Day: August 19, 2018

Ed often said that he and I were “best friends,” and I appreciated that – he also often said the cows were his best friends, and I think that was the real truth –  but I can’t say I was ever sure just what the term meant or means.

Ed had many very close friends, some of which he had known all of his life, and they loved him very much and knew him much longer and better than I did or could in a few short years. There were scores of them who came to honor him and say goodbye.

It’s hard for me to quantify terms like “best friend,” or define it.

I think women forge closer and deeper  relationships and share their lives more openly and fully than men do. Sitting at Ed’s funeral Sunday, I was surrounded by Ed’s family – his brother, his wife and children, his grand-children.

All of them were so much more directly affected by his sickness and death than I am. I never allow myself to forget that.

My life continues tomorrow almost exactly as it was yesterday, but their lives are radically altered for weeks, months, even years to come. There is a tear in their universe, a need for healing.

Their grief is profound and unique, mine is something different. It is important for me to keep that perspective.

It wasn’t that I didn’t feel pain or sorrow, or that’s Ed’s illness did not affect me, it’s just very different. It is not the same thing. What do friends feel when they lose someone they love? I have lost friends in a number of different ways – suicide, my own emotional difficulties, irreconcilable differences, growing apart, changing.

I suppose in some ways my friend Paul’s suicide struck me the hardest at first, it was so surprising and unexpected. Ed was diagnosed with cancer in April and died four months later. That was hard to see in a completely different way.

When Ed and I spoke of it, he said again and again that he had lived a long and  full and good life. He certainly did not want to die, but he always said he accepted death, it was not in his hands. He did not wish to be pitied.

My friendship with him was deep and real, we both trusted it completely. We each had given the other profound gifts.

My therapist told me after my crack up that when I recovered, I would lose every single friend that I had. For better or worse, I had changed, she said,  and they had not.  I had re-written the script that governed my relationships. This was prophetic. I did lose every friend that I had, and I didn’t have many.

It was a lonely feeling, but then I have always felt lonely, and felt it again today.

Friendship plants itself as a small and unobtrusive seed, wrote the author Anna Lyndsey, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart. When a friend dies, the tree is torn up, the pain real and tangible. It is an act of violence.

Ed and I were close, I think the closest I got to any other man who I can recall.

We  only occasionally saw one another. My life could hardly have been more different from his life.

He could not comprehend the life of the writer, and I could not imagine the life of the farmer.

Yet we did love each other and change each other and touch one another. Somehow, our deepest selves were connected to one another.

When the carriage carrying Ed’s casket pulled off down the road, I wanted to chase after it and say “wait, wait, come back.” But of course, I didn’t. And he couldn’t. Who, I thought,  would come running to help me when a bear came into my pasture the next time?

I felt a bit lost today at Ed’s funeral, I cannot imagine what Carol feels tonight or what Ed’s children feel. But I can imagine what i am feeling and perhaps that is what sets it apart for me. Losing Ed, I felt an inner pain today, everyone around me was showing outer pain and, I’m sure, inner pain as well.

I have been naturally and appropriately depressed this week, irritable and impatient and disconnected as death stepped ever closer. When I saw Ed’s casket being hauled away on the two-horse wagon, it felt as if a part of me was taken away with him, but it is a part that I can and will live without. That is the thing about friendships.

I respect life, and I believe that the death of a person I love always calls me to a deeper knowledge of myself and of the powerful spiritual forces within me that I would sometimes call God. This idea is very different from the God being worshipped so beautifully at Ed’s funeral.

My God is not my master, he does not tell me what to do, or manage my life, or make decisions for me,  he permits me to hope and feel and love and create if I can do it myself. And he reminds me every day that I alone am responsible for my life. He offers much hope, but little comfort.

I won’t lie, all of these different feelings rose up in me as Ed was taken away to be buried, and so was a deepening sadness, my own kind of grief. For me, grief if fluid, it changes shape and color before it it can reveal itself, it burrows inward into the shadows.  I show no tears, I feel a great  numbness and exhaustion.

Ed’s death and absence does not end or even diminish this love inside of me, in fact it calls me to take another step into the mystery of my own inexhaustible need for love and connection. It is painful for sure, but even as many people agonized over what was happening to Ed, he didn’t, and most of the time,  I didn’t either.

This is life, it doesn’t need to explain itself to us or apologize for what can happen. No one is to blame.

Lots of people say they believe in God, but it is difficult for many of us to accept God’s work. When all is said and done, I thought, as Ed on his carriage disappeared down the road, our friendship going with it,  followed by a long trail of people, we have to face the reality of our own lives.

I thought also that it is love itself that is God and that offers me eternal life.

Thoreau wrote that the death of a friend provides us the task of a “double living,” we feel obliged to fulfill the promise of a friend’s life and also our own. I felt the truth of that today. Ed’s work is done, mine goes on.

I suppose the truth of it is that I don’t yet know what what to feel or what it is that I do  feel, these are unchartered waters for me.

Even as I grow older, I am not prepared for this, or wise or evolved enough to understand it.

I had a chicken setback today, I’ve been working for weeks to improve my relationship with the chickens by giving them mealworm once or twice a day, and it’s been working. But today, when I came home from Ed Gulley’s funeral, I saw the white hen pushing Minnie away from her food bowl and pecking at her cat food.

Miinnie, sweet as she is, had abandoned her food and was covering beneath the bench. I was holding an empty plastic water bottle and I tossed it in the direction of the cat food bowl to get the hen out of the way and it hit the hen in her butt.

There were also chicken droppings all over the place.

She squawked and marched off the porch in a major huff. “Don’t be a wussy,” I said, the thing only ways about 2 oz. And I was doing so well.  Back to square one, I think.

And so it’s done.

Ed was buried today in a farmer’s funeral after a deeply religious and moving ceremony under a tent in the warm sun. After the ceremony, his casket was placed in a horse drawn cart and ridden to the old town ceremony where the Gulley family has 14 plots.

The family and friends and relatives walked behind the carriage to the ceremony.

The ceremony was timeless and iconic, when I closed my eyes, I could easily have believed I was taken back in time to a farm pasture in Iowa or Kansas. There was a sea of grizzled,wrinkled, tanned and weather faces in the crowd, scores more standing behind the tent.

There were easily 300 people there, Ed was a big man, he lived large and touched the lives and hears of an awful lot of people.

I was privileged to read a hopefully humorous and appreciative eulogy that I had written on the blog earlier in the week. Ed’s family and friends  gave talks, played music, a Mennonite chorale sang six religious hymns.

I wasn’t planning to go to the funeral, but the family asked me to, and of course I should have gone.  I am so glad I went.

I think I just needed to make sure they wanted me there, I am very much something of an outsider and the farm culture is very clannish. There are not a lot of people like me up here, and I often feel that I live far outside of the circle.

You never know when a stranger with a camera and odd ways is intruding. Ed was one of the very few farmers I ever met who got what a blog was and started one with Carol.

The ceremony was nearly two hours long, and Maria and I did not go to the cemetery. We were both just spent. I just kept thinking, I have had enough, I have had enough. She drew sketches through the service, she is an artist everywhere she goes.

My focus is shifting. I would love to be of help to Carol and her family, to whom i believe I have become permanently attached. I want to give up writing about death a bit of a break on my blog, and get on with writing about life. People are making me itchy  by coming up to me with long sad faces as if I had hours to live or lost a best friend.

Those sad faces are not comforting to me.

Well, I guess I did lose a best friend, but I am not in mourning about it, nor would Ed have wanted me to.  I just feel down.

I felt Ed’s loss acutely at the ceremony today, I think it hit me as the casket was lifted up onto the horse carriage that I would not be seeing him again. And I will miss him, he was, at the end, an enormous presence in my life.

I will have to work it out.

Everyone else at the service talked of seeing Ed again in heaven, but my belief system is different, I think my time with Ed is done, except for memory and the way in which he lives on in his very special family. That makes it final and sorrowful for me, I went up to kiss the casket via my lips to my fingers to the casket. I said goodbye, and thanks for being such a good friend to me, for supporting my life and letting me into his.

I have this feeling I will not have a friendship like that again in this world.

I can’t even guess where Carol and the children got their strength today.

Their Sunday started with a pre-service calling line, then the service, then the ride and march to the cemetery, then a celebration of Ed’s life with food. I hope they get some time for peace and rest, between Ed’s sickness and death and the planning for what was a large funeral, they must be physically and spiritually exhausted.

We have invited Carol to come over for dinner this week, she says she would love to come. We mean to stay close to her.

I am spent, I will have to lie down with some music (Mary Lattimore, Hundreds Of Days).

I would like to write about Ed one more time tonight, when I get past some of the sorrow and loss I feel right now. Thanks for sharing this journey with me. It was important.

This dog is named Jen, she is a Chihuahua mix,  five months old and was taken by the authorities from an animal shelter in Texas that is still open. Early this morning, I put this photo up on my blog and Jen became the first dog I have ever put up for adoption on my blog, something I hope to do more frequently.

If we can help people, we can  help dogs, and we did.

Carol Johnson of Friends Of Homeless Animals/RI messaged me this morning to tell me that several of my readers had formally applied to adopt Jen (at first described as a male), after she is cleared by veterinarians an is healthy again.

She was treated brutally, as you can see, but her eyes tell a different story. They are full of hope and feeling as well as pain. Thanks once more, I seem to be saying that every day.

I appreciate the good people to reached out to save this dog. And gratitude to Carol Johnson of FOHA.

They say that a man, seeing others die all around them, never thinks that he or she will die.

In a recent New York Times article, a doctor named Jack Weissman was quoted as saying “What strikes me about our system is that more people are afraid of how they are going to die than the fact that they are going to die.”

As someone who has worked as a hospice volunteer, I believe there is a lot of truth in that.

When we do think of dying, writes Sushila Blackman in her book Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die, we are often more concerned with how to avoid the pain and suffering that may accompany our deaths than we are with really confronting the meaning of death and how to approach it.”

We are in dire need of role models, she wrote, people to show us how to face leaving the world gracefully and to place death in its proper perspective.

We don’t see that done very often.

I think many of us know that in America, death is now another corporate system, not just an individual experience.

We have very few choices about how to die.

Nobody really dies alone or in freedom, especially when we are snared in the death system – insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, hospice,  nursing homes, politicians and legislators and regulators, friends and family.

A hundred years ago, the average American took a week or two weeks to die, on average, almost always at home. In America, the average time it takes to die is about six years. And it often costs a staggering amount of money and involves scores of people.

The dying have little power or representation in the process. Dying is often prolonged, undignified and unnecessarily painful.

Today is my friend Ed Gulley’s funeral, and I am going to be there.  I’m not going to mourn Ed but to celebrate his life.

The family told me it was important to them that I be there, so it is important to me, and to Maria, to go. I am happy to say that Ed sought what some spiritual people call a “Graceful Exit.”

He did think about it, he did confront and seek out its meaning for him, and for those around him. That was his final accomplishment in life, and it is a very significant one.

He thought about how he wanted to die, wrote about it, spoke about it, made videos about it, blogged about it, discussed it with his wife, family and friends. He wanted to at home, he wanted calling hours to be in an open corn  field, he wanted to be buried in the family plot in White Creek, N.Y., and he wanted to be buried in his camo pants and shirt with his family and farmers all around him

People keep telling me how sad it is to lose someone like Ed, and everybody has to make up their own mind about this. I can’t speak for Carol or for Maggie or Chad or Jesse or Jeremy, and wouldn’t. But speaking for me, sadness is only one small part of what I feel for Ed. I am grateful he got to live the life he wanted.

The experience of watching his family gather to love and care for him was nothing but beautiful. He died in a cloud of love.

As I think about Ed’s life and prepare to say the final goodbye, I look for the lessons in his death, of course. When I converted to Quakerism as a teenager, the first thing I learned from that pure and good faith was to celebrate life as well as mourn it.

Ed had a graceful death, insofar as it was possible, he put it in its proper perspective.

He did not, in fact, fear death nearly as much as he feared the prolonged suffering that he and his family might have to endure because of it. And he broke free of the restraints of others, as he did all of his life.

At the end, he lived out the old cliche, he died as he lived, the way he wanted to. I wish him a Graceful  Exit today.