hearts break so they can open

by Rochelle Schieck

I invite you to take a deep breath as your mind and heart travel where they need to in this moment. Notice yourself and your experience. What thoughts are arising? What sensations are present in your body? What emotions are emerging? Whatever has your attention at this moment, can you practice being with it? For a few breaths, I invite you to offer yourself presence.

This was the lesson I learned the first time I sat in a room when someone died. While I was still in my training, I went to sit with an older, wiser woman. Her beige chair was against the wall at the end of a single hospital-style bed with crisp white sheets. There was a frail, middle-aged man in the bed, in his 50’s I think. There were no family or friends around him. The wise woman invited me to practice presence, to bear witness to this man as he transitioned. Even though we did not know him, she taught me that we didn’t need to. We could hold space for his experience by being with him in it. It took me a while to slow down my racing thoughts that were trying to understand what I was doing there. When I did have a moment of deep peace and presence in my mind and heart, he gasped for a breath. The woman looked at me in a way that said,

“Stay calm and stay present.” Together, we watched him take his last breath. When he passed, there was a visceral scene of his spirit no longer inside his body. The intuitive part of me knew he was gone. The woman and I sat in silence for a few minutes before we got up

Another thing I learned in the hospice volunteer training was that the last thing to go is someone’s hearing

This touched me in a personal way when I got the call that my grandmother might not make it through the night. I flew across the country to be with her. When I arrived, she was in a coma, but still alive. I cuddled up to hold her. Her body was softening, minute by minute, letting go of all the tension of the 78 years of her life. Her short gray hair stood up in a dozen different directions at once. I did my best to get comfortable in the half-raised hospital bed, and I began to whisper gratitudes in her ear. I replayed all the moments of my life when I was held and loved by her. I fell asleep and when I awoke, I realized she had died in my arms. She had been held in her granddaughter’s arms while we honored her life.

Many of us have lived with loss. I offer my respect to your relations who have made the courageous journey into this world and beyond it. I also offer my deep respect to you and your journey. You are still alive, heart still beating and your breath still moving in and out! I am thinking of a teacher of mine who shared with me the idea that we used to live a lifetime and die in one body, and now we die many times and are reborn, living many lives in the same body. I’ll always remember the glee she shared with this news of living in accelerated times of change and evolution. It feels true. Even if it is not the literal death of another person or ourselves, the cycles of change require reconciliation with our grief.

How do you/me/we navigate cycles of impermanence, as natural as the leaves falling off the trees? How do you/me/we receive life’s hardships and grief and compost them to be regenerative for ourselves to create more beauty in this world we share? How do you/me/we keep up with the acceleration of change that is so present, where looking life in the eye with love is necessary to meet the heartbreak all around us?

INVITATIONS TO CONSIDER:

1: FEEL: Practice being with challenging feelings and offering deep compassion to them.

2: GATHER: Embrace your human journey by embracing your brothers and sisters who are walking alongside you at this time, in their own way.

3: GRIEVE AS PRAISE: In Martin Prechtel’s book, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, he writes,

Let the natural flow of grief move you to explore if it’s true for you—do hearts break so they can open?

Long life, Honey in the Heart, White roads paved in the eyebrows of the Moon, Which is sea foam, Yellow roads paved with yellow, fat and abundance, From the tail of the Morning Star, No Evil, Thirteen Thank-yous, Earth Fruit Face, Thanks.

-Martín Prechtel

In loving beauty and memory of Jeffrey Pettit

8/10/1927-8/18/2022

In Peace and in Grief as Praise

Your loving daughter filled with gratitude and appreciation for all of you.

In Loving Memory of Margie Cooper

Honoring your strength, softness, tender heart & wicked sense of humor.

In Loving Memory of Bronislawa

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of “Mother”

-EdgarAllenPoe

Love, Glenna

DearestMother,Grandmother,Great Grandmother:Youaresoveryloved!You livethroughusinourhearts.Youarewithus alwaysandinallways.Wefeelyourlovebeamingdownonus. Youareabeaconoflight.