Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  This seminar is called “From Grieving to Believing,” and neither Stacy nor I can quite say the name aloud without wincing. It is led by David Kessler, a thanatologist and grief expert who has written books with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, she of the hallowed five stages and sort of a secular saint of Western grieving.

  There are two other retreat leaders besides Kessler, here to attend to various states of our emotional and metaphysical distress. One of them is a yoga teacher named Paul Denniston, who specializes in something called “grief yoga,” which we practice every morning before breakfast, in a room full of sobs, some stifled, many open. The other is a medium named Maureen Hancock.

  It was the presence of Maureen that Stacy and I circled back to, over and over again, in the car on the way up. What would she do? Our level of familiarity and comfort with the idea of a medium went about as far as Whoopi Goldberg’s pink pillbox hat and rolled-back eyes in Ghost. Ludicrous scenarios proliferated in our heads, and we joked: Would she speak in tongues? Would she fall to the floor and begin to thrash? Behind our dumb jokes, we nursed the unvoiced worry: What had our grief made of us? Had we now joined ranks with the suckers, the wide-eyed, the willfully deluded?

  But we didn’t say any of this, probably because we heard how sour and uncharitable it sounded even in our heads. Instead, there in the car, we nervously repeated the same promise to each other every half hour or so. “Look, this might be weird,” one of us would say. “But if one of us hates it, we can just leave! We don’t have to be there. We’re doing this only because we want to. We can just leave.”

  It becomes clear to us only a few moments after arriving at the seminar that our exit plan is nonviable. “I just have one rule,” says Kessler. “If you feel like you need to leave, you have to tell me. Everyone in this room has had someone in their lives disappear, so no one can just walk out without saying anything first.”

  Stacy and I look at each other: Fuck.

  Kessler wears a collared shirt beneath a snug baby-blue sweater suited for the soft white lights of daytime TV. A tiny headset microphone peeks discreetly out at the left corner of his mouth, and he paces before us like we are his living room furniture. His voice is high and soft and soothing, and his words are beveled smooth and polished into gleaming slogans: “Grief is a reflection of a connection that has been lost,” he says, with the slight loping cadence you adopt when you’ve repeated something a thousand times. “It is a reflection of that love you had for that individual.”

  Behind him, a PowerPoint presentation fires up. On it, I see my life whittled remorselessly into the neat bullet points of the five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. One of them says, curiously, “Arguing with the Snow.”

  Walking in front of the projector light, so his passing shadow bulges on the screen, Kessler asks us, “What if it were snowing outside right now, and I was standing outside, enraged? Imagine you walked past me on the way in, and I was pointing at the snow on the ground as it fell, and I was yelling, ‘You’re not supposed to be here! It is not supposed to be snowing! I don’t like snow! Don’t be here!’ ”

  He pauses for a few snickers. “What would you say? You would say, ‘Oh my god, there’s a crazy person outside arguing with reality.’ You would say, ‘David, it’s snowing; it snowed yesterday. You’re arguing with the snow.’ ”

  He stops pacing at this, does a quick heel turn, and pans across the room. “That’s what I try to tell people when they refuse to own their own reality. I try and tell them, ‘You are arguing with the snow.’ In other words, you can have your own opinions all you want, but reality is gonna win.

  “One of the main things I don’t think people realize is that a broken heart is an open heart,” he continues. “It’s a heart that’s open, that can be healed, can be changed, can be re-formed, can grow new patterns for new types of love. One of the things I want us to work on is to begin to find ways to take that broken heart and allow it to feel that pain, but to grow.”

  Grief is healing, healing is grief—these blandishments soothe me like a warm compress to my forehead. As he speaks, I feel my need for complicating thoughts—for complex ideas with fancy conditional hinges that swing open onto interpretations—being scrubbed clean. Sniffles have already broken out in the audience: an ambient noise that will continue through the weekend. At the end of each row, boxes of tissues—cheap ones, harsh and nose chafing—sit like votive candles. They are passed down from the end of the row to the middle as needed.

  “Grief is fluid, and it is always changing,” he reminds us. “The writer Anne Lamott once said that your brain is a bad neighborhood, and you should never go into it alone.” Above all, “grief is as unique as a fingerprint. We can show you the stages, but they are not a linear journey. In the end, nothing and no one can hand you the map to your own grief.”

  The session lasts an hour and a half, and when it is done, he says, “OK, now go get some lunch and come back ready for Maureen, who is going to do some very exciting work with you.”

  * * *

  After lunch, Stacy and I have a few minutes to kill before Maureen begins. We wander around downstairs, passing signs for a writers’ workshop called “Writing Down the Light” and for an upcoming seminar called “Facing Cancer with Courage.” David Kessler’s books occupy a whole corner shelf of the bookstore to the left. Across the hall, a café with windows looking out onto the grounds sells iced coffee, ice-cream bars, and other worldly pleasures. People sit around, scrolling through their phones, talking loudly without looking up.

  We file back into the studio a few minutes before the second session is supposed to begin. A trimly built middle-aged man with close-cropped silver hair enters alongside us, nodding absently in our direction. We smile nervously; the code of social conduct is muddy in a roomful of bereaved strangers. We all know at least one intimate thing about one another, with zero knowledge of the details. It is a little like attending a family reunion with only the second cousins whose names you don’t remember.

  A young-looking couple takes their seats behind us, and I glance back at them. I wonder what manner of loss brought them here. Something in their demeanor suggests to me we have something awful in common. They are haggard, drawn, depleted looking, despite being fiercely fit. I study them more closely for signs of “dead child.” The man gazes around, examining others and then smiling furtively and looking away when he accidentally makes eye contact. The woman stares straight ahead at nothing.

  In front, Maureen grabs the microphone and strides out, all business and instant chatter. She reminds me of some brassy comedian from the late ’80s, pacing the room at twice the speed of Kessler and spitting rapid-fire patter in a flat Boston Irish accent.

  “As a little kid, I used to see spirits walking all around the house,” she says. “We’re Irish, my parents had a lot of parties; I thought they were drunken house guests!” Some laughs break out. “I tell ya, it’s not easy sometimes,” she continues. “It’s a little hard to ride the subway and have a spirit elbow you, saying, ‘Hey, scooch over! You’re sitting next to my grandson, and I got a few things to tell him.’ One day I was at the drugstore, just trying to buy a hairbrush, and the checkout clerk’s sister wouldn’t leave me alone, she was just jumping up and down. Finally I had to look over my shoulder and snap, ‘Will you keep your pants on for a second? I just need to buy a gosh-darn hairbrush.’ There was no one there! I turn around and the woman behind the counter is looking at me like I’m the Exorcist.”

  She’s not funny, exactly, but she is exuberant and warm, and the room lightens with her energy. People are laughing. She stops pacing, smiles at us. “You see, sometimes I come out and I come on a little strong, and people are like, ‘Aye, what’s the story with this broad?’ ” she acknowledges. “But I’m trying to get your energy up! Laughing, crying, all of those activities help bring our energies up, and that helps me tune in
to you.”

  She stops her monologue and closes her eyes, fanning herself gently with one hand. “OK, I’m getting something here,” she announces, eyes still shut.

  I glance over at Stacy out of the corner of my eye and notice that she’s leaning forward slightly. My body is taut.

  “Did somebody over here…somebody over here…” Maureen wanders down the middle aisle, passing the first five rows of chairs. She is three folding chairs ahead of us. Every head turns slightly to follow her. She stops.

  “I’m seeing a wife,” she announces. “She died of cancer. She died of cancer, and it’s been a few years.” Her eyes are still closed, and a smile flickers across her face: “Oh wow, she’s got a really big energy.” Her eyes open, unfocused, and she says carefully, as if reciting, “Tell Marie that she has to finish college.” She looks around: “Does that mean anything to anybody?”

  The trim middle-aged man who entered the room with us is sitting right in front of her, and he raises his hand. “That’s my wife,” he says, clearly and calmly. “Lorraine. She died two years ago.”

  “Ah, ah,” Maureen says, excited and coming up to him. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “My name is Philip, and my daughter is Marie,” Philip says. “She’s been having trouble ever since her mom passed, and she’s been talking about taking a year off college. I’ve been trying to convince her to stay.”

  There are murmurs in the room. Stacy and I make eye contact again: Holy shit.

  Maureen invites Philip up to the front of the room, and he takes a seat on a stool in front of the projector screen. Maureen sits very close, her body facing his, and reaches out to clasp one hand. She’s still holding the microphone with the other hand. “This isn’t the first time she’s reached out to you since she passed on, is it?” she asks.

  Philip shakes his head gravely: No, it is not. “Last Thanksgiving, we were all sitting around the table, all the kids and the family friends,” he says, “and then the weirdest thing happened—all of the lights flickered on and off in the house. The power hadn’t gone out, because the stove and the microwave were still working. We all looked around at each other to make sure we were seeing the same thing.”

  Maureen’s smile broadens and she closes her eyes again, deeply satisfied. “That was her,” she says, “that was her. Was it a memory of something? She’s saying, ‘Last Christmas! Last Christmas!’ ”

  Again, Philip nods smoothly. “Yes, it was,” he confirms. “She’s talking about the last time we were all together as a family. It was Christmas, and the lights went out while we were all at dinner.”

  Philip isn’t overcome with emotion from any of this. His voice is deep and clear, his skin browned as if he lives somewhere where he spends most of his time outdoors. His shoulders are relaxed, his posture straight, even sitting on the stool. The intimacy of Maureen’s touch, the attention of the entire room, the contemplation of his wife reaching out to him from the beyond—all of it seems to be exactly as he already knew it to be, and Maureen has simply confirmed it. He is serene.

  The sniffling has broken out again. I steal a glance at the young couple behind me. The man is looking straight down at his hands, and the woman seems to have drawn further inside herself. Her temples are slightly recessed, and her hazel eyes are completely opaque.

  Up in front, Lorraine is still insisting via Maureen that her daughter finish college. “She won’t let that go, she’s practically tugging on my shoulder,” Maureen says. “ ‘Make sure! Make sure she promises to finish school.’ ” She playfully socks him in the arm and says, “Wow, she could be a bossy lady, huh?”

  Philip smiles at this, deepening new lines in his face. He is stoic, but his voice warms: “Yes, ma’am,” he says simply. “She sure could.”

  “Well, you two loved each other more than anything, that’s very obvious to me,” Maureen says. “God bless you, and God bless your family.” She hugs Philip and sends him back to his seat as people start clapping.

  The room feels different now. An assortment of strangers has been united in a tidal wave of mutual need, and the need is pure enough that we are suddenly unconcerned about how we appear to others. There are no more nameless “suckers” in here, and there are no skeptics. Stacy and I turn to look at each other; I try to raise a how about that? eyebrow, but I can feel that my face is white. The woman at the end of our row, wearing sweats, stands up abruptly, folds her leg beneath her, and sits back down on it, crossing her arms tightly over her chest.

  Maureen has closed her eyes again, and I can see her eyes flutter slightly beneath the lids. There is another pause as we wait. “I am seeing a lot of tattoos,” she says. “A guy, a young guy, he has tattoos all up and down his arms.” Then, “Oh man, he’s got a very new energy, and he’s talking so fast I can’t get him to calm down. He’s jumping up and down. He keeps shouting, ‘There he is! There he is! Right there in the back!’ ” She opens her eyes. “Is there someone whose name starts with ‘P’ back there? I’m getting the letter ‘P.’ P…Peter? Is there a Peter?”

  I immediately twist in my chair to find my partner in the icebreaking exercise rigid with fear. Slowly, as if unbidden, his long left arm rises. Maureen sweeps down past us, around to his corner chair in the back. Everyone in the front rows turns on their chairs to follow her. The seminar wallflowers are now center stage.

  Peter is more than six feet tall, and he looks supremely uncomfortable on his steel-grey folding chair, his knees at acute angles and his legs splayed. But he does not stand as Maureen waits over him. He just looks up at her like she’s a flight attendant offering him ginger ale. Maureen will not allow this.

  “Well, come on, get up, get up!” she says, reaching down and clasping his shoulder. “I’m not gonna crouch down there.”

  Slowly, painfully, he unfolds himself, presents himself to the room.

  “I sense this is a loved one, and he was close in age to you,” she says, then asks, “How old are you?”

  Peter speaks without leaning his head toward the microphone, just loud enough for me to hear him: “I’m twenty-eight.”

  “OK, and he’s a few years older?” Maureen asks. Peter nods. “Is he a cousin or a…brother?”

  “He was my brother,” states Peter, looking up and making eye contact. His voice is clearer when he says this.

  Maureen’s eyes and voice soften. “He just crossed over recently, didn’t he?” She pauses again, and then lower, “It was drugs, wasn’t it?”

  Peter stiffens slightly but holds her eyes. “Heroin,” he says quietly.

  “Ah,” she says. Then: “When did he pass?”

  “Two weeks ago,” Peter says.

  “Oh my god,” the woman sitting next to me in sweatpants says under her breath.

  I want to get up, to hug Peter, or at least, since he would hate that, to shield him from the glare of the room, to put him somewhere comfortable where he will not have to endure the stares of strangers. I ache for him in my seat.

  “He wants you to know he’s fine,” Maureen assures him. “He just keeps saying, ‘I know I fucked up, buddy, I know I fucked up.’ He had been clean for a while?”

  Peter nods again, says nothing.

  “ ‘Take care of Mom,’ he is saying over and over again. He says it was an accident, he didn’t mean to do it, he’s sorry. He loves you.”

  Peter is looking right at her now, and his back has straightened.

  “He’s just like a big border collie.” Maureen laughs. “So you were the younger one, but you were always kind of taking care of him. Is that right?”

  A small smile tugs at Peter: “That’s right.”

  “Yeah,” Maureen says, simply and fondly, “yeah.

  “ ‘I’m fine, tell him I’m fine,’ he keeps saying that,” she repeats. “And he says, ‘Thank you.’ That’s coming through really loud and
really clear. ‘Thank you.’ ” She regards Peter tenderly. “You are a really good brother to him, and that’s never gonna change,” she says. “He loves you. He wants you to relax.” She mimics grabbing his shoulders and shaking him playfully and says, “Hey, buddy, loosen up!”

  Peter flinches slightly at the contact but relaxes into it.

  “He was always telling you that, huh?” she says.

  At this, Peter actually grins. “Yeah,” he admits.

  “Oh, how wonderful. You’re wonderful, your brother is wonderful. Give me a hug,” Maureen gushes, and the room claps again, more loudly this time.

  Stacy and I find ourselves, as the session goes on, aching to be chosen. Pick me, we plead silently. Greta, we are here. Greta, come get Mommy and Daddy. Maureen jokes about how many spirits are crowding in line, raising their hands, asking to be picked.

  “I think maybe there are too many adults here for Greta to get through,” Stacy whispers to me.

  I picture our daughter, standing next to me at a birthday party, watching the merriment warily with one hand on her mommy’s shoulder, straining her neck to peek over the scrum. She would have no chance in a room like this, I think. I know where I would find her: in the back, watching the room, taking everything in. The session ends with no word from her, and as people file out, Stacy and I sit, unwilling to move.

  * * *

  As you move up in Kripalu’s three-floor compound, you ascend out of worldliness: upstairs, phones are not allowed. The breakfast in the main cafeteria is meant to be taken in silence. We discover this latter bit the following morning, as we navigate the cafeteria’s funereal atmosphere, utterly silent save for the clinks of forks and the sips of tea. I carry my tray, deeply conscious of the rattle and movement of my silverware and plate on it.

  Ahead of me, Stacy picks a brown mug from an inverted stack and moves to fill it before wheeling on me, her eyes popping, hissing in a stage whisper that carries across the room like a megaphone: “Oh my god, they don’t have any fucking coffee!”