I am, every day, astounded at how the work on the Abu Dhabi memoir goes on… and on. It has become an unintended inner pilgrimage, a project of becoming. Naively (or foolishly), I thought I had a ready-made book that simply required typing up handwritten letters I’d written from Abu Dhabi between 2009 and 2012; instead, I merely had the bare bones. I had no idea of the inward journey I was about to embark upon when, eight years after Abu Dhabi, I unfolded those pages from their envelopes. While I often use words like struggle and challenge when asked about our experience, there was also humor, affection, and truth-seeking woven throughout the experience. After all, Philip was there by my side.
Memories of Philip are precious and tender, though there’s always a wistful longing wrapped around them. Love and yearning forever twist my heart. As many widows or widowers will tell you, each in their own way, the passage of time since his death leaves me wishing I had better memorized him. If I could, I would have permanently engraved the visceral sense of the depth of my emotions, the feel of his arms around me, and the sound of his voice. I once accused my mother of making my deceased father and her beloved partner into a saint. Now, I better understand. Today, I wonder how to paint the picture of my impossibly beloved person without elevating him to sainthood. A saint he was not, though as time passes, his flaws soften in memory.
Perfectly timed to coincide with this death anniversary date, the past two weeks have found me revisiting and reviving stories of Philip’s interactions with people in Abu Dhabi. Recalling his generous approach to the strangers he encountered on his daily explorations and expeditions reminds me of who he was when his curiosity and spirit of adventure were sparked. The anecdotes I’ve been focused on recently have allowed me to tease out from memory not saintliness but all that was loveable, playful, and kind.
In addition to my struggles at the college, in the first months, the foreignness of the city—its people, customs, and noise—unnerved me. If not for Philip, I might have thrown in the towel and gotten on the next plane out.
Philip, however, set out daily on a quest to learn about our noisy new home. Despite his argument with the city’s cacophony and chaos, he connected with people on campus, at the markets, in shops, and in our neighborhood, and this contributed to his sense of belonging and, consequently, to mine. His appearance—tall, thin, fair-skinned with unruly sand-colored hair in a population that was mostly shorter and darker–made him stand out. But it was the personality and the soul his body carried that engaged and attracted others. By the end of our first six months, people in the neighborhood recognized him. They nodded and responded with a grin to his Arabic greeting. Hand on his heart, his salaam Aleikum was returned with the customary wa aleikum salaam.
In shops and markets, he was adopted by the vendors and clerks who served him. Of course, they wanted his money, but the exchanges between them grew longer, warmer, and friendlier over time. Philip accepted the tea offered (even when it didn’t accord with his raw fruitarian diet). He knew when to linger and listen, when to ask questions, and when to empathize with ex-pats’ woes. In Abu Dhabi, Philip forged a growing and comforting sense of belonging that helped us to feel less other. Less like strangers in a strange land. And this allowed us to open our minds and hearts to Abu Dhabi and its people.
Rereading the letters more than a decade after the fact returns me to our struggles but also to our growth. I’m awed at our perseverance. I can’t recall another situation that challenged us so profoundly for so long. Philip’s support and companionship not only helped me survive that difficult time but enriched my experience tenfold. His perspective held me to my deeper truth. He wondered if we could open our hearts to the opportunity … to become learners. What could this situation, with all its challenges to our egos and identities, our preferences and prejudices, teach us? His readiness to use external experiences to befriend our inner angels and demons turned an adventure into a project of becoming. We didn’t flee for the airport but persisted because we each had some vague inkling of the deep psycho-spiritual importance of the struggle.
Little did I know when I signed a contract and boarded a plane for Abu Dhabi in 2009 that I’d embarked on an inner journey as much or more than an intriguing encounter with a radically different culture. Nor did I recognize, in 2018, when I thought to transcribe hand-written letters into type, that I was about to embark on yet another journey. Writing has always been my way to deepen my experience … my way to make meaning. Whether I seek to understand myself and my place in this increasingly mad world on the back of a camel or in my studio apartment in Fort Collins, the journey of making meaning pulls me forward.
Living with Philip was always a challenge to grow and become more of who we were meant to be. I am forever grateful for his inquiring and adventuring spirit that continues to inspire and challenge me. His nature was childlike and rascally, while his soul was forever in a deep dive for truth and meaning. He was born of Love and has, no doubt, returned to Love. I carry that love inside me now. It is part of who I am. And today, on this anniversary day of his departure, and always, I return all my love to him.
Four+ years into working and reworking a book that’s changed its name, its purpose, and its structure more times than I like to count, I’ve recently been startled to find the same words showing up in the two different and ostensibly dissimilar life events that have survived the manuscript’s constant dismantling and reconstruction. Besieged by a maelstrom of emotions during my three years in Abu Dhabi, I found myself confronting a spectrum of issues. These ranged from loss of control, anxiety, and threats to my ego — to the more enlightened emotions that gathered and grew the longer I was there: humility, honesty, release, acceptance, resilience, and love. Only recently has it dawned on me that in the two years of overwhelming sadness and grief that followed Philip and Winnie’s dying and deaths, I found myself again facing these same struggles and using these same words.
How can that be?
How can a crazy, stressful, cross-cultural experience be equated with the never-adequately described emotions of grief and grieving? Is it that grief is a foreign country to the heart?
Is Culture Shock—that upending experience of befuddlement and fear felt in a new country, of needing to find one’s footing in the face of customs, languages, and terrain that make little sense to us—somehow, and oddly, like what we experience when we are bereaved? In other words, how is the way we must adjust and adapt to life in a foreign country similar to the way grief takes us to a new inner land and requires of us a major transition? Neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, who has investigated the impact of grief on the brain, suggests that the brain in grief is almost like a separate country, and as grieving progresses, it struggles to discover its new homeland. The impact of grief on the brain, I am finding, is akin to the impact of Culture Shock: both bring disorientation and anxiety because everything is so exhaustingly different from what we’ve known previously. O’Connor teaches me that falling in love with Philip decades earlier and being in love for nearly forty years created, over time, deeply encoded pathways in my brain. As such, in neuroscience-speak, the loss of this person required new encoding of new information. My brain had to establish new neural pathways in order for me to grow slowly into accepting his permanent absence. But before that could happen, while my brain was not yet readjusted, I struggled. My irrational self and my not-yet-adjusted brain believed Philip was still here, still somewhere–just temporarily away. It was this disconnect in the early months after his death that led to the yearning O’Connor speaks of as the hard but natural emotion that comes before we can make the painful transition into a new reality (a new country). In Abu Dhabi, I yearned for what was familiar. In grief, I ached for the presence of my husband and then my mother, who were no longer with me. This yearning in grief threw me into a limbo state, which was not unlike how I often felt in Abu Dhabi, a limbo land. Thinking about this now (and with the help afforded by O’Connor’s important work), the unanticipated similarity between the heartache of grief and my struggles in Abu Dhabi emerges ever more clearly.
In Abu Dhabi, I was presented with daily obstacles that challenged my personality and customary ways of being. Interwoven amongst all these obstacles was the challenge to my sense of control. The girls, first and foremost, undermined my illusion of being in control. They didn’t ‘do college’ according to my expectations. They didn’t communicate or, in fact, live in ways that were familiar or comfortable for me. The college, too, wasn’t run like any college I’d attended as a student or worked at as a Counselor or an Instructor. Working in an unfamiliar place that itself seemed out of control – with changes in policy and practice handed down every other day – kept me off-balance for three long years. And then there was the city. It, too, was like none I’d known. On the ground, it was a chaotic, frenetic jumble that operated seemingly without rules. This itself was paradoxical in a land where so much of one’s life was heavily prescribed and regulated. But then Abu Dhabi was a place of paradoxes and inconsistencies. It was liberal and conservative, modern and medieval. In Abu Dhabi, Philip and I navigated a world that looked like a modern city but felt and even smelled utterly foreign. An ancient, nomadic, tribal energy vibrated beneath the high-rise buildings and modern shopping malls. We lived as strangers in a strange land, attempting to puzzle our way into this challenge to our need for control, a need we hadn’t been aware of until control was largely taken away.
In grief, loss of control was an enormous issue, as well. The world as I’d known it had changed without my consent. The two people I most relied upon were suddenly absent … again without my agreement. The rituals I’d cherished and shared with Philip lost meaning. My daily tasks, now faced alone, felt strange and wrong; a trip to the supermarket or food co-op created anxiety. The loss of my weekly walking and talking phone calls with Winnie left another hole in my life. Conversations with both Philip and Winnie were now held in my head. Of course, I felt out of control.
In Abu Dhabi, constant threats to my ego and identity followed on the heels of the loss of control. At the college, the teacher I’d been for most of my professional life could not recognize the teacher who struggled daily with the girls. And, no surprise, this evoked insecurity and fear. My ways of teaching weren’t working; my long-honed skills were suddenly all wrong. What was I going to do if I couldn’t bring a classroom together? If my style of teaching had ceased to be effective? What if I’d lost my competence? I’d certainly lost my confidence.
These obstacles and the uneasiness they evoked tied me in knots. To untangle those knots and survive Abu Dhabi, I was compelled to wave the white flag. I had to let go and release many of my preferences, expectations, and much of what I thought I knew about myself. But letting go is never easy. It creates its own angst. I would live in a similar space again ten years later as I navigated the waters of grief.
When I found myself widowed, I had a new box to tick on all the forms I’d been using for decades. How would I know myself when I was no longer half of the partnership that had defined my life for 37 years? What would I do with all the love I still had to give? Who would I look to for nurturance when I no longer had a mother? How does a daughter know herself when she becomes a motherless child? Who would I turn to when those people I shared with in times of sorrow and joy were permanently absent? Discomfort related to ego and identity became part of my newly bereaved existence I had not chosen and did not want.
The flip side of the coin holds words (and emotions) representing the strengths and resilience needed to move into and through the unfamiliarity of an uncomfortable cross-cultural experience and that of loss and grief. Two of those words are ‘honesty’ and ‘humility.’ The honesty to admit just how threatened I was came first. At the college, I reluctantly recognized the need to turn to colleagues for help; this was something I’d rarely done. Humility replaced an inflated sense of self. But what do I know? became a regular refrain at the end of my conversations. Professionally, up until Abu Dhabi, I’d felt respected, accepted, and admired; suddenly, I felt anything but. Honesty and humility were also required when my need for help became undeniable after Philip died. I found my way to a grief counselor. Relief flooded my heart when I found a safe person to whom I could openly and honestly express my pain and the uncertainty and disorientation of not knowing who I was anymore. I hadn’t been fully aware of how much I valued self-sufficiency until, suddenly, I’d been felled. For months, as I faced each new situation that had to face alone for the first time, I felt anything but self-sufficient. I felt unsteady on my feet and utterly vulnerable.
My saving grace in both situations came with inculcating the understanding and practice of release and surrender. The more resistance the girls offered, I (grudgingly) realized I was going to have to release my need to be in control. Each time I was disappointed because my expectations hadn’t been met, I learned (painfully) to let go of having things my way. Similarly, after the crushing pain of facing Philip’s death, after months of foot-stomping refusal and the unrelenting yearning for his return, I slowly surrendered; I reluctantly acquiesced to his absence. Not by choice. Not happily. But I am reminded of what a psychic told me 33 years earlier when I could not stop longing for the dog that died in 1978. She said the most loving thing I could do for him was to put my needs aside and set him free. Otherwise, in his love for me, his spirit would continue to be torn between wanting to stay nearby to comfort me versus his need to travel on, to be spiritually free. In 2016, I was telling myself this story again, but now it was Philip’s spirit I had to surrender. If I loved him, I had to release him.
Ultimately, what these two life-changing experiences keep teaching me is how to fall down and get up again. Resilience is a word I have come to honor. When we are knocked around or knocked down, there are any number of possible responses: I choose to get back up.
But I try to go one step further. I seek meaning in the ongoing struggle. To let the challenges and tests be my teachers. Such can only come with the acceptance of what is. Poet/philosopher Mark Nepo refers to this as an “Inner Curriculum.” He says the Inner Curriculum “…is working with what we’re given while staying close to what we love.…” Mary-Frances O’Connor writes of acceptance as the necessary act of allowing every emotion that arises simply to arise. Not to try to overcome or change or even find meaning in sorrow. Just to accept that it is. Acceptance is also identified as the final stage of Culture Shock. In Abu Dhabi, acceptance provided relief, as did time, experience, and surrender. Philip and I moved toward accepting Abu Dhabi as it was. We did not grow to love our life there, but by accepting it, we were better able to shift into more receptive curiosity, humor, and openness. And—amazing grace—I learned (at the age of 60, but better late than never) that I could tolerate and survive what I did not like. I could even grow into a fuller version of myself.
I am a perennial student who, in Abu Dhabi and in grief, had lessons to learn about control, anxiety, and ego. With humility, acceptance, and love, I learned to cope in Abu Dhabi, to cope and to grow. Thinking of those hard lessons learned under a Middle Eastern sun and recognizing the oddly similar lessons that confronted me years later when Philip and then Winnie died, it occurs to me that we rarely see how one chapter in our life may be preparing us for another. If we could understand this (and assume it!), we might better face and value the challenges that arise. We might meet the present moment with openheartedness and hence, achieve receptivity, even in the face of pain. We might surrender to each obstacle that comes our way, honoring a tiny inner voice that has accrued the wisdom to whisper, Wake up. Pay attention. You might need this in another, even more challenging situation to come.
With this awareness at the forefront of my consciousness, I feel the immensity of the gift Abu Dhabi was to me. It gave me the strength to live through grief, and who knows how the combination of Abu Dhabi and grief will help me in the future.
What is clear to me at this time is that a reflective and consciously lived life best proceeds with open-handed and accepting resilience, with honoring the challenges and embracing the love for all one has lost … and for all the love one has yet to live.
P.S. This piece is excerpted from the book-to-be. I’d love to hear your responses and thoughts. Would you read a book like this?
I post this on Philip’s birthday with infinite love and gratitude.
“This is the secret of life: to be non-serious but absolutely involved.” ~Sadhguru
These words continue to remind me of the line from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Ash Wednesday: To care and not to care. This line lives in me. I found it in letters I wrote between 2009 and 2012 when I was struggling to adapt to life in the Middle East. I find it as I wrestle with the manuscript of the book about that time. A book that’s moved in and lived with me for the last four and a half years. And I find it daily in relationships that change, in a body that changes, in an outer world that often evokes despair, and in an inner world that wonders, questions, and longs for depth and transformation.
to care and not to care lives in me as a lifelong challenge extending far beyond but certainly including writing books or blog posts. I continue to care. I hope people will read Impossible Person. (And am delighted that Amazon tells me they do.) Of course, I continue to want readers to love it as much – or nearly as much — as I loved feeling my way into writing about my life with Philip. I continue to hope the book touches readers’ hearts. I hope it lends support to those who live in atypical relationships. I hope it speaks to longings and dreams, to love and the difficulties of love. I hope it makes some people laugh and others cry. And I hope it heals or soothes or speaks to pain. I also continue to let go of caring in the wrong way, of wanting this precious-to-me book to be precious to others. Five years later and coming to the end of writing a second book, it’s easier to let go, to let Impossible Person be perfectly imperfect, much as Philip was, much as I am, much as we all are.
To be non-serious but absolutely involved is a wonderful way to describe my relationship with my impossibly beloved partner. His was a maddening, awe-inspiring, soul-enhancing way to walk through the world. And, ultimately, to walk out of it. It was his way. Thus, it became my way. I still invite you to walk with him. I invite you to read or listen non-seriously but absolutely involved! (And I ask you to anticipate along with me the coming of a new book about our three years in Abu Dhabi.)
Remembering Philip eight years on, childlike joy still comes first to mind. Still scaling trees (in his 60s) in search of fruit. Recklessly befriending a teenage alligator. Running sideways and backward because it was more creative than running forward. Singing in bathtubs and tunnels where the acoustics were best. Reciting and writing poetry, playing guitar, singing … always singing … Filling my days with light and love.
Delighting in nieces and nephews who turned to him for stories, music, laughter, and confidences. Sunny, summer hours spent with Misha when he was little, inventing from the books they read together. They were Bilbo and Gandalf, and anyone they didn’t like was a goblin, dwarf, troll, or, worst of all, Smaug.
Saluting the sun. Sun gazing. Hugging trees. Hugging the ground.
His rolling laughter loosened constriction … diminished pettiness. Hints of something greater flowed through the honeyed warmth of his humor. Absurd limericks he’d scribbled and left tucked into books (that I found after he was gone) tickled and broke my heart all over again. Something about him was timelessly young. The archetypal puer aeternis, the eternal child. Even when undeniably ill and suffering.
And then, in those final months, the senex emerged. A man, old but ethereal. Wise through suffering and the sensing of imminent mortality. So thin, the light shone through him. Lying on his bed in the Costa Rican retreat center, younger guests pulled up a chair to confide dreams, fears, and hopes. Calling on deep knowing that brought its own celestial atmosphere and texture, the air in the room grew dense. Holding a conflicted young man’s hand, leaning in to hear a woman’s secret, his words were lit candles. Pulling from sources of inspiration, all who were graced to be there felt lifted, embraced, entranced. We were awed. As was he. As Time and Fate pushed him inexorably closer to Death,.he became the best of himself … more than himself
Sending all my love and longing out into the Universe and toward you today … and always.
Every so often, someone takes you seriously! You write and publish a book, and the Tattered Cover Bookstore includes you in their local authors! How exciting is that?
As part of their Holiday Programs, TC has given me a table and chair from which to sign copies of …
Life With An Impossible Person: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Transformation.
I’ll be there on Sunday, December 4, from 11 am to 2 pm.
Tattered Cover Bookstore, 2526 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, 80206
If you’re in Denver, please stop by to say hello and do some Holiday shopping at one of my favorite bookstores. (The Impossible Person and I lived a mile away from TC back in the 2000s. It was our regular haunt. Who’d have guessed I’d be signing books there 20+ years down the road?)
The Colorado Authors program is facilitated by Tattered Cover. The program is designed to showcase Colorado’s best independent writers. Thanks for supporting local authors.
