This is a continuation of the series I’ve been writing about the Dark Night of the Soul/Phoenix Era. Read previous posts here, here, here, and here.
At the beginning of the week, I had a very strong compulsion to clear my schedule for the Thursday of that week. I wanted a full day of absolutely nothing on the calendar so that I could work (or not) on whatever I wanted, and it felt like Thursday should be that day. So, I cleared everything.
On Tuesday night of that week, I had a dream with one single symbol. The last time I encountered this symbol three years ago, a good friend passed away. Awaking Wednesday morning and remembering the dream, uneasiness washed over me. I didn’t even want to write the dream down in my dream journal because I didn’t want it to…mean anything. I told myself, “It’s a random dream. Who knows what it means!” Throughout the day, the memory of the dream would pop up, I would feel a wave of apprehension wash over me, and then I’d push it away and carry on with whatever I was doing.
Thursday morning, I leapt out of bed eager to begin my “free” day.
When you’re in the self-transformational Dark Night of the Soul, or the Phoenix Era as I like to call it, it can feel like you’ve reached rock bottom. The end of your rope. Like your capacity to take life in has been maxed out.
That’s when the Universe says, “Oh, no, you’re stronger than this. Let me show you what else you can handle.” (I’m laughing through the tears as I write this)
That’s when on a beautiful, sunny, perfect Los Angeles Thursday, I open my inbox to find the email. The unimaginable. Space-time becomes a vacuum. My vision narrows. I freeze. All thoughts drop away and I am just suspended, hoping this impossible, atrocious moment is a dream.
But it’s not.
A beloved friend and old love has died suddenly and unexpectedly. On Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. In the prime of his life. Doing something he loved, somewhere he loved. In illness, across the world.
The brittle fibers of glue that were holding my cracked heart together had just begun to dry. Now, in one fell swoop, they all snap and my heart finally, fully, gloriously shatters.
So, I sat there at the computer, comically trying to write what I had intended to write, not realizing that it was too late — the grief fog had already rolled in and there would be no clear writing, thinking, or understanding for quite a while. What ended up happening is that I sat there frozen, shut down, staring off into space in a state of shock. Good thing I had cleared my schedule. Bad thing the dream symbol meant what I suspected it meant.
As the condolence texts started to roll in, I just kept thinking, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” My silly mind kept conjuring a to-do list, but my body would not cooperate. It just sat there confused, immobile, and holding off the inevitable… until dusk.
Dusk is when Shock packed its bags and vacated the space so that grief could move in. That’s when the pain started to rip through the center of my body, genuinely feeling like I was being hacked from the inside with a knife. Sharp inhales and exhales accompanied each laceration, never catching quite enough air. The amount of hurt was shocking. I’ve never felt grief quite like this before. Anguish. Anguish is the word that best fits.
Grief is no stranger to me. It’s not a particularly welcome visitor because I know that when it knocks, it’s here for an extended stay and that upsets me. Frightens me. It’s also an unruly visitor — barging into any space-time it feels like, with no consideration for the rest of my existence. With very little warning that it wants my attention now, not later.
Maybe one silver lining is this: grief evolves every time it shows up, and through that, it demonstrates how varied or expansive the human experience is. This time, it surprised me with what it wants to bring forward in my awareness.
What it wants me to remember.
What it wants me to honor.
Shared looks, moments, feelings, laughs, kisses, hugs.
So many little things that are not little at all. These are the things that make human life worth living.
Where this grief wants to be felt has also surprised me. Unlike normal sadness, which usually sits in my heart or stomach, this grief claws through layers and dimensions of my body that were strangers to my awareness — the back of my heart, my shoulders, the back of my neck and it pours out over the top of my head. As weird as it sounds, experiencing this grief has made me more in touch with my body. As the florid, vivid, and intense emotions pour through me in this liminal space between memories and the unbearable pain of the present, I’ve never felt so alive yet so close to death myself.
And I cannot logically explain what this sentence means, but this is what I’ve been feeling: my body keeps searching for the person I lost, trying to find a morsel to hold onto. It’s like my energy expands outward with grasping, begging hands to find him. Instead, it finds a void — which sears.
As my heart broke open in those first 24 hours, a very harsh insight also burst free: the mind may forget, suppress, or judge how much certain people mean to us, but the heart never does. The heart holds all that love until something cracks within you and lets it spill out, past all your defenses. All the love I had forgotten, suppressed, and judged, poured out in waves and waves and waves, but now bringing pain with it. And great, tremendous, unwieldy sorrow that the love had to break free in this way.
I guess this is how I had to learn about the mind-heart disconnect (a common lesson in the Phoenix Era/Dark Night), that your heart does not give one flying f*ck what your head thinks you should do, who you should love, how you should love, or how things should be. It will go on loving and wanting whoever and whatever it wants, whether you let yourself feel it or not.
The good news (for me) is that this wasn’t about not having told him — thank the heavens we had done all that (seriously, don’t wait, tell the people you love that you love them!). In this case, I’m not talking about strictly romantic love. Over the years, he and I had so many different kinds of love between us and it was these different kinds of love that I didn’t entirely understand. As time went on, and I continued not knowing what to do with all the love I had, I (not entirely consciously) began to push it down. Thinking about this tears my heart into pieces right now.
It turns out, all I had to do was feel it.
This insight had the potential to haunt me for a long time. But the second insight that quickly followed was, “Just feel it all now. It’s not too late.” Maybe, as neuroscientist Donald Hoffman says, spacetime is just a human perceptual filter, and outside that filter, everything is timeless and eternal. So, I sat for hours and days, letting enormous amounts of love pour out of me, from me to him. I felt every reverberation of that love that I had pushed down as it now drifted into the ethers. Grief is love, love is energy, and energy never dies. It pours out of us to exist forever in the Cosmos. So, love lives. (thank you for this, Nicco).
But there’s no denying that a physical connection has been severed and that hurts immensely. It’s like his death was an internal earthquake that left a labyrinth of gaping, cracked-open wounds throughout my body and each wave of emotion dumps salt into each and every one of them (and dear God, words are so inadequate here). His spirit may be with me, but his voice isn’t. The physical loss must be grieved.
The skeptical side of me has decided it’s her time to shine, too — even with everything I’ve been through. There’s enough evidence from a diversity of disciplines to entertain the idea that consciousness could live on — and I want to believe that — but growing up in Western culture really does a number on you. It can’t rob me of enchantment anymore, but it certainly can throw down roadblocks. I continuously flick them away because the magic is certainly there – and he’s right here — but my grief is currently too loud to fully take it in. (Sometimes, as Seneca writes, grief doesn’t want to be assuaged.)
But this concept helps:
“Let’s say we have a glass of water. Now its temperature is about 60 degrees. If you reduce the temperature to 20 degrees, it becomes ice. If you raise the temperature above 212 degrees, it will become steam. As the temperature changes, H20 in the form of water appears and disappears, but H20 does not appear and does not disappear. Ice, water, and steam are only its form. Name and form change, but H20 does not change. If you understand the temperature, then you understand the form. Your true self is like this.” — Soen-sa
Eerily, in one of the last long conversations that he and I had, I told him about one of my psychedelic experiences in which my personality (ego) dissolved, and I ceased to exist, only to then have my consciousness expand out in a blast of euphoria and become the entire Universe and all of space and time. In this space, I continued to exist in a different form, and my consciousness had perfect vividness and clarity. He had asked, “Do you believe you now know what death feels like? Do you think it’s really like that?” I had said, “Yes, I believe that’s what it’s like. I’m not afraid to die anymore because it was beautiful.” I feel lucky to have that memory. I hope it was like that for my friend.
There’s really nothing to do with grief but move with it. Since I am a deep, deep feeler (or “sensitive,” as certain family members call it), I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to regulate my emotions so that they don’t overwhelm me. Before I learned these skills, I would just contract and suppress the emotions because I couldn’t handle them, which just disrupted the release of said emotions. It’s impossible to hold or contain the tidal wave feelings of grief, though, so I just observe how they roll through my body, making the ‘flow’ of the Universe, of life, very embodied and personal — and practices that help move the energy are invaluable, like rocking, tapping, using gestures, etc. There’s almost a relief when letting go of protecting my heart from the pain and letting it tear things down. Like, okay fine, I give up. You can break my heart. Take what’s left. Just go.
Even with all that, at first, I didn’t think I could handle the memorial service. Even some of my family and friends were concerned about the effect it would have on me. But I knew that I would just be swapping the pain of the moment for shame, regret, and sadness down the line for having missed it. And yes, I may have wept across America in strangers’ arms on the way to and from the service, but I was happy to do it to honor him because I love him more than I fear my pain — and that has been the greatest gift of all my dark nights.
Now, I see the true value of all the “healing” or “self-transformation” work. It allows you to be in the present, move with the pain, and make choices based on love, not fear. This treasured connection that I had with this amazingly unique person deserves to be felt and honored, with all its love and heartbreak — and I wouldn’t have been able to hold space for all that before. Having confidence in my ability to manage my emotions allows me to show up for myself, him, us, his family, and others in ways that weren’t previously possible. I am so relieved and grateful that I can do that for us, show up from a place of pure love and support.
I hate to admit it, but the Universe was right. I am stronger now. This loss has brought me to my knees, but if this had happened earlier in my life, it may have crushed me into oblivion. While I am currently drifting through the mistiness of grief season, this thought is my companion: grieving is an act of love, and what is loved is never lost.
*** ❤️ In loving, sweet memory of Bradley Anthony Gasser. ❤️ ***
I love you, Brad. Always & forever, through all space, time, dimensions, timelines, and forms of consciousness!!! I’ll see you in the stars.
This blog was originally posted on Cosmos, Coffee, & Consciousness
