Two Lucky

Part of accepting what life hurls (or has hurled) at you is to locate a small space inside you where you can exist in a state of balance so calm it can only be described as grace.

This space can be very hard to find, and even harder to exist in. It is, as I’ve learned, the first impression of tranquility, the first true mirror to your soul.

In the past few months, I’ve spent so much time and money trying to feel, to appear normal that I’ve completely disregarded one pivotal aspect of making myself feel better: inner peace.

I have never been a religious person. Since Rusty was diagnosed, in the years by his side through chemotherapy, I’ve become adept at praying to many different gods, but the salvation I sought was never for myself. I prayed for Rusty to be okay, for him to survive this calamity, for a reprieve from all this fear, from the seemingly endless march from hospital to hospital, but not once did I pray for me to survive. 

I wasn’t dying. Of course I would continue to live should Rusty die. But I didn’t anticipate that living could be so difficult.  

As I’ve learned in the last few months, the outward expression of one’s daily busyness has very little to do with the truth of one’s mental and emotional health. I stupidly ignored what should have been obvious: That to heal internally, I would have to start from the inside. All my life I’ve been taught to be efficient, to be proactive and to manage my problems with cool aplomb; after all, isn’t productivity the best test of a person’s ability to grieve efficiently?

It seems daunting, if not impossible, to search for inner peace in the wake of your lover’s death, but I’ve come to understand that peace is unequivocally necessary, and fundamental for a person to truly honor the dead. That his death does not blind me to the love and beauty of life; in fact, it should increase my awareness of it, and give me the courage to seek it. I was lucky to have found Rusty; his life was a gift to me, and that gift, like his love, is immutable, even in death.

Searching for inner peace, I think, must begin in loving yourself. I don’t mean assuaging the ego in the form of buying new clothes, or treating yourself to nice meals in fancy restaurants (which is what I’ve been doing, though it hasn’t hurt). It’s not a realisation you can purchase from a store; it’s something more basic, more intrinsic, essential. Yet for all its simplicity, it’s also something you have to work on.

It requires effort, reflection, discipline. It requires that you struggle everyday with the one entity you know to be most strenuous to overcome: Yourself.

Since Rusty died, I’ve had only two moments of complete inner tranquility. The first happened in the morning of his burial in Virginia. I was sleeping in one of the beds at the family farm, and awoke to the song of birds and the cool, warbling brook outside my bedroom. It was a week after he had died, and peace had found me unexpectedly in an unguarded moment. 

The second happened about a month later, outside on the fire escape of our New York apartment. It was the cusp of morning, and again, I wasn’t expecting it. I had stayed up all night, and decided to climb out my window to watch the city stir in its sleep.

Each time, it was as if a deeper, more reasonable version of myself was trying to tell me I was going to be okay. But each time, I was too caught up in my own obsessive (selfish?) grief to recognise its value and what it was trying to tell me.

I’ve learned that I must now seek that voice inside me, and strengthen those moments into a familiar state of well-being. To accomplish that, I must first commit to making peace with Rusty’s death, and accept the cool violence with which he was taken from me. 

In so doing, I let go of my anger, my sense of injustice, my need to cling onto my grief.

In so doing, I can begin to recover myself, to pull myself out of this cycle of guilt, and finally - to forgive myself for living.

“The search for inner peace” is a concept that sounds completely vague (thus useless) to my ”big-city” Asian cultural heritage. My instinct is to covet what can be seen, assessed, put on a resume for the world (my family) to approve of. Luckily for me, that is not the only reality I know. Living in New York changed that. And even luckier for me, I know exactly where to start.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under New York. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.