The Gift of the Bonsai

December 29, 2011 — Pat Bertram

My brother gave me a bonsai kit, which was a wonderful and thoughtful gift because I’ve always been fascinated with the little potted trees (that’s what bonsai means — a potted tree). But  . . . (there’s always a “but” somewhere, isn’t there?) I have a brown thumb. Have never been able to keep a houseplant alive. Never.

Still, I’m game for anything new right now, so I decided to plant my tree and see what happens. I got as far as opening the box and reading the “complete” instructions. They said to cover with the seeds “with a light sprinkling of soil, moisten the soil, and cover the pot with plastic wrap. This will create a mini greenhouse and no further watering will be necessary until the seeds sprout. Once the seeds have sprouted, remove the plastic wrap from the pot.” End of instructions.

And then what? These complete instructions are missing the “complete” part. How does one care for the seedlings? What do you do with the plants as they grow? The kit includes four cakes of “growing medium,” but what does one do with this medium? The cakes don’t break up easily, and you can’t exactly sprinkle these chocolate mint-sized cakes over the seeds. And anyway, even if I pulverized the cakes, they would barely cover the bottom of the planter.

So, I began googling.  Bonsai kit.  Garden at Home (the brand) bonsai kit. Black pine bonsai seeds. I found a query about a bonsai kit that sounded like like mine. She didn’t know what to do with the cakes, either. The response that woman was given? Buy a ready grown bonsai and maintain it since growing a black pine bonsai will take years.

Years? How many years? My life is in a state of flux. I can’t count on next week let alone next year or the year after.

More googling. On  the site: Training Black Pine for Bonsai I found this by Brent Walston: I consider the training of black pines, Pinus thunbergii, to be one of the most difficult aspects of bonsai, as well as one of the slowest goals to achieve. After over fifteen years of playing with them, I am only now beginning to get to the ramification stage, and I emphasize ‘beginning’. Of course I am not talking about one inch trunk Shohin here, but full blown three inch trunk monsters like you see in the books. Most of the finest ones I have had the privilege to see have been in training for approximately fifty years or more. This seems to be the general minimum age for really fine trees.

Fifty years to grow a single plant!!!! Ouch. I think the longest I ever kept a house plant alive was one month.

In another article, Brent Walston said: I discourage beginners from working with Black Pine, Pinus thunbergii, because it takes so long, and you need to know so much just to begin. I started with Black Pine, ignorant of this fact and massacred a lot of plants learning how, even with John Naka’s book, Bonsai Techniques I. I bought about 100 of them in one gallon cans, old root bound plants that appeared to have potential. Some of them have turned out to be really nice trees, but ten years later, the best are still several years away from being finished bonsai. Not a subject for the impatient. So when beginners ask me what to do with this seedling pine they just bought, I just roll my eyes and try to talk them into a nice deciduous tree.

And my black pine isn’t even a seedling. It’s merely a seed.

So, I decided I need to find out how to grow a black pine from a seed, and this is what I found at http://www.bonsai4me.com: Though seed is very cheap and easy to obtain, it does have some drawbacks when propagating plants. It is a very slow process; seeds can take many months to germinate, some species can take a number of seasons for their seed to germinate and many species need exacting conditions to begin the process of germination. Many types of seed require periods of cold or mild temperatures or wet weather before they will begin the process of germination.

It might take many months just to germinate my seed? Eek.

A ready-grown Bonsai, or at least one that’s had a few years under its skin, started to look like a fine idea. I found a few, but they cost more than my car is worth. $6,750.00. $5,400.00. $3,700.00. Yikes. Even the cheapest ones cost hundreds of dollars. Did I mention my brown thumb? Inability to keep a plant alive?

Maybe what I need is an artificial bonsai for my planter. Sprinkle it with pine oil. Do you think my brother would notice?

Posted in culture, How to, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 14 Comments »

Grieving the End of This Year

December 28, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been doing well, continuing on with my life after the death of my life mate/soul mate, and then suddenly, here I am, awash in tears again. I had no idea why this would be so, until I found out that so many others in my grief age group — those whose mates died in 2010 — are also going through an upsurge of grief. And now I know what triggered the tears, though I don’t know why.

The body/mind/soul remembers dates, anniversaries, emotional occasions long after the conscious mind has forgotten, which is why I know when Saturday (the day of his death) is coming around again — I can feel the sadness creeping up on me the day before. He died late Friday night or early Saturday morning depending on how you look at it, and my body seems to look at it both ways. But this upsurge in sadness has nothing to do with Friday or Saturday, or even with Christmas.

For those in my grief age group, this was our second Christmas without our loved ones. It was harder this year for some of us than our first Christmas without, perhaps because the truth is settling into our souls, and we know there will never be another Christmas with them no matter how much we yearn for it. (For this very reason, the second year of grief is sometimes harder than the first. The physical and psychical pain isn’t as great, but the emotional shock that protected us has worn off and the truth that they are never coming back has taken root along with a great clawing yearning to see them one more time.)

We’ve survived most of our firsts — the first birthday without, the first summer, the first Halloween, the first Thanksgiving, the first anniversary of their death — and now one more first is almost upon us. We are coming to the end of the first full calendar year without them.

Why would this ending be an occasion for an upsurge of grief? I don’t know. It’s particularly strange for me since I don’t see anything special about a new year — it’s such an arbitrary date — but apparently my internal datekeeper has made a note of it. And now I am grieving the end of this year, this first full calendar year without him.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 13 Comments »

Grief Update: Twenty-one Months

December 27, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Twenty-one months ago, my life mate/soul mate died. How much is a month in grief time? A year? If that’s the case, then today I have reached my 21st birthday in the world of grief. Sometimes it feels as if twenty-one years have passed since his death, our shared life so distant that it could be a dream conceived in present-day loneliness. Other times, it seems as if a mere twenty-one days have passed, as if he recently left — or I did — and soon I will be going home to resume my life with him. Sometimes the pain of separation feels old, as if it is a long-faded scar, other times it feels fresh and raw. Sometimes I see him as clearly as if we’d just parted, other times I have to struggle to remember what he looked like.

During the first year after he died, I was focused on getting through the pain so I could start a new and wonderful life. Somewhere deep inside, beneath thought, resided the feeling that only a great good could offset such a trauma, and I wanted to be ready to embrace my new life. Perhaps something wonderful will happen, but so far, I’m still struggling with the same old life, still struggling with a vast and unending loneliness.

I’ve been making friends, trying to assuage my loneliness, but always I feel his absence. He was the only person who ever truly listened to me, listened beyond my words to the truth of what I was saying, and no matter what I said, he never filtered it through his own  prejudices, opinions, and emotions, but could talk dispassionately and intelligently about even the most passionate subjects. Electric energy crackled between us when we went on one of our ping-ponging conversational excursions from history to music to movies to philosophy to books to science and back again to history.  I know I should be grateful for having him as long as I did, and I am grateful. I should be glad we were able to converse the way we did since that is something so few people have. And I am glad. But still, life is bleak without his being here to pong my pings, conversationally speaking.

I’m trying not to think about where to go from here, trying to trust in the rightness of my path wherever it will take me, but to do so somehow makes me complicitous in his death, as if I’m agreeing it was right that he died. Oddly, back then, I was glad he died. He’d suffered enough, and death was the only way to end his agony. The further away I get from his death, the worse it gets because I only remember that he died. How can he be dead? I don’t even know what “dead” means, just that he is gone from this earth, and has been gone for twenty-one months.

Posted in culture, grief, life, relationships. Tags: , , , , , . 16 Comments »

You’ve Got Mail!!!

December 25, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Mail’s here! Just click on the mailbox to see what you received:

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Christmas and Grief: Creating New Traditions

December 24, 2011 — Pat Bertram

This will be my second Christmas without my life mate/soul mate. I didn’t expect it to be a problem since we never celebrated Christmas as such. But, since it was a day with no mail, no open stores, no reason to do any of our daily activites, we’d fix plates of finger foods — meat, cheese, crackers, apples, carrots — and watch movies all day. It wasn’t until after he died that I realized our non-celebration had become a traditon.

I don’t like watching movies by myself. Without his enjoyment sparking mine, the movies seem flat and uninspired. Apparently whatever energy we generated between us brightened the story and made it personal, as if we were part of it or it was part of us. Now he is gone. That extra energy is gone. The tradition is gone. And I am all that’s left of our shared Christmases.

I never understood the point of traditions. Traditions seemed to be customs people blindly followed long after they’d forgotten the reason for the rituals and, since I have a very hard time dealing with pointlessness, I seldom followed traditions. (Hence my surprise at discovering that we had created a Christmas tradition after all.) Now, however, I do see the point. The point is continuity, connection, comfort. Life can be cold and cruel and desperately lonely. We need something to hold on to, and tradition gives us something to grasp when everything we hold dear has disappeared. Somehow, I will need to create new traditions, if only for myself.

My life mate/soul mate always loved Christmas lights, so last Christmas Eve, I took him for a walk. (He still lives in my heart, and that is the “him” I took walking.) I walked around the neighborhood viewing the lights, not just taking a cursory look as is my wont, but appreciating every scene, every effort the neighbors had put into their vignettes as he would have done. (He was an appreciator. I’d never known anyone who could appreciate every nuance the way he used to.) And tonight — Christmas Eve — I did it again. Walked around the neighborhood. Appreciated the artificial lights and the natural lights above. (Lots of stars tonight!) From such simple beginnings, new traditions are created.

Merry Christmas, compadre, wherever you are.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 9 Comments »

What Grief Taught Me About Love

December 22, 2011 — Pat Bertram

It always amuses me when I see “biographies” of young celebrities. “Biography” connotes more than a simple depiction of the facts of a life. It should tell us the person’s early influences, their failures and successes, their growth through adversity and grace during prosperity, and most of all,  how they ended up where they ended up. What does any of that have to do with an eighteen-, twenty-, or even thirty-year old celebrity? Sure we can see what their childhood influences are, but how do those early years affect their later ones? How do they carry themselves throughout a lifetime of success and failure? What did they learn? (Quite frankly, what is there to say about a person who acheives success at an early age and who maintains that success? So they struggled for a few years. So what? Many people struggle a lifetime and achieve nothing but old age.)

In fiction, the starting point of the story is when the character first encounters a major change that ruptures the status quo of his or her life, and it ends when s/he has established a new normal, a new status quo. In non-fiction, biographies especially, you expect the sweep of years, not merely a fraction of the life. (But then, who am I to say that biographies are non-fiction.)

When a person dies, you can begin to see the sweep of his life. It exists entire and whole in itself, without possibility of change. It is only then that you can make sense of that life, at least as it pertains to you. (I’m not sure we can ever truly make sense of another’s life, since so much of one’s life is internal and hidden from view.) So it is with me and my life mate/soul mate. I can see more clearly what we were to each other and why I still grieve his death.

What we had didn’t feel like love. After a few brief years of hope and happiness, our love was sublimated by the constraints of his growing ill health. It seemed that our cosmic love devolved into the prosaic things of life: cooking meals, doing errands, struggling to keep our retail business alive. And then it devolved further into simply surviving. Getting through the days as best as we could. We always knew we had a deep connection, though we never understood it and at times we both railed against it in our struggle to maintain our own identities, but we took that connection for granted. And what is that connection if not love?

It’s only when the story is ended that you can see the truth of it. And the truth is that love is not what you feel, but what you do. Love is being together, sharing good times and bad. It’s about not being afraid to explore who you are and what you will become. It’s about being together however you can for however long you can.

My wish for you, during this season of giving, is that you find enough love to last a lifetime.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Voyage of Discovery

December 21, 2011 — Pat Bertram

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Thinking Through My Fingers

December 18, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. — Isaac Asimov

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. — Gustave Flaubert

Occasionally, after writing about grief, I get concerned messages from readers or facebook friends suggesting that I might want to see a therapist. Or I get messages of pity, which is strange — why should they feel sorry for me when I don’t feel sorry for myself? The very word — grief — scares people, and worries them, and my use of the word gives people the wrong impression of me. Although I’m on a journey through grief, I don’t spend my days in bed crying my eyes out. I don’t shrink from life or hold myself stiff against onslaughts of pain. I haven’t numbed myself into unfeelingness. In fact, I live normally. I’ve come through the worst of the pain stronger (though not much wiser, at least not yet). I do still have grief bursts, but mostly I’m just . . . journeying.

The problem with continually putting my thoughts and feeling out there for anyone to see is that readers draw their own conclusions based on their own experiences, and sometimes those conclusions don’t reflect my truth. I don’t always like seeing myself through pitying eyes, so periodically I decide to stop writing about grief, and sometimes I do stop for a week or two, but I always come back to it because my message is an important one:

Grief is normal. If a friend or loved one is grieving, and it bothers you, get over it. It is not your problem. Give them the respect they deserve and the space they need to find their way through grief in their own time. (Admittedly, a small percentage of people have trouble and get stuck in one place, but if a person’s grief is fluid — continually changing — chances are she is doing just fine.)

Besides, whether I’m actively grieving or just processing what I’ve learned, writing about grief is a way for me to learn the truth. (And, as I explained yesterday, in my Grief is a Gift post, I have always been a truth-seeker.) So why should I let anyone’s “concern” stop me from thinking with my fingers and discovering what I believe?

Sometimes the discoveries surprise me. In a post a few days ago, What Do You Say to Someone Who is Grieving at Christmas?, I wrote: “Nothing you can ever say will bring the bereft what they most need: life to make sense once more. (That might not be what we most want, but it is what we most need.)” I didn’t realize this before I wrote those words, but it’s the truth. And in this post, I discovered something. I didn’t know until I saw the words, “my message is an important one” that I had a message, had something I wanted to impart with my grief posts.

So, as I continue on my journey through grief, I will still write about it — or not — depending on how I feel, not how anyone else feels.

Posted in culture, grief, life, writing. Tags: , , , . 9 Comments »

Grief is a Gift

December 17, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I did not choose grief. Grief was thrust on me. To be honest, I never expected to grieve. My life mate/soul mate had been sick for so long I thought I was used to the idea of continuing life alone. I thought we’d untwinned our lives and had set out on separate journeys, him to death, me to continued life. His death, however, opened a hole in the universe and the cold breath of eternity has seeped into my soul. I don’t know if the hole can ever be patched. I don’t know if I want it to be. I for sure don’t want to push thoughts of him out of my mind. Such thoughts, though they still bring sadness, help bridge the gap between his presence and his absence. (Absence is such a mild term to describe the unfathomable “goneness” of someone who is dead.)

I’ve come to view grief as a gift. Not many people agree with that, but for me, it is very much of a bequest, the last present he ever gave me. I’ve always been a truth-seeker, always wanted to see what was beyond the veil of everyday reality. (If you’ve read any of my books, you can see the pattern. Each of my novels seeks to reveal the lies that hold our culture together, from so-called conspiracy theories to biological warfare, from human experimentation to old time gangsters. Despite the disparate stories and themes, they are all united by my need for the truth.)

This hole that grief has opened, both into the universe and into the human psyche, might bring me to the truth I seek. And even if it doesn’t take me where I want/need to go, it’s still a gift. Not many people are privileged to find their cosmic twin, to be connected to another human, soul to soul, as we were, and grief is the price I have to pay. Sometimes the price seems too high and I’d like to fling the gift back where it came from, but other times, it almost makes sense, as if the universe is unfolding the way it should be.

From the beginning, even when the pain of his absence made it almost impossible to breathe, I’ve trusted my grief to guide me through the days, weeks, months. Despite the insanity of the feelings grief creates, I knew I was sane and well adjusted, and so I felt free to follow the wild and agonizing ride. I’ve learned much these past twenty months on how to survive, how to find sense in the senselessness, how to find peace within the sadness. I’ve found courage, patience, compassion, and a strength I didn’t know I had. I still don’t know where I am going — I can’t see the end of the road. For all I know, there might not be an end. The journey could be all there is.

My talk of grief gives people the wrong impression. I’m not sure that what I am feeling right now is strictly grief, at least not the way most people think of grief. But it’s not “not grief” either since I do still have upsurges of tears and sadness and loneliness. Most of the time I’m just . . . me. In fact, since I stopped watching the movies and television shows he taped for us, which caused horrendous upsurges in grief since we’d always watched the tapes together, I’ve been in sort of a limbo. Until we find another word than grief for the long-term effects of having lost someone important in our lives, I will continue to use the word “grief,” because whatever I do, whatever I feel is part of my grief journey.

And it’s all a gift.

I just hope I remember that during my next upsurge of grief.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 11 Comments »

I Don’t Feel Your Pain

December 16, 2011 — Pat Bertram

Soul-deep grief changes a person, or at least it should. I still don’t feel much different, and yet I’m gradually finding small differences in myself. First, I discovered I am no longer impatient. Ever since my life mate/soul mate died, there is no place I want to be more than any other place, no place I need to be. Next, I discovered I burnt my “if only”s behind me. I’d tormented myself with thoughts of what might have been if only I had done things differently, but the truth is, no matter what I would have done, he still would have died.

Recently I discovered a third difference: I am no longer a bleeding heart; nor do I attempt to be a surrogate sufferer (one who suffers so another doesn’t have to). Once upon a time, other people’s pain used to weigh heavy on me. It took the death of my life mate/soul mate to make me realize that by shouldering someone else’s pain, his in particular, I was:

a) doing him a disservice because it diminished the truth of his own experience. His pain belonged to him. In no way did my empathic pain lessen his pain. In fact, it made him feel worse, knowing how bad I felt for him.

b) not really feeling his pain. I was feeling what I imagined I might have felt in his situation, which means I was feeling my own pain, not his.

About a year before his death, he took a huge turn for the worst. We hugged every day, knowing each day might be his last, until one day I inadvertently jostled his ear (apparently the cancer had metastasized to that part of his body). An arrow of agony through him, and he pushed me away. From somewhere deep inside me, somewhere deeper than thought, came the harsh words, “He might be dying, but I am not.” (I’d only heard that voice once before, and it was a couple of minutes after I met him. Back then, the voice wailed, “But I don’t even like men with blond hair and brown eyes.”)

So, during that last year, he kept pushing me away — figuratively speaking; I didn’t touch him again until he was on morphine lest I cause him more agony — and I let him. I went about my life, untwinning myself from him as much as possible and cocooning my feelings so that I could survive his dying.

Afterward, I agonized over my dissociation from him. Once he had been everything to me. How could I have possibly have left him to his own pain?

Then I had an epiphany. (October 23, 2010 to be exact.) I realized if, during that last year, I had let myself see what he was feeling, let myself feel what his dying and his death would mean to me, I would have been in such agony I would have cried all the time. He would have hated that he was causing me so much pain, which would have made me feel even worse. I still couldn’t have done anything for him, so eventually I would have blocked out all that was happening. I would have gone on with my own life and left his dying to him. I would have become impatient with the restrictions of our life, with his weakness, with his retreat into himself. In other words, even if I could have gone back and relived that year knowing the truth of it, my behavior would have been the same. And he would still have died.

Ever since this epiphany, I’ve never bled for another person. A dear friend has been struggling with cancer. I feel helpless since there is nothing I can do except send messages of love. Part of me feels I should feel her pain, but mostly I know the truth — that it won’t help her — so I continue with my life and wait for her recovery. (She is surrounded by family so I am not abandoning her.)

Oddly, despite my non-bleeding heart, I have tapped into a deep well of compassion, especially for the bereft. I understand what they are going through, I connect to so many of them, but I don’t feel their pain as if it were my own, because it isn’t my pain. It belongs to them.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »
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