8: The Profound Weight of Absence
Reading time: 12 minutes
Hey there! Thanks for joining me. This email contains the eighth chapter of my "Dreaming In the Real" manuscript. We are almost finished with Part One, Digging Through the Rubble, which comprises nine chapters of the historical timeline.
Starting with Chapter 10, bi-weekly episodes will take you on a journey into the unseen realms of the natural world to discover a fundamental connection between human beings and the benevolent forces of nature that exist beyond our everyday awareness. Join me as I encounter plant spirits, star beings, and ancestors who taught me how to reframe the past and conjure something new and extraordinary.
To access the episode list and preceding chapters, please START HERE.
“And once the storm is over you won’t remember you how made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm’s all about.” ~ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I STORED GRIEF in my body beside deeply engrained emotional wounds. Against my mother's wishes and my better judgment, I gave half of my mom's inheritance to my sister. It felt like the right thing to do at the time. I arranged the details for my mom's celebration of life in Mendocino, and I wrote and illustrated handmade memory cards for our close friends and family.
I reflected on the meaning of personal freedom as I wrote a letter my mom would never read. Viewing it through the lens of my pain, I could only speculate about what it might feel like and who she could have been. Now, I realize that personal freedom hinges on things she never had, the essential elements of physical, mental, and emotional nourishment, protection, and safety. Without these crucial elements, we cannot make choices and decisions in line with our desires and convictions, and we can never flourish.
MY MOM'S TWO daughters, her brother and half-sister, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, spouses, and a newborn great-grandson gathered on the Mendocino coast to celebrate my mom's life. I had mixed feelings about my dad, who didn't go to Mendocino with the rest of us. At the last minute, he chose to stay home because his hernia bothered him. He left me wondering what truly mattered to him. It wasn't his wife and family.
The following month, Nancy and I moved my dad and his belongings into an independent living facility. He gave the house to my sister and me. I realize now the house was a gesture of love, but I wanted nothing to do with it at the time. I sold my half to Nancy. I only visited my dad twice before he missed dinner and breakfast the next day, and a staff member found him dead in his recliner in front of the television with a smile on his face. He died of congestive heart failure less than three months after my mom and twenty-five years after the doctor declared he only had two years to live.
Nancy contacted our cousin in South Dakota, who owned a funeral home, and they arranged to fly our father to Madison. I called Brad at work and asked him to come home, and our little family flew to the Midwestern prairie. We laid my dad to rest in the East Nidaros Lutheran Church cemetery in Baltic, where his grandfather was a founding member and pastor in the late 1800s. He would rest with his family in the only place he knew happiness.
AFTER MY MOM DIED, I cried for a few minutes before calling the coroner. I didn’t have the time, energy, or ability to grieve while taking care of her end-of-life details. Or maybe it was exactly what I needed. I don’t remember. Time seems to misrepresent my interpretations of these past experiences. I don’t know why some memories are clear and others fade or become distorted and embellished each time I look back.
I didn’t cry when my dad died until my cousin Rick sang “Amazing Grace” at his funeral, and the emotion poured out of me, embarrassing everyone. That same year, we had lost Brad’s grandmother and uncle, my mom’s older brother, my mom’s younger brother’s wife, and a lifelong family friend. The family and friends we counted on and spent holidays and birthdays with were gone. I didn’t know how to process it all.
TYLER WAS THREE; Katie was one; and I was thirty-two. I was running on stress-induced energy. I didn’t want to be responsible for everyone’s everything anymore. I needed to put myself first, and I didn’t know how. Weary of being married to someone absent and disconnected from my life and not knowing what to do next, I made a deal with fate. Brad grew up in Montana, and he wanted to move back. I didn’t want our children to grow up in California, and Brad’s mom and three sisters were in Montana, so we made a lowball offer on a house in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. It was a larger house and more acreage than we needed, but it was turnkey. My deal with fate was that if the sellers accepted our offer, I would give our marriage another chance.
The remainder of my mom’s inheritance, along with some money Brad’s grandma left us, made a down payment of almost half the asking price of an eight-bedroom split-level ranch-style house with five acres of manicured lawn, old-growth ponderosas, and fifteen acres of fenced pasture.
In the middle of a snowstorm in the first week of February 1994, we moved to the small town of Stevensville. We weren’t there long before Brad’s job took him to Malaysia for six-month tours of duty, with a month off between tours. We had no internet, and long-distance international phone charges kept us from calling much, so we wrote handwritten letters. His three sisters and mom became my dearest friends, filling a part of the emptiness in my heart.
A phantom narrative of doubt and low self-worth drove me to reaffirm my value by doing everything I could to make our lives work. I spent much of my time caring for the property on a lawn tractor with one or both of my kids riding along. Programmed to extract productivity from every waking hour, the unrelenting standards and self-reliance I learned as a child served me well. But I was overburdened with a sense of responsibility and a nagging feeling that I always needed to do more.
Our life revolved around Brad’s work schedule with an unspoken expectation, maybe just mine, that I would take care of everything else. This expectation dovetailed perfectly with my pattern of subjugating my needs. Even when he was home, I performed most of the physical, mental, and emotional labor. I didn't understand when we married how Brad's career choice supported an unacknowledged avoidance strategy or that his career would come at the expense of everything else.
Brad and I wanted different things from our lives, each other, and our time together. I wanted horses, and he didn’t. In direct opposition to his desires, our fifteen acres of pasture became home to two horses and a rescued pony for the kids. The kids and I took riding lessons, and I found a sense of freedom and connection exploring different trails of the Bitterroot and Sapphire Mountains each week with a group of women riders called the Saddle Tramps.
With mismatched priorities, I couldn’t make my relationship with Brad anything other than what it was, so I continued my efforts to communicate and planned gatherings with his family. But I began to feel more alone when he was home than when he was gone. His presence began to feel like an intrusion.
During my annual visit to the gynecologist, she asked me if I was sexually active. I couldn't hold back my tears. I was sleeping downstairs with the kids while my husband, Brad, was upstairs in our room. I felt a deep longing for connection, yet I didn't want him to touch me. Connecting with someone who didn't seem committed to me seemed impossible. I felt unimportant and uncared for in my marriage. At the time, I couldn't separate my adult self from the part of me that grew up feeling the same way.
The doctor diagnosed me with clinical depression, prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft, and referred me to a therapist. The therapist told me I needed to make some life changes, or I may not survive. She recognized a spiritual inclination, and considering my connection to nature and my explorations of consciousness, she referred me to work with a local shaman.
The shaman looked like anyone’s next-door neighbor. A small woman with long dark hair, maybe ten years my senior, guided me in meditation using a heartbeat rhythm on a Native American-styled hand drum. I journeyed into the earth and met animal spirit guides; a female wolf and a whitetail doe offered loving support and comfort. At home, I practiced intentional out-of-body travel, and my spirit body floated up through the attic and above my house into the sky and through a tunnel of energy that led me to beings made of light. The beings sent me back with strange geometric shapes and symbols, answers to questions I didn’t remember asking. A delicate silver cord made of light always brought me home, and I began to feel reassured that someone, somewhere, was watching out for me.
When my mom was on her deathbed, I watched her converse with beings I couldn’t see. With a newfound connection to the unseen realms, I read every book I could find on life after death and near-death experiences. I read about people who, under hypnosis, recalled other lifetimes and even the time between those lifetimes. These case studies about life, death, and reincarnation led me to explore my origins through past life regression and dreams, which helped me begin to make sense of my family’s painful past. I considered the idea that before we came together in this lifetime, for reasons beyond our comprehension, my parents and I agreed to the parts we would play in each other’s lives—roles to support the evolution of our souls.
With this higher perspective, I could see how my dad sacrificed his ability to love us for his growth. While my mom’s suffering and the dynamic between her and my dad remained beyond my understanding, this new way of looking at life rang true to the core of my being. Memories of my own past lives planted seeds of forgiveness and compassion for our combined familial dysfunction. But my parents were gone, and forgiving my dad came easy. It would be many years before I would forgive Brad and myself for what was happening between us. I didn't understand then how my childhood circumstances affected my adult response to life or how Brad's affected his.
We attended family counseling when he was home but lost any common ground. He believed that my work with the shaman and my studies of consciousness, death, and other lifetimes were of the devil. He likened me to Jezebel, a woman who didn't know her place, who wanted to be valued as equal to men, and who worshiped false gods. Brad dismissed my reality because I didn't believe in the Bible. Our conflicting principles and values brewed within us, affecting our perspectives and behavior. When Brad was home, he withheld communication, and I withheld affection. We lived within the silence of unspoken truth and things we would never know about each other. The failure to build a life together was not his or mine but ours, a mutual struggle we couldn't overcome.
Over our three years in Montana, I mourned the loss of our connection and relationship as if it were already over. Feeling desperate for change, my childhood pattern of being overly responsible pushed me to find solutions. I scheduled a day to talk when Brad was home. I understood that his frequent and prolonged absences would continue. Still, I knew our relationship could improve if I knew what he needed and if he acknowledged what he wasn't contributing, such as sharing his feelings and considering my needs and well-being equal to his own.
With his mom looking after the kids, we spent hours in the living room, him on the couch and me in my dad's old rocking chair, surrounded by the uncomfortable silence of a conversation we would never have. I shared my feelings and ideas while asking him about his. There were no heated arguments or deep sharing. Instead, he withdrew. The silence only made me yearn for connection even more. I suspect he felt the same. We were each of us alone as the gap between us widened.
After my troubled early years and recent losses, I was only beginning to know who I was. With a newfound awareness of life’s bigger picture, I needed to learn more. I didn’t want to break up our family, but I had watched helplessly as my mom died both on the inside and out by staying in a marriage where my dad had not considered her needs. I didn’t know who my kids might become if they had to deal with the fallout of my inner dying, so I made the only decision I could to validate my existence and theirs.
Despite the fear and uncertainty of leaving a safe environment to set out on my own in rural Montana, where there were limited opportunities for a woman without a degree, I left Brad with the big green house to manage on his own. I took the dogs and the kids and rented a small, crude, one-bedroom log cabin on the other side of the valley. Relieved to be away from the aching loneliness of marriage, I found a couple of part-time jobs. Part of me still hoped I would find what I needed so one day we could all be the family I always wanted and that our kids deserved.
Unaware I needed time to heal, I naïvely grasped an opportunity to feel better about myself. I started seeing a man who accepted me for who I was and shared my growing spiritual awareness. When Brad found out, he assumed I must have been seeing him all the while in his absence. We divorced after more than ten years of marriage. Eventually, Brad remarried, and we disagreed about everything related to co-parenting for the next fourteen years.
With a bittersweet sense of relief and heartbreak, I took Craig, my mother's maiden name, as my own. It seemed right. Despite everything she and I had experienced together, I knew how much she loved me.
NEXT: Chapter 9: Finding Clarity in Chaos
Your comments really make my day! I write to connect with people, and hearing what you have to say inspires me to share more. If you can't comment right now, no worries—just drop your thoughts when you can!