5. If Loneliness is a Tending to Grief, Then What?

Rev Syd introduces an intimate, present-time dialogue on loneliness, grief, and caregiving with their partner, artist and community organizer v. nico d’entremont. The conversation explores the assertion that loneliness, in real time, may support us in tending to our past, present and anticipatory grief. The poem “How I Go To The Woods” by Mary Oliver sets the stage. The conversation meanders through nico’s resistance to naming loneliness, preferring “alone,” their father’s sudden death and the responsibilities that followed, anticipatory grief as a beloved elder’s memory disappears, and how loneliness can be felt most acutely in another’s presence. nico shares family history, including their mother’s suicide, and reflects on agency, uncertainty, receiving help, and the ways that loneliness and grief dance together in this present moment. 

• Alone Versus Lonely
• Real-Time, Living Experiences of Loneliness
• Witnessing Dementia in a Loved One
• Family History and Memory Loss
• Loneliness With Others Present

About v. nico d’entremont: 

v. nico d'entremont (they/them) is a trans-disciplinary artist and visual storyteller whose sculptures, hybrid documentaries, ritual/performances, and inter-species collaborations employ materials and processes as allegory. Approaching personal content as embodied research, their artworks examine poetic entanglements across the veil of life and death. Whether sculpting a shrine out of cemetery dirt and human cremains, “baptizing” a cyanotype in a river to wash it, or creating a vitrine to house a feral swarm of honeybees that are revealed to be a saintly apparition, d’entremont’s interdependent studio and spiritual practices emerge from a belief that objects hold memory and that a sculpture can also be a spell. Composed of these objects, d’entremont’s exhibitions cultivate environments through which their spiritual practice may emerge.

The aim of d’entremont’s practice is one of continuous, speculative world-building. While the sculptures and spaces they create examine conditions under which we live, their social interventions seek to engage audience members in participation, dialogue and support in seeking liberation from these conditions. Through decentering dominant narratives and claiming queer ancestry with human and non-human kin, d’entremont seeks pathways toward healing our relationships with ourselves, each other and the lands on which we live.

d'entremont has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City and Boston. They have had work commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and exhibited at The Pasadena Museum of California Art, Commonwealth & Council, Human Resources, Chapman College Art Gallery, Cerritos College Art Gallery, Torrance Art Museum and Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery. They have been supported by numerous awards and residencies including a Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2012, a Social Practice Art projects grant in 2016, and residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, BANFF, The Joan Mitchell Center, ACRE, SPACES Cleveland, Boston Center for the Arts’ Studio Residency, Mesa Refuge, Los Angeles CleanTech Incubator, The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and The Berwick Research Institute. They graduated from UCLA in 2012 with an MFA in Sculpture, and Massachusetts College of Art in 2005 with a BFA in Sculpture and Art Education.

In 2016 d'entremont co-founded the Liberated Arts Collective with Manuel Barrios, Denis Durbin, Paul Macias and Walter Wilson, who were each released from serving term-to-life sentences in California State Prisons that year. Through Liberated Arts, they continue to cultivate spaces where, through art, individuals may heal from the impacts of institutionalization.

Connect with Syd:

Book a free spiritual care discovery call with Rev Syd

Email: syd@bluejaguarhealingarts.com

Website: www.bluejaguarhealingarts.com

Subscribe to Syd’s Substack - Being in a Body: revsydyang.substack.com

Instagram: @bodyliberationchaplain

Buy Syd A Boba Tea: Venmo @bluejaguarlove

Produced by Wowow Podcasts

Music by Lee Frisari

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

There are these assumptions or perceptions that in a romantic relationship or in a parental child relationship or with a mentor and somebody who is an elder who like deeply cares for us. Like those relationships, we're not supposed to feel lonely. We're supposed to feel connected and expansive. And yet, for so many people, that's not the experience. Welcome to the Dharma of Loneliness, a podcast where we reimagine the experience of loneliness as a sacred and welcome container that cradles the love and connection we long for. I'm your host, Rev Sidd, a Buddhist chaplain and spiritual counselor, and I invite you in as we examine this question. If your loneliness is something more than what you have been told, then what? Each month, I invite in a guest to explore a new assertion of what that something more might be. To play with the possibilities that touch at the heart of what it means to be human. We'll listen deeply and reflect courageously as we uncover the wisdom and perhaps the love that loneliness is longing to teach. I'm really excited about this next episode because it is a conversation that is about loneliness and not about loneliness, and it's about lived experience and living experience because it is a conversation and a dialogue that is unfolding in present time. So what we're exploring today is what does it mean to be living in an experience of loneliness, however we define that, that is living with us and unfolding and evolving and becoming in our day-to-day. And I'm also really excited because I get to be here today with V. Nico D'Antremont, who is in a really incredible person and my partner. And so this may be a much more intimate conversation. And we get to um, yeah, we're gonna be talking about some really recent and current life realities. So let me tell you a little bit about Nico. Nico is an artist, a sculptor, a community organizer, and so much more. Um, Nico is somebody who navigates home in three places here in the US, in LA, in Los Angeles, where they have an art practice that's really vibrant with community and where we share a life together. They also spend time in New Hampshire, where they are tending to their father's home and land after his passing a few years ago. And they also spend time in Boston, where they are a caregiver for a beloved elder with Alzheimer's. And that's actually a lot of what we'll be starting to talk about today is the relationship to caregiving and eldering and Alzheimer's, and the relationship between loneliness and our grief. And the reason why I wanted to have this conversation is that so Nico and I recently went on a trip to Paris with their aunt, who is the beloved elder. And their aunt's name is Alice. And Alice was born in Paris. And there was something about being able to offer her a the gift of this trip to travel back to where she was born, where she lived as a child, where she roamed around and froliced and had a lot of memories as a way to reconnect. Um and we also were very conscious that this was probably the last big trip that she'll be able to take. And it was an amazing time. It was extremely magical. And it was so incredibly hard. And in the time during our trip, there was this witnessing that I was able to do with Alice, with Nico, that really spoke to me about the ways that loneliness not just walks with us, not just is a friend to us, but loneliness is an active participant in attending to our grief with us. And so that's what we're gonna be talking about today.

SPEAKER_03 5:39

This is the assertion that if loneliness is attending to grief, then what?

SPEAKER_01 5:47

So before we get into this conversation, I wanted to start with a poem, as I like to do. And this is a poem and a reading, uh, a poem by Mary Oliver, entitled How I Go to the Woods.

SPEAKER_03 6:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend. Start crying.

SPEAKER_03 6:20

Okay, I'm gonna start over on the reading of the poem. Damn it. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone, I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.

SPEAKER_03 7:16

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

So we're setting the stage with that poem. My as always, I'm picking passages where I just start crying when I read them. Um so we'll start with Nico and inviting you into this space, one with that poem, and also with the question of what does loneliness mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 7:59

Well, I'm glad that you shared the poem with me earlier today so I could get my cry out of the way and then start crying right out of the gate. Um, that poem um I think really um hit me because it feels like it relates so much to my experience of this home where we're in right now in New Hampshire. And when we've talked before about your podcast and loneliness, I think that there's been a way in which I've questioned like, how would I how would I answer that question? Like, what is loneliness? I don't think about loneliness. And that's not probably totally true. I just frame it differently. Um, I think a lot about grief. Um it's a big part of my practice, um, my art practice, my life practice. Um and uh so just a bit of explanation about this home. I um, you know, I grew up camping on this land with my parents. Um, my father built a home here and lived here for the last 20 years of his life. And in 2021, I moved from it um, I was relocating from Los Angeles to Boston temporarily um for the sake of being close to my dad and to my aunt um for what I thought was gonna be a year. And I felt I I had felt a really strong message that I needed to get to Boston to be close to them.

SPEAKER_03 9:54

And a month before I moved, my father had a heart attack and died.

SPEAKER_02 10:05

And then I was, I mean, I was I was I was tasked with taking him off life support. Um but as an only child, I was also tasked with dealing with everything regarding the house and every settling all of his affairs. And um, yeah, so I think the poem reminded me of how for the first year after he died, I tried to come up here as much as possible. Um, as once once I started able to come to come up here and be in the house by myself. Um and I was really protective around who I would allow up here because the house felt so alive with his presence. It felt um like it he felt he felt so present here and there were many, many um things to be dealt with, but also there was just time for me to be with the land and be with the home and remember a lot of things and also discover new many new surprises um um based on my father's uh you know organizational method, which involved putting the most emotionally loaded thing in among the most mundane objects. Um But um yeah, I think that I every time I would come up here, you know, like I said, almost almost every weekend some during some periods, I would think, is this the time I'm gonna feel lonely? I'm coming up here by myself. Is this when I is this the time? Right. And it just never happened. I never felt lonely when I was up here because it felt so full of his energy. And there were a couple of people that um that I trusted enough. I trusted their energy enough to um invite them up uh one or two times. But for the most part, it was always me. And um yeah, I don't know. I just that's that's what I thought about um with that poem. And then it also made me think about how when we first started talking, I was in the process of working on an exhibition that was reflecting on that period of time and really reflecting on not only, you know, it was not only reflecting on um the grief involved with losing a parent and thinking about um inheritance and what does that mean and what is it, and you know, both biological, um material, um, but also thinking about what does it mean to be the only one left behind. Um I am, like I said, an only child. I'm not planning on having kids. You know, I'm like it's it's um so there's this very, very poignant experience of feeling alone. But I just somehow really resist naming it as loneliness.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Uh tell me about that resistance.

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Uh I think that lonely the word lone lonely to me feels like it's um I mean I guess that it's kind of get this is gets to the point of your podcast, which is like the feel the word lonely feels like it needs to be solved. Right. Like the word lonely feels like there's a longing for something else. And that isn't my experience. Um, I mean, there have been times that I've, you know, that I've wanted, you know, just in regard to like the only child thing, you know, there have been times that I have wanted to have siblings, either for, you know, little kid reasons, like, you know, you want someone to play with or like or practical reasons, like, gee, it would be really helpful to have someone else helping me manage all of this. Um, but I also am a total control freak, and that's true, and my being an only child is probably part of why that is, and allows me to be that in my full glory at times.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

I appreciate a lot what you're talking about, of that place of alone versus lonely, and that distinction between the words or the experience of those words in a both cognitive and embodied sense of this one is okay. I can work with this. Right. There's that you have that lived experience of being an only child, of being in this world. You're like, I know what it is to be alone, right? And then the layers of that over time. And then to, but to be lonely, it's interesting as you say that. And as we've talked before, there is this question for me of is there a sense that there's something lacking? Right. You talked about like a longing with the word lonely or loneliness. Um and I hear in that, like, oh, well, there's something wrong. It has to be fixed, right? Because there's there's a lack here or there's something incomplete or something missing.

SPEAKER_03 16:24

Does that connect to a little bit what you're talking about?

SPEAKER_02 16:29

Yeah, I mean, I think that it just doesn't occur to me to the feeling of loneliness feels like uh um I like being alone.

SPEAKER_03 16:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

So partly the the fear I have coming into this podcast conversation is that I don't really necessarily feel like I have a lot of deep thoughts on loneliness. I have a lot of deep thoughts on grief. I guess that if I were to replace the word grief with loneliness and just talk about how I feel about grief, it is not something to run away from at all. It's something to embrace and to move through and to have a practice around and in relation to because it teaches me a lot. Yeah. Um, and I guess that it feels scary to other people to think about embracing grief. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Well, I think that you know, one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you is not so much around the concept of loneliness as it is the living experience of it. And so when we were in Paris, there was an afternoon. Um, I think we had come back to where we were staying, and Alice was taking a nap, and you and I were talking, and there was there was something in what was coming up for you was this like another layer of acknowledgement of the ways her cognitive reality and cognitive presence and physical presence, right? Because also her mobility is becoming more challenged. Well, she has Parkinson's. And she has Parkinson's, so it's becoming more limited, right? So there's a lot going on, right?

SPEAKER_03 18:43

And something you said to me that afternoon was this piece around I feel her disappearing in front of me.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Like you're watching the disappearing happen. And as we were talking, it wasn't just about the Alzheimer's, but you mentioned it was also about when she's gone, this will be the last elder that you are like deeply intimately connected to in terms of family. And that when she's gone, all of those ties then disappear. And you talked about it in a way of a sense of being, then I will really be alone. And this is the piece that I wanted to talk about because it's this, whether we call it loneliness or not, it was this moment when your like knowing and your feeling was oh shit. And as you sat with it, right? And we were sitting in the other room in the hotel, the room off the bedroom where Alice was sleeping, and we couldn't run away. We couldn't do anything else. We're not in LA, we're not in Boston, we're not in New Hampshire, where you have so many other things to do, right? So many other projects that can pull you. We're in the city where you don't have that. And so we're sitting there, like, oh, I have to sit with these feelings. This is also why we're here on this trip and why we brought her here. And there was this knowing of like, oh, that feeling of like, oh, okay, this the actual aloneness is rising, is coming, is on the horizon. And as you sat with it, and as I witnessed you, there was this moment where you're like, oh, that feeling invites in the grief. And then you could feel the grief. And as you were feeling that, it was almost like that came back, kind of like a boomerang back to the loneliness, what I'm calling loneliness. Right. Then to the grief and back. And it gave this beautiful, like totally unexpected space that I got to witness with you of the ways that, oh, I'm gonna acknowledge that maybe there's this loneliness that's happening and that like is on uh it's like there's gonna be more of it. And if you sat with it when you sat with it, it's like, oh, then I can actually, it gives me the space to sit with this grief and tend to this huge humongous grief that is both present, past, and future.

SPEAKER_03 21:44

Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of different thoughts about what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_02 21:49

But as I as I'm hearing you describe my experience of this feeling of when Alice Disappears when Alice dies or when Alice's memory becomes whatever it's going to become. Um it's funny because it's like I have a biological family where there are there it's not as though I'm truly, you know, the only person of my bloodline living. Um but Al but Alice is the last person who I feel really grew up, I grew up with. And it's funny because I'm not biologically related to her. I call her my aunt. She's really my father's first wife and best friend. And after they got divorced, um, they stayed best friends. And when my father and mother met, it was sort of Alice, my father and mother were all friends. Um, and so I grew up with Alice um until um until I was about seven, and my mother started to have increasing mental illness and kind of banished Alice from our lives because of uh a lot of a lot of feelings and paranoia and things that were coming up for her suddenly. And I didn't reconnect to Alice until until I was 16 and she showed up at my mother's funeral after my mother took her life. And so there is this, there's also this like we have this really magical connection where she and then so so then after that she really she took on the role of kind of being a mom figure for me. Yeah. Um, she stepped into that role immediately, um, but in this way that I don't think anyone ever could have besides her, because I was so unwilling to be um cared for as a 16-year-old who was in in grief but refusing to refusing to be in grief. And uh, you know, leave me alone, I'm fine. Um and I think that we've just we've we've been together all of these years, and to have had that connection and be reunited, and then to lose her in the last part of her life feels like really cruel irony in some way. Um, but also yeah, she feels like the last person who remembers stories about my parents and remembers me in the way that was held within that family unit. Um I guess that maybe this is obvious, but I I there's something about the disappearance of memory that feels I guess more, yeah, more lonely there. Um because I think that I think I don't know that this is actually connected, but it's just a connection that I'm making in this very moment, which is that I always I always have said that like the that the most lonely that I think that you can ever feel is when you are actually sharing space with someone and because of whatever dynamics um you have between the two of you. You know, I think that like this, I think of this in terms of like when a relation when a um living, when a relationship kind of goes sour um when you're living with your partner and it it's the end. Um but the the most profound loneliness is loneliness in the presence of another person. Yeah. And I think that maybe the feeling of the anticipatory fear, the anticipatory grief, the anticipatory loneliness, whatever you want to call it, of or all of the above. All of the above, yes, and all those things. Um the of what what is it gonna be like when she if she doesn't remember me, if she can't recognize me, if she et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And um, and so I think that also there's this, there's this combination of wanting to squeeze every last precious moment out of our time together, right? While while she's here. Um and also like physically and cognitively, right? Physically squeeze her.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Both physically and cognitively, like her awareness present.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

Yeah, that one. Um, yeah, but also recognizing because I have a deep practice in relation to grief, recognizing that I want to in real time feel my grief. Right.

SPEAKER_03 28:25

And I can't fully feel my grief when I am either in dealing with the administrative stuff of supporting her, you know, Project Alice, or um just being present with her. I can't fully feel it. Um, because I have a little bit have to be on in a way that doesn't feel fully relaxed. Yeah, when I'm with her.

SPEAKER_02 29:05

And so knowing that I need to take take time away from her so that I can be with her um is this struggle as well.

SPEAKER_03 29:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

I think the piece you are touching in on kind of that connection point around how kind of acute that sense of loneliness is in the presence of another person or in um the pr a relationship that is supposed to not be lonely, right? Um, there are these assumptions or perceptions that in a romantic relationship or in a parental child relationship or with a mentor and somebody who is an elder who like deeply cares for us. Like those relationships, we're not supposed to feel lonely. We're supposed to feel connected and expansive, and yet for so many people, that's not the experience, right? And so it's interesting to hear you talk about the ways that being with Alice is maybe unexpectedly connecting you to a present loneliness that maybe doesn't make sense because you don't want that to be the reality, maybe. Um and yet it is maybe a portal through which you get to experience that grief in real time.

SPEAKER_03 30:58

It never occurred to me that one doesn't expect to feel lonely in the presence of a parent.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

You know, I have been told that from others. I don't know if I have a lived experience of that.

SPEAKER_02 31:14

Having grown up with a mother who felt like it was her duty to explain to me her need to her her future need to take her life. Um I think that yeah, I just some something just happened there when you were talking where I where I s you know, new synapses were formed, I think. Um yeah. I mean I think that maybe it's that maybe if I were to accept that there's some loneliness there, um like maybe there's this maybe it's like tapping into some sort of sense of loneliness um that is that same loneliness of sitting with my mother and having those conversations. Because the reality is, I mean, this is the wild thing, yeah, that I basically became a death jewel at the age of 13. Right. Um and was sort of like unwillingly cast into this role and you know, have have felt tortured for many years in various ways because of being put through that, and yet now have this mother figure that I that we have really open conversations about her death. And there was a period when she when when she was um closer to the beginning of first being diagnosed, where she wanted to think about, and actually still still this is this still comes up is thinking about ways that she might want to take um take control over her death and um think about assisted methods and having those conversations and having those conversations be consensual and candid and um and sane um it kind of boggles my mind. Um, but it but that's what that's what those conversations feel like. Um and it does kind of feel like that everything has just been leading to this. Like that that all of my that it's like all of that preparation was to prepare me to be really present for this somehow.

SPEAKER_03 34:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

The preparation the the all of those things that had happened, but then all of the recovery that I have had to go through in order to recover from the things that you know that that is what allows me to be with Alice in that way, and then with myself in the way that I need to be.

SPEAKER_03 34:35

Yeah. I think the another side of that for me has been the expectation that I'm supposed to feel met by and seen by my parents and never did.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

And there was a deep loneliness that I experienced because of that. And as you were talking about um like the experience of being with your mother in this unconsensual death doula role, her taking her life, you experiencing like moving through the grief and the ways that you have, and kind of the like all the different ways that that has impacted your life and it being this space of practice in a way that allows you to be present with Alice. And I think about how the ways that my loneliness as a child, and I I'm just now making this connection has that was that peace, but that was this there has to be something more for me, like as a kid, I'm like, there's something, there has to be something more than this, and everything that I've gone through, and all the recovery, and all the grief, and for me a lot of rage, um allows me to be present in the work that I do now in the world as a spiritual counselor, as a chaplain, as just as a person who does care work. And I think about I've had to walk through those paths, walk those paths, walk through those doors in order to get here. And it's funny, I like it's funny for me in this moment because I'm I'm realizing that, oh shit, has loneliness been like, has this been my work, my spiritual work, my human work for this entire lifetime? And it and I'm just having this moment of like, oh, I didn't see that because I didn't want that to be true. You know, I talk about why, you know, I'm doing this podcast is because of the ways that loneliness showed up at the end of a divorce and at the beginning of the pandemic. And somehow for me, talking about loneliness then made sense. And as we're talking, I'm just having this like deeper realization of, oh no, loneliness has been trying to get my attention and be my friend and be my co-conspirator for a really long time. And I don't think I've been wanting to, or I didn't want to acknowledge that when I was younger. And I remember, it's making me remember this, this uh inner exchange I had with my mom and years ago, and it was when I had first moved back to Los Angeles. I was living in the Bay at the time, and I moved back in, I think it was 2009, to LA, and I never thought I'd move back to LA. And my mom called me and was like, I don't understand how you can live alone. You must be so lonely. I can't be that. That's why I have, I'm so glad I have your dad and all of your siblings, and I have all these people around me. Like, how aren't you lonely? And I remember at the time being like, no, I'm not lonely because I can't accept, I couldn't accept that maybe she was right. And so I had to like eschew it and push it away and say, like, I'm not that. And that conversation like stuck with me because I'm like, oh, I think I was lying. But I'm not gonna admit it because I I'm not gonna admit that maybe my mom was right in that moment. And um, yeah, so this conversation today is making me like, oh, maybe there is a deeper relationship or a deeper thread in the ways that loneliness or longing for connection um or longing for something else, right? That intimacy that you experience with Alice is an intimacy that you're not and you haven't gotten anywhere else.

SPEAKER_03 39:32

Right.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

And it's so sweet to witness because I don't have that relationship with an elder in my life. And so I think there's a curiosity that I'm also bringing to this conversation around what does that loneliness feel like, or what are the textures of that experience for you as you're living it right now and as I'm witnessing you, but you're living it.

SPEAKER_03 40:08

Right.

SPEAKER_02 40:10

Okay, I want to come back to that because also something that you said may gave me words maybe for why I have a bit of a resistance to loneliness, to to naming something as loneliness, or not even naming something as loneliness, but just sort of like what what do I have to what do I have to offer about loneliness? What do I have to say about loneliness? And I think that partly it's because for so many years, that way that you described your mother talking is how I felt. Like, oh, if I was to live alone, I would feel really lonely. If I was to, if I was to not have a partner, I would feel really lonely. If I was to blah blah blah blah, I would feel really lonely. And it was only I think in 2021 the that was the first time, not when I moved here, actually. My so my my partner that I was with, um we uh we had a breakup um at the end of toward the end of 2020, very amicable. We we both said, we'll be like, we'll be like your dad and Alice, you know, that was like that was our goal, um, to be best friends in the same way that my dad and and Alice were best friends. And um, but then I ended up living alone for the first time, really, actually, um, at the beginning of 2020. And I loved it. I was in heaven. I could do anything. And and then I moved, I moved out here in a state of total grief, right? My father, I just my father had just died. I drove across the country, I was starting this new job. And I was having this experience of whenever I would come up here expecting, oh, is this the time I'm gonna feel lonely? But no. And I think that I just for the first time really felt into how much I love being alone.

SPEAKER_03 42:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

That the idea of loneliness doesn't even feel like it has anything to do with anything that I feel. Um, which I which, you know, you're revealing, of course, like, no, it does, but so annoying. Um but yeah, so I I just wanted to name that. Um I want to come back to what you were saying about, I forget how you were wording it, but I I think you were talking about witnessing my relationship with Alice and um not knowing what that feels like to have a mother figure who you're that who you have that relationship with. And I that closeness. That's that closeness. Yeah. And I don't really know that many people do. Maybe, maybe some people that really like their moms have that. Um, but I do feel like Alice and I have something that is beyond beyond a mother-child relationship because we don't have any of the trauma or any of the baggage. We just have the good stuff. And um Yeah, so I don't know. I guess I don't know how to answer the question. What is it like? Is that the question?

SPEAKER_01 43:54

I think the I don't know if it's so much a question as much as it is a curiosity of. What that experience is for you and to have it and to be in this place of it disappearing, it thinning out, it going away.

SPEAKER_03 44:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

I mean, it feels it actually feels very much like having my dad suddenly disappear unexpectedly because I also had a really special relationship with him. Um and I mean I mean, I'm not trying to be difficult that I don't know how to answer that, but um I guess there's there's a a cognitive part of me that feels that maybe wants to say or feels like that's not fair. But the reality is, you know, you've hold heard this before. Um before I decided to move out to the east coast from LA, I was having this really strong feeling that I needed to get here for some reason, something to do with my dad and Alice. And I just asked the universe to put me wherever is gonna be most useful. Just do it. Please don't make me make a decision about this job. Just give it to me if that's where I'm supposed to go. Don't give it to me if I'm not supposed to go there. And um apparently that that prayer or that spell is just it's like not to be messed with unless you really just want to flip, flip the table of your life over. Um, because I definitely that is where I here is where I was meant to be when that happened, or in the in the wake of my dad's death. And then as you remember, in the summer of what now, 2024, right? I that job finally came to an end. And I said, okay, I think I need to say that prayer again. Right. Put me wherever I'm gonna be most useful, because that what what happened last time? We'll see what happens. And then Alice was diagnosed in August. Right. And then two months later. Two months later. Um, and that really is how this spells work for me. They just they're real bangers, you know. Um so I think that I'm telling that anecdote to say that I think that while cognitively there's this part of me that wants to sort of say, oh, it's not fair, um there's this way that it feels like it's being carried. This this this storyline or this narrative is being carried by something beyond me, and that yeah, I just am like one piece of a puzzle, it and this is just what I need to do now, do right now.

SPEAKER_03 47:48

Um and that's that's where I'm at with that.

SPEAKER_02 47:59

I know that wasn't exactly answering your question. What's it like to have the that magical mother figure disappearing in front of you? But it's actually, I mean, I feel like I'm learning so much from her about how I want to die and how I want to live and how I don't want to live. You know, like I am not good at receiving help. And no, you are not. You know, it's it's a thing and it's relatable. It has been really phenomenal to watch Alice go from someone who steadfastly refused to receive help, um, because she because she relied on her brain throughout her whole life. She went to MIT in the 1950s, and like when that like it was like seven women graduated with her, you know. She did she did all these incredible things in electrical engineering, and and she um, you know, to to have there there also is this kind of cruel irony of that um someone who so much depends on their brain, right, losing it in that way, losing her ability to even do simple arithmetic. Um and yet it's taught her how to receive help. And so there's a lesson in it. It's just like lessons don't aren't comfortable.

SPEAKER_03 49:55

Life doesn't offer comfortable lessons. Um yeah. Can we talk about something else that happened on the trip with Alice? Yeah. Um I feel like I'm thinking about just like that that asking for help.

SPEAKER_02 50:27

And I mean this trip was a wildly heroically bad idea in many ways. I mean, it was there was it was it was it was something. Um there were so many twists and turns from the moment we got on that airplane. Yeah, it was just so many things, and um not really surprisingly at one point she fell and she hit her head.

SPEAKER_01 51:10

Yeah. It was terrifying, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:13

And you were with her, yeah. Um, and it's something I know that she falls, right? Um, and it's something that I have now been many hospital emergency rooms post Alice falling, and um and she always is in really good spirits, and it's um it doesn't even matter if she's in really good spirits because actually, like I have had to develop my own practice around accepting that this is a reality for her, right?

SPEAKER_02 52:02

And accepting that I can't protect her in every moment, and that if I were to try to protect her in every moment, it would be insufferable and suffocating, and she would be miserable and I would be miserable. Um that feels also like the like I just I don't want to say that I that I'm not pushing, I don't pushing the idea of loneliness away, or that I'm I'm I'm not arguing that I'm that I'm not defending myself against this idea of loneliness, but I do feel like so much of my energy goes toward thinking about how to be in relation with the uncertainty of someone who is in, you know, for all intents and purposes, um, you know, things happen.

SPEAKER_03 53:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:19

Um and I think that knowing both knowing that she knowing and really upholding the fact that she is a person who still gets to have agency in her life and her medical care and her choice to not have medical care and and not treating her like a child or something like that just because I have the power of attorney or you know, like not um, you know, that is something that I don't know, somehow that feels like this other side of of the coin.

SPEAKER_03 54:17

Yeah. Can you see that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that that is a big part of why we're talking today in kind of this this is real time.

SPEAKER_01 54:34

Yeah. Right? This is loneliness, this is grief, this is perhaps a third yet unnamed thing that is happening in real time in this interrelated, interconnected process of being with the unknown, being with the uncertain, like you said, right? Or being with the uncomfortable, which is probably all of the above, too. And I don't think there are answers.

SPEAKER_03 55:05

I don't think there is one um one story or one definition that encapsulates like some wisdom or some truth, because dharma or the teaching is learned and accessed through living, right?

SPEAKER_01 55:37

The fact that you're walking through this, we're walking through this, we're stumbling through this, um, you know, in both graceful and completely chaotic ways, that this is where the Dharma shows up. This is where that understanding of human relationship shows up. This is where the like the precious jewel, if you will, of what it is to be alive in a body that is both autonomous and utterly indistinguishable from every other body, right?

SPEAKER_03 56:27

Because we are both this and everything at the same time. All of that is showing up.

SPEAKER_01 56:37

But it's not like we're not three years, 30 years down the road where we get to have it all wrapped up in this nice book, right? And be able to tell these stories. And so I think that this why this conversation today feels really maybe bumpy a little bit is trying to have a conversation as two people who like to have full ideas and really deep, thoughtful, considered and considerate reflections, to be in a place where something is in the mess of growing, in the mess of becoming, in the mess of unbecoming, and being able to like step in a puddle of pond water that is full of muck and snails and things that I can't see underneath the water, and like stepping in that and being like, oh, okay, that was a little soft and gooey on my foot, and I don't like that feeling. I don't know what I just stepped in, and yet it's a part of this earth, which means it's a part of the magic and magnificence of all of us, which means this lived and living reality in real time of loneliness and grief, because it is so human, may be just as mucky as that pond water, and at the same time, just as drinkable and clear as the well water that comes out of the tap.

SPEAKER_03 58:41

Right? So we have there's this we're in the all, but it's not yet clear.

SPEAKER_01 58:51

And so I really appreciate you taking the time to muddle through this, if you will, um to talk about living in what building a relationship or being in relationship to loneliness and grief looks like, and how each of them, perhaps it's not just loneliness is tending to grief, but grief is also tending to loneliness.

SPEAKER_03 59:25

Yeah. Well, thank you for asking me to share my tiny thoughts on loneliness.

SPEAKER_01 59:35

You're welcome. So I'm gonna close with reading the poem one more time. So it's again, it's Mary Oliver, How I Go to the Woods. Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone, I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much. So thank you, Nico, for being here and experimenting with me through this conversation. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for this month's conversation. I hope it has offered you some space to slow down, to get curious, and to touch into the wonder and magnificence of all of who you are. Until next time, may you find the cadence of your longing and the wisdom of your heart as you meet your loneliness as a teacher, a friend, and when possible, a lover.