I was afraid to feel the grief: Growing open and missing my mom in the palm of nature
A personal essay about processing my mom's Parkinson's condition while on retreat at Esalen
Hi friend,
If you prefer to listen rather than read, I’ve recorded myself reading this deeply personal essay. Please enjoy:
“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.”
- Joseph Campbell
For years, Joseph Campbell, renowned mythologist and lecturer, celebrated his March 26 birthday at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. I learned this fun fact on my birthday this year while in a brief but deep conversation with a woman in line at the Esalen dining hall. Allison, a bright-eyed brunette, shares my birthday. As we part ways at the end of the serving line, we promise to see each other again next year, agreeing that if this birthday pilgrimage was practiced by Joseph Campbell, we are in good company.
I decided to take a solo birthday trip to Esalen to unplug and reconnect with myself. These days, modern life buries my essential nature, no matter how mindful I attempt to be.
Traveling renews our spirits. Fresh and wild geographies invite us back home to ourselves. Everyone has a slice of earth that offers transformation and healing. When taking these journeys intentionally and mindfully, the earth heals us directly.
As an urban witch, I crave this earthing pilgrimage. My body needs regular periods of time to be alone with myself and the source that unites us all. As an empath, I draw strength from nature. She helps me process and purge the many impressions and experiences that move mysteriously throughout my body.
Esalen is the place I learn and renew. Its beauty is astounding; carefully tended gardens bloom on bluffs; natural soaking mineral pools pull the ick right out of you. Birds sing and creatures spring from a deep well of silent music. This is sacred land. Home of the indigenous Esselen people, three waters meet to make magic: ocean, river, and hot spring. This land calls to me, as it has to so many others, for healing.
Esalen offers weekend, week-long, and months-long workshops in a vast array of subjects including personal growth, meditation, massage, yoga, psychology, and art. I’m enrolled in a meditation retreat, learning Effortless Mindfulness from Loch Kelly.
Driving down from San Francisco on highway 1, I turn winding cliff side roads as my heart nearly leaps out of my chest and water surfaces in the crevices of my eyes. The closer I get, the heavier my foot gets on the gas pedal. I watch the odometer rise. I feel like I am running home. I am running to be held. I am running to mother, mother nature she is.
Birthday ritual
Birthdays can be celebrated as rituals of returning to self. What better time to practice self-love than on one’s birthday. As guideposts in the eternal now, birthdays beckon the question, who Am I now?
A decade ago, I would never have believed 34 would feel like just the beginning. In my twenties, shaped by shallow ideals of the Hollywood entertainment industry, being in your thirties was being past your prime. Welcome to being “old.” I thought life would be over by 34. My younger self is pleasantly surprised.
I write in my journal on my birthday, At 34, it’s nice to know some stuff... and know there is so much more to know. I feel the friendly hand of the universe reaching out to ask, ‘May I have this dance?’
Even with the budding expression lines around my eyes and a new unbudgeable fullness of my low belly, 34 is so much better than 24. The wise woman of my future self whispers, it keeps getting better!
Laying on the main lawn at Esalen, I close my journal and gaze up in the sky. I peak the infinite Pacific ocean on the horizon line as I melt into the soft grass that holds me like a tempurpedic mattress. I roll over, belly to earth, and curl into my own being. Nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one else to hold in this moment, but me.
I appreciate the intermittent cell service at Esalen. Its absence invites guests into presence and offers a reprieve from technology. But when the internet briefly does turn on, my phone floods with birthday wishes. As I scroll through, I notice a message from someone missing, my mom.
“If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully. Stories about food show a strong connection. Wistful silences demonstrate unfinished business. The more a daughter knows about the details of her mother's life - without flinching or whining - the stronger the daughter.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
My birthday is as much as my mother’s day as it is my own. It’s “our” day; I was there and so was she. For every birthday I can remember, my mother was my first greeting of the day. As a child, she’d wake me by singing her own melodic rendition of “happy birthday.”
When I moved out and missed her early morning phone call, she’d leave this song on my voicemail and recount her memory of the day I was born. She’d tell me about how sweet I was as a baby, how much she wanted a daughter, and how happy my existence made her.
This is the first time I don’t get a message from my mom. Did she forget it’s my birthday? She forgets a lot these days.
When my mother told me she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease during the summer of 2020, I congratulated her. It felt like a relief. We’d spent the past two years going from doctor to doctor, doing tests, scans, blood work, and physicals. Everything came back normal. They all told us her condition was a normal sign of aging.
But it didn’t feel normal. It felt like a cheat. She was slipping away from herself and no one had an answer. Parkinson’s is nerve cell damage in the brain, causing dopamine levels to drop. This explained her speech impairment and depression. There is no cure for Parkinson’s but doctors say they can slow the process with pharmaceuticals.
With the diagnosis, we had something to react to. It gave me a false sense of control over what is growing to be the greatest heartbreak I’ve ever known. I was wrong to think that day I learned the diagnosis was a turn around. It would get worse. So much worse. This birthday hit me particularly hard as I never assumed there would be a day my living mom would not call me on my birthday.
Mom, where are you?
Our mother is our first teacher; her heartbeat is our first mantra. My mother’s battle with Parkinson’s disease has invited me into the strongest initiation of my life.
As she changes and becomes less and less of the woman I once sought refuge within, I sever myself from the expectation of life experiences I thought we would share.
When I moved from LA to San Francisco five years ago, I imagined my mom visiting me often. We’d spend the day walking the city, ending in Union Square; eating salads and shoe shopping at Macy’s, like we did together for so many years when I was in high school and my Dad’s job had him keep an apartment in San Francisco. I imagined her being inspired at an art gallery, buying something that made her feel alive, like the time on Polk Street when I was fifteen, she bought an electric painting of her all time favorite artist, Mick Jagger, playing a harmonica. But she never came to visit me alone. She wouldn’t fly alone. She was frozen with fear; afraid of getting lost. She started to need my Dad for everything, way before the diagnosis.
In the last year or so, I’ve become aware of the soul of my unborn baby knocking from the other side of heaven’s door. I always imagined my mother would be there for me the way my grandmother was there for her when my siblings and I were young. My grandmother was always around. She bathed us, fed us ice cream and popcorn, took us out on adventures to feed the ducks at the lake, and had us stay over for sleepovers. My mother will never be that for my children. I have no choice but to let that future vision go.
Many women have challenging relationships with their mothers and while I have my own shade of a mother wound, I will not let that keep me from honoring my mom and her legacy of love. She was a fantastic mother. She had a hard, dark childhood and I think that is what fueled her intention for showering her children with all the privileges she could manage. She saved money to give us dance and music lessons. She volunteered at our schools and was present in our communities the way she must have wished her single working mother could have been for her. My mother is the kindest, most generous, and humorous woman I’ve known. We’ve played and laughed together for decades. She's the kind of person that makes fast friends with strangers. She used to be at least.
Before Parksinson’s, my mother’s eyes sparkled like gemstones. Once bright and focused, her gaze has become despondent, dull, and distant. Like a newborn baby that has not learned to focus, her eyes will roam the room without intention or specificity. When I hold her by the shoulders and peer deeply into her soul windows I see sadness, fear, and confusion.
Her speech has slowed and she has trouble following conversations. Chopping vegetables and herbs has become difficult; she can barely maneuver a knife. I never imagined that my mother, a woman that once remodeled kitchens, hosted large parties, and cooked every dinner for a family of five for twenty-five years, can no longer make herself a meal. My mother, once my wise counsel, cut my heart open when she shared between tears, “you don’t know how hard it is for me to simply exist.”
Where's the woman I’d once known?
How did we get here?
Sad is not bad
Meditation breaks the husk around the psyche. Throughout my week at Esalen, I glimpse my grief as I sit in the silence for it to be known.
It clicks. This is why I’m here at Esalen. I’m here to feel safe to feel the depth of my grief.
This is what meditation and retreats offer us. A break from the routine of life. A space to feel.
Sad is not bad. Sadness is not depression. But the fast pace of modern life has made me unaware that I’ve been tiptoeing around the edges of depression. Moving from one thing to the next, from project to project, client to client, this deep sadness has sat below the surface of my awareness. Unconsciously, I’ve been scared of its massiveness and hadn’t dipped down long enough to ride the wave of grief.
But by my fifth day at Esalen, I’m ready to have my release. I take a walk to the properties edge where the only sounds to be heard are the crashing waves and a wind through the trees. I cry like I've never cried before.
I present my fear and cry for my mom. I cry for how much I miss her. I miss my mother terribly. I miss the real her. I am losing her before she is even gone. Slowly, like a drip faucet, her essence leaks down the disposal.
I make my way to the closest bathroom and look in the mirror. My eyes are bloodshot red and snot runs down my nose. I see the sadness of my inner child plain on my face. I hold myself.
We are all endowed with the ability to mother ourselves. The paradox is it is sometimes the hardest thing to do when we need it most.
Heartbreak is inevitable for all of us. That is life. But the thing about hurt and what causes us pain - it serves a powerful purpose. Just like a physical cut, our hearts open when we are wounded. We grow through pain. We grow through difficult situations.
The key is to give our heartbreak care and attention. That’s how we heal. What would happen if you were to fall and cut open your knee and ignore it? It probably wouldn’t heal as well as if you cleaned it off, bandaged it up, and put it on ice. The same is for tending to the heart.
I’m learning that grief can be a beautiful, natural feeling if you let it move through you. Grief is about human love, connection, and loss. The depth of my grief is equal to the weight of the love I have for my mom.
How does grief become a healing feeling? Acceptance.
My week in Esalen brought me there. Moved by nature, where the forces of the elements, as well as the presence of creatures, plants, land and water connect, the sky, and spirits conspire to break open the husk that kept me numb from this deeper truth.
In this heart-opened place, my soul is crafted by silence and solitude. I returned home, purified by tears and the silence of questions that can never be answered.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, I would so appreciate if you shared it.
With so much love,
Christina
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Beautiful. I have Parkinson’s and wonder what my teenage daughters see in me now that has faded in the last few years.
This is so beautiful! I deeply appreciate your transparency and openness in sharing your experience because it can help heal so many. What I felt most in your writing is your shift in recognizing the importance of feeling your sadness and grief. I am a huge advocate for that and is a big part of my work so I feel so much connection with that journey of yours.