Like Water

Mark Liebenow

I used to tease Death to see how close I could get without actually dying by hiking alone in the wilderness where bears and mountain lions lived. I’d look down over the edge of cliffs at the rocks a mile below and know that if I slipped on a pebble, or if a gust of wind pushed me over, I would land way down there and die a painful death, although I doubted that that would ever happen. But what if the boundary wasn’t as solid as I thought? What if Death was simply a fog that drifted across a meadow that people wandered into and disappeared?

Why did I do things like this? Was I looking for a thrill to spice up a predictable life? Was I defiantly trying to proclaim that I had control over when I would die, even though I suspected this wasn’t entirely true?

Whatever flippancy I had about death ended when my wife Evelyn died unexpectedly in her 40s. I went to work in the morning, she had a rogue heart attack, and she was dead before I could reach her side. I was in shock. I had no appetite and lost ten pounds in the first week. I couldn’t sleep and kept reaching over in the night to check on how Ev was doing only to touch the cold place in bed where she should have been. Shock turned into anger, then into despair. Loneliness settled into my bones and ached. Unable to push away the darkness that had descended, I let wave after wave of emotions flow over me.

When I tried to share my grief with friends, many of them didn’t know what to say. Like me, they were young, hadn’t lost anyone close, and didn’t know what grief was like. I wandered around the house trying to find words to describe the devastation and complexity of grief to others because I knew that if I didn’t face my emotions, they would pile up and pull me down. Yet my friends thought that talking about grief was morbid, so I didn’t talk about it, and my friends didn’t, and they stood off to the side hoping that someone else would know what to say.

In the weeks and months after, a few brave people took the risk and appeared on my doorstep, even though they knew that they couldn’t take my pain away, but they believed that no one should bear the weight of suffering alone. They sipped coffee with me in the long, silent pauses and listened as I tried to describe grief’s tidal ebb and flow. The warmth of their hugs kept me connected to our community, and their presence brought assurance that I would survive.

Evelyn didn’t know she was in danger of dying because no doctor had ever warned her about her heart.

My mother, Martha, probably hoped she was dying, although she may not have been aware of this. Her dementia had progressed over a number of years, but she always wanted to move on to the next thing when the present one was done. When I sat next to her bed in assisted living, I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or had passed on. Maybe she was floating between here and the hereafter, like water in a river as it flows into the ocean and dances with the waves for a time before it disappears. I talked to her softly, and she came back for a moment, answering my questions with murmurs of yes or no, before drifting away again. Two weeks later, she died.

After waiting twenty-four hours and retesting her physical responses, Evelyn was declared brain dead by the ICU doctors. Oxygen had not reached her brain in time. The nurses shifted their focus from keeping Ev alive to keeping her organs viable for transplantation the next day.

Still stunned by the finality of how quickly death came, I returned and sat quietly beside Ev in the empty recovery room for a long time, holding her cool hand, trying to know what to say because this would be the last time I would see her. She was between the two surgeries to donate her organs and then her corneas and patches of skin to help burn victims heal. I was trying to hold myself together and comprehend how someone who was so happy and energetic two days ago after rehearsing for her theater show would never sing or dance again. Her organs had been removed and her body stitched back together and wrapped in a white blanket. It felt like the bottom of my heart had been kicked out. Ev should have been the one to survive, not me, because she was the compassionate one.

I fumbled with words that I didn’t think I’d ever have to say, hoping that she was still near enough to hear. I said I was grateful that we had found each other because she had been my anchor through low-paying jobs and several moves. Eighteen years together was not enough. I had been counting on forty years more when our weathered and wrinkled faces would look like shriveled apples. I wanted her to be safe, wherever she was. I wanted her to open her eyes one more time, even though I knew this wasn’t going to happen. I wanted her to smile and tell me it would be okay, although I didn’t see how it could. I said that I didn’t know how I was going to survive grief without her help because she was the one who knew about things like this. My hour was up. The surgeons were waiting to finish their tasks. I kissed her for the last time, whispered in her ear, “Always, my love,” and left.

How fragile the tether is that holds us to life, and how easily it can be clipped.

My Christian community did not know what to say about someone who brought a smile to everyone’s face but died young and without warning. I couldn’t fault them. They were in shock and grieving Ev too. Growing up, I was taught that everything happened for a reason and according to God’s plan, even if no one ever figured out what this was, like when a child gets leukemia or a young parent dies in a car accident. Too often this directive is interpreted as saying that we shouldn’t grieve, although it’s okay to be sad for a few weeks, maybe even for as long as a month, but then we need to move on and be happy that our loved ones are in heaven. This way of thinking says our emotions aren’t important, there is nothing to be learned by exploring our grief, and nothing to be gained by helping those who were grieving, because whatever suffering we experience in this world doesn’t matter in the long run.

This next-world theology didn’t work for me. Faith wasn’t worth much if we saw people suffering and chose to do nothing. I couldn’t see how Ev’s death was anything positive. Yes, the four women who received her organs were alive because of her, but why did Evelyn have to die? She was the most caring person I knew, and she was taken away like she didn’t matter. I was angry with God. I was angry with the paramedics, who were just across the street, because they didn’t get her heart restarted. That was their job, and they didn’t do it! I was angry with Evelyn for dying and leaving me alone. I was angry with myself for not seeing something the night before that could have saved her life. That was my job. That was my part of the covenant, and I failed! I was also angry that I had no one to blame, no one to yell at, and it felt like I was fighting against a wind that would not answer why.

Frustrated with Christian platitudes, I looked to Judaism and discovered three-thousand-year-old traditions that honored the emotions of those who were grieving, and they provided guidance for what I could do to cope with the emotions that welled up in the first days, weeks, and months. They assured me that I was grieving correctly and that grief was going to take more time than I ever expected. Then I looked to Buddhism because I wanted to understand the context and interplay of death with life, because I did better with thinking than feeling. I understood Buddhism to be saying that all life was suffering, and that the way out of suffering was to step back from the heat and chaos of my emotions and observe my reactions. Figure out what was causing my pain, and let go of my attachments to them to reduce my suffering.

But when a wife I loved with all my heart was ripped away, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to think my way out of something that didn’t make sense. Nor was I going to feel my way through without the help of others. My heart felt like an earthquake had broken it apart and reduced it to rubble. I sat with the urn of Ev’s ashes in the middle of our dining room table and waited for clarity.

Grieving is a lonely journey. It’s made worse when people won’t let survivors talk about their fears because it’s morbid, but instead push them to think only positive thoughts (deny, deflect). Grief is an experience of life; it’s not death, although it can feel like it. Death is death.

I used to see beauty in dead things, although I didn’t think of them as being dead—red and yellow leaves that had fallen on a black path in the rain; the giant sequoia that blew over in a wind storm decades ago, whose trunk now nourished the shoots of a new generation of trees; and empty shells on an ocean beach, the white exoskeletons of mollusks and starfish. These deaths I accepted as the normal give and take of life in nature. Then someone I loved died, and these images of beauty that once made me smile now haunted the rooms in my heart with sorrow.

Even in my beloved Yosemite, in every scenic place that I held dear, I began to see the dead carcasses of birds that I hadn’t noticed before. I watched coyotes chase down elderly deer and chew casually on voles in the meadow. I saw turkey vultures soar gracefully on six-foot wingspans as they rode the thermals high into the sky before gliding back to earth to tug on the entrails of dead raccoons. Life in the outdoors travels through death as it renews and regenerates. It’s the way of impermanence. The hard truth is that the existence of any single life is random, and while I can do many things right to live a long life, I have no agreement with the powers that be that this will actually happen.

Like my friends, I grew up thinking that most people lived into old age and died peacefully at home. Then came Ev’s heart attack, and I became a widower in my forties. One moment she was alive, and then she wasn’t. With Evelyn dying out of the blue, no one seemed safe, and I wondered if I, or one of my friends, was about to go next.

Most of us will do anything to not die, even when we’re old and have lived a good and full life, because comprehending our nonexistence, our not being here, is almost impossible. I think my dad struggled with this when he was ninety-four. He probably knew he was dying because he agreed to enter hospice, and he had been a family doctor and taken care of people who were dying, so he knew what hospice meant. But when he came home after patients died, I don’t know if he stayed up late feeling defeated, whiskey in hand, wondering what more he could have done, if there was something else that he could have tried.

He probably told them that what they had was serious, and they needed to get their affairs in order, because he was direct in that way. But I don’t know if he actually told them they were dying, or that they had only so much time to live, because he knew that some people lived much longer than expected, while others gave up the ghost in a matter of weeks. Some of his patients would have believed him, done what they needed to do, and told the stories to their children of the impossibilities that happened in their life and the accomplishments they were most proud of. Other patients would demand that he try every experimental drug and surgery, no matter the cost or pain it would bring. And some would have simply ignored him, just like they ignored taking the pills he had prescribed earlier that would have stopped their descent into this dire situation, and now it was too late.

Evelyn and I didn’t have that period of slowly dying, when she could wrap her life up and prepare for death, because she died so quickly. While she lay unresponsive in the ICU, the doctors needed immediate answers for a list of medical questions like resuscitation and quality of life, and I didn’t know what Ev wanted. We anticipated discussing these end-of-life matters in twenty years when we retired. Thankfully, we had talked about organ donation because of a public service announcement, so I didn’t have to agonize over this.

I returned to Yosemite whenever grief at home became too much, and the long, hot days of hiking the trails over the mountains and through the forests helped me trust life and breathe deeply again, and it gave me time to work through the roadblocks of grief. I sat for hours beside wild, cascading rivers until my mind cleared of everything but this moment.

I took more risks than I should have because I desperately wanted to shake off the lethargy that clung stubbornly to me, and I thought that a good scare might jumpstart my life. In the beginning I didn’t care if I died in the wilderness because no one needed me to come home. As the months went on, I pulled back from some of the more reckless events, like trying to wade across a swift-flowing river of snowmelt water, knowing that if I fell in, I wouldn’t be able to get out in time before hypothermia set in. I continued to do a few of them because living a cautious life was no longer appealing, because it could not guarantee that I would reach old age. Now I wanted every day to be an adventure, whether I lived for one more year or forty.

The twelve-hour hikes going up and down mountains pushed me to my physical and mental limits, and I began the task of creating a new life without Ev that I never wanted. Yet I continued to hope for the impossible, that Evelyn would walk up to me on the trail, say hi, and apologize that she had gotten lost for a while. In the mornings I felt the warm rays of the sun as it rose over the white granite mountains, listened to the excitement of the rivers as they surged and cascaded over waterfalls in great plumes of white, and breathed in the rich aroma of cedar and Jeffrey pines, and they were enough to keep me going until I cared about life again.

Grief is the water that falls as rain on a burning forest, soaking the earth. It moves with the rhythm of the great rivers that flow down from the mountains and nurture the dry, thirsty meadows. The river of grief is the heart of the ocean that continues to surge after the ocean is gone.

After Ev passed, I wondered where her consciousness was, if she had moved on to a place that could be called a place, and if she had retained any awareness of who she had been. Did she exist for a time in a quantum flux, being neither dead nor alive, as she transitioned through purgatory, the Bardo, the ancient Egyptian court of judgment, and into what we imagine heaven to be? Or did she simply cease to be? I also didn’t know if I would take the risk of loving anyone as deeply as I had loved Evelyn, because I didn’t want to go through the trauma of grief again. Yet I knew that Ev wouldn’t want her death to stop me from caring for others, so I will at least do this.

One night I was standing in the darkness of our backyard at midnight looking for meteorites as Ev and I used to do, huddled together for warmth, and I tried to trace where her light was traveling among the stars, perhaps to Orion, her favorite constellation. I was listening to the cold distance of the cosmos between us when a phone rang. One of Evelyn’s friends in Oregon was calling to say that a psychic told her that Ev wanted me to know she was okay, and that where she was was beyond anything we could imagine. While I hadn’t put any stock in psychics, I found this reassuring, because it told me that more was going on in the universe than I would ever know.

Mark Liebenow writes about nature, grief, prostate cancer, and the wisdom of fools. The author of four books, Mark has had essays, poems, and critical reviews published in numerous literary journals. His work has been named a notable by Best American Essays and nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. He has won the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Award, and the Chautauqua and Literal Latte’s essay prizes. His account of hiking in Yosemite to deal with his wife’s death, Mountains of Light, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. He studied English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and creative nonfiction at Bradley University. http://www.markliebenow.com.