Hans - 64

Going into the darkness to remember the light.

It’s December on the coast. The days are getting darker. I feel the forest calling.

I’d forgotten about the forest for a while. In my 20s I was lost, but not in the forest. Lost in the comforts of academia, wandering a path through the humanities that eventually led me —in a very unconscious way— to being with a woman. Having children. Moving out of the city to raise them. Moving into the forest.

Back into the forest.

I grew up with the coastal Douglas Fir Forest at my back. From the age of seven years I was allowed to wander up and down the creek behind our house. Until I was 10 I was always with my younger sister and my dogs. So, not technically alone. But certainly unsupervised, and certainly open to the magic of the woods. If I think about a moment when this journey I’m on started. A useful date is the death of my sister. A tragic boating accident that left eight people dead. All of their bodies found. Except my eight-year-old sister.

I was two years older, 10. It was the beginning of January. That darkest time of year. And as we get closer to this darkness the forest not only calls me, but it compels me. To sit and listen. To become quiet. To remember who I am. To remember my sister, yes. Because part of this journey involved consciously forgetting her; and then, so much later, and after so much pain, consciously remembering her.

But let’s start with the forgetting.

We were very close. My parents’ marriage was not stable. A lot of love for us kids, but a father who never really grew out of being a teenager, and a mother limited in part by her fundamentalist Mennonite upbringing, but also a woman who needed a husband to be so much more than my father knew how to be. So, we two, my sister and I, we were close. And hearing that she wasn’t coming home, ever, from that boating trip that very, very dark night in early January was too much for me. I have a vivid memory of hearing “the news.” I’m standing in our hallway, next to where the telephone hung on the wall, the telephone that had just told us that all were lost at sea, that all bodies had been found, except one, my sister. I have a vivid memory of the pain twisting my body. Telling my parents, “We have to forget her. We have to forget her.” Because I knew that to do anything else, to hold any memory of her, would be too painful.

And so my beautiful mind did what I asked: I “forgot” my sister.

It wasn’t easy to do. My parents couldn’t forget her. Each, in very different and in very lonely ways, collapsed under the weight of the grief. My mother withdrew and spent some time in the psychiatric unit in the hospital. My father raged. He burned with an anger at everyone and anyone who could be implicated in this death. He was so brittle with this burning that for years after I would “protect” him from any remembrance of my sister. I did not want to be near that fire. It was too hot. And I grew cold, afraid to feel the fire of my own grief.

In the past couple of years I’ve been writing a book. It’s about what I call my “apprenticeship to love.” After four committed relationships I thought it was time that I reflect on what I was doing, and, perhaps, in writing, might share a few things. My sister’s death and my resolve to become an unfeeling stone are part of that apprenticeship.

Unable to allow myself to feel that childhood grief, I was both tender to and at the same time, unfeeling with the women who loved me. Each of them, in their very different ways, were attracted to my tenderness. Each of them, in their own way, left empty by my fear of feeling deeply.

Having children has saved me. Here I began to feel free to give without needing reassurance. And so, I had two daughters in my first marriage, added two sons as part of my second. With them I could give without fear. Yes, accident and illness might take them from me, as accident had taken my sister. But my love could pour over them without fearing that they’d ever consider me unworthy of loving. I’d grieved my sister enough by then to understand that what I feared most of all was not being able to love, and if the woman I loved withdrew her love…. When the women I loved withdrew their love, what I understood to be their love… That was the most grievous injury I could feel.

So, of course, that is what I’ve had to learn: how to love even when all of what I understand as adult loving behaviour withers or is withdrawn. How to be the love that I need, the love that my children —and now my grandchildren— enjoy, the love that my beloved needs. That all of us need.

I don’t believe there is ever an end to this apprenticeship. For me, it’s a process of learning to not only live with my vulnerability, but to practice becoming ever more vulnerable. It is only in becoming every more tender to the world and to life and to all of it’s experiences that I begin to know that I stand at the centre of a great treasure. That treasure is love, and my only need here is to have the courage to feel it all, to receive it all, to not fear it being taken from me, because it is within me, mine.

In a few days I will make what’s become an annual pilgrimage. I’ll take a ferry and drive, then walk into a forest near a beach very close to where my sister drowned. It’ll be in one of these dark and wintry days and I will sit and meditate on who and how I am, 50+ years after my sister’s death. I will say a prayer for myself, for the women who’ve opened themselves to me, who’ve given their children into my care, the women who’ve been tender with me when my tenderness was not equal to the offer. I will offer a prayer of gratitude. That I have known so much love and generosity, and that, after the fact, I am now able to appreciate some of what they offered as love.

Music - Hans' music choices during our photo session included Mstislav Rostropovich - Cello Suite No.1 , Jimi Hendrix and The Allman Brothers Band.