Healing Gifts from Friends: Larry Horowitz & T.

+ Philosophical Contemplations on Longing, Interconnectedness, Neuroscientific Research, Taoism, Nonduality, Ideological Subversion, & the Wave Within the Ocean

I was unprepared for the emotional fallout I would experience after publishing Wingèd Messengers, the latest essay in the series sharing my journey through grief following the loss of my treasured Michael, the Patron Saint of Insects. Judging from the responses I received both publicly and privately, I was not alone.

Wingèd Messengers

Below are the previous entries if you missed them:

I’ve Lost Half of Me: Pitched Past Pitch of Grief

How to Build a Joyful Marriage

The Michael Project #1

Eulogy for the Patron Saint of Insects

The Art of Losing

A few hours after I published it, I heard the sound of seagull¹ squawks. I went outside, looked up, and saw a flock of seagulls passing overhead. I thought it must be a different kind of bird that looked and sounded like them because seagulls aren’t normally around here.

Then it happened again a couple days later, this time a lone seagull crying in the overcast sky, like he was looking for his flockmates. I watched him fly until he vanished into the distant mist.

I later realized they are likely migrating due to the change in seasons, but it still felt special, particularly since the home documentary I filmed of our visit to my maternal grandma’s house in 2004 starts with my zooming in on a seagull, whom I identified with my grandma. Michael and I had been in the midst of editing and scoring that documentary at the time of her fatal stroke. We forced ourselves to complete it despite our paralyzing grief, and spending that time with her afterimage became in itself a healing gift.

What’s in a Name?

The next day, just after I finished drafting this piece and was wrapping up before going to bed, I noticed a shadow pass over our yard out of the corner of my eye. I had an intuitive sense that it could be a raptor. When I looked outside and noticed Snickerdoodle cautiously eyeing something from the patio chair, I stepped outside.

I was greeted by a Swainson’s hawk perched on the back fence. My first thought was for the kitties’ safety, so I stepped toward him, expecting him to fly off. He didn’t.

“You’re not even afraid of me, are you?” I asked him.

He rustled his wings and folded them back down, looking at me nonchalantly.

I resumed walking toward him. Once I got within around ten feet, he lackadaisically flew off into the neighbor’s yard. I climbed on a tree stump and tried to spot him, but he had disappeared.

I was so focused on defending the kitties, I didn’t even think about him being a wingèd messenger until I walked inside, and then the idea struck me.

If I’d known he was going to be so unfazed, I’d have grabbed my phone and snapped a picture. As it is, I had to find a stock photo, but this is exactly what he looked like.

While searching for information on their typical prey, I read:

“Swainson’s Hawk feed their chicks the usual ‘three r’s’ of the North American buteo diet: rodents, rabbits, and reptiles. But when they’re not breeding, the adults switch to a diet made up almost exclusively of insects, especially grasshoppers and dragonflies.”

Those of you who read Wingèd Messengers will recognize the significance of the final word.

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Healing Gifts from Larry Horowitz

As with the comments on my prior posts on Michael, I found myself shattered by the beauty and poignancy of your words, but this time, it hurt almost as much as reading the ones on my first post when my grief was at its rawest. In an email to Larry Horowitz—who had shared that “on January 22nd the love of my life for more than four decades took her last breath and returned to her spiritual home”—I said:

“Today, I sobbed more than I have in months, and I feel more tears coming on as I write this. I suppose this is what is meant by the oft-repeated phrase that grief is not linear.”

Reeling from his own fresh grief over his precious Mandy, Larry magnanimously reached out to offer me comfort, sharing the Ullie-Kaye poems a nearby distance and the antidote accompanied by the note:

“The first is for you. The second is for those who are willing to help you with your sadness.”

Larry told me in an email:

“Mandy & I have been fans of yours for so long that finally meeting you feels slightly unreal. You have magically written our thoughts as if you were inside our hearts and minds. So thank you for saving us all that time putting in writing what we had hoped to express. (Not to mention the exhaustive research that goes into your essays.) Please know that you are our hero. And I know Mandy & I are in good company.”

I felt honored to meet Mandy but was heartbroken that it was a posthumous introduction. In our comment exchange, I told Larry:

“I scarcely know how to begin writing this. My heart feels so broken, so shattered, as if Mandy were one of my own family members, and in a way, she was, being part of our karass. I am so sad we never got to connect before it was too late, but I thank you for introducing me to this extraordinary woman, whom I feel honored to have had as a reader.

“I think I went through about a quarter of a Kleenex box while reading your heartwrenching Facebook post and then watching that poignant memorial slideshow.

“Mandy was—is—stunningly beautiful, inside and out, and it is clear you two managed to achieve the rarest sort of love, the kind I describe in How to Build a Joyful Marriage.

“That image of her looking heavenward at the end of the slideshow gutted me but also reminded me she is now part of all that is, was, and forever will be.”

I then offered a gift I had received that morning, writing:

“I would like to share with you another gift I received when I got up today. I was listening to Devotchka’s remastered album How It Ends on Spotify, and Dearly Departed came on. That—and the whole rest of the album, but particularly You Love Me and How It Ends—opened the floodgates of my heart, partly because of the beauty of the music itself but also because Devotchka’s music features heavily in our favorite film, Little Miss Sunshine, which we watched the morning our cherished cat, Boland, breathed his last breath, and whose name could not be uttered for years afterward because of how agonizingly painful it was to both of us, but especially Michael, whose fragile heart could not bear the grief:

Dearly Departed

by Devotchka

Sweetheart
How I miss your heart
Beating next to mine

The right words
Were always hard to find
When all our time was fine
When darling you were mine, all mine

And I know
I know you had no choice
But I how I miss your voice
Singing right with mine

Flesh of my flesh
Soul of my soul
Come back home

All this darkness cannot hurt us
’Cause they made you from the light
Here on birthplace, don’t be nervous
You will make it through this night

Sweetheart
How I miss your heart
Beating next to mine

Flesh of my flesh
Soul of my soul
Come back home

As I was writing the above, Devotchka’s Exhaustible started playing, and the lyrics feel like intersecting puzzle pieces, reiterating the theme of returning home, where we are at last reunited with our lost beloveds for eternity. The documentary about my grandma has “Home” in the title and ends with a dedication to her, whom we describe as “H O M E.”

Exhaustible

by Devotchka

You and I look good together
This day is getting a lot better
Let’s get inside out of this weather
And there is no one loves you better
Than me my dear

You and I, we’re not so different
Exhaustible and inefficient
Following our intuition
To get back home
To get back home again

Our departure hour is getting closer
You are glowing like phosphorous
Of all the things I’ll miss the most
If we ever get back home

You and I can conquer distance
Space and time and mass resistance
And I really must insist
You come with me my dear
Come with me my dear

You and I we’re not so different
Exhaustible and inefficient
You and I look good together
Let’s get inside out of this weather
There is no one loves you better
There is no one loves you better
Than me my dear
Than me my dear

My longtime friend Cynthia Rae Bauman later joined the conversation with Larry, catching another wingèd synchronicity in Larry’s previous comment:

“My heart smiled in particular though when I saw that you felt inspired to include the Native American meaning of Toxaway - red bird, or Cardinal - because Cardinals in particular have long been considered to be signs from a departed loved one. (My father sent many after he passed, in the most spectacular of ways.) So in a thread about your dear Mandy, on a post titled ‘Wingèd Messengers’ about Margaret’s beloved Michael, in a conversation about departed loved ones in general, I couldn’t help but feel that Mandy whispered to you to include that definition, as another caress from the other side.”

Healing Gifts from T.

I was recently corresponding with T., a simpatico friend of a quarter decade, and I remembered I had intended to share her grief offerings as part of my Healing Gifts from Friends series.

Healing Gifts from Friends: Wendy

I had begun drafting this post prior to the publication of Wingèd Messengers, and now feels like the appropriate time to publish it, both for Larry and for any of you who may be hurting and need to know others understand what it feels like. The death of someone you love, tragically, is an experience none of us escape—unless you have never loved and don’t intend to start.