Stan Rubin, our guest contest judge, shares these remarks about his choice of Amanda Noble’s essay, “The Meditation Room”: A nuanced portrayal of the shifting stages of private grief––and its gradual acceptance. This process is depicted with precision, intelligence, and sophisticated self-awareness. The writing keeps a sharp focus. A lot of emotional terrain is deftly reduced to the manageable space of a single room. The transformation of the room equals the transformation of the author, still tentative and ongoing. The ending is wonderfully affirmative, in a real and surprising way.

The Meditation Room
by Amanda Noble

I stood looking at my dead husband’s study, crowded with paper and God knows what else. Deteriorating posters on the walls, crumbling to my touch, a few books, and lots of boxes crammed under the old door that he used as a desk.  I felt as if clearing the room out would amount to throwing him away. The very idea of that was anxiety-provoking.  Because he wasn’t gone, not really. My biggest fear was that the act of clearing out his most precious, private, dust-covered space would anger him and keep him from visiting me. I was alarmed about going on without him for many reasons, but throwing out his possessions filled me with dread. In the year following his death, he visited me on a regular basis. It was painful to wake up and find him beside me on the sofa or in bed with me, but it was also comforting. His visits never frightened me.

I couldn’t do much of anything that first year, except to attend a grief support group. My tears were uncontrollable. I was especially likely to cry whenever anyone said something nice to me. Kindness was my biggest trigger. In addition, everything scared me: driving, going to the grocery store, walking in the neighborhood. I became convinced that that all my loved ones would die––immediately. My father had died just six weeks previously, contributing to my fears. The safest place for me was in bed, but it was nearly impossible to read unless the topic was death or the afterlife. I didn’t answer the phone or the knocks on my door. At night, I watched a lot of TV.

And I wandered around the house, filled with Bruce’s things. I had lived in the house for nearly twenty years, but when I moved in it was so over-run with his possessions, accumulated for more than 40 years, that my meager belongings from many years as a graduate student were loaded into his truck and taken to his second home on the north coast of California, loaded into the attic and forgotten. It was hardly an ideal way to begin a life together. When his adult children came to pick up the family furniture from the house Bruce and I shared, space opened up, but they also delivered things, mostly other furniture, but also some art, from the coast house. I craved more open space. In order to achieve that, I would have to begin the task of “going through his things.” I didn’t want to live in a jam-packed, unattractive shrine. Instead, I set up a memorial in the living room on a small table we purchased together. It held a large portrait of him, taken shortly before he died, his glasses, wallet, watch, a notebook and pen. I added a clothespin because he had studied clotheslines as part of his energy consumption studies. I also found a small wire bird that took its place on the table; Bruce taught me how to “bird,” which I grew to love.

I began to listen to friends who suggested calling a clutter expert. The truth was that in the last few years, I had begun to realize that I had grown less and less happy with our home, so crammed and disordered, it had become unmanageable to the point that I was embarrassed to entertain. I began to feel hopeful when I decided to hire someone to help.   But when Claudia arrived, I knew I was in trouble. My energy had never been lower.  I wore a cloak of depression that seemed a permanent part of my wardrobe, while she was fast-talking, steamrolling over the mess that confronted us, aiming for a schedule to meet once a week to assess my progress.  She even gave me homework assignments. She did help, but her cheerful expectations filled me with the anxiety of a student who knew she would fail. It wasn’t unusual for me to reschedule appointments with her. We did agree that clearing out his office seemed like the best place to start.

I turned down his adult children when they asked to move in for a week to go through his things. They told me I didn’t need to be present, even though it was my home and had been for the last 20 years. Instead, I offered to pack boxes for them, and did pack at least 20, full of childhood photos, letters and other memories. By the time they got around to making an offer to help, our relationship was pretty well in ruins, at least for the time being. We were fighting over his trust; the fight included lawyers, court and mediators.  There were many complaints I had of their behavior, some might think them petty, but those who do might want to give being a stepmother a whirl before judging me. I realized years ago that I was nothing to them but their father’s wife, and at the moment we were at a standstill in negotiating his trust. Even celebrating his life became a kind of battle with their snubbing the memorial I planned and giving their own memorial, which I attended despite the misgivings of those in my grief support group. The last thing I wanted was that they stay with me for a week now, expecting me to cook and entertain them. That kind of generosity had died with Bruce.

It was early in the second year when I began clearing out his office space. By then, I realized that the levels of stress I carried were very hard on my body. My grief had increased my anxiety to a toxic level; I was waiting for the next shoe to drop. The legal morass was almost impossible for me to handle. The local paper advertised a class offered to reduce stress through meditation. It was an evidenced-based program, which impressed the scientist in me. I had never meditated before, but I was drawn to it.  Meditation sounded peaceful and I was in need of peace, especially if it might lower my stress. I began attending the weekly class and meditating at home in my living room. In truth, I felt a tremendous lack of inner peace, something I believed needed attention.  Bruce’s visits were less frequent, as were my father’s. Because I had experienced their visits, I grew to believe strongly in an afterlife. I knew that those beliefs needed more attention as did my lack of inner peace. I began to prepare for a spiritual journey and was hopeful that a meditation practice would get me started on that path.

My new belief in an afterlife was not so far off my path, a path that had been ignored because Bruce scoffed at any kind of spiritual beliefs. I had always been interested in what many people called “woo-woo” phenomena, such as astrology, tarot cards, psychics, and totem animals. People encouraged me to join a church for access to a bigger community, which I sorely needed. I tried attending the only church that had room for non-conformists: the Unitarians. I mixed up the time of the service, and arrived in-between services. Milling around, wondering if I should wait or come back, I was attacked by “church ladies,” who began actively recruiting me for various committees.  As soon as there was a lull in their recruitment efforts, I turned tail and ran. I didn’t want to join an organization that was more concerned with committee participation than the emptiness of my soul. I had been raised Christian, but right-wing fundamentalist Christians turned me against Christianity. Eastern religions appealed to me, especially Buddhism, as I’d read books by practitioners, and my meditation practice was certainly in keeping with Buddhist beliefs.

As I built my meditation practice, I continued clearing out Bruce’s office, packed tightly with accumulated paper, among other things.  He never threw anything away, kept written remarks he’d overheard that tickled him, poems I wrote to him over nearly twenty years of marriage, a massive collection of cookbooks in addition to stacks of unfiled recipes he’d clipped from newspapers for at least ten years, old mortgage pay books, ancient checking account records ––I even found some pornographic videos in a locked box. I brought the box to a locksmith and when he opened it the videos spilled across his counter. Terribly embarrassed, I couldn’t wait to throw them in the trash.

Those videos surprised and hurt me. I knew nothing of their existence or origin.  I was also wounded when I found naked pictures of his second wife who was about 20 years old at the time they were taken; I tucked them into one of the boxes for the kids.  I found Bruce’s wretchedly mean assessments of a woman he was seeing just prior to our relationship. On top of all that were the typed and handwritten notes trying to puzzle out our compatibility. I ritually burned those notes, my anger and pain adding accelerant. I burned his remarks about his former girlfriend, too, both wanting to protect her, and believing that his kids had no right to see their father’s musings about her. And, as I learned to meditate, I grew to believe I needed a separate space for it. When the room was finally emptied out, I painted the room a pale lime green, bought a bamboo screen to separate the room from the dining room, moved my bamboo furniture into the room, set up a kind of alter with small Buddhas, some Indian gods, candles in a variety of holders, and a large image of the Indian-depicted Buddha to hang on the wall. I burned sage to clear the room, not of Bruce himself, but of the videos, whatever they meant, the photos of his ex-wife and other reminders of her, and the less than kind writings I’d discovered.  When I used the room, I wanted my memories of him to reflect the kind, loving man I remembered.

I still wasn’t quite sure that I was a Buddhist. In truth, it was meditation that cemented me to Buddhism, to the power of being both present and in an entirely different realm. I delighted in softening my mind, slowing my breathing, and being present in my body.  The books on Buddhism and my meditation CDs had a place on a small shelf in the room.  I was still a baby-meditator, needing instruction to help focus my mind, which helped with what Buddhists called “monkey mind,” the obsessive, but “normal” wanderings of our minds. I may always need instruction of this sort and I don’t believe that it’s a shortcoming. After all, these instructions encourage important things such as self-compassion, compassion toward others, and healing one’s self.

Soon, I decided that I needed more accouterments for the room. I had been meditating on my back, using a yoga mat with a pillow to support my head. A large, lightweight box containing my meditation cushions arrived. I had splurged and bought a zafu, a small round pillow, and a zabuton, a slightly larger square pillow on which the zafu sits.  My hips sometimes ached, and I hoped the zabuton would help support them while I sat.  I found that I often preferred to meditate on my back, in what yoga instructors called the corpse pose, so I spread the pillows out and ordered a couple more zafus to cushion my body. I had learned that physical pain made it harder to absorb the words leading to tranquility.

As I continued to meditate, I found that it calmed me, enabled me to release some of the pain and heartache I preserved since Bruce died. Had I wanted to savor the hurt, keep it alive, like a flame I’d never extinguish?  Holding on to the excruciating pain seemed the only way to hold on to him. Despite the hurts, including the painful things that I had found, we had a lovely relationship. Early on we invented the phrase “happiness management” because our delight was such that we grinned constantly. I had never been so happy. But he was gone, at least from the physical world I occupied. I felt him around me, but not as strongly as I had in the past.

Once in a while I added a statue or candle to my alter or a piece of art to a wall. My heart still aches but not as tenaciously, and I’ve added others I’ve lost to think of while meditating. I’ve embraced the Buddhist belief that life is suffering. They prescribe living in the present moment as often as possible. And to learn to bring compassion to ourselves and others as we make our way while on this Earth, hoping that there are periods of joy between the periods of suffering. After five years, I’m still clearing away the things he left behind. Most of it is gone except for a couple of boxes of papers and his chock-filled garage, which I can’t fully face, but eventually I’ll get there. What remains are our poems to each other, pieces of clothing I can’t part with, some photographs, our travel journals.  These are not painful things, but remembrances of pleasure. They still make me cry, but more often I smile.

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Reading Amanda’s essay, I feel grounded both in the room she has cleared and now meditates in and in her grief process. I feel the humility with which she took a new path and the benefits of that path. I relate to her words, know again what it means to save the small artifacts of a life and to let go of others, including feelings of anger and disappointment, as you travel on in life without the beloved. Amanda wrote about her essay:

Clearing out my recently deceased husband’s office was extraordinarily difficult and the essay describes all the difficulties I had as well as the not-so-welcome hurtful discoveries. These grief difficulties were juxtaposed with my desire to create a peaceful space in which I could meditate. I worked on this piece for at least two years. I wanted to remove the bitterness that it originally contained so I tried to create a short version, but that didn’t work. I think I experienced all the stages of grief while I worked on this piece. The room needed to be cleared out so that it belonged to me. Sheila’s suggested revisions on my initial contest entry helped me get there.

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Having others eyes on your work as you shape it and bring it home is ever helpful. Having your readers let you know how they connect is important. Please leave Amanda a comment.