Out of the Blue

Not long before my friend, Linda Pace, died on July 2, 2007, she had a dream that helped me manage what became a storm of loss. In the dream, Linda stood in the backyard of a home she once lived in. On the ground she saw in clear, bold letters the following image: S-T-A-Y.

For Linda, the dream image became a talisman as she fought a vigorous battle against breast cancer. When she faced  painful procedures in the hospital, she would look up and meet my gaze with her marble-sized brown eyes, smile and say: "No problem. I can stay with this."

Her death hit me hard. She was more than a friend to me -- she was a fellow dream tender, someone who listened and cared about my hopes for my life as a writer, an artist who challenged my perceptions. When we looked at provocative contemporary art together and I couldn't connect with the work, Linda would laugh and say: "Look harder. Don't ever be afraid of looking." When she died, it was as if all the lights went out.


 Then out of the blue, the losses piled up, one after another. On August 23, 2008, my father died. On November 15, 2009 my brother and only sibling committed suicide. On January 17, 2012, my ex-husband and the father of my two children died in the Haiti earthquake. I remembered the image in Linda's dream: S-T-A-Y and decided I needed lessons in fending off the idea of total loss.


 I took meditation classes at the San Antonio Zen Center, located in a small, frame house on Woodlawn with honey-colored wooden floors and black cushions for sitting. The instruction was to sit and breathe. At first, I found the practice almost impossible. The moment I got quiet and still I felt everything I did not want to feel -- the anxiety, sadness and fear. After each inhale, I'd sustain the pause in the breath and then on the exhale I would say to myself: Stay. At first, I was as patient as a rattlesnake. Twenty minutes of silence and sitting was all I could sustain. Then, I made it to forty and then to an hour. At home, I created a place to sit Zen. I have a cushion and a rug. I sit looking out onto my back yard. On that cushion, I stay.

Slowly, I am making progress as a student of Zen. As I stay with the breath, I experience some of what has been lost. I feel the breaks in my heart.  At the end of each session, I bow in gratitude for all that I have been given. If there is no experience of loss, there was nothing to value.  Staying has become a way to salvage the goodness from each of these relationships, to make meaning out of some of what has been lost. Paradoxically, it's also ended a long estrangement from my own true self and provided an  opening to something new. So, here's my advice: S-T-A-Y.