Love and Presence in the Hardest Times with Greta Bro

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Speakers
Beth Tener
Greta Bro

Beth Tener: Welcome back to the Living Love podcast. We’re in season two about Kinship Through Life Transitions. The stories in these episodes are from a decade of my life from about age 30 to 40. We explore different transitions in life and what supports us to get through, especially the inner resources and the resources of friendship and community.

The early episodes in this series were about changes that I was choosing to make, e.g., changing jobs, exploring the spiritual path, making changes to have more of a work life balance. The third episode, you might remember, was about sources of connected strength. I had Greta Bro with me, who is a psycho-spiritual guide and a singer songwriter. Just a very wise soul.

Greta was accompanying me in many ways during the time of these events. You’ll have heard her name through the episodes. I’m grateful to have Greta back today as we talk about how we find strength to get through the hardest times. I’ll recap where we are in the story and then invite Greta in.

Just to remind you, I was in my late 30s and I had fallen in love with Rick. About three years in, we decided to get married. In my episode with Tenneson Wolfe, we talked about how we navigated these big decisions about marriage and where to live. We decided to move from Boston to New Hampshire and build a home together, literally. You’ll hear in that episode how Greta was helpful in those decisions, helping me discern the path and decide, given the choices at hand, how not to be in fear about it all, but take it in measured steps.

The next episode was with Margie Zohn. We talked about community during the cancer journey. Two weeks after Rick and I had were engaged, we learned he had kidney cancer. We talked about him going through surgeries and the ups and downs of his illness and how our community really rallied. That brings us to today.

Today is a hard part of the story. It was “the dark night of the soul” as Greta helped me understand, which is that time of life where everything you’re trying isn’t working.

Where do you find the strength to walk through those times? Knowing how many people in the world today are going through hard times, I thought this is a time to share my story. It’s not an easy story to share, but I feel like I may do some good. I want to welcome you, Greta.

When we were talking these stories, you said you wanted to come back when I was talking about that topic. I’d love to hear what drew you to want to talk with me today about this part of the story.

Greta Bro: I think that people need to understand that their life goes in cycles. It isn’t like we get to a place and we’ve arrived, it’s always this movement between different stages of being and becoming. You see it in the child going through different developmental stages, and you see it throughout our life as we age. There’s this movement between growth coming to a zenith, completion of something, then decline, decay. I think the dark night of the soul is right at that place where we have a loss of some kind and life is this mixture of joy and grieving. Accepting and learning how to deal with grieving is such a big part of the journey because most of us want to run from it. It’s hard.

Beth Tener: If we’re going through it alone, it can just be crushing, but if we have accompaniment and a guide, a friend who can put it in the bigger perspective, like you just did, even the hardest things, it’s easier to bear. It helps when we’re given a frame, a bigger context and story of what it means.

It’s very easy to just get into “this hurts and life is so unfair. Why me?”

Greta Bro: Addiction, escape. We need each other in these dark times and we go through them collectively as well. And we’re in one right now.

Beth Tener: We are.

I’ll come back to the story. Just to remind listeners. Rick and I got engaged in November, two weeks after we got engaged, we learned he had cancer. He went through the initial surgery that I talked about in the last episode. It was kidney cancer. He had the surgery and got the tumor out and they felt they got it all.

At his six month checkup, everything was clean. They said, “go live your life.” We were in the middle of a house construction project. We kept going with that and it was really pretty crazy. The following August he started having unexplained pain and we couldn’t work out what it was. We had a lot of delays with doctors appointments and biopsies, trying this experimental drug because they realized it probably was cancer.

Between August and October, we were going through that with him and we were moving our two different apartments into this new house that wasn’t yet completely finished. It was kind of a construction site, so you can imagine the stress of this, with someone who’s dealing with pain and all that uncertainty.

It was incredibly hard. Our original plans were to move into the house and have a small wedding at the house in October when the contractor told us the house would be done. (Most people who hear this later say, we were naive about contractors.) It got delayed and then Rick had so much pain.

We made the hard decision to postpone our wedding ceremony to wait till the house was done and we got Rick out of this painful situation. That itself was a hard thing.

I feel like a lot of us having come through COVID know that feeling of something you really had your heart set on that you just have to let go, right?

Greta Bro: I think of the period of COVID as being so much a dark night of the soul, which means people had to go inside and create new structures, come to know themselves. What do you love? What do you not like? Where is your ‘no?’ That was happening. Yes, so many people were alone and consequently there were a lot of suicides too in that period.

Beth Tener: I think of the young people. I think of a wedding as a ritual when you’re at that point in your life where you’re ready for the ritual of commitment to a person. For younger people, there were a lot of like stage gates and special things that just couldn’t happen in those years, such as graduations. It was very sad.

Greta Bro: They’re at a different developmental stage where they need their peers. They’re coming into their own consciousness, their own group, their own wisdom, separate from their parents. Yeah. It was very hard, a lot of isolation, but there’s a way in which I think we all have to have an inner life. You have to come to know yourself. I think life is largely about self knowledge and coming into new levels of self-acceptance and self-love through self-forgiveness.

Beth Tener: By October, we got moved into the new house and then by November, the doctors recommended that Rick go through a second surgery. We had to do a lot of tests and we went back to the hospital and they did that surgery. In the middle of it, the surgeon came out and told me that what they found was not what they thought. Basically the cancer had spread into his colon.

It was really not good news at all. We got him through that and in the hospital, he ended up getting edema, which happens sometimes when you have cancer, if you have tumors in your midsection, the fluids can’t flow through your body. His legs got really heavy, which made it very hard to walk.

It was several weeks in the hospital and eventually we got him home again, but his life started becoming much more constricted. He couldn’t even be on the second floor of the house. He could mainly go between the bedroom and bathroom. His spirit was still really strong. I wrote in my journal at this time, “I think about how our life before cancer, we were roaming a big geography of places and activities and lots of things to do and traveling. Rick was teaching grad school in Boston. Life was busy and we were coming and going, saying hello and goodbye.”

Greta Bro: And making love.

Beth Tener: Then like when illness comes, it’s like you come home. Our geography got really small: our house, the doctor, the hospital, the pharmacy. People came to visit us. All those things got pared down. It was all about: What will it take to support his life? How can I love him today? I had to give up a lot of my work. It was a really hard time just tending to the reality of what we were dealing with.

It felt like our life was being compressed through an hour glass. We had to drop all pretenses and clutter and just live in the truth of here we are today. How do I love you today? I welcome your thoughts on that experience, Greta.

Greta Bro: It’s so painful, but it’s such a gift too, to be able to come into that level of presence.

In the dark night of the soul, it’s the opposite of coming into a period of abundance. You are shedding.

I went through a very powerful dark night of the soul in my late 20s, 29. At that period, I was literally losing a pound and a half a day for weeks to the point of I was getting emaciated. It was a kind of colitis where I was just bleeding to death in your gut.

Greta Bro: I was basically being boiled down.​​ This is what you’re talking about with Rick, where you’re just present with, I love you. I love you, I’m here. I love you. Okay. What can you eat today? What can you know? It’s just that presence. I saw it with the two of you – there was so much love. It makes me tear up. It was very, very beautiful. It’s very moving, especially when all your dreams have been dashed. You just built this beautiful home with all the different parts of your life represented in the home.

Then this happens. You both chose the most important thing, which was love.

In my journey, I was in a hospital because I had been living in Brooklyn, was visiting relatives in Northern Wisconsin, and I had proctitis. Then suddenly that turned into this colitis across my whole intestines. When I got to a little hospital in Minnesota, the doctor was feeding me all these little meals. I was constantly going and throwing up. He just kept feeding me meals and finally I just knew one day when my colon was distended and I was about to rupture.

I just said No, with, this inner authority.  I was a hippie, a free love singer, you know, mystic, hippie, mystic. All of a sudden this part emerged with such inner authority. “I will not eat another thing. I need an x-ray now.”

I called my uncle and aunt who are both doctors. I said, “can you get me into a good hospital in Chicago?” I just sucked up all my energy and left. I ended up in a really great hospital in Chicago, Billings University, where they put me on bowel rest, complete bowel rest. The doctor in Duluth was giving me Demerol that was making my gut slow down,  which is why I almost ruptured. From then on, I had this inner authority, which I realized is a keystone aspect of my inner life. It was foundational.

Beth Tener: In your outer life too. I know that inner authority.

Greta Bro: When I was 29 I wasn’t manifesting that so much, Here it came and emerged and saved me. This is the kind of thing you can expect in the dark night of the soul.

You are going to such exquisite levels of the feminine, I feel your life had been very goal oriented and suddenly you’re dropping into, I’m still, I’m here. I’m with you.

Beth Tener: Absolutely. That inner authority, I mean, that’s part of the development, right? You were accepting what the outer authority of the expert doctors were saying, and then your life was on the line. It’s also the life force coming through you, Greta. You were like, I’m not believing this whole suite of doctors around me. I know, I know. I’m going to fight for it.

Greta Bro: Then I went into all kinds of vibrational healing. This beautiful wisdom was just pouring through me because I couldn’t eat. I was working with color, working with sound. My doctor at the University of Chicago really supported me. He had all his interns come and talk to me because he thought I was an empowered patient. I put a sign on my door that said “meditating, don’t bother me right now.” What I’m saying is that an empowered patient emerged out of that, when I was 98 pounds from 135, completely boiled down.

And this kick ass part of myself, badass, in a good sense. I think there’s something that happened to you too, Beth, to this whole journey.

Beth Tener: I think so. Thank you for sharing that story. I think it’s really powerful.

I wanted to talk about what was going through my inner world at this point. You were talking about being goal oriented. In my upbringing and in the work world, I’d been trained in this American optimism and hope that things are going to get better soon. If you work hard, you can manifest your dreams. You can do it. We can control the outcome if we just plan for it.

When you’re dealing with cancer, we’d trying various things, then the next day he’d have pain or his body would be weaker. It was just pointless to dream up plans for the future or to think about where we’re headed next. It was just this reality that things were actually getting worse. Whatever we were doing wasn’t leading to anything. It was this totally new territory for me. Like the maps that I’d lived my normal life with were just kind of useless in that time.

I had to step back from this “fix it” mentality. This idea that wee can fix any problem with mind over matter. If we just have a positive attitude, we can overcome it. What I was trained to do was completely not working at that moment.

I needed to go to the spiritual truths. That’s what helped me. I was practicing yoga and studying philosophy of yoga and Buddhism. The idea that the body is impermanent. It is going to fall apart and change before our eyes. I had to stop arguing with that reality. If I was in my head saying “what should be” versus saying, “okay, the truth of what’s happening now is this and how can I be in this moment with Rick.” If I’m in resistance to it or saying it should be different. I can’t really just be in it. I love your thoughts on that, Greta.

Greta Bro: Beautifully said, Beth. I think that when we are up against tremendous destructuring of our life, I’ll use that word where, we had plans and then it’s destructured, suddenly we’re doing something else.

Then this issue is what happened during COVID. How can we be resilient so that you’re able to be flexible and flow with what is. In some of the Eastern traditions, especially Buddhism, they look at how you can embrace what is and also accept and trust it.

This is a metamorphosis. We can look to nature for understanding metamorphosis. When a caterpillar is a larva within a chrysalis, initially it fights all the cells to become a butterfly.

Beth Tener: Yes, the immune system of the caterpillar, I think, is trying to kill off the parts changing.

Greta Bro: It’s a natural response to change. Many people have used this metaphor in talking about transformation. There’s a certain point when the organism of the larva accepts it and flows with it.

I think it’s helpful to see the dark night of the soul as a metamorphosis, as a time of being in the chrysalis, whether it’s collective or personal, understanding that these times are sacred, they’re transformational times. In these times, parts of us re-emerge. These are times for shedding old attitudes and perspectives so that we can come into a more authentic self.

It boils us down to our essential self.

Beth Tener: When I was in it as a couple with Rick, it was a profound experience of love. In those weeks, as hard as it was, there was an intensity of love between two people when you’re having to rely on each other.

There was a beauty in what we had. I was in my yoga teacher training. We had to commit to doing a daily practice. He was really supportive of me doing that. I would get up and do yoga practice in the morning. Then we would sit on the bed together. It literally felt like we were sitting on a rock amidst a huge churning ocean.

He would stroke my hair; he was weaker at that point, so this was what he could do. We would both name things we loved in the world and we wanted to happen in the future. It was this lovely little way we were trying to hold steady together in this completely swirling, falling apart situation.

Greta Bro: Yes. Actually a little like my poem Out to Sea. I would like read that now if you’d like.

Beth Tener: Yes

Greta Bro: It’s something I wrote just about the journey of being stripped of identity and not knowing who you are. It’s called Out to Sea.

You head out to sea because now you have no choice.

Storms blow and rage, bouncing your craft around until masts and bowsprits shatter. You become a nameless sailor, resigned to the pull of the invisible currents which draw you far from the familiar shore.

Months pass, you drift in doubt, worried that there is still no land in sight, just miles of endless sea outstretched before you.

You have left all belongings behind. Only the barest of vessels can navigate these waters. You’ve become nameless to find more truth. The advice of friends and family sounds wrong. Letters float in scattered phrases around you. Meaningless locutions litter the deck. Only silence speaks clearly now.

Something has taken you far from home. Veiled self hums mystic chords until one night, lips cracked and skin blistered from harsh exposure to the elements. You rest in deep surrender, peaceful, trusting, and unafraid. In the soft amber glow of dawn, awakened by the awesome sound, you clearly hear the first utterance of your new name.

Beth Tener: That poem brings us right into that place. Thank you for sharing that.

Greta Bro: You’re welcome.

Beth Tener: I will come back to the story. At times I felt that spiritual orientation and I could be praying, seeing this as a divine unfolding. I felt I have to be in it and I have to trust it. Then at other times, I would be so mad this was happening.  I remember saying to friends,”we were just getting married. This was supposed to be this joyous time. What’s happening now is plain mean. It’s just mean!”

I was also self critical, like I should have done this or that differently. If I’d only thought to get that healer there, or what if I’m not feeding Rick the right things, maybe he shouldn’t be eating this.Or if I can just line up one more appointment…I was feeling such pressure on me, it was hard.

In December, he got through the second surgery and we got him home and he had a few more weeks in the house. He loved this new house we built, which is really special, but the pain came back and it was hard.

When you go through cancer, it’s difficult to get the pain meds right because your body keeps changing. What worked the day before isn’t working. With all the opioid concerns, it was hard to get the drugs adjusted to get him out of steady pain. Eventually by mid December, we got to get him back in the hospital to get the pain meds figured out. We wanted to get them started on chemo.

At that point, a lot of friends were urging us to go to Dana Farber in Boston. That’s the best cancer treatment center in the region. We hadn’t gone there yet. We got him into Dana Farber and we got in with a kidney cancer specialist there, and they did the tests.

For me, it was an enormous relief because I was holding it all like by myself too much. I’m not a doctor, so to be in a hospital where all these people were caring for Rick was a relief. I remember one of the early doctors asked me how Rick was doing. He asked “is this typical how he is?”

I’m said, “no, he’s usually a lot funnier than this.” He was subdued.

This was one of the darkest moments, when the doctors sat us down and told us, they’d looked at everything and assessed him. They said, it’s really hard to tell you this “what you have is a kind of cancer that’s aggressive and we’re not going to be able to cure it. The best we can do is keep you where you are and not let it get worse. We can try chemo.but there aren’t many that work for this kind of cancer.”

It was a crushing moment to hear that.

In our case, no doctor had sat us down and told us that before. We were holding the idea that he would recover. That was definitely a very dark time. He was still in the hospital and then they got him on different pain medications.

We had postponed our wedding that fall. While he was in the hospital in December,  we thought, let’s try to get married this year. It was a bit like your story of finding that inner authority. We were just like, this situation’s horrible, but this is one little thing we can reclaim. The hospital and social workers were super supportive and said they can help you make that happen.

Obviously, it’s not gonna be the major wedding we want, but we’ll get married and create our own ceremony. We were able to pull that off with our friend Jack within that year. Just us me and Rick in the hospital room with a chaplain and Jack. It was actually incredibly intimate and sweet. The nurses all rallied and had a huge spread of food.

We called different friends and they were playing us music. It was our own attempt to create some little pocket of love and setting our own course within the course of this horrible illness we were dealing with.

Greta Bro: I remember that period vividly, Beth. On one level, it was so shocking to hear that, since no one had said it before.

On another level, you two still stayed in that beautiful, I don’t want to say bubble, as impenetrable, but bubble of your love, that glow of your love. You really stayed there. You were really present with each other. It was so beautiful to see and so gentle. He’d still be funny.

Beth Tener: When we were trying to get the pain meds right, there were a few days where he was really loopy and not present with me. Finally, they got the levels of the meds right and they kicked in. Then he was himself again, which I hadn’t seen in a while.

Rick pulled me over and said, come, come here. He’s asked, “what’s going on? You’re not connecting with me.” I was like, “well, you weren’t here.”

He literally pulled me into him and said, “I’m here now. I want to know how you are.” He wanted that connection. It was so beautiful to me. Often, as couples, we get so busy and we’re like ships in the night. We take each other for granted.

In that moment, it showed me: this is what matters. “I want you with me and how are you?” It was really beautiful.

Greta Bro: Such a beautiful love story.

Beth Tener: At Christmas, he gave me the gift of going home to be with my family. I shared that story in the previous episode with Margie. I’d been spending so many nights in the hospital and I was exhausted. Rick was Jewish. He organized with Margie, who’s Jewish, too, to “send in the Jews.” All of our Jewish friends went on Christmas and brought him Chinese food and hung out with Rick while I went home. Even in the hospital with so little means, he still was orchestrating these sweet things.

We eventually got him out of the hospital and back home to our house again in New Hampshire, but it was just wasn’t going our way. Life became a spiral of doctor’s visits and white blood cells are crashing and having to go in for blood transfusions and chemo. You know how that goes in this time of an illness.

We were doing our best. I remember Rick was really sure that he was going to make it through. He said “don’t listen to the doctors. I know my life force and they’re just talking statistics. You’ve got to be with me and trust this.”

I was taking his cue and certainly I can go into a holding a certain level of denial myself. I didn’t want to know the statistics. I was doing all I could to be completely with him in the fight and that got hard. Friends and family who hadn’t seen him in a while, who are reading our emails where we were staying with hope; they would see him and be shocked because it he was looking like he was dying.

I wrote in my journal, “we holding to this vision of his whole full recovery in a way that denies the reality before us. Exhaustion comes from trying to force a different reality on events instead of aligning what is. In this case, “what is” is his body is falling apart and succumbing to this aggressive disease.

I wrote the truth down. I wrote “we are fighting it, not healing it. And the collateral damage is violent, hurtful and wearing us down.” It was really hard to acknowledge, but I got to the truth of that. It was scary and incredibly frustrating to have worked so hard and not be able to change it, to feel like it was like in vain.

I was feeling like I failed. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine. He had gone through a lot of Buddhist training and hospice training. He was so kind in that moment just to be with me as my friend and say,

“Beth, I know you really want Rick to live and you both have so much to live for. There’s the reality that you want to hold that hope and live towards that. And, there’s the reality that he might not live. Can you hold both and talk to him about both of those possibilities? The reality is it that it could go either way, right? I found that so helpful because a lot of our family and friends were rallying to the, “we’re going to make it” story.

To have a friend who could hold the truth with me, that allowed me to then go have a conversation with Rick about that. I said “you know, we totally want one path, but if we don’t get that, and your time is limited, is there anything you would want to do?”

He still didn’t feel like it was going to go that way, but he’s said “I actually don’t want much different than we’re doing. I just want to be with you and I want the life we’re having right now.”

Greta Bro: I remember in that period, everybody was trying to support Rick where he was. This goes to Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

I think that denial is part of it. Anger is part of it and they don’t all happen in that order. But that acceptance is very healing. It’s the fertile ground for where you can go into a deeper level of grieving, letting go, being present, knowing this is what is happening.

I worked in my internship in the 1980s at LaMille Shattuck Hospital with people who are dying. It was such a privilege. I was an expressive arts therapist, counseling psychology. I moved my little record player in there and played music, in these times when the ultimate issues that were coming up. It’s such a profound opening.The whole ego structure transforms.

The two of you were really present and also human. Okay, he’s a strong guy. He’s a very wise person. He’s a very soulful person. Let’s support what he wants to do. At a certain point you had to follow him, is what I’m trying to say.

Beth Tener: That illness, it brings you to your knees. It sort of is a crushing kind of time. I remember this one night in the hospital… when you’re the patient, your body’s poked and prodded and you go through all these medical things. The diagnostic methods can be so invasive. At one point they put radiation in his body to do a test and you’re thinking :this is so crazy what the way we do it.” I’m blessed that he got the care he did, but still when you’re in it, it’s bizarre.

We were in the hospital again and he had to stay over, which he wasn’t happy about. The doctors wanted to do an endoscopy, which is a test where you have to go under anesthesia and they stick something down your throat. Rick was just tired and he really didn’t want to go under anesthesia again.

I was trying to be hopeful. I said, “I know you don’t want to do it, but you’re healing.” Then he just looked at me and he said, “you’re lying.” It was true. He was not really healing at that point, right? But that was like breaking his commitment to that story in a way.

Greta Bro: It was him coming out of denial. He’s coming out of denial. The two of you could then go to another level of acceptance and supporting him through the dying process and others supporting the two of you. You had so many people involved. It was a beautiful process and very painful since it wasn’t just, it wasn’t like you were in your nineties dying. Or even eighties, you know? This was very premature.

Beth Tener: Yeah, he was 48.

Greta Bro: You just built a new house.

Beth Tener: We were just stepping into the next chapter and I was like, “no, no, no, this, this is not what’s supposed to happen in this chapter of the book. Not at all.”

Greta Bro: Except that one comes to understand in hindsight, reviewing your life, and of course, with spiritual principles that every stage, offers gifts. Every period. Even though it’s so hard and grieving is so hard.

Beth Tener: I’ll come back to the story again. Picking up what you were saying, Greta, about acceptance. You’re going in between all those things. I experienced this  back and forth in it. You’re still believing healing can happen and then the next day you’re crushed and you’re so afraid that he’s not going to live and then you’re like, maybe he will live. It’s a very ricocheting kind of experience.

We were in the hospital again. It was a day where he had to get a blood transfusion, which means you sit in a chair all day long and you get blood. I had a friend in my yoga teacher training program named Sally, who had said, how can I help?

She is a therapist. I asked if she could come to the hospital and meet me for lunch to talk. Rick said “go, go do what you need to do.” She came to the hospital and we had lunch in the cafeteria. She was listening and I was going through everything. “I tried this, I tried that” and sharing how I felt like such a personal failure.

At that point, I was so over exhausted and holding the weight of his well being and his life in my hands. Almost as if, if I didn’t do this or that… We’re trying to hold the positive vision… Sally sat there with me and looked right in my eyes. She said something to the effect that your soul has a journey and Rick’s soul has a journey. It’s not yours to decide or control –  it’s bigger than both of you and if you think that it’s on your shoulders, whether he lives or dies, it’s magical thinking. You don’t have that much power in the situation.

I still remember how intently she looked at me and in that moment of that connection and her saying that truth, I could release it. I could see all that weight and it just lifted off my shoulders – this acceptance that this was bigger than me. His soul had this journey and as much as we both wanted to get a lot more years together, that wasn’t mine to control.

That moment turned out to be such a gift for me. I think that’s a stage of spiritual development where you go from thinking you can control it to being on your knees and getting to acceptance that some things in life are bigger than me, that I don’t get to choose.

That allowed me, in a sense, to release him. In the end, he only lived two more days after that conversation. It was right at the end. We had just started to think about hospice and palliative care. I remember gratefully being able to say, “Rick, I love you. And if you need to go, you can go” because he was in so much pain.

I’ll tell you one other story of his last words. He was in the ICU and he was in a big easy chair because with his breathing at the end, it was easier to sit. He had an oxygen mask on and his best friend Jack and I were there, as well as a nurse. Rick and Jack had been like brothers for 20 years. He said, “Jack, I love you” and Jack said, “I love you, Rick.”

He looked at me and he said, “Beth, I love you.” And I said the same. Then he looks at the young nurse and he goes. “You, I’m not so sure about yet.”

He put the oxygen mask on and then he pulled it off again. He said “some people think saying I love you all the time is silly, but I think it is soulful and necessary.” Then he puts the oxygen mask back on.

Greta Bro: That was his wisdom.

Beth Tener: Turns out, he died the next day. So that was like the last coherent thing he said to us. I’ve always treasured that little story.

That’s the end of the stories for today. Next time we’re going to get into talking about the grief journey and how do we find our way through, even in these hardest times. I kept calling it like a divine unfolding. Can I trust that as a divine unfolding?

Greta Bro: Trusting the continual metamorphosis that life is, as you say, the divine unfolding. Instead of looking for that stasis and what’s stable and I got it, I got it figured out. Instead, always upgrading your body of wisdom, always expecting change.

This is when you get good at writing life, right? Is working with, accepting, I mean, not to say that it isn’t hard, but not just expect continual metamorphosis. From a spiritual perspective, you become more and more connected to an essential self that your whole personality structure reflects.

Beth Tener: Greta is a singer songwriter and she has this song called Faith. I will play an excerpt. I think the third verse of it speaks to that moment in the darkness where you can’t see the light.

Greta Bro singing: If you open, you can feel the light. Breaking through the shadows of the night Sing, little bird, sing of what we can’t yet see. Sing, little bird, sing of what will one day be.

Greta Bro: I wrote the song about what it means to have faith. Not in the sense of praying to a higher power, but faith in the sense of consciously embracing what you are going through and understanding this notion, which is very much the feminine, that we are in constant regeneration, constant metamorphosis, constant change. We know that the universe, or at least in my world, the universe is a benevolent place. So that this complete transformation, this turning, turning, turning, is leading to something magnificent, like a sculpture. All our inner work, all our meditation, all our prayers, all our seeking, takes away that which is not really us, and then exposes this gorgeous self that is phenomenal, beyond words. Each person gets rid of conditioning and here comes this self.

Beth Tener: I think of this time as a crucible and also mention the kinship and the community around me and Rick through this. His family, my family, all of our close friends were just right there, particularly at the end. He was in the ICU for a few days and they had a pretty big waiting room. The word went out that this was the time, and, I’m not kidding, we had like 16 people in the waiting room, hugging and bringing in food and one by one saying goodbye to Rick.

I remember the nurse asking, who is this man? He must be pretty special that this level of people are gathered.

I once read a poem that someone had written who worked in hospice. When someone’s dying, everyone is in a space of love – love for him, love each other, love him, love each other.

So back to my hourglass image, it was just a profound experience of community and of connection and love. It all strips away to that. You’re facing someone’s death, and  all that niceties and all the distractions between people. You just went towards love, inherently, in the crisis.

For me, I was carried. The strength I had to do what I did. I just knew so many people were praying for me, and so many people had my back. It strengthened me to go through that crucible with him.

Greta Bro: As painful as it was to go through that death and dying process, it has brought such depth to your being, Beth. You have empathy for others’ journeys, for the earth. I think that going through that level of cracking the heart open and coming into presence, like the wounded healer, really makes us vessels of love.

Beth Tener: I agree. There was something I felt in it. I kept talking about the imagery of being crushed. We talked about stripping down, but like onto your knees, like surrender. Like that moment with Sally, I couldn’t have gotten to, it took me months to get to that level of, okay, it’s not mine to control.

Ever since, I’ve gone through life more in reality. At some level you can manifest your dreams and at a certain fundamental level, you can’t. That is the reality of life. But you can live from the reality that you can’t, and that is actually a more grounded, true way to be living.

Greta Bro: I think that it’s not about controlling your reality, it’s about co-creating. On a soul level, a whole different agenda is going on than in the wounded ego and the personality level. We have to listen to that deeper agenda.

Beth Tener: We sure do.  I’ll just say one more story about that. When we got home and friends were helping me like clean out our bedroom and all the medicines. My  friend found a photo of me and Rick and right near it was a little post it note with a scrawl because it was hard for him to even write.

He had written. “As long as I am able, I am going to invest into this relationship and stroke Beth’s hair daily.”

That was the intention he was holding in those weeks, with everything I have, I’m going to pour into this relationship, loving her. Isn’t that beautiful?

Greta Bro: Beautiful and so indicative of a deep and profound love. Everlasting love because love doesn’t disappear when we die. It’s circulating through the cells of the entire universe. So you had that love.

Beth Tener: We did. One of my other best friends had gone through losing her husband to cancer the year before. At one point she wrote me an email and she said, as tragic as both of our stories are, the experience of being able to love someone through their last days and months and days, that is a profound, sacred time.

It’s not just a tragedy. It’s like, okay, I got to love this incredible person through that time of his sacred transition. There is a blessing in that, even though I would never wish it on me or anyone, but that’s the truth of life.

Greta Bro: It is. And the soul journeys on forever.

Beth Tener: All right. Thank you, Greta. Thanks again.

Thanks again for listening. I know so many. People have stories of losing loved ones, and this is just one to share. I appreciate you listening.

Next time, on the podcast, we will be continuing the kinship through life transitions theme and talking about how our community came together to create some beautiful rituals to honor Rick and to support our own grieving and kind of healing through the loss, as well as what I call my time of life in the slow lane.

How did I grieve the loss and find my way to new beginnings? How did kinship and friendship support me in that? One story among many, but I so appreciate you listening. We will be closing today with another song from Greta Bro. This one’s called Feel Your Love. We’ll see you next time.