Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  “Well, maybe that’s just another word for it then, but that’s semantics,” the therapist friend says. She’s a little less smooth now, a little more heated, and I can sense her mentally rolling up her sleeves. She has some skin in the game. Next to her, her newly bereaved friend sits quietly, her hands in her lap, like she might during an argument at the family dinner table.

  The room is devolving swiftly, and I clear my throat nervously. “I’m sorry I brought up the stages,” I say, raising a hand. A few discomfited laughs. “I think what I meant is that for me, they’ve been a helpful map. They don’t make sense for everyone, necessarily”—I make a gesture of inclusion to Judy and Carolyn—“but for me, it’s helped to have a spot on the map. When I’m angry—”

  “When you’re angry, just be angry,” Judy cuts in. “You don’t need to label things.”

  My anger turns cold, and I wheel on her. Suddenly I feel somewhat dangerous to myself. “Could you let me finish?” I say loudly, not caring how hostile I sound. “I really don’t appreciate you cutting me off while I am talking. Or, for that matter, when my wife is.”

  I see Judy’s eyes refocus on me then, and her jaw sets. My foreboding becomes prophecy: I am about to get into a fight with the moderator of a grief support group.

  “Look,” she says. “I can tell you are struggling with anger. I did, too. But I never claimed to be perfect. I’m just another bereaved parent like you. The only difference is I’ve been on this road a little longer than you have.”

  “I can’t believe you would say that,” I say, raising my voice. “What gives you the right to pull rank on someone with your grief?”

  Now the entire room is my audience, mine and Judy’s, our angers flaring and competing for the remaining oxygen in the room. We are the two trolls in this group, she and I, and we openly glare with recognition at each other. The other parents, the stories and grief they bore with them into that room, become as remote to me as natural disasters in other countries.

  After a moment, Judy seems to realize how inappropriate it is to be arguing with a first-time member. I watch her adjust and modulate. “I’m sorry if you took offense at something I said,” she says, landing somewhere just left of apologizing.

  “It’s OK,” I say, with a tone meant to convey just how fucking far from OK it is.

  Someone else cuts in uncomfortably and the group moves on, but for me the rest of the meeting occurs on mute, drowned out by the pounding in my ears.

  After, Judy comes up to me, attempting to smooth over the rift. She pulls another nearby member into our circle, laughing theatrically: “Boy, let me tell you, this guy got the full Judy tonight!” She shakes her head. “You know what happened?” addressing me by talking to her friend. “There was a professional in the room”—there’s that word again, and it occurs to me that this is also a common euphemism for “whore”—“and I just got a little feral.”

  She grips my shoulders and looks me in the eyes, and I feel myself tense up again. “Promise me something? Promise me you’ll come back. Every single time is different. Different members, different”—and here she pauses, her eyes searching mine—“moderators. That’s all I’ve got to say. Don’t make this be your only shot.”

  I mutter something stiffly to her. I am unwilling to accept decency and grace from this woman, now that I’ve invested energy in making her my enemy.

  I puncture the silence of the long subway ride home a few stops in. “I’m sorry I got into a fight with the grief group lady,” I mumble, hot and ashamed.

  “I saw that coming a mile away,” Stacy replies drily.

  * * *

  Stacy and I are flying to New Mexico to be with our daughter’s spirit. It is a place we have no memories of, either apart from each other or as a family. In this, as in everything else on our path toward healing, we have no idea what we are doing.

  The accident happened a mere twenty days after Greta’s second birthday; somewhere in there, Mother’s Day came and went. These twenty days are a haunted landscape, and our memories of her start churning up so bright and vivid they begin to seem unreal. “Sometimes my memories of her feel like folklore in my own brain,” Stacy says. What about the time Greta looked up from her plate and said, out of the blue, “Food is very special to me”? Stacy was at home with her and I was at work, and she texted me, thunderstruck. Now the story has started to seem blurry and unreliable: There’s no way Greta actually said that, did she? When two grief-stricken parents are the only witnesses, the details start to feel suspect. And yet I have the text message in my history, dated and time-stamped.

  We are spending a few days in Santa Fe and then driving into Taos, a small artist community that doesn’t so much border the mountains as taper off gradually into them. Somewhere in those foothills is Golden Willow Retreat, an adobe house on a patch of farmland run by a man named Ted Wiard. Ted has the sort of grief story that could make anyone feel faint: in short succession, he lost his brother to a boating accident, his wife to cancer, and then his two children to a car crash. Dazed and lost, he checked himself briefly into a rehab program, simply because he could not find anywhere else to go. Then he returned to his home of Taos and built a center of his own, a resting place for those in deep grief.

  This is where we plan to wake up on our daughter’s third birthday. We are both intensely curious about the place and a little apprehensive, as we were before Kripalu, about the unknown it represents—we can’t even find any pictures of it online. We have never celebrated Greta’s birthday without her, so we are flying double blind.

  Our first evening in Santa Fe, we dress up in warm, festive clothes and go wandering. The first meal we eat is covered in green chilies, and we decide that henceforth every meal we eat will be covered in the same. Then we meander, sated and content, to a new age bookstore and crystal shop. We spend a befuddled hour or so in there, picking up crystals and inspecting them as if we are waiting for them to do something to us.

  “How about this one?” I ask Stacy. “It’s self-healing Inca quartz.”

  “Ooh, I like that one,” Stacy says, looking. She inspects the price tag: $250. We put it back.

  I spend twenty minutes gazing at the books in the back; I walk past EASTERN THOUGHT, browse with some mild interest in WICCAN. I see the names of writers I vaguely recognize: Alan Watts, Harold S. Kushner. I find myself thumbing through a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a seven-hundred-verse Hindu scripture. Probably a little too far in the deep end, I think. When Stacy comes to find me later, I am holding a Tibetan singing bowl up to my ear, tracing its edges with the wooden stick and listening. I give Stacy a lost look: Do I need this? We start laughing together in the middle of the store. We leave clutching two small stones, one for each of us, having spent about fifteen dollars and feeling reasonably secure in our purchases. “We have to start small,” Stacy reasons. “Baby steps!”

  We go hiking in astonishing rock formations, the kinds that have earned the Southwest its mythical status. I have spent plenty of time in mountains before, visiting family in Colorado, but it’s true that something here feels different. It could be the supreme absence of other people, or the twisting and alien nature of the formations themselves. Or maybe there is something to the state motto, the one on key chains and souvenir-store tchotchkes, deeming this the “Land of Enchantment.” I don’t feel Greta’s presence yet, but I feel Stacy’s, warm and clear, beside me, and I feel the presence of our son.

  The day we drive into Taos, we stop at a café at the edge of the small town, with murals painted on the walls by a local artist. There is a rusted old Harley parked out front, next to a VW with a COEXIST bumper sticker. They are playing some indie rock in here I should recognize but can’t place. I look out the window and try to imagine what it will be like to be alone with our thoughts for the next several days and how we are going to pass the time. The mountains are visible from the café wind
ow. Will we find you here, baby girl? I wonder. We get back in the car and drive farther into nothingness, only the occasional roadside memorial in the form of a cross to mark distance.

  The first turn off the country highway that our GPS alerts us to takes us down a dirt road and around trailers, as we drive essentially through their backyards. The road angles up and off to the left suddenly, and as we round the corner, an abandoned house looms, coated in graffiti and with all its windows knocked out, presumably shattered by bored kids hurling rocks. “Well, I hope this isn’t it,” I say to Stacy. It’s not, and we keep driving.

  The road keeps tugging us up, our rental car straining like a vintage roller coaster cresting the first drop. A few small houses, front drainage ditches nearly choked by weeds, pass by, and the road narrows so suddenly that a mailbox jutting into the road nearly knocks our mirror. Suddenly a field opens up on our right, and Golden Willow unfolds before us. The house sits at a comforting remove in the middle of a vast field, flanked at its back by a small adobe chapel, the only two buildings in the treeless plain.

  We stand outside our car for a moment, the wind whipping into us, unsure whether we should knock, fearful we might interrupt another griever in the midst of some cathartic revelation. Stacy calls the administrator, Kiersten, from the driveway, only to watch her emerge, phone in hand, from the door. She hugs us both and invites us in.

  Ted is out of town, at a conference of some sort, for the entire time we are here, but his presence hovers everywhere. Everyone seems to have been touched in some way by him, and everyone here has a story. The woman who cooks meals taught his children at school. Kiersten alludes to rough times of her own, years ago, as a midwife. “Ted was there,” she says simply.

  On the day of Greta’s birthday we are scheduled to meet with someone named Jim, a therapist who works at Golden Willow as a “ceremonialist.” Much like Maureen the medium, Jim the ceremonialist is the subject of intense speculation between Stacy and me.

  When he arrives, we are alone in the house except for Kiersten, who’s in the office. He knocks on the door; I answer. He wears a fringed white buckskin vest, and his white hair is pulled back into a ponytail. He has a hound’s tooth around his neck, and his face and hands are brown and craggy like the surrounding rocks. He smells overwhelmingly of tobacco; when I shake his hand, the scent fills my nostrils.

  Jim’s skin is sunbaked and geologic, and it is difficult to tell if he is in his forties or his sixties. He speaks slowly, unhurriedly, like someone who judges the hour by the sun. “I know a lot of different ceremonies,” he says, picking something absently off his buckskin vest with a leathery, calloused hand and flicking it off. “It all depends on what sort of…experience you two are looking for.” He looks us in the eyes. “What are you looking for?”

  And there it is: the million-dollar question neither of us can answer. This is really new to us, we try to explain. We are feeling our way toward a more spiritual life. We’ve both had some experiences that have made us want to connect to deeper things. We are not religious. But, you know.

  Jim cuts in to save us. “I think I have an idea,” he says. “I’m going to go out to the chapel to set up; you two can just wait here. I’ll come and get you.”

  And with that, he lumbers out of the room, picking up a sack at his feet. We watch him open the sliding glass doors and make his way across the field to the chapel.

  “What do you think he’s doing out there?” Stacy whispers.

  “I have no idea.” I’m whispering, too, even though we are alone in the room. “What do you think we’re going to walk in on? I just hope Jim isn’t naked.”

  We snicker like middle schoolers; we’ve traveled thousands of miles, and somehow even this far along in our journey we revert to behaving like little kids when confronted with the unfamiliar. I think of Greta again, her little toes in the ocean, flinching a little from the ferocity before her. I know how you feel, little girl.

  Just then, a loud thud makes us both jump. “Jesus!” I say involuntarily. Something has slammed, hard, into the far window, and I look over only to see a smear and a single feather. The sound is loud enough that Kiersten emerges from the back office.

  We walk over to the window and find ourselves looking at a single grey dove, stone dead and on its back, its black eyes fixing on us sightlessly. No one speaks.

  I break the silence. “That probably happens a lot, right?”

  Kiersten is still looking at the bird. She turns to us, a quizzical smile on her face. “No, actually. That never happens.”

  I laugh nervously. “That doesn’t seem like a good sign,” I joke.

  “I don’t think it’s good or bad,” Kiersten says. “It’s now part of your journey. I’m going to go bring it to Jim.”

  She steps outside and scoops up the bird’s corpse with her bare hands, marching over to the chapel. Jim steps out (still fully clothed, I am relieved to note), and the two of them confer. Kiersten says something; Jim nods, looking down thoughtfully at the bird. Finally, he takes it with him into the chapel and closes the door. Kiersten brushes her hands together a little, heads back toward the house. She looks at us meaningfully again when she reenters the kitchen, not saying anything, and then heads back in the office, the door closing behind her.

  Stacy and I are spooked into silence; the dead dove has robbed us of the luxury of skepticism. Maureen’s voice comes back to me from Kripalu: Pay attention to signs. Well, this didn’t feel like a sign; this felt like an intervention. Whatever is happening to us right now feels undeniable, outside of our comprehension. We have waded in over our heads. Whatever happens next we have no choice but to embrace.

  Finally, Jim comes out to get us. “I think we’re all ready now,” he says simply. We follow him wordlessly over the rock path out the back and into the small chapel. Ted built it himself with the help of a group of teenagers and young children in the area who had lost siblings or parents.

  There is a small fire in the woodstove. At the far end, we spot a series of symbols and totems on the floor, arranged in a circle. Jim sits down, cross-legged, and we follow suit. There is a bag of fresh tobacco next to him, a slit cut open in its side, and a series of small patches of cloth, laid out in a cross formation. “This is a tobacco prayer-tying ceremony,” he explains, gesturing at the cloths. “Each color represents a different direction: black for the west, red for the north, yellow for the east, and white for the south.”

  Each of those directions has different emotional connotations, he explains. He palms a cloth and expertly pinches a handful of tobacco with his fingers and places it in the center, folding the edges and twisting everything into a little parcel. “When you hold the tobacco between your fingers, you try and take a moment to focus on it. The idea is to imbue it with an intention.” He loops twine around the top of the parcel, pulls it taut: “You choose the color that speaks to you, and you put the tobacco inside it.”

  I feel certain that I am going to spill tobacco bits all over the chapel floor. But with shaky hands, I pluck a purple cloth, between east and west—the realm of the great unknown, Jim says, the great mystery of life and death—and hold a hairy strand of tobacco between my thumb and forefinger. I stare at it, hard: I want to be at peace with where you are, Greta, I think to it, and I try to imagine the thought being soaked up into the leaves from the oils of my fingers. I gently press the tobacco into the bundle and tie it off. It lists to the side, slightly, but it holds. My prayer is intact.

  The three of us fold and tie silently for some time. When we have each made four or five packets, all tied on a long piece of twine, we stop and compare.

  “The yellow is for our son,” Stacy says, holding up her string, which shows red, yellow, black, and white packets. “He feels like a new, uncomplicated energy to me, for some reason…very eager, very open and happy. This is an intention to be ready for him and to be ready to recei
ve his energy.”

  At the end of the ceremony, Jim gets up to go and then remembers something. Going over to the corner, he unveils the still corpse of the dove, wrapped in a blanket. Then he pulls out a pocketknife, flicks open the blade, and places the tip at the joint connecting the wing to the bird’s torso. He hesitates and looks up at us: “Is this too weird?”

  I start laughing in spite of myself. “I really don’t know, Jim. What does ‘too weird’ mean in these circumstances?”

  He laughs back, a rumbly smoker’s sound. “Good point.”

  He begins sawing. The cartilage shifts, and Jim has to pull the joint taut. The operation is not graceful; the knife is dull, and he has to work hard enough to make me wince. But after a minute, Jim presents us each with a cut-off dove’s wing, the edges still glistening pink. “You’re probably going to want to put those in salt,” he advises.

  We exit the chapel, Stacy and I holding a bloodied wing each. Some cumulus clouds, shocking in their three-dimensional clarity, have moved overhead. We are holding our prayer ties, which we will burn on our last day, sending our hopes and fears and intentions into the air. Jim digs a small hole with a shovel, while we stand off to the side. He lowers the wingless dove into the hole, scatters some tobacco, and makes a cross sign of sorts, an invocation toward the north, south, west, and east. “Thank you to the Great Spirit for sending us this messenger,” he intones gravely. “We wish you peace on your journey.”

  He stands, brushes his knees off, and looks at us, suddenly Jim the therapist again, his shamanic air shaken off.

  “Well, that’s it,” he says. He cocks his head. “If you found this helpful and want to do something more, you can just let Kiersten know. I’d be happy to come back. If not, I hope you took some healing from this experience.”

  And with that, he turns and walks back to the house. We are alone with our thoughts, the interred bird beneath our feet.