by Petrea King
It was hard to come to terms with his death when one minute he’d been alive and well in India, and then he just wasn’t. In some strange way, I felt that at least now he was forever safe in my heart, though knowing this brought little comfort. We have precious few photos, a letter or two, an abstract picture he drew and a beautiful cowry shell he always kept with him, which now sits with me here on my desk.
Brenden had often inhabited a world beyond our access, and as news of his death filtered through the grapevine, we received letters from strangers who loved and appreciated him. These letters often came from the ‘night people’ who told us wonderful stories of Brenden getting them off drugs by sleeping across their doorway or helping a woman create a home for herself and her kids away from domestic violence. He had often brought hope to others even though he found precious little for himself.
To this day, I can see a head in the crowd, a posture, a face like Brenden’s, and wonder, what if it wasn’t my brother who died? What if he’s off living elsewhere, and someone else did those unspeakable things to himself? I know that he’s dead, but reconciling the way he died has been hard. He was a peace lover, a gentle man who wouldn’t hurt a fly, though his illness provoked incidents like the telephone flying down the hallway. It speaks of the anguish and despair he must have felt that he turned to such violence in ending his suffering.
As with all of the dead he is frozen in time, never a day over thirty-two.
Each family member grieves in their own way, and these are often not in synch with one another or even compatible. So it was with us. No one knew what to say.
Rae and I wanted to talk but could only do so quietly, mindful that Geoff didn’t want anything said unnecessarily and certainly not publicly. Ross buried himself in busyness, doing his best to support the family and staff. We each grieved the loss of Brenden in our own private ways, though Rae and I drew closer because we struggled as much with the manner of his death as with the death itself. His suicide had been expected for so many years, but not in those last two happy ones and never with such violence. We were left to reconcile the unreality and certainty of his death.
Rae found that she could no longer meditate, even though meditation had been an integral part of her spiritual life for many years. When she closed her eyes, all she could experience were dark and menacing colours—black, grey, burnt orange, dirty green—that formed a swirling cloud between her and finding peace. She ached for peace as I did, both of us numb and unable to talk properly about our acute distress.
My uncle Peter—Rae’s brother, who also worked in the family business—lowered the flag to half-mast at the office. The staff who knew Brenden were distraught. Everyone who knew Brenden, loved him. We had no language to describe our feelings.
Tears provided no refuge, and mine were stifled anyway, along with a trove of other unresolved griefs and traumas. I would cope as I always coped. There was no choice but to cope.
Leo couldn’t meet me in my grief, and I couldn’t blame him. Our relationship was teetering on the edge of a disastrous end, and I felt shattered. My long-held sense of responsibility for Brenden was finished. I felt that I’d failed not only him but also myself. Intellectually I knew this to be nonsense, as no one is responsible for another person’s life in such circumstances, but that’s how the helpless child in me felt.
***
During this tumultuous time, we moved to a much larger home high on the hills of Manly Vale, overlooking a distant ocean. We settled in well enough, but grief came with us.
I was unable or unwilling to keep pandering to Leo’s prescriptions for my existence, and I could no longer cope with some of the habits he enforced. They were only small things, like having his socks colour-coded and folded in a particular way, or his shirts hung all facing the same way while being colour-coded. Woe betide me if a blue shirt was hung among the white ones. One day, I found myself standing in front of his cupboard with a blue-checked shirt in my hand, having a panic attack because I couldn’t remember whether it should go among the blue shirts or the checked ones.
If I did the laundry while he was at work, when he arrived home he would check to see if the clothes had all been ironed, folded correctly and put away. Another day, on hearing his tyres on the gravel driveway, my anxiety was overwhelming because the laundry basket still had some clothes in it. I found myself hiding clothes under a bed so there would be no evidence of what he saw as laziness.
He frequently ran his finger along skirting boards or behind furniture or the piano to ensure I was keeping everything spotless. He also checked the fridge regularly—jars needed to be stored according to type, with their labels facing out, and there were major upsets if any fruit or vegetable had wilted, let alone gone bad. Perhaps this stemmed from Leo’s childhood stress around food as a precious commodity.
Whatever the reasons for his obsessions, I did my very best to have everything perfectly arranged. But the more I tried, the more he would look for what I’d missed. My self-esteem was completely tied to getting things right for Leo, and he was a hard taskmaster indeed. The only one harder on me than Leo was myself.
I had become increasingly afraid of his temper and couldn’t sleep with my back to him. My fear was no doubt unfounded, but it certainly had me in its grip.
But then came a major turning point in our relationship.
One Saturday, Leo stood at the bottom of the twenty or so stairs at the back of the house, while I stood on the landing above, outside the kitchen door, with Simon on my hip and Ada by my side. I’d been preparing lunch when Leo had summoned me to the landing. While working in his office downstairs, he’d noticed an approaching thunderstorm. He stood looking up at me and, with an air of impatience, he motioned to the clouds and said, ‘Your laundry on the clothesline is about to get wet.’
Perhaps I felt safer because of the distance between us and the height from which I spoke. But my reply, ‘It’s our laundry,’ signalled a profound change in me.
We stared at each other, and then Leo nodded, disappeared into the laundry to retrieve a basket—and quietly took in the laundry.
CHAPTER 14
Grief and loss
Grief is a difficult beast to know and live with. Geoff and Ross threw their energies into the business, and Rae and I continued numbly with our responsibilities and chores. The only respite Rae and I enjoyed together involved a weekly meditation group, which included a discussion on spiritual teachings from A Course in Miracles. This group of people provided a safe harbour where we explored our life and grief from a spiritual perspective.
A few months later, Rae, Ada and I travelled to a meditation conference in Los Angeles and then on to a spiritual community, Ananda, in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. This was a wonderful escape for Rae from Geoff and me from Leo. For the first time, we each spoke a little of what was going on in our marriages. Both of us had gone to great lengths to maintain an air of normalcy for the other, each too afraid of the consequences of speaking up. Family secrets are always destructive to someone, but neither of us had a way of articulating our distress until we were alone together.
Then, at Ananda, Rae experienced a profound moment of healing. On hearing of Brenden’s recent death, our new friends there offered to host a meditation to focus on freeing his spirit, given there had been no funeral or formal acknowledgement of his passing. During this short ceremony, Rae felt the burden of grief lift from her heart. She had a strong sensation of a white dove resting in her cupped hands; she felt soft feathers and the scratch of claws as this symbolic creature flew from her hands into the light.
We returned to Australia slightly relieved of the ache of anguish, though my grief remained a crumpled heap of self-recriminations, sadness, shame and guilt.
People often don’t understand the physicality of grief. I felt hollowed out or that a significant part of me had been amputated or was missing. I no longer felt capable of continuing—or certainly not as I had up until then. Life had made sense
when Brenden was alive, even though it was often painful. Without him there was no sense, no compass, no way to move forward; he was the pivotal point in my life. I kept going through the motions of living, but being confronted by my sense of identity and personal values meant I came up lacking in this changed landscape of grief. My inadequacies glared back at me from everywhere I looked.
***
While I was at Ananda, I had a strong sense that it could be good for me to return with Leo and the kids, and for me and Leo to undertake yoga and meditation teacher training there. This course was comprehensive and highly respected both in Australia and the United States, and it was only accessible as a full-time, three-month, live-in course. Care and a school would be provided for the children, and although the accommodation would be very different from our house in Australian middle-class suburbia, it would be a rustic, clean and comfortable geodesic dome set among the manzanita trees.
I discussed the idea with Leo, and we both felt it could provide a perfect opportunity to heal and improve our relationship. Perhaps by focusing on our mutual interests in a different environment, we could start afresh.
Our house sold the week we put it on the market. Six weeks after my return from the first Ananda trip, Leo and I had packed up our home, put everything into storage and set off on our adventure into a better future. Or so we thought.
Leo and I loved the course. Our days were full of the theory and practice of yoga, our meals were supplied, the children were happy and cared for, and it was a perfect environment for us all to flourish.
For the first time in a long time, I experienced moments of peace. But my laughter and the camaraderie of the other students made Leo jealous. He didn’t like that there were a lot of men in the yoga course, and I was well-liked by our fellow students—as was he.
Somehow, Leo got it fixed in his mind that I’d coerced him into coming to Ananda with my sole intention being to leave him. I tried to reassure him that this wasn’t true, but he chose not to believe me. Belief can trap or free us; in this instance, nothing I could do or say would change Leo’s mind. Our arguments became more frequent and, given we were living in a one-room geodesic dome, I tried to shield the children from his anger. But he couldn’t bear being told anything, so asking him to speak more quietly or not shout at me as it upset the children was like waving a red rag to a bull.
One afternoon during our free time, I went into town with the children to pick up some supplies. Nevada City was a forty-minute drive from the yoga teaching campus, and on our return a couple of hours later, Leo was nowhere to be seen. Everything looked normal and nothing seemed awry, so I told the children that their father must have gone for a walk, which he often did during our free time.
But Leo didn’t return that night, and both children were upset. I felt uneasy—but, wanting to reassure them, I told them that perhaps Leo was staying with friends in the main village of Ananda, a few kilometres from the yoga teaching campus. I cuddled and comforted them, saying he would be back tomorrow for sure.
But Leo didn’t return the next day or the next, and by then I was very concerned. Our news spread and everyone in the community was on the lookout, but there was no word of Leo.
And then I noticed that his stock market charts were gone. My heart sank. If they were gone, Leo was gone. Because his clothes were still there, it hadn’t occurred to me that he had returned to Australia. He had taken what cash we had, his passport and charts, and nothing else. There was no way of contacting him, given we no longer had a home in Australia. I left messages with the only friend I thought he would contact, but there was never a word from Leo.
***
I decided to complete the yoga course, which had been fully paid for along with the costs of the children’s care and education. Ananda kindly refunded the rest of Leo’s fees so I had some cash for our necessities.
Stressful things often happen all at once, and a series of unexpected mishaps with Simon, who was almost four, made him even more anxious at the time that his father disappeared from his life.
I was carrying him on my hip up a muddy slope when I slipped and we both got covered in mud. Instead of laughing at our predicament, he cried inconsolably. We went to the ablutions block to clean up, and the hot water tap came off in my hand with steaming water spurting towards the ceiling. Simon sobbed louder.
The next day we were in the car when we hit black ice and slid precariously close to a sheer thousand-foot drop into the Yuba River. We hit a tree, spun around and ended up as an obstruction on a blind curve, unhurt but unable to open the car doors.
I heard a truck approaching down the hill. I prayed that its tyres would grip the road better than ours had, and that the driver would see us in time to brake. Thankfully he did see us, but instead of helping us he used his massive bumper bar to nudge our car out of his way. Perhaps he didn’t know there were people inside, but he didn’t check. I feared that his intention was to dispatch our vehicle over the edge, as this remote area was a little reminiscent of the film Deliverance.
The sound of the bumper against the car and its dreadful shuddering as we were pushed closer to the edge were terrifying. I couldn’t hold and comfort Simon; he was strapped into the back seat and I hadn’t had time to climb over and release him.
These events were too much for Simon, who looked at me as if to say, ‘I’ve been left with a fuckwit! Where’s my daddy?’
He started having the most awful nightmares and would wake screaming a dozen times a night. I would hold him, rocking back and forth, but he was wide-eyed, unseeing and inconsolable. It was heartbreaking, as if he didn’t even recognise me.
Some of the mothers in the Ananda community recommended I take Simon to a family counsellor in Nevada City. Emily White-side was very experienced with children, and I felt it imperative to get assistance as I was way out of my depth. Emily specialised in sand-tray therapy, and Simon was given free rein in the tray while she and I talked. As I was leaving, Emily said to me, ‘Wrap him in a rainbow before he goes to sleep.’
That night, I told Simon I was going to wrap him in a rainbow and connect a rainbow from his heart to mine. I did this with Ada first so he felt reassured that this was fun and not at all scary. Ada, who was seven, loved the gentle ritual I developed.
When she was all tucked up and ready for sleep, I asked her to close her eyes and imagine I was wrapping her in a cloud of red, the colour of tomatoes, cherries and letterboxes. While I did this, I ran my hand from the top of her head to the tips of her toes so she could better imagine she was being wrapped in the colour. Then I asked her to imagine orange, the colour of oranges and nasturtiums, all the while running my hand gently over her body. Next yellow, the colour of daffodils, sunshine and baby ducklings. Green, the colour of grass and fresh spring leaves. Blue, the colour of the clear blue sky and bluebirds. Indigo, the colour of the night sky behind the stars. And violet, the colour of tiny violets peeping out among their foliage. All the while, I was running my hand from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.
Then I put my hand on her heart and asked her to imagine a really strong rainbow that started in her heart and, moving my hand to my own heart, told her that this rainbow would keep us connected all through the night. I suggested she send a rainbow to Daddy and to her grandparents back in Australia, and that she could send all her love and blessings like fairy dust across the rainbow to them.
Simon watched me perform this ritual with Ada and decided he would like to be wrapped in a rainbow too. I repeated the process with him, and this time I made up a little prayer to go with what I was doing.
I wrap you in a rainbow of light, to care for you all through the night. Your guardian angel watches from above and showers you with her great love.
We also sent a rainbow to his father and grandparents.
Simon’s nightmares dropped to just two that night, and the next night he had none. That was the last of his nightmares, thank heavens.
From then on, if ever
I had to be away from either of the children while I was completing my course, I would put my hand on their hearts and remind them that a rainbow connected us at all times.
***
Towards the end of the course, Swami Kriyananda, the founder of the Ananda community and a former disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda (author of Autobiography of a Yogi), asked to see me one Sunday after the morning service. These beautiful open-air gatherings focused on meditation and devotional chanting and were open to the community of more than four hundred people.
I was curious and a little apprehensive about why Swami wanted to see me. I hadn’t had anything to do with him during my teacher training course and had only seen him at a distance during the occasional gatherings for lectures or morning services.
Swami had heard about Leo’s unexpected return to Australia, which had left me financially vulnerable, and he suggested that I work with him in a secretarial and housekeeping capacity. I thanked him for his kindness but said I needed to return to Australia to see if I could reconnect and perhaps resolve things with Leo. I was hopeful our time apart might help him to be open to talking things through. The children needed their father and remaining at Ananda obviously wouldn’t be practical long-term. Swami gave a nod but said not to give him my answer yet and to think about his offer.
Swami was greatly loved and respected by everyone in Ananda. Although he didn’t set himself up as a guru or seek people who treated him with devotion, most of the community would have given their right arm to work closely with him.
The following week, after the morning service, Swami stopped as he passed me and asked whether I had reconsidered his offer. Again, I thanked him but assured him of my approaching return to Australia. He responded by saying, ‘Take a little longer to consider,’ and off he went. I thought it strange that he was so insistent.
The children were feeling more settled; they enjoyed their regular routines at school and preschool, and the company of the other kids. Simon slept soundly, content that he was connected to his father through the rainbow. He and Ada had a lot of space and freedom to play and explore, as the community was spread across hundreds of acres of beautiful countryside. The only rules for living in the community were no dogs (because of the bountiful deer), no drugs and to meditate daily.
