Remembering John

 Remembering John

My twin died 42 years ago today. John and I were two months short of turning 27. 

My brother had lost hope of ever finding love. On Friday, January 27th, 1978, he checked into a motel not many miles from where he lived outside of Detroit. He'd been spending weekends with our mother and lived the rest of the week in a halfway house for people struggling with depression. John had paid for three nights of lodging and spent that last weekend alone in his motel room consuming vodka and Valium, calling the suicide crisis line off and on, and writing increasingly incoherent poetry. He hadn't been dead long when the hotel staff found his body that Monday morning after he did not check out.

This is one of the poems that John left, which is about his experience of not being loved by our mother...

If Only

I love to be loved.

I need to be loved.

And I am angry when I am not loved.

And when I am angry, I am not loved.

If only I weren’t angry

about not being loved,

maybe I could find

the love that I need.

— John Strong

3/25/51 — 1/30/78

*****

It is the saddest thing when we humans are isolated and live our lives feeling cut off from love. This experience of hunger for love — and its many qualities of tenderness and touch, kindness and compassion, intimacy and connection, safety and trust — is tragically epidemic in our culture. Depression and despair, addictions and abuse, shame and fear, anger and violence, and so much more is incredibly common. So many of us, as I did for many years, lock the truth of our grief away so deeply in our hearts that the many layers of sorrow and loss remain unknown to others and even to ourselves. And we cannot truly befriend ourselves as long as there is no safe container to hold us as we engage in opening to what it is that we carry in our hearts and souls.

When my brother died, I did not cry for three days. And then it was only when I was back in Michigan with my closest friend, who held me. After I wept deeply for half an hour, I stuffed everything back away for the next five years. It took that long before I sought support and began the long journey back into my body and my heart.

John never found his way through and out.

But I have. And everything that I embody today — the depths of my ever growing capacity for compassion, tenderness, kindness, and love — is not just for me, my children, my loved ones, and all beings and the planet I cherish, but also for John. I carry John in my heart. 

And this ancestral pain which had been carried generation after generation after generation has finally found a container in me to be held, healed, and transformed. And now the trajectory for myself and my children and all the generations to come has radically shifted. Even our mother, who for nearly her entire life had been unable to love, has experienced a partial awakening beginning when she was 87. 

THIS IS THE POWER OF LOVE.

*****

Just today in my therapy session I was reflecting on life before, on my brother, and all that I experienced and didn't know back then. And I just held my younger self and my brother and our parents with so much tenderness, compassion, and love. We were all starved for love back then.

But no more. No more.

And I smile as I imagine my brother smiling at all the wondrous and amazing transformations that have happened since those days decades ago when I last saw John on the psychiatric ward of Cottage Hospital in Grosse Pointe and he told me, "I know I need to get away from Mom, and I know I can't." And I knew, those eight months before his death, that I would return to Oregon and that I would never see my brother again.

Sometimes the things that are our worst nightmares, with deep love and tender and wise support, end up becoming the portals through which our hearts are broken open and everything, absolutely everything changes. I never would have known this 42 years ago right now when I first learned that John was dead. It just felt like I was dying.

*****

Over the years, there has indeed been a death for me, but a very different one than the one for my brother. I've been learning how to recognize and understand and gradually let go of the obstacles which have been blocking my heart's capacity to know love. The old harmful belief systems, the ocean of unwept tears, the shame and secrecy, the image management and pretense, the relentless judging of me or you, the bone deep rage and resentments, the addictions and plethora of other distractions that led me away from my heart and yours — all this and more has been dying away over the past 37 years of my gradual awakening.

And it is so true that every time we allow our hearts to break open, more space is cleared for love. It's when our hearts get blocked — with ungrieved losses and betrayals, buried trauma and abuse, denied fears and shame, addictions and distractions of all sorts, a relentless inner critic and endless projections, unknown generational carried pain, and more — that we can get dangerously stuck. And the longer we're stuck, the greater the risks that we will live without ever truly knowing love.

And this is so sad, so sad. Because love is what we are. At least this has certainly been what I have learned and experienced. 

*****

Today I'm not only able to remember my brother's suffering, but also his moments where he felt alive and free. Sailing on his first little red sailboat on Orchard Lake in Michigan were among the happy times for John. And me.

 

And today I carry my twin with me. John will always be part of who I am. And his life and death will always be something which has pushed me to do the heart-work he wasn't able to do when he was alive, and to do it for both of us.

This amazing journey of healing and awakening has also brought me to this place where I am committed to living my life, as best as I can, with the commitment to Do No Harm. And this path has guided me to the soulful conscious engagement of working to alleviate suffering within myself, our family, our community, our world. Today I get to do all this and more. 

Miracles and Grace truly happen.

I have learned so much from my brother's life and death on this heart path I've been profoundly blessed with traveling. I have learned that even in our greatest sorrows, there is some gift waiting to be claimed. This comes with opening to the spiritual process of transforming pain and suffering into something radically different. And with this has come the greatest teaching — to never underestimate the power of love. 

Love is who we are.

*****

A Prayer

 

May we be at peace.

May our hearts remain open.

May we know the beauty of our own true nature.

May we be healed. 

❤❤❤

With heartfelt blessings to us all,

Molly