my dead. Maybe it’s not as common as I believe it to be.

But I feel a need to thank them again, and name and honor the ways they all continue to live in my life. To claim them as part of my ongoing, unfolding reality. I feel the need do this intermittently.

You are what happens to you, after all.

You are who happened to you.

I’ve buried many of people I’ve been closest to. Maybe it’s actually dangerous to be my friend (I have considered this and ruled it out for the most part).  Or maybe those of us who have lived in various kinds of danger find each other and we don’t always make it through, or we die much later of wounds we thought were nothing at the time.

Maybe those who have seen something hair-raising and feral in other human beings’ eyes, recognize each other, unknowingly sharing our inflated Adverse Childhood Experiences scores  - and our bodies are more likely to give out sooner.

I don’t know why. Why doesn’t really matter to me.

That I keep them with me, that is what matters.

So, for those of you who are stumbling across these words and don’t know anything about me:  I have been in what is considered a “secure” enough remission from a unique and unstageable, unprognosable  cancer for one year. The odds of my making it to this spot were incredibly unlikely – and in no way in response to any of my own efforts. Pure fucking luck.

I cared for my mother and Ellie, a chosen sister as they died of cancer while I was getting sick myself but didn’t know it. I thought I was just exhausted. That my strange symptoms and perfectly normal blood tests eventually led to an accurate diagnosis at all is staggering.

And just as it seemed clear that several different kinds of treatments all at once together were working well enough – a colleague that I wrote with, started a podcast with and talked to every day – killed himself.

[ To people who have been reading here for a while: I’m really sorry that I have to do this part this over and over,  but new people cross my path now and then and need me to explain myself. Those who have known me for a long time know all of this – it’s all been shared and out in the open – but not everyone who finds me wants to read through my entire online archives before they ask how I got like this. ]

And I think this is part of loving people who have died out from under me. The people who protected and nurtured my beating heart – before, during and since their deaths.

In my life death has come in clusters, or so it seems. Perhaps that is true in many people’s lives, or perhaps it just seems so. Maybe people just catch the bus when they need to go, and the bus runs at certain times when lots of people are coming and going.

When I graduated from high school in 1982 with my two oldest and dearest friends – we passed around tattered copies of Tales of the City series.  I was Mona, obviously. Mikey was clearly (Mickey) Mouse. Bob was a hairy drag version of Anna Madrigal – and like the books characters – we rented a house together: The Los Angeles Tales.

Mikey and me

I was in college and moved off campus to live with them. We had bonded by blood as high school drama geeks together.  Our family lives were all challenging in their own way, and honestly, all three of us were pretty challenging characters as a result.  We would argue, bicker and still withstand each other, we would fight and laugh, and drink, cry and get sloppy and promise to always stand by each other – even while we annoyed the crap out of each other and laughed so hard that it wasn’t uncommon for one of us to fall to the ground rolling with delight.

There was never a breakup among us, just growing up, from fourteen on  - we just grew inevitably alongside and away from each other – into our separate lives. We couldn’t live in one house together forever. Mikey moved in with a guy we didn’t adore for a time, and later moved to San Francisco, lived in the Haight, bartending, as he had in Boy’s Town in LA.

Bob settled in Encinitas, an ecological activist or a green guerilla or whatever we called climate activists who chained themselves to things and got arrested in the 80’s and 90’s. We didn’t see him as future looking, although we knew he was right and telling important truths.  At first it seemed to be an extension of a nostalgic love of the hippie ecology we had all seen in elementary school or lived out by our older siblings or babysitters.

Bob - (all three of us had matching perms)

Bob was a prophet really, a wicca Prophet with a capital “P” – the kind that gets run out of town or pressed to the margins or finds himself in the belly of whale. I could not commit to devoting myself to a mono-cause with his single-mindedness.

Bob grew as a Bob-should. Mikey in the direction that he chose and needed to live out. And I grew in my own on the opposite coast in NYC. I didn’t go back much – but we talked, visited each other. We could still bicker, worry, annoy and laugh with and over each other – but that was chosen family.

But then, Mikey died  in our early 30’s without ever seeking treatment for the HIV infection that he had Bob had  contracted while we lived together.

I mean, first our teachers and mentors, directors and choreographers had started getting sick, wasting and dying as soon as we graduated from high school. Which was scary and painful.  And I nursed Bob and Mikey through the weird high fever and acute flu which turned out to be HIV infection syndrome - but we didn’t know it then.

Mikey had converted to HIV positive first. Bob maybe six months later. All before we were twenty one. AIDS had been woven into to our whole lives together.

And Bob and I lived on, grieving and remembering and stepping away and coming back to each other like a dance. And at the end of every phone call, we sang this song to each other as we had since we were in junior high:

Hmm-mm I want to be your friend, hmm-hmm and a little bit more.

Hmm-mm I want to be your pal, hmm-hmm and a little bit more.

Hmm-mm I want to be a flower growing at your door.

I wanna be your grandmother-grandfather- mother- father- sister-brother,

Hmm and a little bit more.

Our Chosen Family Song.

And then about a decade later, Bob died. And the next day, my dad died.

And because I’ve never written much about Bob before – I’ll tell you about our last conversation:

We’d been in a very warm-phase in our friendship. Appreciative of each other, and all the failures and growth we had watched unfold for each other.  Facebook meant we could stay more abreast of each other’s daily lives, and root for each other.

He’d even come with his husband (I’d gotten an invitation to their Handfasting ceremony – but it cost more than I could afford to fly across country) – to visit Brooklyn soon after I became a mother, and he met and held my son Eli on his lap, and it made me tear up because this hairy wicca man and his dapper husband  - living the life he was called to, and looking so happy – was holding my son, and he was always amazing with babies, and it was lovely.

And a few years later, when my kids were six and five, I sent him this note in our direct messages:  

“Bobby, I need you to grant me a Bobby-Indulgence so I don’t go to hell: I am taking my children to Disney World because I weirdly think they should see Disney once, and it actually sounds fun to me”

I remembered the hours upon hours the three of us had spent together at Disney Land. Usually high, but not always at all. Sometimes, just because it was nearby, and it was a Sunday afternoon, and we were sad and moody.

He wrote back:

“There is no place safer than the belly of the beast, my dear. Indulgence granted. Go forth and have fun.”

A month or so later we were leaving for the airport for Orlando, and I checked my messages before heading out. Bob had died of an opportunistic pneumonia, out of the blue. We had thought he might live forever on protease inhibitors. We had almost all forgotten that he was living with a deadly virus in his body.

My Dad would die the next night. I would find out in the early morning in the bathroom of a Disney hotel, my husband and kids sleeping in a set of Disney double beds.   We did not leave the park. Friends who knew both Bob and Mikey called me, and I cried a bit with them.  

Bob had been nearly dead before, t-cells down to almost nothing, skinny as can be, before treatments were invented and pulled him from the brink of death. He’d had another ten years or so and seemed vital and happy and well – although as all of those who lived and died as a result of the early waves – he had no idea what the long-term would look like.

(I don’t either with my own time-bomb dormant in my body, and it comforts me that Bob was able to do so many  beautiful things with his life while living with a similar uncertainty)

But this time he wasn’t nearly dead; he was really most sincerely dead.

We all chipped in for what was at the time, a fairly early and expensive fully organic burial because there was no one else on earth who deserved to be wrapped in a sheet and come back as a glorious flowering bush.

These were my first and dearest friends. And my first dead friends.

I found myself dreaming of them both regularly, and felt them near me, or would talk to them in my head in times of danger or challenge, or when the veil was thin.

It wasn’t so surprising really. I’d seen my dead grandma, smiling and looking pretty in her red pantsuit over my shoulder in a mirror soon after her death, and after that I talked regularly to her and to my grandfather in my head when I missed them or needed to feel them near.  

Bob and Mikey were just as present – and we could argue and tease and support each other as best we could, just as we had in life. I knew what they would say. I could hear their voice. Remember the sound of their laughter.

My father’s side of the family was pretty dead, but I really didn’t talk to them. I had visited his father who we called Gramps before he died – and we frankly had no idea what to say to each other.

“I guess I never really got to know you” he said.

“Yup.”  I replied.

My dad had shown up one night after he died, while I was asleep, in a dream – at the foot of my bed. “You were the healthiest person who loved me” he said, setting me up to ask for help of some kind.

“No way. Go. Go. I don’t know what work you have to do, but I am not the one to help you do it.  It is not my job. You have to figure it out your own”  I dream-spoke back to him.

When I woke, I took the Marlboro Red hard pack that my younger brother had sent me with  one-third of my Dad’s ashes wrapped in the package tin-foil. I hadn’t known what to do with human cremains in New York. But grabbed my folding bike while the house was asleep and drove down to the Manhattan Bridge. It wasn’t a green-belt then – just a shitty East river beach with old tires and Styrofoam and hypodermic needles.  I dumped the ashes in the water and dropped the Marlboro pack in the one over-flowing garbage can.

So, I’ve written about all the rest of this ad nauseum as well as my own solo journey circling the drain.

And about how my own illness and bereavements were so entangled as to be completely inseparable, as well as the gratitude and guilt, and grief that followed what felt like repeated tidal waves of death.

I’ll not say more about the promises I made to let their lives change mine, to live out my love for them, to share my appreciation for their love, their modeling, their struggles, to carry whatever piece of their legacies that were shared with me.  

Dream that I have a plot of earth and have been given Ellie’s deceased body, wrapped in straw, from head to toe like a shroud. I decide to make it into something beautiful – I plant flowers and dig a sculpture into and out of the earth. I lay Ellie’s body along the top edge of the plot and bury her. Packing in the cool, sandy earth all around her. And I make sure that the packed earth retains her shape. And plant purple flowers with feathery leaves where her hair would be. I finish and it is beautiful. A garden with a visiting spot and space for her that is her and of her and earth and straw and filled with seeds which will bloom in the spring into beautiful flowers.

And I’m proud of it but I say: I am never going to do that again. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I know Ellie and my mother have done their best to keep my children safe and alive when they have been in serious danger.

I must also thank my dead in-laws, whose bodies I sat with, whose belongings I packed away, who I loved, and who became my indelible family too.

And there are archetypes and spirits, bodhisattvas and guardian angels who I should and must claim and thank too. And guides and mentors who’ve I’ve only met through the teachings and books they have left behind.

And of course, the clients I’ve accompanied through their own losses and illnesses and dying. Our guarded and  confidential goodbyes at funerals, and at hospital bedsides. There have been times where I have been asked to be present in a medical consultation and been the one to explain that they are dying, their body is shutting down. I have held client’s hands in the hospital on their last day.

They have all been my teachers and initiators too.

And all of these stand with me, alongside me in my strange work  - where I try to rely on what they left with me and honor them all.

They are my beloved dead.

As much a part of my daily life and work as when they were alive.

This beautiful, motley crew assure me every day, in their own way,

that love – in whatever form, never dies.

For Walter and Wilma, Maggie, Rodney, Richard, Mikey and Bob.

For Marianne, Saul, and Roszie.

For Ellie and Jason.

For those whose names I cannot share.

For all who mourn, may we be comforted,

May we comfort each other.