Communion
I
When you refuse to face the fact that you will die, you become fragile and raw. The limitations in your life - your work, your commitments, the slow fruition of your patient endeavors - begin to chafe like rough rope. Your promises become hedged, useless things, carelessly spilled and effortlessly abandoned.
All of your boundaries become negotiable, including the obligations that make relationship possible, the thick mantle of family ties, the ritual habits of identity. You pronounce judgment on everything, but can make a decision on nothing. You fritter away your priceless energy on a thousand irrelevant distractions. Your soul scatters in the ten directions. You have no idea who you really are.
You are sure that life has no meaning, that there is, in fact, no meaning to anything at all. Existence is cold, cruel and absurd. There is no reason to desire, no reason to sacrifice, no reason to put the needs of others before your own, no reason to take charge of your life, to author it toward an ending. There is no reason to try. Success is no better or worse than failure. There is no difference.
Don’t you see? You cannot exist outside of time.
This Substack first took birth as an idea for a meditation retreat, early in 2022. It was right after TPOT disappeared, leaving a smudge of spent jouissance just legible enough to be commodified by Grimes.
Taal, Buddhi, Chaos and the gang were still giggling and turning non-dual, self-congratulatory cartwheels all over the Twitter timeline. We circumambulated the Holy Mountain, marking every trailhead (and avoiding every switchback) below the timberline.
But it was plain how many of our fellow seekers were trapped, suffering from a phantom bad air that no self-therapy nostrum could cure. A burbling, indistinct anxiety, a diffuse guilt, a thinness of will, similar to the excess of unlived life that plagues gamers and big talkers. But these were not Peter Pans who refused to grow up - they were adults limping along on a severed spiritual hamstring.
I recognized it: the result of a life artificially separated from death. It develops in people who haven’t experienced enough grief or dealt enough loss. Their bodies have not yet accepted the heavy fact of their condemnation. They have not built the muscles one only develops by wrestling with an angel.
This, I thought, was something I could offer fellow travelers. I had been a Marine, a professional in the business of death. I was no stranger to terror, to trauma, to loss. I had menteed under a lifelong martial artist, who had me do extensive work around my own fear of death.
I announced that I would host a meditation retreat in Olympia, Washington. I named it Holy Tension, and wrote several lectures about mortality and its dialectic connection to meditation and human development. What greater comfort could I offer to another being than to help them take death as object, to see its beauty, to understand its generativity, its generous offer of loving space to the future?
Holy Tension was a success. I rode its headwinds and put myself to work. With tapestries, shelves and poster boards, I partitioned a secluded little space in my basement. I bought a small library of books - about three dozen - on grief, burial and the afterlife. For weeks, I meditated, studied, wrote and dreamed about death.
Then, my father’s heart stopped.
II
One hot and humid afternoon, in the middle of September, 2022, my Dad told my Mom that he was going to take her shopping. She complained - we don’t have the money - and he said don’t worry, just go get your purse. So she did. When she came back to the living room, he was white and rigid as a marble statue. His eyes were full of disbelief.
His heart had missed a beat, and was trying futilely to re-establish a rhythm. For two full minutes, he endured, on his feet, as my demented, disabled mother slowly came to an understanding of what was happening. When at last she did, she wrangled him into a nearby chair. She had been a nurse for 43 years. She didn’t need presence of mind to give him CPR. She had practiced it into her bones.
Many months later, my mother would tell me, quietly, that as she waited there for the ambulance, she glimpsed a demon in the living room, looming over my father, waiting to take him to hell. She said she looked it in the eye, summoned all of her courage, shook her fists and compelled it, in the name of Jesus, to leave him alone. It fled before her wrath.
That’s how I know he’s in Heaven, she told me. I saved him.
Dad was in the hospital for almost a month. His heart was strong again but CPR had broken one of his ribs and punctured his lung. His 78 year-old body was fighting multiple infections, and he couldn’t breathe without a ventilator. The neurologists didn’t know whether he was conscious, let alone the potential extent of the damage. He bristled with tubes and bags and wires.
My brother Mike took shifts with me at the hospital, staying with Dad and Mom, who waited by his bedside every day. We traded off, every other day, until our older sister, Bree, flew into town. Soon after, my son Lou and his mother, Audrey, showed up, too. We came together and operated with an ease and generosity of effort that we hadn’t had in decades, or maybe ever.
Some nights we were all able to be there together, and we had big sleepovers in Dad’s hospital room. Mike, a quiet, ruddy bridge builder, related and expressed himself openly with us for the first time since we were kids - a surprising break from his character. Bree, the oldest of us and a graying suburban matriarch, pronounced grandly that he had matured.
My ex-wife, Audrey, a pale woman who faithfully brought her Doc Martins and bright red hair dye along into her 40s, kept saying how important we all were to her. She could never forget that our family had welcomed her and kept loving her, all these years, even after the divorce, she said. She was so grateful for all the support she’d gotten from me and from Mom and Dad over the years. Of course she would be here. She was one of us.
My son, Lou, sixteen and extremely moody, had initially resented his grandmother for her inability to remember his pronouns. He became more philosophical when I all but grabbed his ear and dragged him off for a father-son talk about mercy. After that, he became more forgiving, and was able to relax.
One day, Dad woke up. He recognized us. They took out his ventilator so he could speak, and his voice was small and high-pitched. He wheezed that he wanted to go home. He joked that everyone needed to get out so he and Mom could make love. He asked whether his hair looked okay. He asked if we were holding up, if there was anything he could do for us. He told us that he loved us, over and over. He kept laughing for no reason.
Everyone swelled up with hope. Maybe he was going to beat this. Maybe he was going to get a second chance - another six months or a year. Time to get his affairs in order, sort out his past, make amends, maybe a bucket list.
That night, a blood clot from his lung broke free and migrated to his brain. He had three rapid, devastating strokes, one right after another. He never really came back.
Dad died in my living room. It was horrible. The hospice company didn’t deliver his final dose of morphine on time, and didn’t respond to our frantic calls. We considered buying heroin from the local homeless camp, if they even had some, if they would even talk to us, but we didn’t know how to measure it, how to give it to him, whether there was fentanyl in it that might kill him on the spot. We tried to ration the dwindling morphine from a delivery earlier in the week, to give him just enough so that he wasn’t screaming. He spent his last days in unspeakable, needless agony.
When the nurse came to pronounce him dead - the same nurse who failed to bring his medication - I left the living room and went to the basement, both to remove myself and to try and meditate and calm down. I was afraid that if I had to look at her, I might throttle her to death with my own hands.
I have only fragments of memories of the days after Dad died. The funeral, the thicket of paperwork, the halting, bumbling, sorry-for-your-losses from a small army of administrative workers at the crematorium, the bank, the insurance company, the cemetery.
I do remember this: at the funeral reception, I got everyone’s attention and said, listen, this is how we can honor Dad. We can remember how important and right it feels when we are connected like this. We can set aside an annual family gathering, and start making holidays important again - start treating them like they’re something special, because they are. They bring everyone together. We need them, and we need each other.
We can swear, here and now, that we won’t lose each other. We can swear that we’ll be a family again.
No one objected. Why would they? One by one, everyone made the promise. I really do believe that, at the time, they meant it.
I received another flurry of promises. Let me know if you need anything. I’m here for you. Anything at all. Bree flew home to Tennessee. Mike and Audrey returned to their otherwise unchanged lives.
I brought Mom home to live with me. My son moved into the basement to open a room for her, I ceded the living room to her cat, and expanded my new basement office space to include room for my counseling work. It was a total rearrangement of my house, and of my life. New spaces, new definitions, new rituals, new boundaries.
III
In past, saner ages, people were expected to mourn for a year, and to be mostly useless throughout. No one from a traditional culture could tell you what “executive function” was, but they could tell you that grief makes you an idiot. It’s an open wound in your awareness through which the past pours in.
My grief tore incessantly at my attention, pulling it again and again into a labyrinth of memory, searching for my father, for the little boy that still needed him, for my abandoned hopes for our relationship. For all the things I wish I’d forgiven him for.
I knew I needed ample space and time to feel, to pray, to journal and heal. But I didn’t have either. Mom’s life was precarious and her agony was consuming. She needed me.
Three years previously, she had developed an unidentifiable, progressive encephalopathy. Probably a kind of dementia, but no way to know for sure, short of autopsy. Her brain was damaged just enough that she couldn’t quite care for herself.
She hadn’t been to the doctor, outside of emergencies, in three years. She was incontinent, had infected abscesses in her mouth, hadn’t been able to afford prescription eyeglasses in years - relying instead on weak reading glasses from Rite Aid - and her blood pressure was so precarious that if she missed her medication, she entered a lethal hypertensive crisis within hours. My life became a litany of new patient paperwork, appointments, phone calls and house chores, on top of running a brand-new coaching business and showing up as a father for my son. It was messy and exhausting. I had no idea how to care for an elderly woman, much less one whose mind was failing, much less one who was never more than a few unmedicated hours from death.
Her grief was so tar-like, so black and thick and slow, that she could not string complex thoughts together. She could only alight, briefly, on small impulses and observations, on short, staccato sentences. She could only bear a few seconds of contact with the real before its implications became torturous.
I watched her as best as I could, to learn her patterns, see where she struggled, where she needed handles and railings installed, where she needed non-slip tape and platforms to step up on, where she needed doors removed and shelves installed.
She slept for about twelve hours a day, and in the twelve she was awake, she would mostly sit on the edge of the bed, her short legs not quite touching the ground, and cry into her thick eyeglasses. She needed to look at old pictures and Dad’s possessions and tell me the same five stories about him, over and over, each time forgetting which she had just told. I wondered if she would be able to fully grieve if she couldn’t remember the grieving she had already done. I told myself, as long as her body lives long enough to quit his, it doesn’t matter what story she tells about it.
I called my family, asked them to show up, to spend time with Mom, to learn her needs and get to know how we could best care for her. I published a list of tasks I needed assistance with, asked for help with research and planning, asked for help assessing my blindspots. I received reassuring noises, a lot of praise for initiative, but little concrete action.
Hang in there, I told myself. They’re grieving Dad. They have busy lives. They all promised. It’ll take time for us to get used to being a family again.
I was overwhelmed, but determined not to let the stress of caring for Mom consume my life. I still felt driven to create, to develop the course, to impart to others what I could. In the brief moments I could, between sessions and late at night, I returned to a habit of writing and studying.
Our culture hides death from us. This is why people have such deep difficulty understanding their mortal anxiety. You can only respond to what you notice.
I realized I would need to teach people to actually see death before I could teach them to come to terms with it. I needed to teach them that it was not something far off in a hazy, ever-receding future. It is here, right now, at hand. It is always right behind you.
I needed to get people to meditate. I didn’t need to teach them how, I needed to show them how to get themselves to do it. That’s the part people struggle with the most. How to show up, how to be devoted, how to sacralize with ritual and attention. How to set boundaries.
This was the beginning of The Mystic’s Almanac.
IV
On Thanksgiving, Mom lost her balance and fell. She hit her head on the corner of a prominent baseboard in the dining room, and the whole left side swelled up and turned green and purple. We rushed her to the emergency room and spent an anxious night waiting for a report. The news was not good, but not our worst fear - she had fractured her skull and her spine, but missed her temple by about an inch. She would likely make a full recovery, but would need a month or more of bedrest, a back brace and a battery of complicated follow-up care.
I was already overwhelmed, and now it had become physically impossible to keep up with my mother’s care needs. I reached out to my family for help.
This is what happens when you do not face the reality of your impending death: You become physically, emotionally, spiritually incapable of approaching the thought of it without intolerable distress.
You may think that you will rise to the occasion, but I promise you: you will sink to the level of your habits.
Over and over, my family came up short, if they came up with anything at all. I kept receiving hollow promises, dead smiles, performative linguistic rituals. Administrative tasks that should have taken 30 minutes languished for weeks at the bottom of people’s to-do lists. My son hid in his room and played hours of video games, studiously avoiding helping his grandmother with her laundry, or me with the household chores. Messes in the house piled up. The systems I had created started to come apart before anyone had really used them.
I started to come apart too. I asked for help more insistently, then pleaded. Soon, I found that the only way I could force an issue, to get the level of attention that both Mom and I needed, was to get angry. I would publish a scathing group text message, or call and rant at my chosen target until they relented, or holler at my son. Each time I used my anger, I would get a brief, powerful burst of reinforcement - chores would get done, appointments would be made and fulfilled, paperwork would be finished and submitted. Each time, within a couple of days, Mom’s needs would once again drop to the bottom of everyone’s priority list.
I shouted, I shamed, I stomped, I bared my teeth and made heavy ultimatums. It worked too well. Everyone would apologize and say you’re right, you’re under so much stress, we let you down, we’re so sorry. These were the limits they understood: You only need to pay attention to the man in your life when he becomes frightening.
They couldn’t see the pattern. Over and over, my family would find the right thing to say - whatever they needed to preserve their self-images, whatever they needed to promise to get me off their case. But unconsciously, their bodies couldn’t handle the dread and terror of being near Mom. Age, enfeeblement, death - these were so near to her, so obvious on her. She stooped and bent under their nearness. She bore them like a millstone.
By the New Year, I had become a barely contained whorl of judgment and contempt. I was angry at my siblings, angry at my son, angry at the entire female sex for a huge litany of crimes I had recently remembered in great detail. I was angry at any object that had the misfortune to arise in my consciousness, however briefly. I was enraged at the world, and at myself.
To contain the fury, and to keep myself together, I began tithing my time to God. I meditated and prayed for two and a half hours each day: 45 minutes before Mom awoke, three 10-minute sessions throughout the day, 1 hour and 15 minutes in the evening after Mom went to bed. I was practicing metta, Brother Lawrence’s Remembrance, Jack Kornfield’s forgiveness meditations, sinking as deep into samadhi as I could go, ruthlessly separating every thought from its attendant sensation, letting my wrath pulse and ponder and wave and foam and evaporate.
I wanted to believe the misery my family was undergoing had a purpose, and that some spiritual good could emerge from it. I wanted to believe I could cleanse all of our karma, break cycles of neglect and abuse and pain that extended back through generations, beyond history, beyond the species.
I wanted to believe I was “advanced” enough to do it all myself, to contain all of the hurt. I just needed to remember that this was all an illusion, empty, a spaciousness. It only contained what I brought to it. I could heal this, I knew I could, I just needed to remember. I needed to fucking remember.
By the end of January, Mom recovered enough to get upright and mobile again. But the combination of bedrest, lack of stimulation and the fog of sickness caused her mind to deteriorate further. She stopped using her cane, which led to four more falls, one after the other. None of them injured her seriously, thank God, but it set me on a razor’s edge. Every time I heard a floorboard creak, my nervous system burst into flames. I bought four canes and distributed them around the house, one for each room, and started following her around, clucking at her, reminding her of the stakes if she fell and hit her head again.
Before long, she got fed up. She resented my hovering and incessant corrections. She said I was treating her like a child. She called me a slavedriver. She developed a habit of asking me for the time, several times per hour, almost like a tic, or like a finger poke to the chest. When I grew tired of this, I bought a clock for the living room, and reminded her that her phone was always at hand. She kept asking me anyway.
This went on for a few days, until one morning, I just stopped answering her. Gabriel, what time is it? I said nothing. I was scrolling Twitter. Gabriel. I continued to ignore her. She said, Gabriel, tell me what time it is. Without looking up, I said, Mom, I bought a clock, it’s right there.
Fuck. You. Her voice was as shrill and hostile as I’ve ever heard it. Her face was bright red and her eyes were flickering back and forth between mine, searching for a challenge. She half stood up, her back straight and her knees bent, like a Sumo wrestler. She shook with rage. She’d had enough - of my goddamn slavedriving, my goddamn meddling, my goddamn rules about how the kitchen was organized, my goddamn calendars and alarms and lists and reminders. Fuck you. Fuck this house. Fuck this shit.
I took a deep breath and retreated to the basement. I spent the rest of the day there, practicing and praying and writing.
The next morning, Mom had forgotten the entire thing.
In March, we got a visit from a Medicaid caseworker. She declined coffee. She gave us a short interview, throughout which her expression progressively grew darker. Afterward, in a pained voice, she informed us that Mom did not qualify for Medicaid. She was close, but there were a few. Well. Technicalities.
I looked the caseworker in the eyes. Okay, I said. But they sent you here to interview us. So you tell me that in your best judgment, you think my Mom could live on her own. Tell me you think she can pay her bills, feed herself, get herself to church and social functions, manage her own medical care. The caseworker pursed her lips. Her eyes were apologetic. The law is the law.
That night, I cried.
V
Easter Sunday’s mass was so beautiful, Mom said. They had a full choir, a trio of guitarists, even a horn section. There were so, so many flowers. She said, when we got to the sign of peace, one man said He Is Risen instead of Peace Be With You. Ty used to say that. Doesn’t that remind you of Ty?
I smiled and said, yeah. She sighed and said, I miss him. I said, I miss him too. She went quiet for several minutes. Then she asked me, what time is it? Without thinking, I said, oh hey Mom, there’s a clock right here on the dashboard.
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
I stopped the car. She was crackling with rage. I could not fathom what set her off about this simple deflection. My heart was pounding, and my hands were trembling.
I said, Mom, did you just tell me to shut the fuck up? She said, yes I did.
Mom, listen to me. I have been nothing but good to you for the last six months. I’ve always tried to be good to you. I’m giving you everything, everything. I upended my entire life so we wouldn’t have to feed you to the machine.
And then a voice come out of me, as quiet and cold and hard as stone. I said, Mom, you’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met in my life.
She released her fists and her arms dropped to her sides. Tears streamed down her cheeks. When we finally got home, just as we pulled into the driveway, she said, I’m sorry, Gabriel. I love you.
I said, I love you too, Mom. I forgive you. I couldn’t take care of you on my own. That’s not your fault.
I spoke the truth, but I wasn’t speaking truly. I didn’t feel a thing that I said to her - not the love, not the forgiveness, not the mercy. I felt dark and empty and heavy. Thick walls had closed around my heart. I could no longer find a feeling of care for my mother’s wellbeing. I was no longer afraid of her falling, or getting sick, or dying. I couldn’t even find any anger at her.
I could no longer feel my heart. In its place was a rawness, a ruin. A collapse.
I went to the basement and set up my practice cushion. I lit incense, bowed to my seat, journaled, recited a poem, rang the prayer bell. I practiced attention. I practiced insight. I practiced metta. I practiced the presence of God.
The air around me was still, silent and cold.
Mom is in a facility now, in Tennessee. She has nurses that don’t mind when she cusses at them, and there are no baseboards in her room. It’s the South, so there’s only one Catholic church, fifty miles away. That means she can only go on Sundays. But there are group outings to the mall three times a week, and everyone enjoys shopping day. It’s all part of a solid, predictable routine, which, along with clear expectations, is very good for people with memory problems.
Mom calls me almost every day. They have a big craft room and a bigger library than she can believe, and they give her as much Diet Dr. Pepper as she wants. The food is hit or miss, nothing like my cooking, she says, but Bree visits twice a week and brings dinner and a baby grandson to play with.
There are big windows that look out on beautiful mountains - she doesn’t know if they’re the Smokeys or the Blue Ridge, she can never remember - but she really thinks I would like hiking in them. She mentions the mountains to me three or four times a week. I think she wants me to visit. I’m planning a trip out there in June.
No one comes to terms with death. Death’s terms are absolute. Your only decision is whether to lie to yourself.
When you start telling the truth, you change. It’s a painful reckoning, but you start to get right. Then, you rediscover something - that by merely paying attention, you can bless, commemorate, sanctify the world. It’s your holy human birthright.
You’re doing it right now.
When you learn to attend to life closely, lovingly, you realize that it isn’t made up of its dramas - its furies, glories and rites of passage - and it isn’t made up of the plain, woven thrum of ordinary days. It is a wild, lovely, swift-moving sacrament, an infinite communion, so gorgeous and glorious in its fullness that it drowns the mind. You can’t capture it. You can’t understand it. But you can give yourself to it. And if you really unite with it, with all your heart, it will also take your death. For gratitude.
I have lost my father, and I have lost my family. I am no longer sure I have anything to teach you. I just want to tell you this:
You can do everything in your power to get it right. You can exhaust every resource, call in every favor, spend every dollar, give every hour, and you can still come up short. You are not in control. It does not matter where you draw the lines.
When you pray, pray for grace.