Etched into my memory is the day I learned that my mother died. My twin and I were in our senior year of high school, and our younger brother was still in elementary school. Mom had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and had been in and out of the hospital for months. That time was difficult, but both our parents reassured us that she would be just fine. I dismissed how frail she looked and her diminished energy because I’d been taught to listen to adults.
It was New Year’s Day 1966, cold and snowy as usual in Minneapolis. Dad had gone to the hospital after breakfast. By early afternoon, I was washing dishes while Lou Ann dried them. Dad came in the back door without taking off his boots or coat and collapsed into a kitchen chair and began to cry. I’d never seen him cry before. The air in the room became very still, and I found myself frozen in place. When he finally looked up, he said, “Your mother died this morning.” I remember my silent scream: You said she’d be fine! I felt a burning in the back of my throat and just made it to the bathroom in time. This, I learned later, was both denial and shock.
Losing my twin was different. I’d been preparing for her death since her diagnosis. I knew in a deep, cellular way that I would lose her. After six days in home hospice, her care group gathered around her bed. She had just slipped into a coma, and her breathing was erratic. I remember holding my hand on Lou Ann’s chest, feeling her heart speed up and finally stop. I experienced a feeling of falling from a great height with no bottom in sight. A different type of shock — but this time, no denial.
When my mom died in 1966, Lou Ann and I were 17, and there was little understanding about grief and loss. After the weeklong Jewish observance of Shiva, our family resumed daily activities. Because my brother Mark was only ten years old, he was allowed to cry and be angry, but the adults in the family expected Lou Ann and me to take over our mother’s role, fixing meals, doing laundry, cleaning the house, helping Mark with homework, and being the adults the family needed us to be.
I felt like I was enclosed in a glass bubble, cut off from reality and from myself, for at least two years. A year after my mother’s death, I barely recognized myself: I had been eating to numb my feelings and had gained almost fifty pounds. Years later, I recognized that I had been severely depressed.
As I began to heal from the loss of my mother and entered therapy, I came to realize that my family’s reaction to generations of trauma was to avoid, deny, and escape from any emotions. When my very first therapist asked me how losing my mom made me feel, I had no words to describe feelings, let alone express my experience. I knew my stomach hurt and I felt like screaming and throwing things, but I’d never learned to articulate those sensations as emotions.
After Lou Ann died, 39 years later, I had plenty of words to describe my feelings — but more importantly, I promised myself that I would actually experience them. I was so broken it didn’t really feel like a choice. Tears were an everyday occasion. Instead of pretending to be fine, I accepted the pain of the loss and allowed myself to embrace what I was feeling. The road to recovery was long, hard, and never linear. I leaned on my wife, my friends, my community, and finally a good grief therapist. I learned that surrendering to hard feelings was excruciating, but eventually, and incrementally, I began to feel better — to find my way back to life. I learned that working with someone skilled in grief counseling was helpful, as was homeopathy, bodywork, exercise, music, and writing.
I tell myself that I am mostly recovered from losing Lou Ann. I can talk about her without crying and have many happy memories instead of remembering her frail, emaciated body at the end. I feel a closeness with her daily, almost as if I’m sharing my life with her again. When I look at the pictures of her sitting on our piano, I see her beaming love at me through her eyes, appreciating how well I’ve continued to live my life without her. I feel her presence the most when I write about Death Charts, and use astrology to help others move toward healing from their devastating loss.
For me, the single most important antidote to loss is belief in something beyond this material plane. Because Lou Ann’s illness was condensed into five short months, I think her spiritual changes came in an exaggerated and rapid way. First, she dreamt of being surrounded by a circle of friends glowing with light and holding her up — we are all interconnected. Then she had a profound awareness that “I am not my body” as cancer ravaged her organs — we are Spirit.
Finally, as she was actively dying, she had a series of near-death experiences and traveled to the “other side,” communing with dead relatives and telling us stories of a wonderful place where she was free from pain, surrounded by love, and heard the most beautiful music that soothed her spirit. There is life after life.
I hold onto these understandings as part of my own path to recovery. I was not alone in my healing; my healing was possible because of connection — both human and transpersonal. I am Spirit, and every time I work with the planets and see their synchronicity with life, I feel the power of something greater than myself. I believed Lou Ann when she told me that our mom was waiting for her on the other side, and that when they saw each other, they felt only love.
There is life after life.