To my readers: This essay can stand alone, but I suggest that, as background, you read my previous post “Let’s Talk About Me” first.
Leona had one hell of a story, or in mythological terms, a cycle of stories centering around a heroic figure who leaves the comfort of the known, descends into the underworld and returns sadder but wiser to give their gifts to the world. Born in 1925 in Montana, she survived years of sexual abuse by her father by repressing her memories. During World War Two she worked as a “Rosie the Riveter.” She married, raised five children and lived a conventional middle-class life as a religious educator – at least until, amid the turmoil of the 1960s, the memories returned.
A feminist, she returned to college in her mid-fifties, became a psychotherapist and wrote a 1995 memoir, Forget the Night. Writing and publishing such a book forced her to experience the pain and the shame all over again. It meant descending to the underworld, again. Becoming a public figure and mentor meant constantly living with the memories, walking with one’s ghosts.
Leona intuited the value of connecting her wounds to her gifts and converting those wounds into art, into forms of storytelling. Then the underworld opened again and swallowed her. Between 1984 and 1989 she had lost Tag, her husband of forty years, and two of her adult sons, Tom and Brad. A third son has been institutionalized much of his life for mental illness. Eventually, however, her soul demanded that she make something out of her tragedies or she would simply perish with grief. She made art to survive, and she was very clear that she was a survivor, not a victim. Indeed, she became a nationally recognized expert in the treatment of sex abuse survivors. Her best known workshop was titled “The Miracle of Forgetting.”
When I met her on Day of the Dead in 1991, Leona was performing her annual one-woman play, donning several homemade masks to tell the tale of her losses. But the masks, rather than fencing her off from her audience in a “fourth wall”, served to bring everyone into her story. Once inside it, once we accepted the invitation to experience (her) reality without censoring any of it, we were able, surprisingly, to access our own pain, even if it rarely matched the intensity of Leona’s. When the play ended, we were a community, even if it was temporary. This was Leona’s performance, but like the Greek Tragedies it was modeled upon, it sank the audience so deeply into the depths of human suffering that we could identify a profoundly human commonality of feeling.
Whether as therapist, dancer or storyteller, Leona had learned the value of authentic ritual, spending much time with Michael Meade and Malidoma and Sobonfu Some´, who’d brought African grief rituals to America.
Around that time my wife and I began to facilitate our own Day of the Dead grief rituals, and Leona attended regularly, for fifteen years. This focus on ritual and the necessity of grieving was what first brought us together. Leona knew – better than anyone I’ve ever met – that the kind of losses she had experienced never heal completely, and that the spirits of the dead require our regular attention throughout life. Our indigenous teachers had made it clear: we help the dead move on fully to the Other World with our grief and our beauty. If we don’t, they become ghosts, stuck between the worlds, haunting us rather than assisting us. If we do, they may become ancestors.
Leona never shrank from a confrontation or the opportunity to speak truth. She’d spent too many years not doing that, and she wasn’t about to retreat into the passive stance of her early gender conditioning. One year, she brought something to the grief ritual that initially annoyed me. This was Berkeley, after all. We were all grieving our government’s criminal invasion of Iraq and the slaughter that had ensued. Leona brought an American flag folded into a triangle.
She had received it at the funeral of one of her sons, a veteran. Her politics were as radical as ours, but she knew the value of a ritual object that has been invested with deep emotion. She told his story and those of her husband and other dead son. She had told these stories at previous gatherings (and would continue to do so at future ones), but this time, the presence of that flag, which had been soaked repeatedly with her tears, brought us all more deeply into the great hall of our common grief. Below the politics lay the human essence that we would have shared with anyone who’d experienced loss, and who hadn’t? One year, she brought a poem she’d written:
Happy Birthday, Little Boy
Balloons of red and white and blue,
Paper hats and eight red candles
On a birthday cake
He rips the colored paper, to grasp
His dreamed of present
From Mattel
Bang, Bang
You’re Dead
Bang, Bang,
You’re Dead.
In the desert sands a boy grown
To be a man
Stealthily enters a darkened home
Bang, Bang
You’re dead
Bang, Bang
You’re dead
Another boy of eight will never grow to be a man.
A mother’s piercing scream,
Holds her bleeding son,
Screams of helplessness
Screams of rage,
Carried on the waters
A million miles away.
Another mother’s tears embrace a casket
Draped with a flag.
Oh, my children, what have we done to you?
A man is always someone’s little boy;
A woman is always someone’s little girl;
A mother’s womb, cries out
In the emptiness….
Oh, My children, what have we done to you?
Leona also attended our poetry salons, where she often related those stories of loss. Always, this talk would deepen everyone’s experience. That’s not to imply that she was a morose person. Indeed, she epitomized the African wisdom teaching – the more we open to the darkness, the more we open to the light. We experience intensities and ecstasies of joy and laughter that we would never have known otherwise. She knew that the joy (she was not a New Age person) was a very thin place without its attendant grief. She could joyfully dance her grief and tearfully express her joy.
Then, in a very short period in her late seventies, Leona retired, sold her house and had major heart surgery. Insurance statistics tell that at that age, any one of those transitions could be a killer. But she embraced her new life, her brood of grandchildren, her daughter and her one functional son Laurie – until he died in an auto accident when she was 79. Another lost son, another traumatic grief for her to experience and metabolize without turning away, another opening of the underworld. She held it all together, the love and the loss, she refused to despair, and she was grateful. She joined a writer’s workshop and began another autobiography with these words:
I have six grandchildren. Only one of them has a living father. Their fathers are my sons and I owe them the stories their fathers will never be able to tell them.
In her 81st year, she met Levell Holmes and fell in love. This brought all the old losses back. Loving someone meant that he wmight die and leave her. Opening to love at her age was a profound struggle, but she accepted it all. She wrote of “…the spoiling I get there as a bonus in my already abundant life. Can you believe he has convinced me it makes him happy?”
After six years, Levell died, and she survived another loss. Elders show us how to survive loss. Elders show us how to live life in its fullness.
And they show us how to become elders ourselves. Here are her “Instructions for Novice Elder”:
1 – Be aware of withholding your wisdom. Look always for opportunities to practice expression.
2 – Break at least one “rule” every day, either yours or someone else’s.
3 – Play as much as possible, night and day. Play most of the time. Buy yourself lots of toys.
4 – Laugh. Giggle. Learn to cackle, especially in inappropriate places & times. Be as inappropriate as possible.
5 – Speak the TRUTH, as you perceive it, whether anyone believes it or not.
6 – Be on the alert for mystery and magic. Bring it to people’s attention. Say things like, “No, this is not reasonable. This is magic.”
7 – Eat well. Sleep as much as you want. Exercise. It’s later than you think.
8 – Make love at every opportunity.
9 – Never forget you are a role model for all maidens, matrons & mothers. You have a sacred responsibility to fulfill the obligations of your training.
10 – Get as much help & advice from your mentor as you want or need.
Do not forget that you do not know what you are doing. You never did; you just thought you did. Now you know that you don’t know and THAT is WISDOM…ENJOY
In this world in which most true elders have been replaced by “olders”, even our ideas of elders have been diminished: one-dimensional New Age images of kindly old men with white beards and sweet grandmothers sipping tea under flowering vines. True enough, but people like Leona learn to drop the veneer of niceness. She could be fierce when the situation required. She had become more of who she had been born to be, not less. She could cut someone’s grandiosity down when others were satisfied to be polite.
But more often she was willing to bless. If she cared for others, she didn’t wait for them to say they loved her; she voiced her affection for them. She helped initiate younger women. She could see their gifts even if they couldn’t, and she would encourage them to offer those gifts to the world (in the old way, by writing them a letter). And those gifts, as she knew so well, were and are always intimately associated with one’s original wounds.
Indeed, her style of blessing expressed this mystery. One might begin speaking to her about a personal issue. But soon (like the entertaining narcissists she superficially resembled), she would hijack the conversation, rambling on and revisiting her old and well-known personal losses. She was needy – but if we were honest, wouldn’t we admit that we all are? She just had to tell her story once again. She was shamelessly self-referential.
But this is where she differed profoundly from other narcissists, indeed from anyone else I’ve ever met. No matter how long she rambled, when I struggled to maintain my attention, she would bring her monologue around to a comment that related her story and her insights directly to the issue that we had begun with. It was absolutely astounding, and it was always worth the wait, worth the struggle to pay attention. That’s a teaching.
I remember Ram Dass, back in the seventies: “You never lose your neuroses; you just lose interest in them.” Leona had found a way to use her grief and even her neediness to serve others. She had found her gift in her wound. Despite – or because of – her own narcissism, she was curious about others. She could bless because she knew her wounds inside out. That was her greatest gift to me. Her shamelessness encouraged everyone to embrace the shameless expression of our own gifts. She inspired people to accept their full selves, not just their better selves.
Approaching her 86th birthday, she went midnight shopping on Black Friday. She stayed out until 3:00 AM and wrote a hilarious account of gettinga tattoo.
As late as her 88th year, Leona found a ride to our grief Ritual. These full day events can be tiring even for younger people. She had to sit while we stood and chanted. But she struggled to her feet to briefly join us in the dance of grief and gratitude.
That year she wrote about the past:
It is haunting me, in my dreams and in my unconscious: knocking, knocking, knocking and keeping me awake…My ear remembers Tag’s voice telling me Tom was killed and I can still hear my own voice scream when Suzanne told me Laurie was killed…If I let it be there it will pass. If I fight with it, it will be stuck in my body. I hear my acupuncturist say, “In China, when a mother’s firstborn son dies, she will weep forever”.
But she also wrote:
We could slide into pessimism and darkness, or we can choose each day to count our blessing. I pray for myself to have wisdom in faith; hope in the power of love; and the grace to smile when I see angels all around me…I remembered many handsome young men who spoke with me and gave me a hug and I knew the Goddess / Great Mother was blessing me and I said “Thank you.”…I am no longer lost in the land of the dead.
The Greek playwright Sophocles said of himself and his esteemed rival Euripides: “I show people as they might be, and he shows people as they are.” Leona could do both.
What’s the truth of a life? Only the sum of one’s impact on everyone one meets. Everyone has his or her blind spots, prejudices and unfulfilled longings. Who knows the whole story? Who cares? Who doesn’t wish (too late) that he/she had asked more questions, filled in the blank areas of memory? Perhaps there’s a reason why we try to retain only the “best” memories. We remember people at their best, those moments when they embodied our highest aspirations, because we need to picture their essence, their “original medicine”. We need to see everyone both in terms of who they can be, as well as who they are. What we need to remember is possibility. That’s another thing that true elders teach us. Glimpsing their original medicine, we are reminded to imagine our own.
Leona spent her last years in a residence for seniors, living among “old” people. She had nearly completed her second book before the final diagnosis. She moved in with her daughter a few months before her 90th birthday. Right up until the drugs relieved the pain and she slipped into blessed sleep, she remained irreverent, opinionated, silly, unafraid (after all, hadn’t she suffered far more than anything death might offer?) and, of course, talkative. She loved these words by Mary Oliver:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
And she admired this African proverb: When death comes, let it find you alive. Close to the end, Leona asked her friend Rico to bring as many copies of Forget the Night as he could carry to the temple at Burning Man and create a shrine to burn. Long before, the African elders had told her that she needed to “sit in her chair” to recognize her eldership. So, Rico created a literal chair out of her books and burned them. Her grandchild Spencer wrote:
My grandmother wanted everyone to know this: “I am a dancer, I am a swimmer, I am a writer, I am a thinker, I laugh and I cry. And I am not this body...” Leona touched so many lives in so many different ways. Many friends have everlasting memories with her. Many protégés have memorable teachings. Many people knew her as a free thinker, a writer, a neighbor who always welcomed champagne-filled conversations. She was a therapist, who helped people reach their inner light. She was a speaker who helped people grieve. I knew her to ride roller coasters, making clam chowder every Christmas Eve. I knew her perfume bottle that spritzed me like the old movies. I knew her oversized couch was best for sleepovers, and there were never early mornings. I knew that nothing was planned in our adventures but that we would see where the day took us. I knew her to be the one to go get tattooed and then get hers bigger than ours! I knew her strong warm embrace, her unconditional love. I knew her as Maleona, my grandmother.
Her memorial service brought many of the facets of her life together, beginning with African drumming and ending with a Baptist sermon. May our beauty and our grief have aided her in her journey to the Other World.
