Slipping Away

loving connectedness

In Amsterdam in 1972. Photograph: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

When I was in the jungles of the Yucatan and Chiapas a few years after my daughter Jenny died, I contracted a nasty double dose of parasites and bacteria, and became very ill. I had been traveling in Mexico for most of my life and had never been this sick. My agent suggested that maybe I was so comfortable there that I let my guard down. Perhaps I was so depleted by the travails of that winter that I had no resistance. Whatever the explanation, I developed a high fever one night and in my delirium I had a kind of vision.

I had just returned home and was hoping a night in my own bed would soothe the fiery pain in my joints. But it felt like I was boiling from the inside and I couldn’t sleep. At one point, as I was writhing in the dark of night, I realized I could call out to Jenny for help. I wasn’t asking for anything in particular. I simply remembered that she was available to me, and so I reached for her. The instant I called, I felt her rushing in to surround me with her love. I felt enfolded, as if by great wings. And then she just held me.

After a few moments, I felt her begin to slip away. I cried out: “Jenny, don’t leave me!” I began to wail. She returned and wrapped herself around me again. “I will never leave you, Mom. I am always with you.” Finally, I felt strong enough to let her go. I thanked her, and surrendered to our separation, as I have done a thousand times. And then I lay in my steaming bed and wept. My husband woke and held me. “Jenny was here!” I told him. “She was just here! Can you feel her?” What he felt was me, burning up. The next day he took me to the doctor. It took months to recover from the disease, but the gift Jenny gave me that night will be with me always.

Not long after this vision, I had the honor to sit with my neighbor Kate, whose beautiful young free spirit daughter, Nina, had been recently murdered, two days after her sister’s wedding in the Caribbean. As the weeks unfold and Kate’s heart was blazing with love and longing, her mind, as minds are designed to do, was busy seeking understanding.

As with every single grieving person I know, Kate felt her daughter very close to her in the first days following her death. Now, two months later, Nina’s presence was starting to feel increasingly tenuous. Kate sensed that Nina was continuing on her journey, and she couldn’t help but wonder where that journey was leading and if her loved one was okay.

As we were talking, I saw a light stream into Kate’s heart. I do not usually experience psychic phenomena, but I knew in that instant that Nina was flowing into her mother’s heart in response to the intense love and pain Kate was feeling. And I had an epiphany.

I realized that the feeling we have of our loved ones being close to us immediately following their death might have more to do with us than with them. In the wake of a profound loss, the limitations of our ordinary perceptions are stripped from our consciousness and we are given a glimpse of that which lies beyond the mundane. When we love someone deeply, we cannot help but try to follow them when they’ve left this world. At first, propelled by shock and supported by grace, we are successful in parting the curtain and stepping through. As time goes by, we, the living, must necessarily return to this world. This distancing may feel like they are moving away from us, but, as with Einstein’s train analogy, that’s an artifact of relativity. We’re the ones who, despite our deep desire for connection, are slipping away, back into life.

This reminds me of an interview I read with Leonard Cohen years ago. He was talking about falling in love, and how popular psychology describes this state in pathological terms as a matter of our projecting onto the blank screen of another all our hopes and dreams about romantic love, rather than seeing the person for who she or he really is. Leonard disagreed with this analysis. Rather, he said, when we fall in love, we are seeing truly. As time goes by, the veils of our ordinary conditioned consciousness begin to drop again and obscure the clear vision we were gifted with at first. Isn’t that beautiful?

I think a similar thing is true with grief. The loving connectedness grieving people report in the wake of fresh loss is sometimes labeled “denial” and is attributed to the shock of losing a loved one. However, I have always perceived people in that state as being filled with grace. Their sense of connectedness to their loved ones does not feel delusional to me, but quite the opposite. Grief and loss have lifted the illusion of separation, and, for a moment, we experience the boundarylessness of love.

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