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My father died suddenly in the silver light of an early Spring morning. He was 54 years old. I was 23. My brother was 21. He died suddenly, collapsing on the floor of his country cabin near Arlington, Vermont. He was found 3 days later after being missed at the little general store. He would show up each morning for his favorite ritual of a cup of hot black coffee as he chatted with “the locals” and fetched his mail from a wall of little brass numbered mailboxes. His was a classic case of Ivy League city-slicker who had moved to the country and was just mortifyingly delighted by regular small-town Vermont goings-on. Given his irascible charm and journalist-inspired curiosity and persistence, it wasn’t long before ‘the locals’ loved him for his epic story-telling and bright, mischievous laugh—often at his own expense.
I had incredible inexplicable experiences and dialogic channels of communication with my Dad that were straight-up bizarrely and deeply reassuringly on point.
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Despite having had a heart transplant six years earlier, it was clear that the raven of death came for my father entirely unexpectedly. I actually know this to be true based on a series of dreams I had after his death. He would “call” me via telephone and express his own shock and horror at the abrupt lack of completion and that he simply “wasn’t ready to die yet.” These messages and my own knowing of their truth were disorienting and caused me great pain. I could feel his soul thrashing against its sudden and foreign formlessness.
As a window stylist for Barney’s and other iconic retail palaces along 5th Avenue in Manhattan, I poured my earnings and chunks of savings toward sessions with extraordinary, highly-curated mediums, channels, and shamans. I had to wait for months in advance to meet some, and I met all with the clear intention to soften the hungry disembodied tantrums of my father’s soul. I had incredible inexplicable experiences and dialogic channels of communication with my Dad that were straight-up bizarrely and deeply reassuringly on point. I was fortunate and always felt deeply protected as I entered these liminal and strange realms of the spirit, and absolutely had “evidence” that he was still “reach-able”.
Peacefulness and a calm, centered disposition were not exactly how my rebellious, grandiose Dad rolled in in actual “real life.”
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I told no one of this strange between-world agreement it seemed I had made to somehow shepherd the soul of my suddenly dead father to a place of peace. It’s important to say that looking back, I am aware that I did this work as much for me and my peace of mind and heart as for the sake of his soul, but at the time, I simply did not know how to live until I knew his soul was peaceful inside of death.
Anyone who knew my father knows that he was quite the larger-than-life character. Peacefulness and a calm, centered disposition were not exactly how my rebellious, grandiose Dad rolled in in actual “real life.” Nonetheless, it deeply shocked me to discover that even in death, his spirit had the same careening appetite for big expression and vibrant experience that it did in life. Session by grief-fueled session with the medium/priestess/shaman, the spirit of my dead father and I did the peculiar, ancient workings of life and death, and death and life, to soothe his thrashing, and to quiet the marrow-deep knowing I had that this was a soul not yet at peace. It is—to this day—perhaps the strangest work I’ve done in this life, this mid-wiving of a reluctant dead father’s spirit to a place of acceptance: the required initiation into ancestry.
My father was a brilliant, complex man and as with many men who lead big, complex lives, he left a bit of a—shall-we-say—tangled legacy.
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In my grief, I was amphibian: one foot on the terrestrial ground of the world, the other in the dark rivers of the after-life. Grief-soaked, freshly skinned, and prematurely exposed to the ravages of being “fatherless,” I was all too aware of the tempestuous nature of his blood coursing through mine, more so at times than I wished. I can nearly feel it now as I write these words, the ancestral influence of both bloodline and spirit.
My father was a brilliant, complex man and as with many men who lead big, complex lives, he left a bit of a—shall-we-say—tangled legacy. There were legal conundrums and squirrely compromising liens against inheritances to appease multiple bitter x-wives and no indications of how to honor this complicated, deeply accomplished and yet fragmented life. And yet, there was a single letter written to my Mom (his 1st wife and the mother of his only kids), with the instructions to open it upon his death. My father was the occasional and infamous writer of extremely precisely-crafted, caustic letters to his x-wives (providing excellent fodder in his divorce proceedings) and in moments of particularly poor judgment, to his own children. We called these missives his “poisoned pen” letters—and they were indeed wrathful and radically inappropriate. My Mom later shared how afraid she was to even tell us that she had one last letter from him, her name scrawled in navy ink across the center of the sallowed white sealed envelope, piercingly calligraphic against the otherwise empty field.
I share this story now because I am choosing to come forward in all ways in my life in a frequency of truth-telling, and perhaps most of all, because it is woven each day into the work that I have been called to do.
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Inside was a letter of practical and mundane details (if such a thing can exist when it is the words written by a living man, knowing that the next eyes to read them will be upon his death)—and a few sentences conveying his feelings of forgiveness and profound appreciation. It was literally one piece of paper, a single typed letter, signed in the same generic blue ink as the name, “Elizabeth” etched on the exterior of the envelope. It didn’t fix everything, and it certainly was a far cry from having his death ducks in a row—but it was something—and it mattered. It still matters and for me, it has carried a massively healing function in contrast to the eminently clear unrest of this man’s soul perhaps in life as well as in the initial years after his death. This letter was not an antidote, but it was medicine. Had he died without having the presence to have written this letter, the arc of the grieving process of mourning the numinosity and the very real shadow of a father who was in both bone and psyche, a great, complicated and at times, wildly difficult man would have been even more treacherous. This was a gift left by the noble, loving, generously-hearted King aspect of my very human Dad.
I share this story now because I have never written a word of this experience and have spoken of it in its fullness fewer times than the fingers on my own hand. I share this story now because I am choosing to come forward in all ways in my life in a frequency of truth-telling, and perhaps most of all, because it is woven each day into the work that I have been called to do.
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In my practice, I work with men. Together and over time, we meet and mine their dreams—both of the night and of the vision that they hold for their lives. We speak of the archetype of Father and of the King, both alive and dead. Sometimes, for some fathers and fallen kings, now old and weakening, they are lost living inside an unlived life and the states of being of life and of death are desperately co-mingled. We speak of Death—the symbolic death of reinvention and renewal seen in the fatal plummet of Icarus and his melted newfangled wings or the Phoenix rising from the fiery ash—that occurs when we are willing to look closely at Self, and the identities it has erected. We speak of love and family, and sometimes, their profound fragmentation: rage and sorrow, guilt, shame, and loss. This is scar work. This is the place of reparation and integration. This is the place where the King aspect is called upon to do its stoic and often lonely service to the world.
I am transparent and name the bias that I carry about men and their massively vital relationship to legacy, and take an admitted fierce, loving, and bold stand that my clients sit through their own fears and their own tears to write The Letter.
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Instead of shepherding the soul of a reluctant dead man (who happened to be my beloved father) to a place of peace, I now midwife men as they open their shrouded, taut hearts and through their willingness to bear their own pain, birth a greater capacity for their own aliveness. Men birth themselves through their broken hearts. I am transparent and name the bias that I carry about men and their massively vital relationship to legacy, and take an admitted fierce, loving, and bold stand that my clients sit through their own fears and their own tears to write The Letter. This is a piece of paper—flimsy, generic, bleached white—that becomes a sacrament. This is the last will and testament of a man’s heart that will be intentionally left so that when the great raven of death arrives silently or with a thunderous cacophony, that no matter the incompletion, that somewhere, in the care of someone, there is an envelope and inside that envelope is a letter written by the awakened heart—however fleeting this moment may be—of a King.
I am called today to write these words for you. As we stand between ending and beginning, between darkness and the return of the light of these sacred winter days, sit and call upon the aspect of you that is King, the benevolent—and at times—estranged keeper of the people, keeper of your people, to write The Letter. Honor and forgive those you love and those you have loved so that one day when the shadow of the great raven draws close, through our own sorrow and grief’s molten ravishing, it is your words, the words of a presenced King, that will guide us through ending and into beginning, again.
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Photo credit: Devin Averyon Unsplash
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