Still and still . . .

Technically, what I’m doing is not ashraming.

First of all, ashram is not a verb, although I’ve made it one (the way I did with pretzel, as in do NOT pretzelize yourself to please someone else. It never works).

Second of all, an ashram is a place where one goes to find seclusion in order to undertake close spiritual study, often including yoga and meditation practice. I did not go to such a place. I stayed home, which is why my friend Kim refers to it as "homeshram." But I did meditate during homeshram. Not daily. Just once with a group.

But the overall Lizshram plan was most definitely to undertake close study. Of myself. Of how I'm doing. Of what I need in order to be okay. To make this so, I unplugged from Facebook and emails and chose not to see anyone socially for a week. I wanted time to write, paint, think, cry, and maybe even finally hang the one piece of art my fire did not consume.

The piece survived my fire because it was in Toronto. I had been storing it with extended family while at grad school but wasn't able to retrieve it when I later moved to Montreal because it wouldn't fit it into my packed-to-the-gills truck. It never occurred to me that the quarter-inch thick (i.e FLAT) art work leaning against the back wall of the extended family member's garage, which is the size of most people’s houses, would be a big deal. It wasn't. It was a HUGE deal to him. And since I couldn't get it out of his garage because I had no money to transport it, he took matters into his own hands and simply gave it to his son, who was too young at the time to see why this was tantamount to theft. I can write about this now because the issue did finally get resolved and the love was restored all around.

The art piece – a blurry image of what looks like two figures standing on a beach, the tension between them palpable and moving – was made by a divorcing friend who gave it to me after I gave her refuge in my home before she was deported back to England. When my own so-called life partnership ended, I got the piece in my own so-called divorce. So, as you can imagine, having something of such symbolic import then taken from me by my family caused a lot of heartache. Feeling helpless, I decided to get all Buddhist on my own ass and told myself it was better the piece hang on a wall than languish in a garage. But, the truth is, mostly what I thought was, How could they?

Today, however, I realize that this so-called theft saved my art from burning in my fire. The fact is, sometimes we don’t see the reason behind things for years and years. That’s why I have learned to wait things out a little longer.

It also reminded me that there's always more than a few ways to tell a story. When I’m overwhelmed, I tell it like a horror movie or a soap opera. When I have had enough time to feel, cry, and heal, my heart opens and I become more grateful, which makes my stories more generous.

The last few weeks have been overwhelming. And I’ve been angry. Correction, the last few months. Since Andy died. And before that, too. Facing the thought of re-building after my fire often sent me to my bed for days of weeping, movie watching, and popcorn scarfing. In contrast, Andy’s death didn’t make me cry for months on end. Or even weeks. In fact, after the first few tears, it stopped them altogether. His death has been so big that I have gone numb.

So much so I can still barely look at his pictures, although I did recently force myself to tape a pic of Andy in his plane to my wall because I was convinced I’d paint my way through the numbness. But I can no more paint him than I can look at him.

I think of Andy more now than when he was alive. Correction, I think more about our childhood, during which time I became myself through him. I am putting emphasis on our childhood because anything that belongs to my childhood belongs to Andy as much as it belongs to me. Andy formed my thoughts and ideas. He was my teacher, my tormentor, my refuge, my other half. With barely two years between us, it never occurred to me that he was anything other than my own brain and beating heart.

When we were around 9 and 11, Andy hatched a plan to get up at 5 am so that we could go exploring our gated community in Manila. We’d walk around the well-kept streets lined with Spanish-style houses, also walled and gated, with bougainvillea and oleander spilling over concrete or edging between iron gates. I can’t remember what we talked about. It didn't matter. We were a tribe.

On one particular morning when we got home from exploring, Andy put on a record and told me to listen closely to the lyrics. "Billy Don’t be a Hero." When the song ended, I asked Andy to explain it to me. He told me it was about a soldier going off to war. And that he died. I burst into tears. I thought of Andy going to war, and of him dying. What would I do without Andy? He probably laughed. Not mean-spiritedly. Andy was not mean or insensitive. He just didn’t cry his emotions.

A week before ashram, my friend Abi gave me Tracy Emin’s sort-of memoir called, "Strangeland." In it, Tracy traces a trajectory from being the daughter (and twin to a boy who ends up in jail) of an eccentric Turkish businessman who loses his fortune and more-or-less abandons his family, to surviving her childhood with her English mother who is forced to squat in her husband's abandoned house while working a series of terrible jobs in order to care for her kids, to Tracy chain smoking and drinking and fucking her way through her constantly breaking heart, only she breaks it a thousand times more through her own misguided attempts at cauterizing her childhood wounds.

I am not a chain smoker or a drinker or compulsive fucker, but I do have other unhealthy ways of numbing my pain.

Tracy writes about one of her loneliness dreams – (I have those, too!) – in which a boy she loves invites her to go with him to the sea wall in her home town. Tracy is so moved by the wall's beauty she says, “it’s beautiful,” just before the boy plunges a knife into her stomach. As blood pumps into her hand, instead of describing how she feels, she writes, “The sea is begging to disappear.”

[Thank you, Shawna Cooper, for this most evocative pic]

My bed has also begged to disappear. That was a few years ago, long before Andy died. But that thought is no longer possible. Andy has effectively saved my life by losing his. We can’t have another death. Even me.

Tracy wakes from her loneliness dream and says, “The fucking bastard: tricked by my own loneliness, and it fucking knew.”

Yes, loneliness does fucking know – it knows where you live and which doorbell to press and which dark alley to take you down in order to finish the job. It comes looking exactly like the love you crave and then it laughs as it beats your once-beautiful face into something no one could love.

Tracy writes, “Have you ever longed for someone so much, so deeply that you thought you would die? That your heart would just stop beating? I am longing now, but for whom I don’t know. My whole body craves to be held. I am desperate to love and be loved. I want my mind to float into another’s. I want to be set free from despair by the love I feel for another. I want to be physically part of someone. I want to be joined. I want to be open and free to explore every part of them, as though I were exploring myself.”

Yes. Tracy. Yes.

I feel it still, but I fear I also lost the ability to long, to believe, to hope. I have longed so hard for some people that I wonder if have spent not only all my longing on them but my innocence as well – my eye-popping belief in a love that would be transcendent, connected, and divine, while my stupid heart stopped at nothing to give, give, give, and give.

A few weeks ago I remembered how I used to make gifts for people I loved. For a man I once loved, I made a series of shadow boxes with his first book of poetry inside each box. In the first box, the book was pinned to the back wall like a butterfly specimen, and a small key hung on a nail beside it with a locked padlock on the outside of the box. It was called Fetish Object. In the second box, the book was flayed open with each page cut into petal shapes, every two pages glued together with a copper wire in between that helped me shape the petals once the glue had dried, the excess wire curling out from the pages like golden stamens. Transformation. In the last box, the book was again at the back of the box, but in front of it were layers of acetate hanging at intervals, and on which I had photocopied my love letters to him, a kind of palimpsest of love you had to look through to get to the picture of us I had glued to the cover of his book. It was of us dancing at his book launch. Love Letter.

For the next lover, I made a painting of his son.

And the one after that, I made a painting of his daughter.

After that, there was no one I wanted to make anything for.

When I was ten, my mother finally let me get my ears pierced. Andy bought me a pair of earrings from the grocery store just outside our village. Even then I knew I could not wear them and never did. The posts were not made of good-enough metal. The fronts were flat, white plastic discs with green leaves printed on them. I loved them because Andy bought them for me. But I didn't think they were pretty, and that made me cry. Secretly. Almost like I knew I would be punished for that thought.

Later, back in Canada, when we were teenagers, Andy had his best friend make me a pendant in shop class. It was silver, shaped like a telephone. I loved talking on the phone in those days (not anymore). He gave the pendant to me for Christmas. I wore it constantly. I kept the earrings and necklace right to the end.

It occurred to me the other day that my fire spared me anything that would remind me of Andy. Earrings and pendant gone. Not to mention all the love letters from people who once loved me, and all the art books they gave me. The fire made it as if I have never been loved at all. Where is the concrete proof? Andy gone. Letters gone. Dedications gone.

Andy will never stand up for me at my wedding as he did for Justin. This missed "milestone" seems to be not only about how I wanted to impress Andy, to show him that I was capable of succeeding at life (however conventional, and however much I challenge those conventions), but also about how I wanted him to see me joyous, blossoming in the light of a beloved. With their wives and children, it seemed that Andy and Justin now belonged to their own tribe. I wanted to belong with them. But mostly, I wanted Andy to tell a room full of people that he loved me. Yes, that's what it's about: to hear Andy love me. I know he did. But still . . .

Andy will never again spend time thinking about the perfect gift for me. But what does that matter when what is given can so easily be taken away.

I'm almost done my ashram, but I am not sure I am any further along. And that may be because I am not sure where I am going.

But despite it all, I am grateful. Or try very hard to be. Because I don't want to spend whatever time is left feeling bitter, or numb.

I am grateful for the message another Liz Phillips sent me the day before ashram began -- a young woman almost exactly twenty years my junior, who bears my name, who friended me on Facebook for fun, and who wished me well, almost like receiving a message from my younger self.

I am grateful for Dawn, my sister-in-law, my soul sister, who sent me a bouquet of Lisyanthus (pronounced Lizzy-anthus, funnily enough) – flowers that look like A-line organza skirts circa 1920. Dawn, who makes me feel feminine when most of the time I feel like a bull in a china shop.

I am grateful to Cody, my chosen brother, who makes the kind of jokes that Andy did and Justin still does -- perfectly timed, always off colour, ripping the laughter right out of me in spite of myself. Cody, always there when I need him, and most often when I haven't even noticed a train barelling down the tracks. He has restored something I thought I had lost along the way: trust.

I am grateful to Abi for always recommending exactly the right book. But exactly. And at the exact right time. Like she knows what my heart needs and when. "Strangeland" was made for Lizshram.

I am grateful to Zane for Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha," which I also read this week, and which reminded me that in everything there is both sinner and saint, lightness and dark; and that what binds all things and all people, joyous and painful, is love.

I am even grateful to the men who have loved me and left me because I honestly believe they protected me from themselves.

And I am grateful for Shy, who always knows when to crawl into my lap and curl up into a little ball of safety, cracking my chest wide open with a love I am only beginning to learn -- the unconditional love of caring for another being.

I am especially grateful for all the unconditional love that has come my way from my embarrassment of family and friends -- my father, Justin, Jacline, Mark and Tonya, Kim, Lilly, Diana, Rosemary, Freyda, Sara (all the Saras) and all the hundreds of childhood and adulthood friends who have crossed my path to lend me a hand, to give me refuge, to love me no matter what -- my definition of riches and my very reason for living.

A close friend of Dawn’s in Ottawa shared a story with me a few weeks ago about her grieving friend. This friend was told that in the Jewish tradition it is a sin to spend your life with the dead. In other words, you must grieve. But not for too long. Because while you are alive, you are supposed to live. You can't follow the dead to where they have gone. So don't try.

Being a terrible Jew, I have no idea if this really is Jewish folk wisdom. But I am grateful for this story, which I pull out each time I feel the pain of being alive when Andy is not. The thing is, Andy was always the first of us in the family to live -- to really live! I still don't know how to live like he did. But even from where ever he has gone, he's still showing me the way as he lives through Dawn -- who has become as much a part of me as my own brain and my own beating heart.