Today I had the following email, in response to an invitation to the Celebration of Wendy's life that we are planning for February 11. It's from our friend Mariem Martinson, who with her husband Ross Nichols has gone to live in Victoria BC:
This morning I was noticing that Wendy's handiwork is all around me. As you know, I have done a lot of embroidered art work. Good with colouring pictures with thread but useless with a sewing machine, Wendy helped me to create 3 tapestries by backing my work with beautiful silks, so they could be either hung on the wall or inserted in screens. Two of "our" creations are hanging on the bedroom wall. I then walked over to my meditation area in the spare room, and took my maala (my lapis prayer beads) out of the beautiful silk draw string bag, one of about 6 that Wendy and I made for my Buddhist friends. She did the real work (cutting and stitching the bags), while I braided the ribbons and threaded them into the bags using Wendy's bodkin. She never minded helping me, in fact she seemed delighted.
I sometimes had to remind myself that Wendy was not my age, she was so active; and so willing and happy to give of herself and her talents. Imagine, she even gave her body, so that her last earthly possession could benefit others.
I wanted you to know that for 49 days after Wendy died, I did a special Buddhist practice for her, called "powa," which is simply a traditional way for helping the deceased to have an auspicious rebirth with good conditions. Ross and I hung prayer flags for her on a mountain overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We think she would like the view and we will always think of her as we hike past even after the flags disintegrate in the wind. What ever variations we have in our views of reality, we love and celebrate Wendy.
Love,
Mariem and Ross
And here's a small excerpt from my email reply to a message from another West Coast friend, Jeff House, about love and friendship:
Reading all through Wendy's diaries will be a mammoth undertaking. She began keeping a daily journal in 1953, possibly earlier, and all are here save, significantly, her diaries for 1957 and 1958, the first two years of our married life. Very early in our married life, we both had grave misgivings. Had we made a horrible mistake? For those first two years, our marriage was a fragile, delicate thing. We had great sex, but other than through our genital organs we weren't connecting meaningfully. I recall that we had dark, perhaps evil, thoughts occasionally. Years later we confessed these to each other,but at the time it must have been obvious occasionally, perhaps even often. I suppose Wendy wrote down some thoughts of that nature in her diary, then later, possibly years later, she reread them, and destroyed these two small volumes (her early years were tightly compressed in small pocket-book sized daily diaries, room for at most a dozen lines per day if written very small, Later, when I began giving her a diary each Christmas along with other presents, they grew to 8 1/2 x 11 inch blank books usually with a page per day). I can't date the momentous, miraculous day - night - that our love became cemented, consolidated into a friendly, deep affection and understanding that we felt utterly confident would last as long as we both lived. It was before David was born. Quite suddenly however, we knew we would be all right, no matter what fate might throw at us. Of course we had rows, quarrels, after that. However, from the day we were married we adhered to a very important precept that came to us from my grandmother, "Never let the sun go down on a quarrel" -- always kiss and make up before bed. We did this, even in our darkest period, and it probably saved our marriage. That unhappy period, which I imagine occurs in many marriages, will pass if both partners in a marriage work at dispelling it, as we did.
So here we have some reasons why Wendy lives on after her physical presence has come to an end. There's much more I could say. I could paste in my essay on dying and death, that appeared in the Annals of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. But I think I'll save that for another occasion.
No comments:
Post a Comment