https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3fiBBELqGY
Two autumns have become winter since Carol Lydecker died that October night.
She was my wife, my lover, my very best and most trusted friend, my comfort and counsel. A dancer, a gardener, and a bright light for all who knew her. And then, long before she or I were ready, it was over.
For 28 long months, Carol fought against the anal cancer that had spread into her lungs via her lymph system. Hope ebbed and flowed as she battled through radiation, chemotherapy, surgeries and a host of complications.
But in early August 2012, following a harrowing week in Intensive Care that temporarily spared her life, she received a terminal diagnosis.
For eight weeks, a circle of family and friends helped me care for Carol in home hospice. Helped me bear a 24-hour a day burden that would have surely defeated my efforts alone.
The last poisonous dregs of suffering spilled out shortly after midnight as our 24th wedding anniversary passed. Satisfied she’d reached her goal, Carol drew her final, labored breath 55 minutes into Oct. 2.
The days and months in the wake of her death were suffused with a depth of suffering and sorrow I never imagined it was possible for a person to feel.
I thought I was strong, thought I possessed courage. I was wrong. I could only endure and hope, pray, beg for relief.
Twelve hours before Carol passed away, I sat at our dining room table, numb with fatigue and desperately wanting her suffering to end. I wrote one final note to her — and to myself — on her Caring Bridge website. I spoke of the love she’d given me and the path she’d shown me, and of my desire that she stop struggling, stop suffering and just let go.
“I think that if there is any hope for those of us left behind when those we love die, beyond general concepts of heaven and paradise, it lies in the belief that there is a place of great light and love from which we came and that those we love are going back to that light. …”
As we moved toward our inevitable physical parting, Carol repeatedly urged me to embrace the light myself. To move out of the shadows of bitterness and despair and into the light of acceptance and love.
But now it’s time to turn your compassion on yourself. Let go. Walk out of this last shadow, Carol.
Return to the light, sweet girl.
That night Carol answered my plea, and as her suffering ended, I was left alone to face the enormity of her absence and the hollowness of my courage.
Winter
The cancer that had wasted Carol’s lungs and destroyed her dancer’s body could never defeat her spirit. But it nearly crushed mine.
In her absence, the world went dark and silent. No, not dark. Grey. Not silent. Muffled.
A dark winter of the soul descended, stark and bitter, filled with dreary days and empty nights. Suppleness grew brittle; joy dried up and fell to earth like dust. My blood seemed to thicken and chill, movement became laborious. Waves of emotions crashed down without warning, threatening to cast me into a free-fall I feared had no bottom.
Grief brought me to my knees. For the next 16 months, mourning took me deep inside — and eventually far away from what I once considered home.
Life without Carol was a crowded wilderness of myriad things and activities that once held so much meaning. Alien and familiar, lacking something essential to the original, like a song out of key.
I survived the first six months only because I turned to God. Turned to Him and apologized for still, in my heart, wanting her more than Him.
Carol was always His best face to me, the presence in my life that allowed me to see this world as a loving and good place, if only for moments.
Too often I took it all for granted, the blessing that she was, her presence, her love for me. Treated it as if it would always be there.
Tibetan monks have a practice called dul tson kyil khor, in which they create beautiful multicolored geometric designs in sand, called sand mandalas. It is art created with meticulous attention to detail, for the sole purpose of conveying the impermanence of life, the ephemeral nature of this physical world.
Once completed, the monks allow the public to view and appreciate the mandalas briefly, then they ceremonially destroy their beautiful creations.
We are all sand mandalas, the monks are saying. Our physical beings fated to be wiped away one day, returned to their elemental particles, the beauty — and the ugliness — they collectively reflect ceasing to exist.
Enjoy the beauty, the monks tell us, but do not try to grasp it. It is, like life itself, far too fragile for that.
I learned that everything in life is fragile.
Lost summer
In April 2013 spring returned to the world. But winter was still locked deep within me. Carol would not ever again be here with me to welcome the spring in our garden, to celebrate the growing warmth, the lengthening light, the soul-stirring fecund scents from the earth and the fragile greenery that so delighted her.
In the wake of the death of American writer Joy Davidman, the woman he married in his mid-50s, British philosopher/novelist C.S. Lewis wrote in his journals, “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
Like Lewis, I experienced an emptiness that reached into, through and over everything. That was just … everywhere.
Yet during this darkest period, the roiling wake inside me began to settle, and a reawakening stirred.
It came at a time when I feared I had exhausted my ability to endure. A healing awareness that there is a place within me where no winter can enter.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer,” wrote Albert Camus.
Eventually I found it too. The pain of Carol’s absence slowly eased, morphing day by day from something jagged and agonizing into a dull, empty ache.
As the first anniversary of Carol’s death came and went, I found I had emerged from the lacerating depths of grief, through the chill greyness of mourning and into a wobbly sense of acceptance and hope.
I began to accept that no authentic healing is ever gained without pain. That there can be no awareness of any importance without facing things we’d rather avoid.
Love over fear
This life is about the challenge of choosing love over fear, of stepping toward the light and away from the dark.
“Love is the only answer. Remember not to live from fear, but from love,” Carol told an adoring crowd at her “living wake” a month before she died.
Love requires hard work, requires that you risk being hurt. Requires that you admit you’ve been wrong, both in the past and in the moment.
Love requires stepping outside your ego and taking another’s heart into consideration, making their needs and concerns equal to your own.
Fear demands only that you allow yourself to fall down spiritually and let your darker feelings dictate your actions. It feels like power, like security, but leaves you increasingly weak and vulnerable and ultimately empty.
Carol accepted the challenge of being a loving person. So often I was satisfied to fall down, while telling myself that I was being strong. In fact, I was too afraid to embrace the power of love and the demands it placed on me.
Only in Carol’s absence did I finally accept the challenge of beginning to walk the path she strode with such grace.
It has not been easy. For so long, there was no “getting back to normal,” only becoming functional again.
But mere functionality soon felt like stagnation. And so with the blizzards of last winter mirroring the cold in my heart, in early January I left the alien familiarity of home for a genuinely alien place.
Yearning to see what there was to find in this strange new life I hadn’t sought and didn’t want but needed to somehow figure out.
Exile
Seventeen months after Carol’s death, in mid-February, I sat before my laptop at a simple, creaky table in the second floor bedroom of a three-room apartment on a dusty, noisy side street in Granada, Nicaragua.
In a place of exile, doing exactly what needed doing. Alone with my thoughts and emotions, struggling to put it all into words and sort those words into something I hoped might convey who Carol was, what happened to her, and how I felt about it.
I wrote of my grief and mourning and the slow trudge back to living in this world without her. Wrote of an ordinary woman with an extraordinary soul.
I was on an odyssey, one with no home to return to because there was no person there to make it so. “Home” is something I must re-imagine, somehow recreate, if I am ever to experience it again.
Camus wrote that his invincible inner summer “makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.”
In Nicaragua I would find my own something stronger, my own ways and reasons for pushing back against my circumstances. Would find the desire to re-enter the world fully. Would find the courage to finally choose love over fear.
After his wife died, Lewis wrote, “I look up at the night sky. Is there anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?”
But I did feel Carol. As I lay in a hammock in Esteli, Nicaragua on a cool January evening, gazing up at the darkening sky, spring began its subtle re-emergence from my heart, weeks before I realized it.
Four thousand feet up in the Nicaraguan mountains, away from ambient man-made light, the night heavens are spectacular, the delicate swirls behind the star groupings stunningly visible to the human eye.
Somewhere among that vastness, I imagined Carol smiling down from a place where winter never touches the soul. Beyond all harm, enveloped in ecstatic peace beyond my understanding, dancing with the God who made it all and all of us.
And for one evening at least, I was utterly content to watch from a distance and smile. The way I used to smile standing beside her in our garden in springtime.
It would not be the last time I felt her.
Six weeks later, on the Ides of March, I stood on the rooftop terrace of the Hotel Casa San Francisco in Granada at sunset, as multi-hued clouds heralded the day’s waning and night’s arrival.
The cooling late-afternoon skies over Granada are a roiling yeast of ever-shifting colors and shapes. As if God were playing in the atmosphere with some massive, fluid sand mandala.
As the sun slid down toward the horizon to the west of the city, a rich orange mist hugged the tops of the low mountains. Above, silver streaks overlapped reddish hues and above that, deep purples and greys shadowed the darkening blue sky.
The gently waving fronds of the tall, broad palm tree to the west were outlined in dark relief against this rich light show.
Through it all, flocks of birds floated and darted in the foreground.
For a few minutes, everything pulsed. Then the sky froze, the orange mist on the mountain ridge sat like a parfait, the lowest clouds turning to deep amber, suspended above the horizon as if hung in place, still and unchanging.
Until it all changed yet again, bleeding out to wherever color goes when the sun leaves the sky. In mere seconds, only a few mundane pinks and blues remained visible in the deepening grey/black.
Soon even those remnants were gone and night reigned with stars piercing the nascent darkness.
I felt a somber sense of wholeness, absent of sadness and pain. Just the simple desire to be still and quiet, to watch and feel. Merely to be, without the chatter, without any reasoning or rationalizing.
And I whispered to Carol, “I’m back. I’m OK. I’m going to be all right.”
Spring returns
I’m still deciding how I will arrange my remaining days on this earth. Whatever I choose, it is a task that will be informed by the example of a small and gentle woman who lived her life from a place of truth and love.
In the end, Carol did not hold off fear solely through her will. She was aided by pharmaceuticals, narcotics to ease the pain and anti-anxiety meds to mask awareness of her growing suffocation.
She was afraid, very afraid at times. But she entered the final phase of her life consciously embracing love over fear. And at the end, all around her was love, from both physical and non-physical beings.
In the end there simply was no room for anything else but love.
When those of us in physical form had done all we could for her, Carol let go of this world and was carried away by other beings, back to the light. And as her beautiful spirit exploded into a fullness of soul and returned home, beyond my sight, the mandala of her physical being swirled apart and fell inert, still and grey.
This is “a fallen world where sorrows and blessings intermingle freely,” Sarah Young wrote in Jesus Calling. Carol had that small book of daily meditations on the night stand by her deathbed. I read to her from it every night during that final September.
Out of all my sorrow, from the agony of suffering, I now realize that blessings have indeed emerged. But it will be a while more before I can celebrate them. The cost was just too dear.
The truth is, having borne the pain, faced the fear and found that place within me where love reigns and winter has no sway, I see with new eyes, feel with a less encumbered heart.
Now sometimes, when the sky comes alive and night and day lie intertwined like lovers, Carol’s presence fills it all.
She is truly larger than the sky now, a mandala of swirling colors above me, spirit dancing through the atmosphere.
As I watch, my heart swells and I whisper, “Hello again, sweet girl. Thank you for sharing your dance with me one more time.”
And I smile as I stand with her in her new garden.
