The Breath Returned To My Spirit

There are times in life that stand out in bold highlight… times we’d never choose but come in spite of our preferences. Times that are meant to teach us that if we have preferences, then we’ll suffer. The summer of 2002 was that time for me. On the eve of my daughter Hira’s wedding, a joyous family time, my beloved partner, Jimmy, passed suddenly from this earth. We were away from home in Seattle to celebrate what should have been wonderful occasion, filled with love. My father had left his body a mere 3 months before, and my intrepid little mother, Alice, was sharing a hotel suite with us, having flown in from Florida for the nuptials.

“Gee,” he looks like he ought to go to the hospital,” she said, and when he collapsed on the floor and I called the EMT’s, he refused to go.

Little did I know that the shadow of the gallows was waiting. The noose was tightening. He would be dead in a mere few hours.

Yes, the wound of the death of his physical body was deep and unfathomable, but what followed was beyond comprehension. We’d lived together for almost fifteen years. We’d traveled to many parts of the world together every winter. As with all couples, we’d had our ups and downs and had recently come to a deeper understanding of the true place for meditation in our relating. I’d drawn a line regarding his catharsis of anger onto me, using the Silver Platter (collection of Osho’s discourses) to dredge up quotes meant to clarify one’s personal responsibility in such matters, as he’d been blaming me for what he called his episodic rages. After about three month’s time, just following my 59th birthday, Jimmy snapped out of a deep place of self-exploration, and as was his humorous and roundabout manner, he phoned my children, saying this:

“When you’re 60 years old, you’re beyond blame. No one can blame you anymore. Not your children. Not your parents. Not your lover. No one. I’m giving your mother an early birthday present. The blame game stops here and now.” While delivered humorously and with underlying meaning, it remains one of the best presents ever received. His was to process his understandings in silence and without dialogue.

Since we had never legally married, having chosen to be together out of love, immediately following his death and literally on the eve of my departure from our shared home to fly to Florida to be with my mother as she went through radiation treatments for breast cancer (I told you this period was one of profound lessons), within hours before my departure I received an eviction notice. His family claimed I was a squatter, tenant, and had never lived with him! The specter of the hangman approached. I went forward, grief holding me fast, vowing as a meditator not to escape from the roller coaster of emotions and events, such events no one could have imagined.

Soon after arriving in Florida, I received a phone call that our house had been ‘tossed’, meaning everything had been rifled. My attorney advised me to return immediately, sort things out, get out whatever I could salvage, and get on with my life. I was, of course, devastated. Again, through an unstoppable torrent of tears, I vowed not to escape what life handed me, even if it meant that I was taken to the newly-erected scaffold done in my honor by life.

Well-meaning friends offered me any manner of chemical escapes… booze, pills, drugs… all of which I refused. If I was going to drown, then as I’d learned from Osho, let me surrender to the eddy and be sucked down willingly and without resistance.

And so it went….

About nine months later, after receiving many reassuring signs, I began to re-surface from the consuming dark waters of grief, having given myself over. There was light at the end of the tunnel, and as we all say in the face of life’s lessons, life goes on.
The noose loosened. I began to breathe again. The identity that was wrapped up in being with Jimmy began to drop. Life going on meant that due to my resolve not to avoid the pain life was giving me, I was somehow strengthened, and certainly much more compassionate when it came to another’s grief. The breath returned to my spirit.

Other losses have come. As it was with Osho’s experience of his grandfather’s death in that bullock cart when he was a small child, I have learned profound lessons regarding attachment. Sadnesses come. Sadnesses go. And although I am reluctant to say this out loud, it is doubtful that I will ever feel the hangman’s noose tighten around my throat due to the death of a beloved fellow traveler. I have learned the valuable lesson of acceptance.

Premrup lives in Florida and is an ordinary, ageing woman (her words), working primarily with QXCI, short for Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, a computerized form of healing.  She enjoys humor and writing and says, “I apply a heavy dose of meditation to whatever I do.”

www.quantumpremrup.net