Rose Petals

Rose Petals

January 6th, 2008

Yesterday I made love to my home. I reclaimed her as my sanctuary. I mean I got down on my hands and knees and actually reached under furniture, damp dusted the underside of things where the dog hair clung, carefully rewound the Christmas tree lights, dragged the tree outside, vacuumed the pine needles from under the carpet, and put the gasping poinsettias outside to ‘go to sleep’.

There are two significant aspects of this, one is that I normally mutter and spit through a perfunctory swiping of the floor – gathering the tumbleweeds of pet hair- not quite reaching the corners. I usually make a joke that the maid will get the rest – but I am she and well, you just can’t get good help these days. The second is that I am putting my home in order after the first Christmas and New Year since my beloved husband, George’s death, last February.

Three weeks ago I was ready to bolt. I was going to take my sons to a beach somewhere and let the holiday roll right on past. It was my younger son, Chris who stopped me in my tracks. He said, “I don’t know why you have a problem with Christmas. Last year wasn’t our best Christmas, for sure, but this is our home and this is where we should be.’ In those words and in his wise young eyes was the absolute spirit of George. It is just what he would have said. I hugged Chris and thanked him for his clarity and the three of us chose to celebrate the season and had a holiday much more joyful and healing than sad.

It was on Christmas Eve a year ago that I knew George was going to really die. On Christmas Day at 11:00 PM a 20 lb turkey, stuffing and vegetables were dumped into a green garbage bag – no one could eat. At 3 in the morning after Boxing Day, I got my older son to help me get George in the car and I drove to the hospital. On New Year’s Eve, George and I sat in the emergency room, George in a wheel chair, silent and still, enduring God knows what kind of pain and me breathing and praying. Our two young sons Nick, 20 and Chris, 17 were out at celebrations. I wouldn’t call them until after midnight to tell them I had brought their dad back to the hospital. They had been so relieved when he had been allowed to come home just that afternoon. But wait, that isn’t the point of this story.

That part is the Little Drama as opposed to the Big Picture, as I have come to see Life over the past several years. My good friend calls it the Epic Story. Like the Iliad. The one that is truly our path to God. It is the divine blueprint of All That We Can Be. That path leads us right through the minefield of the small self with all it’s fears and rages, life and death dramas to our Greater Self - the poet, teacher, leader who resides in the heart of God.

Here there is no death. Or rather death has no ‘sting’. There is only love – in it’s many and glorious forms and as we are birthed into this world, live and sooner or later die out of this world, we can be carried through our darkest nights on the grace of this knowing, or be badly bruised on the harshness of a ‘real’ and physical world. It actually becomes a conscious choice over which only we have control.

I cannot trivialize the illness and death of my husband, the father of my sons, my business partner, mentor, lover, and soul mate. George and Marilyn was a phrase. For twenty- seven years we worked together, played together, had lunch together, shopped together, and on the way home in separate cars chatted on our cells to one another. We always had something to talk about. We rarely argued. We loved one another deeply and always wanted what was best for the other. We were only ever apart three or four times in more than a quarter century. It was a big separation.


Was I afraid? Yes I was terrified. I look back and realize I had bargained with God and offered to endure years of a million daily fears in exchange for the One Big One.

Was I sad? Yes, many nights I lay on our bedroom floor and wailed in the middle of the night, mindless in sorrow.

Was I angry? You bet. I hated the arrogance of doctors, the soullessness of CAT Scans, the iniquity of the body. I was bloody outraged that my husband was to die. I wasn’t ready!

Did I suffer? In the sleepless nights and the numbed out days when I couldn’t fix what was broken, yes.

But so what? It all happened anyway – whether I liked it or not.

What emerged from the depths of my experience were a series of lessons about Life and Death. Really about Life, mostly. They are a mere handful of truths that will help us live Life more fully, prepare for our own death more objectively and accept the death of those we love. Death is just the context for living our life. We are absolutely – for sure – all going to die, one way or another – sooner or later. We all know this but continue to act surprised or betrayed when it actually is visited upon us or one we love. There are no untimely deaths. Cancer, car accident, or crib death is merely part of the scrip. We all have an exit ticket.

There is a purpose to every single human life and how we express that to its fullest is our job on this planet. To the extent that we fulfill that mandate, the easier it will be for us to let go of the physical world and give ourselves over. There is a saying that a good life means a good death. To my mind a ‘good’ life does not mean one of perfection – pleasing God in our flawless following of rules, but of being real in all its darks and lights and striving. When we embrace this truth, we express our divinity in being God’s hands, eyes, mouth, ears, heart – healer, artist, teacher, counselor, lover -whatever.

The irony of all this is that I live in a world of healers – spiritual, energetic, natural. A world of miracles. In fact it is my business. After we sold our company and retired, George helped me realize my dream. In July 2005, two weeks after I opened my boutique dedicated to the healing and creative arts, George collapsed and was rushed to hospital. He needed fourteen litres of blood, had a tumor from prostate cancer that had shut down his kidneys and he nearly died. The oncologist refused to take him on as a patient and she said there was nothing she could do. His urologist said he wouldn’t live until Christmas, and he would spend the rest of his life dependant on dialysis.

George lived another eighteen months. He did it for me and our two sons, his family, and many others whose lives he touched during that time. I thought he was going to be my poster boy for miracles. How could the husband of one in the healing world die of the nastiest of illnesses – cancer?

But George did die. And in that passing emerged a profoundly beautiful love story. For in that final walk on Earth together, George, always my protector, led me through the fire of my greatest fears, and in return, I had the privilege of looking deeply into his eyes as he passed through the veil so he would not be afraid. From that moment the life and death drama of every day fell away and I witnessed my own soul’s journey.

I have lived my life in pursuit of the spiritual. I have prayed for clarity and understanding. I was certain that as I prayed for God’s Will to be done, that if I was really good and fulfilled my guidance in building this business around living life authentically and spiritually, I would be rewarded by my husband’s miraculous cure. How else could I really interpret his illness?

As it happened, something was lost in my interpretation. When I surrendered (small ‘s’) to God’s Will, I sensed this voice saying ‘Are you sure?’ and I answered ‘Yep, yep yep!’ because, of course, I thought I knew what that meant. But what God really meant was that I would have to go where I dreaded more than anywhere on earth – and that was to the hospital. In this case forty-two hours in the emergency section where George rocked back and forth on his gurney in pain and I sat on an overturned barf bowl for hours on end. God’s Will also meant that I would ultimately have to give up my beloved to Death when in my heart of hearts I knew he could have been healed. This is where I learned that healing does not always mean living.

To some I have shown strength or courage, but the truth is strength comes through surrender. In surrendering to what is, we can then look to what we need to lift us and move us through a difficult passage. This is where I can gratefully acknowledge the cast of hundreds who helped me – and George and family - by word or deed, practice, therapy or healing to take Life in hand and really Live it – to death.

This is the part I want to share. The circumstances of the Little Drama are the tools for the Big Picture and serve only as the flash cards of greater meaning and purpose.

Yesterday, I plucked some faded roses from the Christmas Centerpiece on the dining table. I was about to put them in the green bin, but instead opened the sliding door and took each one and opened the flowers in my hand and strew them across the snow. The crisp brown outer petals fell away in my hands and within the bud, deep pink silken petals unfurled. Snowflakes and rose petals swirled in the air and cascaded to the ground and rested there. As I look out the window and see the graceful pattern, it is a message that like the roses, there is no death – just transformation and beauty when we look through the eyes of Love.