Seven in The Morning

Just for the hell of it, I decided to switch things up and work on my blog at 7 in the morning instead of 7 in the evening.  Well that didn’t go much better for me.  That was 4 days ago.  I’m easily distracted.  I think it was a run to Caribou followed by an impromptu 114 mile ride with a 52  degree high, followed by a desperate need to get warm again.  Fortunately for me my blog due date was replaced by our One Year Out blog, so I got off the hook. Now I’m back.  It’s 10:00 Sunday morning and I’m sitting in the sun in my jammies listening to Classic Vinyl and it’s time to get back to it.

I’ve mentioned many times that music is my solace, it feeds my soul. I’ve had several experiences lately where that feed morphed into so much more for me that I’m about to tell you.

While up at my mom’s, sitting alone in my truck to smoke during the snow storms, listening to a local radio station that claimed to be playing the Legends of Country Music.  They were. That’s when I found myself reaching back to my roots.  That’s when some pieces of my soul started filtering through and I felt myself starting to emerge from the depths of my grief into some semblance of who I actually am.  Caretaking of your spouse as they transition through dementia to the end changes you dramatically and I wasn’t even sure of who I was anymore. The music opened me up and gave me access to some of the pieces again.

Music has also been a big part of everything Alice and I do together.  We share a deep passion for music.  We’re from different generations with a different development path of our tastes in music.  She’s opened me up to whole new genres of music that I mostly ignored over the last 30 -40 years.  Music that really resonated with me.  I’ve found more peace and music that energizes me and empowers my soul.  Although I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that some of that music is the music my sons were not allowed to play around me, and if it was rated “R”, it wasn’t allowed at all.  My how times have changed.

I lost my play list on my old phone, don’t have a new one and got tired of listening to the radio and those fucking commercials.  So I signed up for SiriusXM. During my evening decompression, do nothing time I’ve been enjoying listening to the music I’ve always enjoyed. One evening after Alice and I spent some time jamming to her music in the truck she headed inside because she had to work early in the morning.  I turned on my music and started listening.  It took a while to transition from jamming to letting the music quietly flow over me.  It was really quite jarring to my psyche for a while until I eventually settled in to my music space.  That’s where the idea for this blog came about.  Music is so many different things for me.

One weekend Alice invited me to go with her to a Qoya class. I had no clue as to what that would be, but jumped at the chance.  Throughout the last few years I’ve opened up my soul in order to explore spiritual healing at a deeper level and had indicated to her that I wanted to pursue some of these so-called “alternative healing” thing-a-majigs she had been telling me about.  Being who she is, she’s always observing and understands what music does for me, so I guess she thought this just might the right opportunity for me to experience something more with the combination of music and movement.

I gotta digress a bit here.  I may have written about some or all of this before but in preparation for telling you what the Qoya class did for me, I want to prefix it with some context about the beginnings of what has felt like an accelerated spiritual growth journey for me over the last few years.

I have always lived my life open to what’s around the next corner but when I made the decision that it was time to downsize (me needing back fusion surgery and the return of my husband’s cancer) I needed to find that part of me that would step up and walk through this life stage. At that time I had no fucking clue of what I was going to be walking through.

My husband and I had several conversations about our spiritual beliefs over time and I was really questioning what I believed. The next summer, at the ripe age of 66, I faced deep grief for the first time in my life when my father passed away, while I was in the midst of realizing that my husband had Alzheimer’s and was already on his end of life journey.  As this all unfolded I spent a lot of time reflecting and reconciling the beliefs I had held most of my life with how my life was unfolding and wondering whether they still sustained me. During the first few weeks after my father died so many things started happening that profoundly changed me.  I can’t exactly remember the sequence of events (I don’t store details, I store the physical, emotional, spiritual reactions as I experience, that’s how I operate.  I only store the details that I deem important enough to define the experience.  Everything else gets tossed). This is how those events unfolded:

• A few days after my father’s death, I realized that the pictures I had taken of the double rainbow outside my front door were taken the evening my dad had died, before my mom had called me to tell me he was gone.  I called her and asked what time he had actually passed.  We determined that I had taken the pictures an hour or so after he passed.  My mom said, “now we know he’s where he was going [heaven]. “. I’m not sure yet what I believe about “heaven’ but I know that’s what he believed and I’m so glad that he made it there.

• As my mom and I discussed funeral arrangements and plans for when I would be heading up north and following a conversation with my sister-in-law, I took the initiative to invite in my youngest brother (I’m the oldest, with two younger brothers, 3 and 5 years younger.  When they got bigger than me I started calling them “little brothers” to make sure they understood, that although they may be bigger than me now, I’m still the big sister). We had been estranged for 18 years and I was the last hold-out (my mom, dad and middle brother got there faster than my stubborn ass did).  He hadn’t attended family events in years.  But, it occurred to me that all three of us needed to grieve within our family and the rest of it doesn’t matter.  The first family gathering after I got up north was an incredible family moment in time. It quickly transitioned from “awkward” to peace in being together.  For me, it was everything I would ever want in a family moment even down to the moment when my middle brother gave me that grin and look that said “I’m so happy, but it’s about fucking time, big sis.”  What a gift for me!

• My best friend wanted to come up north, but had her own family funeral in western Minnesota.  A close friend of mine and my husband’s also wanted to come up for the funeral.  So, my friend drove me up early so she could see my mom before heading out and our other close friend drove my husband up.  They got there just as my brothers did and were a part of that whole experience too.  The other really cool thing about that was the fact that when my husband got out of the car, he was present in a way that he hadn’t been able to be for some time.  His love for me brought him back so he could be there for me.  And, he was.  (My mom and I both said he was his old self during that time.) The next day, during the visitation time another incredible event happened that filled my heart to overflowing.  My youngest son was always close to his grandpa and since moving up north and gotten even closer.  We were all just kind of sitting around greeting people and talking.  My son was awkwardly standing at the edges of the group, not knowing what to do in that moment.  My husband stood up, walked over to him and quietly asked my son if he wanted him to walk up to the open casket with him.  I watched as my son’s demeanor changed, he nodded and they walked up together.  I witnessed an incredible connection and it hit my soul.

• During the graveside service I felt the presence of my dad’s final peace and it opened me up to let him go.

• Around 10:00 that night while we were having a smoke, my husband was no longer capable of sustaining his presence and stepped off the ledge back into the world he could handle.  It hurt my heart to see him go, but at the same time, so fucking grateful for the time he was there.

I see all this as my baptism into fire.  I’ve talked about many other healing and growing experiences as I’ve walked through my version of hell.  Two years and nine and a half months later I found another level of healing in Qoya.

I really didn’t know what to expect.  Alice explained a little more to me on our way.  This was a brand new experience and environment for me to be in.  To say I was a bit uncomfortable and not really sure about what I was about to experience is putting it mildly.  I just went into a “follow the leader” mode.  As the other women came and settled in, I just observed and asked Alice the occasional question.  Ultimately we ended up in a circle around an altar with candles burning and various other things and had been invited to place a personal item on it if we chose..  OK, what the hell.  I followed suit and took off the spoon necklace of my mother-in-law's that I had been wearing ever since I found it in a box a few weeks earlier and placed it on the altar.  I think we started out with some yoga poses and other relaxing movements while the music may or may not have not played at times (those pesky details I don’t always recall) and moved into getting up on our feet   I felt really awkward at first.  But the point was to start moving however we felt to the music and focus on moving with the feelings rather than how it looks.  So I started moving and eventually quit watching what was going on the room, listened to the music and the instructor’s voice and just moving without thought, but with feeling.  Soon, I found myself with tears just streaming down my face.  Tears continued to fall off and on throughout the rest of the time.  I just kept moving and experiencing.  There was a slight interruption when during a calming break I needed to pee.  No big deal.  However, there wasn’t much light in the hall by the restroom and I tripped on the entrance due to a change in elevation in the floor.  I think my out loud response was heard by everyone there and went something like this:  “God fucking damn it!”  Fortunately everything still seemed relatively calming when I returned to the room and got a grin from Alice and a whispered “are you ok?”  Yeah, I’m fine, just doing me, didn’t break anything.

We continued to move and the tears continued to fall.  By then I knew I was moving through my grief and just embraced it and kept moving and crying.  At the end the instructor invited us to move closer into the circle and asked each of us what we were feeling.  Everyone responded with some kind of cool, peaceful feelings, my response at that moment was “Deep agonizing pain” or something like that.  I was still there.  We then paired off with someone we didn’t know to share our experience with.  I ended up with the instructor, my lucky day.  Seriously, again don’t recall the details of what we shared and did with our flower petals she had given us at the beginning of the class.  However, my statement to her when I stood up was “I feel cleansed.”  I later described it as my grief having been washed into love.  I started to feel the love in my heart that I had been hiding because it hurt so bad.  I found some more internal strengths that I didn’t think I was capable of when it came to love.  I may have to talk about that more someday, because that goes all the way back through my life.  I’m not ready for that all that yet.  For now, it’s enough that I found it.

I continued to move to the music throughout everything I did, particularly in the following 36-48 hours.  I just couldn’t stop moving to the music.  I always loved to dance and even when I didn’t have the physical ability to do that, still have quietly moved to music as I listen to it, but I now found myself moving with an abandon I had not previously experienced.  I don’t think it looks any prettier than when I was on the dance floor back in the day, but it does flow without too much thought about that anymore.

It took a few days before I was willing to dig into the depths of that experience even with Alice and weeks before I was ready to write about it.  The changes in how I feel about myself and finding the ability within myself to love more and express that love in what I do and how I interact with others is pretty incredible.  I always wondered if I was even capable of feeling that.  I don’t know what else to say about it.  I’m only beginning to understand what this intensive healing is doing for me.  I do know that my responses and actions to people and situations are going along with it as I experience the kind of love for myself and others that I didn’t know I had.  My grief is also wrapped in that love and I can feel it when the memories come and the tears fall.

I am so grateful for the gifts I have been given during my journey through hell and the healing and growth I’ve experienced as a result.  There’s something very satisfying for my soul in being able to take more with me as I continue my life’s journey, especially today as I write about it and understand at an even deeper level the changes that have happened within me.  I’m not wild about the pain it took to get here, but I’m really looking forward to more growth and I acknowledge and accept the pain that makes it possible.

Love and Peace,

Chick (still sitting in the sun in my jammies, still listening to Classic Vinyl)