I’m dealing with grief

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Grief is always complicated. As humans, we are filled with so many emotions and nothing ever seems to be black and white, unless you have a condition where that is how your brain works. If that’s the case it’s ok. It’s ok to seek help and find guidance and therapy to understand how to relate to others and how to help them relate to you.

Around the November new moon, my best friend and spiritual sister un-alived herself. In my grief, I wrote something about what she means to me, and while this isn’t exactly touching on the dynamics of grief or connecting spirituality to grief it’s something I feel compelled to share before I touch on healing grief through spirituality. To be truthful, I’m not sure when I will feel ready to share my experiences over the past few weeks with my spirituality and how I connect with the universe in the ways that I do. Like grief these things are complicated, but I eventually hope to be able to share that part. For now, I will share a little part of what Loren meant to me.

 

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Loren is my best friend. Her love was whole and honest. It retained the innocence of a child’s. It was a fearless, courageous, sincere love. And just when you felt lost in a world full of hurt and impatient people, Loren would come around and remind you about real, uncomplicated love. The kind that made it easy to grow with her and love her over the years.  

Loren was first my lover. Our relationship was easy and made me feel happier and stronger for being in it. She would play music that her parents would listen to when she was a baby. We would dance to those songs and we planned a future together with children. 

But I was assaulted by our landlord and our spark died. She still loved me, but it was never the same. We had to relearn how to love each other. 

Later on in our relationship she began to transition, and again we had to relearn how to love each other. 

As she later struggled with her romantic identity we separated, and again we relearned how to love each other. 

She began to grow in her new communities and I began to heal my past traumas. We once again changed how we supported and grew with each other. 

When I met my husband our relationship changed again: this time she went from being a friend to becoming a sister.

We went from lovers, to friends to family over the course of learning how to love each other. 

We went through and did everything together. 

I could talk about all of the incredible inseparable years we spent together. I could talk about all of the different people that have reached out to me sharing stories about her. I could talk about the many times that she dragged me out to do work for others, but those things aren’t what make Loren Loren. What makes Loren is in the tiny details. Sometimes those things are hidden and subtle, and other times they are transparent and obvious. When Loren first started her transition we went to support groups at Affirmations in Ferndale to help her ease into it. She realized that the people there needed help, so she decided to start a kung fu class for young lgbtq+. This was the catalyst for her teaching the queer community to protect themselves. Later she would go on to work with many more organizations teaching the vulnerable about confidence and safety.

Loren was playful. 

Up until very recently when we had sleepovers we would have our childhood stuffed animals hang out together. We would make sheet forts together. We used to playfully throw rocks at each other and play with sticks like they were swords. We would take turns making inanimate objects talk to one another at the most inopportune times. We always asked each other “If a witch turned me into a  ______ would you still be my friend?” 

She used to hike her pants up high and hold onto the waistband of them, lifting one leg at a time to do a weird little jig. She danced around like this, singing and charming a room with her unreasonable personality. We dressed in matching outfits to go out dancing at clubs, or bars or to weddings like a clique of girls in high school. Every time we drove anywhere and she saw a factory with a smokestack she would say that it was my house and it was full of farts that were escaping. 

Loren was also eccentric. 

She once had a possum that lived under her stove for a week and whenever she shared that story her whole face would squish up with laughter. She was so pleased with that. For a long time she kept her clothes in a paper bag next to the bed while she slept, regardless of whether she lived in the place or not. Most of the time she dressed like the manifestation of the clean-dirty laundry pile. 

And Loren related to animals

Our pets loved Loren more than they love my husband and me. They would ignore us and Loren would have to be the one to give them their commands to get them under control, because nothing else in their world mattered but what she was up to. 

Loren loved the outdoors. 

One of the most important things we would do together was camp. We would try to go as often as possible, sometimes going across the country. When we would go camping we would play Nebraska by Bruce Springstein because it reminded her of her trips to the Boundary Waters with her dad. She would tell me the stories from those trips while the album was playing. We both liked to quietly whittle at our campsite, never actually making anything useful. 

One of my most important trips with Loren was to Lake Superior Provincial Park. We didn’t hike too far, but the trails were hard and labeled dangerous. We climbed practically vertical rocks and through boulderous shorelines, to finally camp at a private beach. It was incredible. We spent the evenings swimming in the sunset and reading by the firelight. After we left the park we went to a gift shop where she bought a sticker for the Lake Superior Circle Tour that we planned on hiking over the years to come. She also bought me a mug. It’s the only mug that I’ve used since then. 

Loren was the maid of honor at my wedding, and for my bachelorette party she took me camping. She originally invited all of the bridesmaids, though only one other ended up coming. It was my husband’s oldest friend whom I didn’t know well at the time. Loren found a cabin in the U.P. that we could canoe to. We hiked along the Pictured Rocks trails and it was my first time eating U.P. pasties, and we play-fought the entire time. She didn’t tell me about the trip’s soundtrack until we gassed the car up just before first getting on the highway. The only music Loren brought for the entire weekend-long trip was the muppet soundtrack. She played Moving Right Along over and over and over the entire weekend. Every time she started up the car she had that song ready to go. And just like I said earlier, she was playful. We would move around and talk like the muppets all the time, pretending that’s how we normally moved and talked. Pepé the king prawn was one of her favorite muppets. I think because he is so oblivious, gangly, and the way his head flops around when he speaks. 

Loren’s hair was all sorts of colors. I used to call her a little calico kitty. She had red colors near her ears, black near one of her temples, and light dusty brown across most of it with a mohawk of gold down the center, protecting her crown. After seeing her baby pictures it’s obvious her style never changed. She wore lots of plaid then and she continued to favor it as she got older.

Loren helped me in my darkest hours with my family trauma. She supported me while I confronted my family by driving to New England with me and staying by my side the entire time. We helped each other with our spiritual struggles, talking about hopelessness and how it felt to be disconnected from purpose. We worked together on finding a purpose and what that meant to us as individuals. We discussed different approaches to life and exhausted our options together over the years, searching for the answers.

We often talked about symbolism and the importance of plants to other cultures. One of the last times we went camping together we camped in a field of wild yarrow flowers. It was a safe and wondrous time together. We listened to the whirring of the trees and allowed the sound to carry us off into a meditative state. For the Anishinaabe yarrow protects us from evil and that’s what it truly felt like: that we were able to stop, sink deep into our protective selves, and heal.

The house I share with my husband is made of memories of Loren. She helped us build our walls, she helped us patch our roof, she helped us cut down our trees and burn out the stumps, clean out the trash, pull the loose nails, and fill it with laughter. Every day we wake up we are surrounded by a house that is a quilt of her love and support. 

Loren always encouraged me in whatever I wanted to do. She spoke gently and patiently to me while inspiring me, or helping me to define the details. The way she interacted helped me appreciate what I was doing, and I know I couldn’t match the effort she put into her attention to others.

I remember when she started working with electronics after her transition. I would sleep over at her apartment and she would bring her small shoebox-sized synthesizer into the parlor and we would play it together in the dark. It was like she was proud of her work, but didn’t want it to be seen. The same way that she was proud of herself but truly had an aversion to being seen. 

She was vulnerable and saw that vulnerability in everyone because of how defenseless she thought she was. It was like she exposed her whole being when she sat with you, and in that space she found herself uneasy and susceptible to pain. Her sensitivity made her struggle with life.

For lack of better words, to be seen by Loren is to be seen by god. If you were willing to open up she would connect her soul to yours. My entire friendship with her was a cosmic experience that made me move in ways that I never thought possible.  

When I think about loss I think about how a lot of what people are feeling is fear – the fear of never seeing someone again – and in this space they panic. I also think about how that fear can turn into anger and resentment over being “manipulated” into that scary place. With Loren’s passing I chose not to feel those things. With her death what loss feels like to me is love, love that has nowhere to go, love that I will never get to share with Loren again. Love that she deserved in her final moments. With Loren’s death, I’m forced to begin a new chapter in our friendship. And once again I need to relearn how to love her.

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