WALKING ON AIR
The concept of walking on air started for me when my husband, Bob, died. I kept thinking of the Buddhist monks’ sand paintings, of how they worked for over a week, making an intricate design with colored sand and then, in a ritual of letting go, would wash the whole thing away.
The ritual is formulated to remind us of the impermanence of everything. I felt that impermanence when Bob died. We had worked for eleven years to create a healthy, loving relationship, and his kidney cancer came and washed away everything we had built together. All I had left were my memories of the experiences with him and what I had learned in my years with my beloved husband. And, of course, the love.
The week I became a widow, I remember thinking, “We are all walking on air, and we just have to be good air walkers.” Of course my thinking about it has evolved since then, but that concept has remained with me. I will be describing that in this book.
I was in the middle of writing my second book, called Walking on Air, Creating Your Life With an Open Heart, when the coronavirus hit New York. I am a white, seventy-eight-year old clinical psychologist who has experienced a tremendous amount of privilege and, at the same time, I’ve had profound losses. My sixty-two-year-old husband, Bob, and my thirty-two-year-old daughter, Chris, died within a three-month period in 2001. I wrote my first book, Ruthless Grieving: The Journey to Acceptance and Beyond, about how to survive traumatic loss and my personal journey to Acceptance.
In this book, I am going past the journey to acceptance to beyond acceptance, to creating a joyful and fulfilling life. I will describe the experiences and the tools I used to redefine my life with a loving heart, and the practice of living in the moment. That is what I call “walking on air.”
In March 2020, I moved from New York City to my house in Sag Harbor. I no longer felt safe in my little apartment on West 13th Street, and I was fortunate enough to have a house in the country. Like so many of us, I thought I was leaving for a few weeks, and have now been living here for over two years and am planning to stay.
Even though I had helped many people through traumatic losses, it took me a few weeks to realize that most of us—including myself—were in a state of shock and grief. I didn’t know how to continue the book, despite the fact that there had never been a more walking-on-air time than now.
After living in my house in Sag Harbor for over four months, I began to feel safe in my world again. I have been living with my mate, Bill, and my little poodle, Lily, and have adjusted to a life of isolation within the backdrop of a ruthless pandemic. Some are calling it radical simplicity, and it is that.
I started to feel a little foggy and had trouble remembering things after my move to Sag Harbor. My father had died of Alzheimer’s disease a few years after Bob and Chris. Since I went through his slow, painful deterioration and ultimate demise, I’ve been more aware and a little afraid of how my mind is working.
I was comforted in April by my friend telling me “during this pandemic, every day is Blurrsday.” It helped to know that everyone has been feeling somewhat disoriented. Then another friend reminded me that brain fog is a symptom of being in shock, which further quelled my fears about my own functioning.
So, apparently, I am not suffering from Alzheimer’s at this time, and I am proceeding with caution to write Walking on Air.
I want to express what an opportunity for growth and, eventually, joy that most losses can be. It’s not that we embrace loss (and certainly not initially), but we can learn to live with loss and the uncertainty it provokes and be willing to let it help us get to the essence of who we are and of being alive in this day.
Walking on air is going beyond our linear thinking to know that anything can happen at any moment. It is believing and knowing that there is something beyond our five senses and being on the quest to connect with that something. For me, it happens through love and living in the day, which leads to living in the moment. Right now is our only safety, and it’s always right now.
I believe that we are all walking on air. In the year 2000, I was aware of my daughter, Chris’, heroin addiction and lived with the fear of the dreaded phone call announcing her death. When Bob died, my linear thinking said, “Well, then Chris won’t die.” I even thought that from the other side, Bob could help her to live and recover from her addiction. The other side had become very real for me after Bob’s death, and I truly believed that Bob could help Chris to survive and recover from her addiction.
One of the most effective approaches to walking on air is living in the day. It gives me a chance to get into the present, to know that all I can deal with is this day. I heard a quote that I think illustrates this perfectly. It was in a documentary about Henrietta Boggs, the wife of Jose “Don Pepe” Figueres Ferrer, who helped install democracy in Costa Rica in 1948. I was surprised to hear her say, “The only way to live is a second at a time, as if each second might be your last.”[1] That is the spirit of walking on air, which we will be addressing in the first section of this book, “Living in the Day.”
There is something beyond the five senses, beyond what we see and feel. When I’m tuned into that, I feel like I am walking on air. When someone close to us dies, it’s difficult, (for me, almost impossible) to deny the spiritual dimension. I knew that Bob had gone somewhere, and it was a place I wanted to know.
That walking-on-air feeling often includes the joyfulness that the term signifies, as well. Unfortunately, that connection comes with uncertainty, which I am still learning to embrace. It’s a complex idea and one that I’ve been grappling with since my traumatic losses in 2001.
After Bob and Chris died, I intensified my spiritual exploration, and leaned on all the spiritual inspiration I could find. Ram Das, the spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author, has been a source of inspiration since I heard him speak in 1996. Because he died this year, I’ve been studying more about his essential messages. I think the main theme of all of his talks is that who we are is Loving Awareness. That is what he practiced with his own father, who had Alzheimer’s in his later years, and what I practiced with my father in his demented state. That has evolved for me into the concept of “Throwing Love.” at all the challenges of life, which is the second section of this book.
Pema Chodron says that we have to develop an appetite for uncertainty. I began to understand that more deeply when I heard a beautifully dressed woman giving a talk at a spiritual gathering I attended a year after my losses. She said, “We don’t go from A to B, we just go from A.” I can still see her taking a step in her patent leather high heels and leaving her foot in the air. “Will the floor be there to hold us up?” she asked. Taking that first step—and the next, and then another—is an act of faith. Another inspiration was when I heard Senator Kamala Harris say, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”[2] Usually the floor persists, but sometimes is does not, and we go into free fall.
Pema also writes that “Adverse circumstances become the method by which we awaken.”[3] What we awaken to, I am still working on, but all roads seem to lead to living in the moment as we embrace the uncertainties of everything else.
My editor was helping me to write more often and in a better flow. I told her that I was aware of a great dread that I awaken with in the morning when I’m meant to write. I also shared that when I write, I often don’t know where it’s going, but the next ideas come as I continue writing. She said to me “Susan, You are a Discovery Writer – you don’t write from an outline or in an intellectual way, but spontaneously, from the heart.”
Her telling me that gave me permission not to know where I’m going when I’m writing and intervened on the dread I feel when opening my computer.
I’ve extended that to identifying as a Discovery Liver, just doing the next “right thing” without knowing the big picture. I’ve found that having the attitude of Discovery is like walking on air, one step at a time.
In the third section of this book, “Creating Your Life with an Open Heart,” I will be describing my life today and the tools and methods I use to sustain a fulfilling, joyful life. When I told my son I was writing a book about life beyond grief, he said to me, “Mom, the best information you have for your readers is what a wonderful, happy life you have created after so many losses. Tell them how you did it.” That is this book.
[1] [add citation for documentary The First Lady of the Revolution.] Henrietta Boggs died in September 2020 of the novel coronavirus (alternately, of COVID-19) at the age of 102.
[2] https://www.demconvention.com/press-releases/select-remarks-from-senator-kamala-harris-from-night-three-of-the-2020-democratic-national-convention/