I've been torn apart put back together With a couple of pieces in wrong I'm holding up now But I won't be for long
Head Over Heels
Greg Keelor & Jim Cuddy
I've written about the power of dreams before. It appears I'm at it again. In the past week I've dreamed about Michele several times. Michele Sereda was my mother-in-law, but that's a label that can't even come close to describing our relationship. I first met Michele shortly after Danny and I became an item, well over 20 years ago. She was an artist who co-founded and led an alternative theater company called Curtain Razors. I was working as an actor at that time, and I was new to the city. Within weeks of meeting Michele she had included me in the group that co-created a performance art show called the Chicken Cabaret. The show was about... chickens, and we all played chickens of different shapes and sizes (that's me in the photo on the left, and Michele on the right holding her niece Jane).
Since that time, my career has veered in other directions. However, being kindred Scorpios, Michele and I shared many of the same political and artistic sensibilities, and she continued to mentor me in both my personal and professional pursuits. I turned to her frequently for advice and for her creative problem solving genius. She was also an amazing cook and gave phenomenal hugs.
In my post about trauma, I mentioned that Michele died in a car accident in February 2015. Although her death is certainly counted amongst my traumas, I think it's actually grief that I'm still wrestling with. Like most things, grief is defined in multiple ways, but many researchers agree that it is "the emotional experience of the psychological, behavioral, social, and physical reactions" that a person goes through after some kind of significant loss, most frequently a death (Boernera, Stroebeb, Schutb, & Wortman, 2016, p. 1). There are lots of theories about grief, but you've probably heard about one of the most popular that comes from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1969). Her work created the foundation for the wildly popular book, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (2005), which details how people progress through stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I'm not going to review the book because it's been widely criticized for normalizing a staged experience of grief when anyone who has experienced grief knows that it isn't like that at all. Maybe you go through all those things but maybe not, or maybe not in that order. And this doesn't address the ache in your chest that persists throughout it all, and which never goes away.
Up until very recently I was pretty sure that I had dealt with the grief associated with Michele's death. I had worked through the fears that had arisen from my grief, especially about driving on the highway since, at that time, I passed highway accidents nearly every day on my commute to and from work. We created some great traditions to remember her at special times during each year. We talked about Michele with the kids and did our best to keep her spirit alive. All was well.
Then, I moved to the west coast and decided to attend my first silent meditation retreat. During the retreat we had lots of flexibility to do walking meditation in the afternoons, so I'd often amble away from the retreat center along the quiet country roads that surrounded it. On one of these walking meditations, I turned a corner and was overwhelmed by what sounded like hundreds of chickens kicking up a fuss. It was a chicken cacophony. At first I smiled, but then I felt like I was battered by some kind of grief hammer. I was smothered by grief, sobbing in the middle of an empty country road, and all I could think of was Michele and the Chicken Cabaret. To this day I don't know if the chickens were actually there (I didn't see them), or if it was the work of my imagination.
After that I started to dream about Michele more frequently. The dreams have intensified recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic has ramped up and my thoughts have turned increasingly inward. The most vivid dream involved a deceased Michele, laid out on her own kitchen table as the family prepared for her wake. Somehow she regained enough life to sit up and shout that I was wasting my time and talent and that I should be ashamed. I woke up sweating and panicked.
So what is this all about, and what does it have to do with finding significance in my life? I think what Michele is trying to tell me from a cosmic distance is that my unresolved grief is creating a barrier. I am persisting in holding on to stuff that I need to let go of, or at the very least acknowledge, including the decisions I've made in the past that have taken me places I didn't really want to go. I have to acknowledge my losses as part of the human experience, as part of *my* human experience.
I have to decide that my losses don't define me.
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