Hope on the Range
By: Source: AARP.org Date Posted: 2005-03-01 00:00:00-05:00
By Barbara Lazear Ascher
Originally published in May/June 2005 AARP the Magazine
"Looks like pancreatic cancer."
My husband's voice on the other end of the phone was calm and matter-of-fact as he announced his doom. Weeks of tests resulted in two words that would change my life and end his, and yet he reported them in a manner instilled by 50 years as a physician. Rather than being overwhelmed, he engaged in a hovering attention to pain.
"You learn to take a step of distance from your feelings," he said to me years ago when I asked how he could attend to so much suffering. At the time, in my early 20s and in the throes of postadolescent passions, I found that answer cold, uncaring. It was only in gathering maturity that I began to see that to care for others, it is their feelings, not your own, that must be given weight and merit. In my older years I began to learn that what he was describing was compassion.
And so it was in keeping with his character that when he came home for dinner that night and we embraced, his first words were, "I have had a good life. I can face all of this. But you," he said. "This is a terrible betrayal of you."
"No!" I argued. "No betrayal. You brought me the greatest love of my life."
Now I know that he knew something I didn't. With the prescience of the dying, he divined the excruciating and chaotic pain I would suffer in the wake of his death. He grieved that unlike in times of sorrows past, he would not be here to support me. This was anguish that I would bear alone.
Within three months he was dead.
I know what they would have us believe, those who attempt to comfort us because the raw and brutal nature of our mourning makes them uncomfortable: they would have us believe that "love never dies," that "love lives on." In those first months I would have said to them, "Not in my cold bed, it doesn't. Not at my dinner table."
Love isn't filling the chair Bob should be sitting in. It's not reaching for my hand as I toast empty space each night repeating our evening ritual, a lift of the wine glass, a whispered "I love you."
I struggled to heed my husband's advice, to take a step of distance, but grief would have none of that. It rose like a Chimera invading the spaces I occupied. It roared loudly enough to drown out all other thoughts.
I determined to flee. To put physical distance between myself and the home now inhabited by this monster. I would go to a place where the only sound was the wind blowing louder than the Chimera's roar. To a place where no one was trying to make me feel better. To a place where nature's voice would be the loudest.
A solitary, rural childhood had ingrained in me a deep belief in nature's redemptive powers. I would head to Wyoming and the 7D, a 250-acre working cattle and dude ranch situated in the 350,488-acre Absaroka Wilderness within the Shoshone National Forest. Surely that was enough wilderness to absorb my grief.
I invited my dear friend and stepdaughter, Elizabeth, four years my junior, to join me. We share a love of horseback riding and empty spaces. She too was suffering.
And as my youngest daughter, Rebecca, would say to me many months hence when describing the depths of her own grief, "You can have another husband someday. I'll never have another father."
Elizabeth and I flew west with our cowboy boots and broken hearts.
The first night, wind and rain hammered our small log cabin. Nature's large-mannered motions were beginning to put my grief into perspective.
Mourning's dominion began to retreat before wilderness. We rode horses through ocher-and-rose-layered canyons revealing millions of years of geological history. We galloped beneath the sky's deep, impersonal blue. We raced through afternoon's golden light gilding the bared throats of sego lilies.
One of these afternoons, as our horses paused to drink from a river, Elizabeth and I turned to smile at each other and noticed that now happiness mingled with grief in the tears streaming down our cheeks. That is the way of grief. First it breaks your heart, and then it breaks it open.
We were awakening from grief's deep sleep of self-preoccupation. We were beginning to sense the insignificance of our sorrows when poised at the edge of ancient canyon walls formed by rushing rivers long since departed. Once, this land belonged to the waters; then they receded and new life moved in; then it too was replaced. The paths our horses followed were first trod by wild animals, then by Native Americans, then by wagon trains bearing the hopeful to a new land. Paths of life moving as we do across an indifferent landscape.
It is in the nature of immense pain to repeat its constant refrain, You are the most important person in the world because your suffering is so large. Here against this backdrop of history and vast vistas exceeding the eye's ability to see, the self became laughable in its insistence on its own importance.
We were beset daily by beauty existing for its own sake. Early morning skies washed clean by night rain, streams licking the new light, trees raising their branches as though in praise, as though shouting alleluia! Beauty is nature's way of declaring itself, of insisting on our attention. "Look, look!" it practically shouts. "Here, here."
And at night, what was our loneliness when spread out beneath stars and the silence between them?
On our seventh and last day, we rode a steep and narrow trail to the top of a canyon rim. Carol, the wrangler who had led us there, bid us to dismount and follow her onto a rock overhang. "This," she whispered, "is my favorite place in the world."
We peered a thousand feet below, where eagles soared above a silver thread of a river pulled by an invisible needle through the tapestry's background green.
"This place makes you feel both large and small. Large because it fills you up. Small because it puts your life in perspective." Only the wind responded. She continued, "An old cowboy first brought me to this place, and all he had to say as we stood here was 'It's a good life if you live it.' "
Our sermon on the mount.
You never know where the lessons will come from. It's why we keep showing up at life's class that requires perfect attendance.
I realized as we listened to Carol that I'd forgotten the vow I made my husband when we knew that death was the inevitable outcome of his diagnosis: "Each day will have a celebration," I declared. And so it had. We read poetry to each other after dinner, we dined on caviar, we played old records and slow-danced across the kitchen floor.
Once widowed, I turned my back on celebration. On this mountaintop, I came to know what I'd known before: life deserves to be celebrated. It's our way of saying thank you.
Barbara Lazear Ascher, who frequently writes about travel, is editorial director of Delphinium Books.
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