suffering

I had planned to spend the weekend catching up on my reading for this class. Then Saturday I felt physically ill, and combined with this pile of emotional burdens I carry, I could not. Then sunday slipped away. And today, I cannot stop crying.
I am sitting here looking at a picture I took of my dad the day he died. It was just after sunrise, and so the sun is brilliant. And he is smiling. He emits this glow from the photograph; the same glow that is evident in so many photographs, and in so many memories. My dad radiated happiness and gratitude.

Sometimes I think I would have given anything to had at least some warning. My whole system is still confused by what happened that day; I am still reeling. But steadily, this sludge of reality is sinking in. He's dead. Gone. I cannot call him. I cannot hug him. And with it, reality brings deep holes of grief. I feel so much pain in my life right now. Less than a month after my dad died, my mom and I had to have our dog put down. My mom has Parkinson's disease, making our already slightly strained relationship more complicated. My horse is sick, probably infected with EPM, a neurological parasite. He was treated for the disease 4 years ago, but it seems to come back. Most of my friends are working a lot now, with school. My boyfriend works heinous hours. So I am alone much of my time. I have always embraced aloneness, and I believe that loneliness is part of the essence of the grief process. Loneliness is a part of the definition of grief. No one can share the memories I have with my dad. They are mine alone. Yet this means that the pain that comes from those memories is mine alone as well. I think for me, the loneliness is compacted by the trauma of watching my dad die. I have never felt more alone than I did on that mountain, coming down without him.

At first, I wanted to scream to everyone: "my dad just died of a massive heart attack on a mountain in front of me! He was so healthy! My dad!" and at the same time that I want to scream this out I want to deny it. This urge has quieted a bit, as the day to day activities slowly begin to feel something close to normal again.

I do not want to sound like such a "downer", but that's what my life is right now. I lay this foundation because I want to talk about my experiences with suffering, and to share some of what has come from it. I am experiencing grief, just as everyone who is alive now will at some point in their life times. Death is as much a part of life as birth, and therefore, grief too is very much a part the human experience. We all must grieve; we all must suffer. Pain is hard to deal with. We want to run from it, stuff it down, kill it with medication, avoid, ignore...anything but feel it. But to feel pain is to allow it to pass on.

I told my friend Anna the other day that sometimes I want to go back to the days just after my dad's death. Those days are a blur, I was so numb. I have never lived more in the present moment than I did then. I had to. I had to extract every possible joy from each moment; I had to revel in the feeling of breath in my lungs, marvel at the sound of my heart beat, gasp at how terribly fragile life is. But it is the fragile-ness of life that make it so precious.

I found a quote in a grief meditations book that someone gave me that I read often. It really spoke to me, and spoke to my experience. Ironically, it is one of the few quotes in this book that is somewhat religious.

"She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the might, grimness and tenderness of God. She thought that now for the first time she began to know herself, and she gained extraordinary hope in this beginning of knowledge."

-James Agee

The author of the meditations book, Martha Witmore Hickman adds: "If we have ever wondered about the limits of our strength and our ability to endure, our experience of loss will tell us much. Our life is shaken to the foundation. But we survive. And our of this terrible, rarefied self-knowledge comes, if we are fortunate, a kind of empathy with all creation--a sense of wonder at the suffering and the beauty, of the world. "

When I realized my dad was having a heart attack on the mountain, I felt this rising, almost uncontrollable urge to panic. But I told myself "You cannot." And I did not. From this experience, I was able to access a level of deep calm that I did not know I was capable of. I learned that I am capable of handling a situation that is worse than a nightmare, and I am stong enough to slowly step out of that situation and continue living. There have been moments when I am profoundly aware of this moving forward. The first huge step was starting down the mountain alone. I remember looking back and seeing my dad's body, just lying there. The body. Only moments before, he had been a man. He had been my dad. When I first realized that I would have to hike down without him, I took off and immediately tripped and fell. I stood up, took some deep breathes and told myself: "Natalie, you have to get off this mountain safely." I carefully took another step, and walked down the mountain and into my new reality. I did not notice until I was at the bottom of the mountain, in the Ranger's office, that my knee was bleeding.

Because my dad died in Boulder county, he was at the coroner's office there for a few days. He died so suddenly, and his medical records were so clean that they had to do a complete autopsy to rule out foul play. My mom flew up to Denver the day dad died. I called her from the mountain, a short ways down from where he died. By the time I got to the trail head, she was on her way up. We had a few days in Denver to digest. I was glad for that time, for by the time we got back to Durango, CO, there had been enough in the paper that many had figured out what happened and were waiting to hug me and comfort me and do....something! (All of this, as anyone knows who has gone through a painful experience is a bit overwhelming). Anyway, my next big step was leaving Denver for Durango. I felt it was another step out of my cloud toward reality. The last big step was leaving Durango to return to Bozeman. I remember walking into my apartment the night I got back and seeing the passage of time everywhere: dust, rotting food in the fridge...it was bizarre to see my apartment the way I had left it and to think of how different my life was when I had left compared to my return. And yes, since I've been back in Bozeman, I do feel like reality is sinking in, and along with it the grief. Today, three months ago, my dad met me in Estes Park, and we had a lovely diner. He was happy and healthy and content and so, so alive.

Anyway, I said above that I wanted to address the question of why we suffer. And I want to do so by sharing with you my experience.

Life is about extracting every possible inch or crumble of joy we can from every moment. Because a lot of life sucks. Everyone has bad moments. Sometimes you think a day is a bad day. But I think there are no truly bad days, only a bad perspective. The bad day I shared in class, for example. Yes in the moment it sucked, but now I can look back and think that that day brought my mom and I closer. It gave us the ability to connect in a way that we otherwise might not have. I am glad I could be there to support her through the day that should have been my parent's 30th wedding anniversary. And I was glad she was there to support me through that day, missing him, and through my horse's sudden illness. Therefore, even though the day was difficult, there was something beautiful that emerged. Nicholas Kristof said that when he travels to the darkest, most corrupt, violent places in the world, he also finds alongside the awfulness, examples of absolute goodness that humanity is capable of. I think this is why we suffer. Because to truly appreciate what we are grateful for in life, we must experience loss. Because grief adds a whole new highness to the feeling of joy.

Author Paulo Coehlo uses wine as a metaphor: "You can only know a good wine if you have first tasted a bad one" (Brida).

Because beauty comes from pain; pain is never alone; for me it is accompanied by good things that come from it's experience. When I was little and I was sick or had teeth pulled, no matter how miserable I was, I could always be grateful that my loving parents were there to take care of me. Now, I can be grateful for what my friends can give me for support during this time. I am grateful for all of the love I currently experience in my life, and for all of the love that I have experienced.

With the pain of my dad's death comes a strange gratitude. I am grateful for the pain, for the depth of the loss and the suffering. My hole is so deep because the man who left it was so great. My dad and I had a special connection that I will never experience with another human. He loved me intensely and unconditionally. And I will never stop loving him. I can say that I have no large regrets. My dad and I had a wonderful relationship, and there was no unfinished business or hardness between us. How many people can say that about their fathers? I have more good memories with my dad in 22 years than many people have in 50. I can be oh so grateful for those happy memories, for all the photographs.

Something inside me smiles when people tell me that my experience led them to reevaluate a relationship in their life. My best friend, Page, told me that she is really treasuring every moment with her mother. That she feels a sort of urgency to ask her mother all the questions she has been wanting to ask and to enjoy her mother as much as she can. The park ranger who helped me to the bottom of the mountain told me as I was leaving that she was going to call her dad: "yeah...we don't get along that well. But I think I need to call him. I need to call him." And many other people have told me that they have reevaluated relationships with parents, their health, perhaps the priorities in their lives. So from my dad's death comes inspiration. I had several people tell me that his obituary and his funeral were just that: inspiring. I feel proud to be the daughter of my father. He truly lived his life by his ideals and values. He was passionate about his work, he was passionate about being a volunteer firefighter, passionate for the mountains, wilderness and wildness in general really, and most of all passionate about his family. He made huge sacrifices to always be there to support me in any event that I did, and he would always take my calls, no matter how busy or stresses he might have been. He made us, his family, such a priority in his life. And for this I am so, so grateful. I have to question myself, would I be this grateful for these memories if my dad had not died so suddenly and tragically?

I have found myself scrutinizing every aspect of my dad that is within me. I have always known that I am a lot like my dad. We even look a lot alike. But through the experience of looking through so many photographs and all of his files, all of his personal belongings--what cards he kept, what articles he saved--I have learned so much about my father. And the more I learn about him, the more closely I examine him, the more of him I find in myself.

My dad was always trying to teach me to follow my dreams, and to learn to love myself. He often told me that when I couldn't sleep at night, I should repeat the mantra: "I like myself." But I have this funny habit of judging and putting down many aspects of myself. This experience of grief has changed that for me. I have found so much strength within myself that I did not know I had; and I have found so much of him in me. I love him so much, how can I hate something that I love? I have begun to embrace those parts of myself that I think come from him, and I have found so much of myself that I can be proud of and grateful for. My whole perception of myself has shifted. I also feel like my entire perspective on life has changed. I now know how precious every moment is, and how quickly life can be over. Just because I am young does not make me immune to death, and I think it is healthy to have some awareness of our mortality, so that we may enjoy every moment more in knowing that this life is not forever. Through the suddenness of my dad's death, I have learned to focus on today, and today is the day to do what i want to do. Or it is the day to work towards what I truly want to be doing.

Sometimes I find myself wishing I had had some warning. I am almost jealous of friends whose parents died from cancer. I think "at least they knew death was approaching." But, first of all, I do not think there is any benefit that can be gained from comparing our experiences of pain or grief, every experience is different, and second of all, I look at the photographs of me and him on the day, oblivious to looming death, happy to be together in the mountains. And I think that my dad died exactly as he would have wanted to die. He was in the mountains, in a beautiful and spiritual place, he was doing something he loved. He was healthy up until those last moments. And he was with me, the daughter he has always adored. He said he wanted to "flame out". I think he got his final wish.

Sometimes I wish with all of my heart that I did not have to carry the experience of watching my father die with me. And yet, I am so grateful to have been there. I have no questions about his death; I know we did absolutely everything possible, and there simply was no way to save him. And especially because my dad and I did not have the opportunity to see each other frequently recently, I am so, so thankful that I was able to spend that final day with him. And I am thankful that I could be there with him; I like to think i was a source of some comfort during those final painful moments. In a way, this experience pushes my relationship and my closeness with my dad onto another level. I feel so close to him now.