Hummingbird as Gift

Yesterday I finally started my writing group here in my beautiful home. It's been a long time coming. I was in a writing group back in '03-'05 and I have missed it something awful. There is something magical about a writing group, as if ideas flow through the group into the collective pens and onto each person's page. Like a channeling of sorts <insert new age California fruits 'n nuts hippy quip here>.

It was unseasonably warm yesterday for January. We should have rain by now. That worries me, but on the flip-side, it's days like those that have kept me warm here for 16 years and why I can't leave. One of among many other Cali delights. So I had the balcony door wide open to highlight the sprawling sunlit view of the giant roach clip in the west. 

I was just about to share my live writing from the prompt I had given our group... "The last time I kissed him/her..." as I had once again taken a stab at a scene I've been writing over and over for five years now about the last time I saw my ex, Bryce, alive before his suicide. It's a painfully sweet scene. More painful than sweet. Quite telling of my muse for this next book: the degradation of a renaissance man.

Just as I was about to read, something flew through the open balcony door. A bird? A big bee? So fast, what is that?

A hummingbird.

He was a big one. With a pointy beak and wings that could cut a fly in two. I thought and said, "Wow. It must be tiring flopping one's wings like that. I hope the little guy rests?"

"This is auspicious," Jenny from Denmark said.

We were all nervous, yet calm. I could tell that while we each sit with dying people every week, we couldn't stand the idea of that little hummingbird dying in my living room. Not as we were in the midst of writing about death, loss, spirituality, and meaning. Now really, what a cruel joke that would be?

Ben, the guy and tallest of our group, said, "I think I'll move over here so he doesn't see me as an imposing obstacle."

I couldn't look at first and kept turning away when he'd flop into the high window...his wings hitting the glass...over...and over...again, thinking it was an exit to the outside world.

Then Ben had a thought. "Can those high windows open?" he said.

I kept wishing we had a butterfly net. How DOES one safely catch a hummingbird?

We have a long pole that opens those high windows, so Ben fetched it.

And just as I was about to hand off the responsibility to "the man of the group" (something we Daddy-Girls tend to default to in stressful moments when men are around), I pulled up all the calm from all the meditation I've done, and the 15 minutes we had just done together before we started writing, stood on a step ladder, and slowly raised the pole toward the high window and the bird, and I effortlessly opened the window. 

The hummingbird landed on the ledge as if happy to rest for a bit. In no rush to leave.

"Go on, guy. Fly away. Move left. There now. Through the window. Freedom is near," were just some of the phrases whispered by the three meditating writers.

And off he flew, eventually, through the crack on the underside of the window.

We all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

This morning I looked up the significance of hummingbirds and this was my favorite find of the lot:

"...The first time is more of an awakening, the second is the opportunity to open your heart and accept the healing. The bird came not just to your house, but inside. You faced with experience with a gentle approach in catching and releasing the bird without harming it. This reflects your own personal healing journey, to face your own experiences with grace. You remind me of my own experience in my teen years when I rescued many a hummingbird as they frantically tried to escape through the boathouse windows, catching them in a fishing net and carrying them outside. This hummingbird was willing to risk its own precious life to help you in your journey, but there was no other option, we do what we must do without thought of our own wellbeing. The first hummingbird came to awaken and heal you so you could drive home safely. The second came to give you opportunity to give back. ..."

Collaborative Grieving: Many Voices Building Hope in The Spoken Coast Project

One of the gifts that has come out of my grief is the concept I've called collaborative grieving. I think of collaborative grieving as the opposite of isolation in our grief process. While the unspoken message in our society is that grief is something to process in private, outside of work hours, and as quickly as possible to return to someone's version of normal, I chose the opposite. I grieved out loud, in public, in workshops, with strangers, and now I feel free of my suffering because I had to do so.

In the rest of the world, collaborative grieving is ingrained in ritual and in culture. When I traveled alone through Asia for two years in 2000, I discovered grief was a part of daily life. There grief is not something to fear, or quieted to exist merely in life's shadows. Death and grief happen in community - and it is shared and processed out in the open among its members. In Indonesia on the island of Bali, processing death even has its own month - August - where villagers have their teeth filed, the dead body wrapped in a white sheet is placed on an altar to be carried by its community, and the body burns while its ashes float over loved ones into the tropical air. When I stumbled on this ritual during the month my parents visited me on the road, my father became uncomfortable - frustrated even - while I had to remind myself not to stick out my tongue, as if catching flakes of snow. I like to think that moment was my personal foreshadowing, as to how I might arrive at my personal place of comfort with death.

But being in Asia didn't bring me to collaborative grieving, or to sit on my comfortable cushion with death. It just gave me a glimpse into the concept. I had to struggle and grieve myself - and bring what I was experiencing after my boyfriend's suicide into my community - in order to find solace.

Insert The Spoken Coast Project.

I met Marissa Krupa, the creator of The Spoken Coast Project, shortly after Bryce's suicide. She most likely knew me as the girl in a heap of emotions who cried out my sorrow to strangers. Fortunately, I was able to return that gift of listening when she learned that her mother, and her brother, were both diagnosed with late stage cancers. Marissa went through her own grieving process - and continues to do so - through her project. Her brother, Mickey, unfortunately died early this year. But the way her community failed her in her grieving process prompted Marissa to look at her own life, and to make the necessary changes in order to honor Mickey's life as well as her own. She was laid off from her job, but she chose to leave the corporate sector that abandoned her to properly grieve her brother and find her own hope. How is she doing that? By climbing every peak Mickey climbed - from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. She is feeling all of her feelings, as well as interviewing people about their own grieving process between each climb.

Marissa interviewed me this summer, and what arose from the ashes in my interview - and in all of the people she has interviewed in her path - was this trailer to introduce her project. It's about a fifteen minute film. And it's about death. But most importantly, it's about how we think we are grieving as individuals, but it's our collaborative grieving that creates the healing we have worked so hard to live with today. Please watch and enjoy. And if you are so inspired, please donate some dollars or some airline miles to her project so that Marissa can continue this very important work. She needs it. I needed it. America certainly needs it. And I imagine - that one day - you will need it too.

The Real Prescription for Healing Your Loss

How in the hell do I survive my loved one's suicide?

I'm often emailed and asked this question by friends, friends of friends, and just last week, from a woman in South America who lost her boyfriend and found my story in The Courage Companion: How to Live Life With True Power. Near and far, we are all reaching out for someone to help us navigate this traumatic loss.

I decided that the research, grief work, and learnings from my boyfriend's suicide five years ago is necessary for me to share with all of you. Not only because doing this all cleaned my slate to start anew, but because my grief allowed me to seek out diverse methods for healing fully in all areas of my life, and to come up with a real prescription for what I believe might just work for many of us left in the wake of suicide. To be honest, there is also a selfish incentive to sharing what I've learned with other survivors. Each time I share what I've learned, I get to watch myself heal and grow even further. It allows me to chart my progress and then take what I've learned to support others along this trecherous path.

Before I launch into what a magazine would probably title, Top Eight Ways to Heal Your Loved One's Suicide, I want to say that I am so sorry for your loss. I truly mean that. If you are here, this may be the first time that one person can say to you, "I know exactly how you feel," and really mean it. It is the first time in my life when I've felt 100% aligned with others (survivors, that is) and the first time in my life when I've felt I truly belonged (even when I didn't want to). No one should have to experience the level of guilt, shame, anger, confusion, and trauma that comes with the messy package that is suicide. But what I have learned in just five years is that if you take the time to process your grief fully, go into the trauma instead of treating it as just another aversion, and care for your heart as if it's the sweetest guest in your house, then the possibility to grow and expand and become more compassionate in this lifetime is more available to you.

What I've learned for myself after Bryce's suicide is that suicide is incrementally painful for three reasons:

1) it is shocking and often unexpected, even if we happen to later see that the signs were possibly there;

2) often our peers don't have the tools to talk about it with us because our society doesn't;

3) it's a stigma death, one that's unnecessarily loaded with shame and guilt in our world culture.

I have had to work very hard to move through all of the above. But the only way out is through, and through has now become a purpose in my life, to help others navigate suicide as I did. This way, we can rid ourselves of the shame and the stigma, and then educate ourselves so that no one has to suffer beyond the loved one we lost who suffered too much already. We may only have one life, so let's save ourselves while we're living it.

Here is my prescription for how to survive after a loved one's suicide:

1) Join a Suicide Support Group - it doesn't matter how far or close you were to the person who took their life, suicide has a profound ripple effect. Suicide Support Groups (which I trained to lead and will begin next year) can be found through AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention) here and through the American Association on Suicidology here. They both have incredible resource pages, as well. I did my suicide support group with San Francisco Suicide Prevention and they list their groups here. Being in a suicide support group or grief group gives you a community of people who are going what you are going through, so they understand your pain and they are the people you can talk to about all that you are feeling. They are the only people I can go to to talk about suicide, fully, even today. They are the only ones I feel comfortable sharing the intimate details of my loss, of the trauma, of the secrets that died in the shame. In fact, I had brunch with four people from my suicide group last month and it continues to help process our grief today. A suicide support group is grounding, it is safe, and it is necessary. Studies prove this fact.

2) Process your grief fully - I also did a grief group that had a mindfulness focus because the eight week suicide support group had not been enough. I feel grateful that I had seven years of meditation practice under my belt when Bryce took his life, and as I was comfortable with the topic of death from my meditation practice, the Zen Center where I live in San Francisco offered exactly what I needed in a mindfulness-based grief group. Help yourself by giving yourself the time to process the grief, no matter how long it takes. Many people will expect it *should* take you less time than it actually does. I have learned that often that is because they may be uncomfortable with their own ideas around death, or because your grief is too much for them. Let that stay with them, you have enough to deal with at this time.

During my loss, I had to teach myself and educate my peers by pulling back, hunkering down, saying no to outings, and to the needs of others upon me. Saying "No" taught me my limitations during my grief, and by doing so, I magically taught them that grief is personal and grief takes time. When I was soft with myself, others were softer towards me. It also taught my friends and family how to be with me during the grief years.

3) After you've helped yourself, help others - Early on in my meditation practice I realized that doing service always deepened my compassion. But I have found this to be particularly true with suicide prevention. This came much later down the road, after a few years, when I had worked through my grief quite a bit. How I did that is the following: 

-Zen Hospice Project —where I worked for the last year as Volunteer Coordinator & serve as a Volunteer Caregiver at the bedside one day a week—was where I eventually landed to lean in toward death in order to heal my grief. This is not recommended in the first year from your loss, but can be an incredible act of service to another and to oneself when the time feels right.

There I learned by watching family members and residents that when we don't fully process the grief that happens throughout our lives, it shows up in our bodies, in our minds, in how we relate to our loved ones, and to others in our current day-to-day life.

-Overnight Walk & Community Walks with AFSP - these are healing opportunities to gather with other survivors and honor your loved one by walking overnight through cities in America. I did mine in New York City years ago and will never experience the camraderie and hope I felt gathered with other survivors as we made our way through all of Manhattan and Brooklyn in the middle of the night to great sunrise.

-AFSP's Suicide Support Group Facilitator Training - trains survivors to lead a suicide support group. I took the training and found that my own support group was invaluable, as mentioned above.

-Volunteering as an adult facilitator with Challenge Day - I was drawn to this work when I saw it on Oprah just after Bryce's suicide. As a volunteer adult facilitator, I join the organization when they go into middle schools and high schools and teach teens how to break down the barriers, the bullying, and talk to us about anything. Often they talk to us about their pain, their cutting, and their suicidal thoughts. For teens, these actions are often an extension of what is going on at home, on top of the pressure & bullying they now have in schools. It allowed me to learn how to be with teens and heal what Bryce first experienced as a teen himself.

4) Therapy and 12-Step family groups - I realized after my two grief groups that it wasn't enough. I still needed to talk out the trauma and the pain. I asked for recommendations in the field and sought out a suicidologist. The therapist I found taught suicidology to graduate students and had worked with survivors for years. She knew exactly the level of pain I had suffered and was a wealth of information. This one-on-one relationship was invaluable. When I finished my time with her (she had come out of retirement to work with me), I leaned heavily on Al-Anon, a 12-Step program for family members of alcoholics. People often assume that Bryce suffered from addiction when I am in "the rooms" (a term they use in 12-step regarding meetings), but this was not the case. What I did learn, through the opportunity of tracing the lineage of my desire to be with him while at a 12-Step based rehab treatment facility for a family member the summer after Bryce died, was that I survived too many codependent relationships. I needed to learn to live my life anew, and this time with the knowledge of recovering from the effects of the family disease of alcoholism, along with the support of others doing the same.

5) Grief workshops - One day I mistyped my blog address and magically landed on Nancee Sobonya's website for her documentary, The Gifts of Grief. Nancee and I both came to the conclusion that there are gifts in grief if we allow ourselves to process our grief in order to find them. I highly recommend the film and her subsequent workshops.

6) Create a ritual - Ritual around death is severely lacking in our culture. I feel fortunate enough to live in the Mission district of San Francisco where the Latin culture celebrates Dia de Los Muertos. Bryce's birthday is November 1st, and every year on his birthday or the day after Dia de Los Muertos arrives in my neighborhood. I join other mourners and walk the city by candlelight in a procession that leads us to altars that people in the community have created to honor their loved ones they have lost. It is an incredibly healing night for me. If you don't have access to such celebrations, lighting a candle to honor your loved one on their birthday-or doing something kind for yourself to honor your loved one on their death day-is incredibly healing. This year on the anniversary of Bryce's suicide, I took a bit of his ashes out to the beach and sprinkled him out there. How I received his ashes four years ago was a surreal experience, but I have vowed that since Bryce and I loved to travel the world together, I will take a little bit of his ashes whenever I go to places where he never went. 

7) Trim the Fat - One thing I learned very early on was who I could and could not spend time with after the suicide. Some of my friends were very angry at what Bryce "did to me" and voiced their opinions, sometimes too honestly. Other friends had an ingrained sense in them to just listen, as much as possible, whenever I needed it. Guess which friends I ended up spending more time with after the suicide? Bingo. There are some friends that require more than we have to give on any given day. These were the friends that I knew I couldn't spend much time with, if only because all of my extra energy (of which I had little) was spent tending to my grief. I made sure to let people know how I was feeling at all times and made no promises that I couldn't keep.

8) Read, read, and then read some more - Some of my best understanding as to why people die by suicide was by reading books on those who have researched the topic, and by those who have survived a loss themselves. Below are the most helpful books I read on grief, death, & suicide. And there is a whole stack on my bed stand that I have the rest of my life to read. I often feel that homicide and suicide are so similar because they are the most unexpected ways to die, leaving survivors behind to pick up their pieces. Remember, your life may feel it's in pieces now, but I can assure you that will evolve over time if you tend to your grief. Hold those pieces with tremendous care - the pieces of your broken heart - and eventually, once put back together, the hole in your heart can be filled with new love and a new life.

Recommended books on death: 

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion is an articulate writer and this won the National Book Award. It's a stunning portrait into losing your partner and what you have to face. 

Angel Catcher: A Journal of Loss and Remembrance - this journal written by a mother-daughter team who lost their son doing aid work for the UN in Africa is perfectly scripted to help you journal your loss and remember the details your loved one left behind for you. Fill it out so you don't forget. Read it later to chart your progress.

Tear Soup - this book is simple, kind, and it's perfect for kids. Or it's perfect for you when the heavy reading is just too much. I wrote an article for a magazine where I was staff writer entitled, "Serve Them Tear Soup, Kids Can Handle It", about how I discovered this sweet book and how deep inside me I somehow just knew how to talk to kids about suicide and death. Keep it simple. Kids do.

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death - this was helpful regarding the trauma we face as humans when looking death squarely in the face. 

On Death & Dying - the bible on death by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Half a Life - Darin Strauss' memoir about a tragic accident describes perfectly what life can be like while living it with unanswerable questions.

Recommended books specifically on suicide:

Touched by Suicide: Hope and Healing After Loss

and

No Time To Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One - Carla Fine does a *fine* job navigating the intricacies of losing your partner to suicide.

Why People Die By Suicide - a son who's father killed himself, so he became a suicidologist and wrote the best book that explained suicide in concrete terms for me.

Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide 

and

An Unquiet Mind both by Kay Redfield Jamison - she stuggles with depression herself, is on staff at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and is also on the AFSP Board in NYC. She knows her subject matter deeply and lives with it everyday.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression - this book put the pieces together for me regarding men and suicide and insight to untreated early childhood trauma and how it can lead to depression later in life.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron - he was a master in his time to write about his depression.

Go into your grief,
for there your soul will grow.
                                            - Carl Jung

The Courage to Prevent

As I wrote a few months back, a fellow Litquake committee member published her recent book, The Courage Companion: How to Live Life with True Power. which profiled my story of courage as one of the chapters. Insert The Voice of America, which broadcasts to 125 million people around the world and decided to do a story on the book and interview three of its contributors. I was happily one of them. You can read the story while listening to its broadcast on The Voice of America website here. And if you're so inspired, leave a comment on my blog about your own act of courage, comments are what I look forward to after sharing a story or two.
One of the things you try to do as a writer while pounding away solo at the keyboard for days (or waking up grateful for jet lag that book themes, stories, and ideas are racing through your head), is get yourself some press. I'm lucky to have lived in San Francisco long enough to make nicey-nice with fellow writers, that once in awhile, press happens.

Discovering Choices in Wake of Tragedy

Photo from left to right, K, LSD, & me,
circa 1980-something.
In memoriam for our friend, LSD, listen here to
Through The Dark, by KT Tunstall

I received an email late Wednesday night from my mother. She didn't add to her own note, just "Sad News" in the subject line with a forwarded email from her friend from the town near Chicago where we had lived. Halfway down the forwarded email, my mother's friend wrote that my high school friend, LSD, had accidently overdosed at his parents' home and died. My mother's friend wrote,

"I think the last time I saw him was about 20 years ago. He was standing on the corner of Illinois Road and Bank Lane, right near your apartment, talking with Amanda. I remember how gorgeous he was and what a worry to all the mothers."  

After the sadness hit, and grief's familiar relatives made their way through my body (sluggishness & a headache from a mind that begins to drown in thoughts & memories), I realized that when I hear of a death close to me now, it bears double the weight because of Bryce, my former partner's, suicide. The visual that comes to mind is when teenage kids (the same age when LSD above and I were friends) run and do a "pile up" on one other kid's back, and the laughing faces and flailing limbs roll all over the back of the one sitting on the ground until they all topple on top of him. This is how the grief feels when I hear of someone I once loved and their premature death. Perhaps this is how LSD felt before he died.

When I re-read the email from my mother's friend, I remember LSD during that time when we were fourteen (and he was fifteen - the first one to drive, no doubt). I remember his killer smile. Driving around in the back seat of his dad's Cadillac convertible. Then driving around the next summer in the back of his own Jeep. I remember always feeling included around him, that I could come over to his house, play in his pool, flirt with the boys, listen to Steve Miller, and joke around. But what else do I remember, as it pops up so clearly from my mother's friend's email, and I think more about now that I'm closer to age fifty (the age those mothers were during that time) than sixteen? Her words, " I remember how gorgeous he was and what a worry to all the mothers." What a worry to all the mothers, she remembers.

I remember that to.

Her words made me think how lucky I was to get out alive and mostly unscathed. Not in the sense that I was a troubled teen (though in my own quiet way I most definitely was), but that the antics that we got away with during those years makes me shudder at what I could be up against raising a child these days. In the scheme of teenage antics, was what played out back then quite minor? Mostly, yes. At 10:00 p.m. as a handful of giggling 16 year-olds falling all over 18 year-old jocks, while 16 year-old boys yanked out the screen in the kitchen faucet to smoke out. But it made me think about the same scene that replayed itself every weekend until, I wondered, it led straight to what happened to LSD three nights ago. From 1989 at 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday to a fateful Tuesday night this past week in 2010.

LSD reached out to me some months ago and emailed me to tell me how happy he was that I had found love again. He had hope in his voice in that message. I've spent this week grieving how hard it was for him to keep that hope going. The same way hope had its way of failing Bryce.

I woke up this morning and read that in lieu of flowers to LSD's family, who always welcomed us into their home as much as LSD did, donations should be made to Hazelden. I thought about the obituary that read "age 38" and "Hazelden". Then I thought about my own family. About the thousands of dollars spent on trying to help family members through their addictions. I thought about my two weeks in rehab for family week for a family member's addiction, and how it led my own family to finally recount the addictions of our elders that were still living, now sober, or not. And then I thought about all of our family members who had passed. My great grandfather who took his own life in the bathtub. Or my grandmother passed out at the bottom of my mother's childhood stairs. And how the effects of those memories trickled down...and trickled down...until my loved ones, like Bryce, took their own lives. Then I paused and thought about the Al-Anon "Promises", and how I wished that all of my elders, and Bryce, and our smiling, handsome, friendly, welcoming, LSD, could have lived long enough to discover these promises for themselves.

"...We will discover that we are worthy of loving...We will love others without losing ourselves, and will learn to accept love in return...Our sight, once clouded and confused, will clear and we will be able to perceive reality and recognize truth...Courage and fellowship will replace fear...We will be able to risk failure to develop new, hidden talents...Our lives, no matter how battered and degraded, will yield hope to share with others...We will begin to feel and will come to know the vastness of our emotions, but we will not be slaves to them...Our secrets will no longer bind us in shame...As we gain the ability to forgive ourselves, our families and the world, our choices will expand...Serenity and peace will have meaning for us as we allow our lives and the lives of those we love to flow day by day...with (God's) ease, balance, and grace...No longer terrified, we will discover we are free to delight in life's paradox, mystery, and awe...We will laugh more...Fear will be replaced by faith, and gratitude will come naturally as we realize that our (Higher Power) is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves..."

~From Survival to Recovery, pp. 269-270.