Tag Archives: Death

Books not written…

Posted in Personal, Spiritual Journey, Uncategorized by

In my last post, I said the next one would discuss my journey with ho’oponopono and anger, but I received word yesterday that my dear friend Gay‘s husband, David, died yesterday and changed the plan.

The Nine Gates memorial service for Gay is being held Monday, which would have been her 93d birthday. David had hoped to go but his health has been bad since her death; now the memorial will be for him too.

The eighth death in 3 years among my friends (and let’s not forget both my parents too) kind of slammed me. And right now I’m in a stage of melancholy and wishful thinking.

Both Gay and David were working on books for pretty much all the time I knew them. Gay, who actually wrote several well-received books in an earlier stage of her life, wanted to write one to explain the ideas behind her creation of Nine Gates Mystery School.

I write too, and while I was living in the apartment on her property, I worked as a copy editor and proofreader so we talked here and there about collaborating, with her providing the content and me helping with organization, proofing, editing, etc. And probably some cheerleading.

I really hoped with me or without me that the project would happen as her work was so brilliant, especially her concept of playing all the notes of our beingness.

David was a Druid. His family was from the Isle of Iona and David was the one son to whom his father passed the family’s generations of knowledge. David was also a scholar, so he added copious research to the practical basics. He was going to write a book about the practices, especially covering his extensive work on the oghams. (I’m going to hunt through some of my files for material; I loved working with oghams but remember very little of the specifics and David’s teaching was a little different from the few other sources).

I especially loved his deep info on the labyrinth, or Dromenon as he called it. For my session of Nine Gates in 1990 he presented a huge piece on the chakras and the labyrinth, which he apparently didn’t teach at any other session. I adored it but there was so much material I came away really only with the memory that at every turn in the labyrinth you are either turning inward or outward in one of the chakras.

When you reach the end, you’ve done a complete inner and outer journey through the chakras. His teaching was to pause at each turn to acknowledge the inward or outward movement. I never know which chakra I’m in as I move through each turn, but just the pause and acknowledgement always adds great depth. I looked forward to his book and my hope was that it would have a complete chart of how we move through the chakras.

For many reasons, neither of them ever finished writing their respective books and I’m not sure if either had enough written on some retrievable device or notebook that someone else could finish the project and publish. So two amazing teachers, with unique and illuminating understanding of spiritual life have died and so much knowledge is lost.

On another front, I really thought for many years that I would get back to California and be available to help the two of them as they got older. My mother was not only older but in way worse health than either of them, so I assumed she would pass away while they were still functioning pretty independently and I’d be available when they needed more help.

But in the way the Universe has of orchestrating from a different consciousness, my mother wound up living to be much older than anyone (including her) expected and about the time she went into a downward spiral, so did David and Gay. And I lost all 3 in the space of 15 months.

I won’t wallow in this space of “what ifs” and wishes for different outcomes, but I wanted to mark this moment and the thoughts jumbling through… Today it is what is for me.

Gay Luce, friend and mentor, on her way to the other side

Posted in New Age, Personal by

I received word that my dear friend Gay Luce, whose health has been failing rapidly the last couple of years, is in transition, expected to die at any time. She’s been so important in my life, I can’t quite grasp the idea of a world without her in it.

As has been true of a number of big changes that turned out great, meeting Gay was a fluke. I’d been taking some classes with spiritual teachers Arthur and Ann Cataldo. They met and liked Gay so much they helped sponsor a workshop in Chicago. Since they lived in FL and I lived in suburban Evanston at the time, they asked me to help field phone calls about the workshop in exchange for a free ticket.

I was happy to help but the workshop was a long haul from where I lived and I wasn’t sure I’d go. Literally up until getting up that morning and driving, I was never sure I’d attend. I felt uncomfortable in the crowd of people I didn’t know and wondered if I could slip out at a break when Gay walked in the room and the light around her drew me in. She hadn’t talked much about Nine Gates Mystery School before I knew I had to sign up.

The tuition for Nine Gates, which is a residential program that takes place over 2 9-day sessions, is high and it took a lot of questioning and negotiating to finally wind up with a time-payment plan and to head off in the winter of 1990 to Westerbeke Ranch in Sonoma for the first session. See here for more info on the workshop.

Not only did the workshop completely blow me away–life changing, really–but I met fantastic people, many of whom lived out there. My life was in transition anyway and after the 1st session I started wondering about moving out there so I could immerse myself more deeply. With that in mind I drove out to Joshua Tree for session 2 and after went up to the Bay Area to look around. By the end of the trip I’d decided to move.

It took quite a while to sell my house, but in spring of 1991 I headed to San Francisco. A horrible roommate left me soon looking for new digs and it happened that Gay had just evicted the tenant in the apartment attached to her house. So, suddenly I was living at the home of my revered teacher. Initially I felt some trepidation, but it didn’t take long for Gay, her husband, David, and I to become a family. We wandered in and out of each others’ homes and our pets felt equally free to hang out anywhere.

They were already talking about selling the 2-acre place in Corte Madera; that didn’t happen until 27 years later, but every time they brought up the possibility, they also told me they were looking for something that would have space for me too and it’s hard to tell you how deeply that moved me. Eventually, due to the high cost of living and having a lot of senior relatives in Kentucky, I was the one who wound up moving away…

The property had been and continued to be the scene of many rituals and spiritual gatherings and it’s hard to describe the magical energy of this land in the hills near Mount Tamalpais. Amazing teachers came through all the time. Constant heady discussions of deep metaphysical topics and learning insights became my norm.

Perhaps the most life-impacting aspect of time with Gay was, for me, experiencing absolute love and acceptance for the first time ever. There was no potential career path or odd plan I could come up with that Gay didn’t meet with absolute enthusiasm and expressing her certainty that I would be good at it. Being more accustomed to being discouraged from following the paths that most interested me, it took a while to understand what a gift it was to be so totally supported.

For many years after I moved to Kentucky we talked often and I went out to house and cat sit while they went to sessions of Nine Gates many times but in recent years between more on my plate with “Mom care” and Gay’s increasing problems with aphasia along with their move away from the home I’d shared meant contact decreased.

This is not the first time I’ve felt terrible at the end that my contacts with someone had not been as frequent as I felt they should have been, but I’ve also realized life just works that way sometimes. In the meantime, I’m gratefully running thousands of images of our years of laughter, shared meals, amazing conversations and adventures through my mind. As far as a positive and major transformational influence on my life, I think Gay had more impact than any other. I also know we closed every conversation with “I love you” so that’s the last thing I said to her…

May her journey into the light be joyful and easy.

My shifting world

Posted in Personal by

An estate sale place came yesterday and took most of the stuff in the living/dining room area. A number of family pieces were in the mix and lots of Mom’s finer decorating choices. She was very proud of having nice things. Now I walk through those rooms and hear the echoes.

While there are some chairs and a couch and a LOT of little stuff still in there, it’s largely empty and they took almost all of the artwork, which I think is particularly creating the echo. The emptiness and the echoes make this huge transition so real. It has somehow made my mother’s death hit home more deeply.

Getting those two rooms prepped, given her hoarding habits, was a huge job but the whole rest of the house faces me and I feel overwhelmed. The main task now that I have some clear space is to extract my stuff and get it gathered in one area for the movers to make their estimates and haul it to Florida.
But the crap load of stuff filling all the rest of the space is still there and at this point I have almost too many options for how to deal. My favorite much of the time is just walk away and leave it all. But I have the name of a yard sale “picker” who would come offer a flat fee and haul all or most away. Also tempting but requires more prep from me.

We’ll see. Right now I’m really tired. Since Mom broke her leg in February I feel like I’ve been on a hamster wheel and on top of all the jobs that created for me, my unwinding head muscles have been REALLY in overdrive, so I also don’t get nearly enough sleep. And hanging around here in the house I’ve shared with her for 24 years (and visited her for 12 years before that) I miss all our interactions.

I keep telling people, the crazy one is TV. Since neither of us have felt great much of the time, we both watch a lot of TV and especially in the last few years, as the technology escaped her, we’ve watched together. So it’s weird to watch AGT alone after something like 15 seasons of watching with her. Or to finish the last episodes of the new Bosch spin-off she’d been so excited about. Every day it seems I watch something we would have watched together and wish for one more time we could talk about the characters, the scenery…

Add in the blows SCOTUS is delivering every day and I feel like I’m spinning in a world of madness while trying to cope with my personal grief.

After the big push to clear the two front rooms so I have space to get my belongings piled together, I’m taking a couple of days to kick back a little before tackling the monumental task of getting this place emptied. I’ve lived here the longest of any home I’ve ever had. Hard to imagine how short a time I still have.