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| Sitting on the shores of Lake Saint Clair, Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan |
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| 745 Harcourt Rd., Grosse Pointe Park, MI as it is today ― This is the 1st home that my parents built in 1951 and where our family lived until my brother and I were 6. |
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| The 2nd home my parents built as it is today ― 563 Thorn Tree, Grosse Pointe Woods, MI ― where my brother and I lived beginning at age 6. |
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| Gazing into what had been my bedroom, August 2021. Vast remodeling was underway, providing easy access to the inside and studs that lay bare that I hadn't seen since 1957. |
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| Visiting our new home on Thorn Tree while under construction, winter 1956 and spring 1957. |
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| My
beloved kitty is peeking out over the snow behind me. Months later my
mother would accidentally run over and kill her in our driveway. |
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| Graduation Day, June 1969. |
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| Home visiting from college, with my twin John, 1971. |
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| Woodlawn Cemetery, Detroit, 2021 |
| The Long Journey Home |
Every one to five years I make the journey back to the home of my childhood and ancestors. Often part of the trip is to attend high school class reunions and visit friends and family. And there are other times when I returned to attend memorial services and bury family members who have died. This last trip, in the summer of 2021, I took some of my mother's ashes which I buried both by my father and brother at Pine Lake Cemetery in West Bloomfield Township, and also next to the graves of my grandparents and my maternal ancestors at Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit.
No matter the time between visits, one thing that I've been doing every trip back to Michigan since 1989 is to visit the homes, the schools, the cemeteries, the lakes which hold so many memories. These experiences of going back, in sobriety and as an adult on a healing path, have been a significant part of a long journey home — home to my heart.
It was 1989 when I first returned to Michigan both sober and in the early years of healing childhood losses and trauma. I traveled alone, leaving my three young sons and their father at our home in Oregon, where I had been living since my first husband and I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1975.
Our 20th high school class reunion that year from Grosse Pointe High School was my first to attend. I was so glad that I went. It was also very bittersweet. My heart was filled with memories of my twin brother, who had died in 1978. The reunion in 1989 would also have been John's 20th reunion.
My pilgrimage back to the places of my childhood and youth in 1989 was intense, profound, healing, and transformative. As I first drove the old neighborhoods, it wasn't until I turned the corner and drove down Thorn Tree Road that I was overcome with grief as I neared and then passed this second home that my parents had built and which is where my family lived all those years ago. Only this time was different from all my experiences prior to that. I was not medicating myself. I was not disassociated and numb. And for the first time I returned to this childhood home with a heart that was opening and tender and raw. I wanted to feel. I wanted to heal. And all I could do was sob and grieve and feel what I hadn't allowed myself to experience before.
From there, I slowly drove as near as I could get to Lake Saint Clair, parked my car, and walked the two blocks to where I sat on the shores of this beautiful lake. And this is where I believe that I saw my brother, who had died 11 years earlier... which is a story for another time.
Grace and synchronicity followed me every step of the way on this healing and life changing journey. The next day, feeling stronger, I drove back to Thorn Tree, knocked on the door and introduced myself to the owners who'd bought the home from my mother after my dad had died in 1975. And I walked the floors and stepped into all the rooms of this second childhood home.
The following day I knocked on the door of the first home that my parents had built on Harcourt in Grosse Pointe Park, where we lived for the first six years of my life. And the older woman who answered the door remembered me from 32 years earlier when she had bought the home from my parents. And she hugged me and welcomed me in. I remembered which bedroom my brother and I had shared and more. I remembered things that I hadn't been able to. But now more and more was coming back to me.
After each deep dive into the heart of my history, I had planned in advance where I could find and attend ACOA meetings, a 12 Step program for adult children of alcoholics and other carried family pain and trauma. One of those meetings was at Cottage Hospital in Grosse Pointe, which is the hospital where I last saw my brother just eight months prior to his suicide. John had been on the psychiatric ward. And when I walked out of the doors of that hospital in May of 1977, I knew that I would never see my brother again.
All along the way, I sought support because I was clear what my intentions were and that I would need it. There was so much that I was seeking for the first time to face, embrace, and heal in the land of my ancestors and the home of my childhood.
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| Kuan Yin. Photo by Molly |
Every morning a new arrival.
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
On this path of heart of "moving towards the roar," of welcoming rather than rejecting and burying whatever arises within my heart and my life I have experienced more and more of the healing of the past so that I am increasingly here in the present. Rather than fragmentation and addiction and disassociation, my capacity to embody greater wholeness and conscious awareness is continuously evolving and expanding. And, over these many years, judgments have been transformed into compassion, depression and despair into gratitude, disconnection into trust and belonging, and fear and loneliness into love.
This is the journey of befriending ourselves and of strengthening the muscles of our hearts. This is a sacred, holy journey of growing into our authentic wholeness as human beings, of recognizing the beauty of our true nature and that of others, and of experiencing the truth of our interconnection with all beings.
It is so profound to go from feeling so separate and alone to the consciousness of our deep interbeing with all of life. Such a gift, such a gift. In the midst of it all, it is so amazing to be alive.
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| Photo by Molly |
There are many different ways in which we humans hold grief. To one degree or another, we tend to either be fragmented and weighted down with what we suppress or we gradually grow strong-hearted as we learn how to free ourselves to increasingly experience life as it is with all of its joys and sorrows.
How I hold grief today has vastly changed from years past when I kept my deep sadness, secrets, shame, fears, losses and trauma at bay. To the degree that I was silent and disassociated from what I carried in my heart, I was also unknowingly compelled to expend a lot of energy depressing, repressing, and holding down my pain.
And, of course, I acted out what was held tightly within. What was abandoned in my heart showed up in abandoning myself through a variety of addictions and distractions, through being drawn to relationships which mirrored and repeated abandonment, through empathic impairment and being instinct injured, through illness and depression and anxiety, through not consistently being the open-hearted and emotionally present mother that my sons needed, through judgments and projections and painful triggers, and through building walls on the outside which reflected the walls I'd built on the inside.
I was estranged from the wisdom of my heart.
It is not easy to experience life as it is. It is not easy to be human. My deep awareness of how difficult and courageous it is to be in the world today with our eyes and hearts open fills me with the deepest compassion for us all.
What I have also discovered is that how we hold grief individually and collectively in our families and friendships, in communities and cultures, in our nation and beyond makes a tremendous difference in our lives and in our world. Whether our hearts are more open and fluid and expansive, or closed and constricted and defended, has a great impact on our capacity for authenticity, vulnerability, intimacy, trust, compassion, and the consciousness and truth and love with which we live our lives.
Even for those who grew up in less shame-based and more open-hearted families, it is still hard for so many to embrace grief openly because of the grief-phobic culture in which we live. How many times do we witness people we know and others we don't apologizing as soon as they begin to cry? "I'm sorry," they say. Yet, what is the message that we may absorb again and again when we see human beings apologize for being human? Sadly, so many of us internalize that we should get over it, that our sadness needs to be kept private, that there is something wrong with our tears and our grief, and that we need to be something other than who we are.
The consequence of all this is that we act out our unrealized grief as individuals, as communities, as nations. And the unhealed past continues to haunt and plague the present. We deny black students the right to know their own history. We deny the human caused climate crisis even as today catastrophic tornadoes and wildfires ravish our country. We polarize and otherize human beings. We turn our backs on the epidemic of animal cruelty that is ingrained in the animal agricultural industrial complex. We collude with endless war and endless violence. We fight for unlimited gun rights and against civil rights and human rights and the great possibilities for us, as a species, to radically change and evolve into our greater potential.
Underneath so many of the countless faces of violence and trauma that permeate our culture and the world is unaddressed grief and trauma. Hearts that are defended are not able to respond in ways which are conscious of a highest good for all. Hearts that are walled up are compelled to build outer walls towards other humans, our planetary sisters and brothers, our Earth Mother. Hearts that struggle to be open and fluid are impaired in the capacity to be compassionate and to act out of love.
All of this may seem unrelated to the journeys I have made back to the land of my childhood and ancestors. However, there is a connecting thread here. And that is the value embedded in each of our individual and collective journeys that we choose to consciously make into greater wholeness and healing, greater truth and authenticity, greater vulnerability and belonging, greater courage and compassion, and greater peace and tenderness and love.
My personal pilgrimages back to Michigan reflect a symbolism for the larger journey of my heart and soul. And these soulful journeys that any of us make are unique to each of us. No two will be the same. However, the invitation remains for all of us: what does your path of heart look like and where does it take you? Hopefully, into a greater expansiveness and the ongoing evolution of what it is to be wholly human. We are all sacred beings, all family, all related. We need each other.
Bringing an ever growing heart-centeredness into our hurting beautiful world is something that I believe is deeply needed. Bless us all on our journeys...
💗 Molly
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