A meditation on losing a force of nature, the feral truth of grief, and why we must learn to stand at the edge instead of turning away…
My beloved sacred soul sister Jane is gone.
Jane.
My Jane.
Our Jane.
A luminous, wise woman, a visionary, a true beauty. Brimming with grace, she was a force. She stood strongly for what and who she believed in. To feel her love was a special thing—whale-dive deep and fiercely alive. Forever on a spiritual path, her eyes sparkled with wisdom, intelligence, and good humor. She was a collector of beauty. Her world shimmered with it—in people, in art and treasures that reflected the richness of her inner life, in her dreams and visions. She wanted to make the world a better place, and she did, just by being here.
Jane promised she would come back and asked me to look for signs.
I said: I will look for you always –
In purple hearts
In the number seven
In doves
In mandalas… and roses
In signs of the Mother (whom she devoted much of her life to).
And on the night she left, the sky showed me this:
Though she is in everything and everywhere. Though I still hear her voice and her photos rotate through my Aura frame with an eerie and blessed regularity, she is no longer on this earth.
And my heart is broken.
And still I see signs: a dove who sat for a while outside my kitchen window, a mandala in a spiderweb, and, of course, the heart in the sky. A friend asked if seeing the heart in the sky gave me peace, and I wanted to scream, “No!”—as if I took a vow not to feel peace at Jane’s passing, at all the passings. I wasn’t sure how peace and bottomless sorrow could coexist. How any light could sneak in when the void seems so dark.
For Jane, I choose to walk the razor’s edge of grief and gratitude. Gratitude for the many gifts of my long and profound friendship with this wonder of a woman. And deep, very very very deep grief in the missing of her. In what we have lost. In the knowing that she still had so much good to do on this earth.
I returned to the book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. Weller invites us into an apprenticeship with sorrow, and for Jane, I am accepting the task: to expand my capacity to be with grief. To feel its ache, its flatness, its shattered beauty, its confusion, its anger, its rawness.
All of it.
Grief is a topic I’ve contemplated and experienced intensely. Grief is something I’ve written about and railed for and against. How we are in our society about grief (i.e., terrible) is something I’ve spoken about on my soapbox.
As Weller writes in his beautiful book, once upon a time, the village held grief with us and for us. But now we mostly walk the path alone. The loss of such a holding community, in itself, Weller writes, carries grief.
We just don’t know what to do with grief in our fast-moving culture. We are well-meaning yet don’t have the right questions to ask, so we say, “How are you?” or “Are you ok?”
But the griever knows the ways we might respond are too threatening for ordinary ears.
How am I?
I am in agony. I am broken. I am altered forever. I am experiencing the groundlessness of being.
Am I ok?
I don’t know, as I howl at the edge of the abyss and wonder if I will be swallowed.
In grief, I haven’t wanted to be asked these questions because I’m afraid my answers might scare people off. Or I’m afraid that if I say, “I’m ok,” meaning in this moment, the asker will move on and I’ll be left in the dankness of grief, alone.
I don’t want to be rescued from it. I want to know you are there and that you have experienced your own rupture. That you realize that the greater the love, the greater the anguish. And that allowing the full spectrum (and specter) of pain to exist is paying tribute to all we have lost, along with all the pain in the world. And that this process is necessary if we want to be fully human. Fully alive.
This pain feels feral.
A subterranean growl rises from my core. A swipe of a paw, claws extended, ready to take blood. It says, “Don’t you dare try to take this from me. Don’t offer me a lollipop and pat my head on your way by.”
Oh, the ways we silence each other’s pain when we can’t be with it.
Instead, can we stand side by side—on that razor’s edge—at the edge of the abyss where the winds threaten to flay us instead of calling each other to safety?
We lose so much when we won’t stand on the edge. We become tame (or violent in other ways), deadened, asleep.
Weller writes that grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. He says it’s “alive, wild, and untamed; it cannot be domesticated.” He says we “move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold.” If we are forced to return to “normal” too soon, disastrous consequences ensue. He echoes Rumi’s words from The Guest House: “Every day a new arrival…” where he asks us to welcome even a crowd of sorrows, dark thoughts, and shame, as what arrives has been sent as a guide from the beyond.
I choose to welcome them all. Not that I am the perfect host, but I am welcoming them. I vow not to live an unlived life. Or a shallow life.
Jane was born on October 7th, 1960, and she left this earth on March 7th, 2026, at 7:07 p.m., seven months before her sixty-sixth birthday.
As her beautiful daughter Lily wrote, of course she did.
Jane and her sevens.
I vow to keep my eyes wide open for the signs that Jane promised. I will look for beauty.
I know that to stand at the edge and rage into the storm for as long as we need is how we learn we won’t dissolve.
“So… no,” I bellow with steam rising from my nostrils and claws extended, “I am not ok. And I never will be again.”
I will hold it all.
Beauty and sorrow. Grief and gratitude.
All of it.
For Jane.
Click for Jane’s obituary in the Mountain Mail
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