Garden,

 

I’m sitting in my garden and it is a lovely afternoon. The leaves have all been cleaned up and it feels so pleasant, to look at the patio, which is overgrown with green moss, after the rain. We have picked the giant grapefruits and the oranges and they taste delicious. These days are so relaxing and nourishing.

 

I don’t really mind, that I am still without a job and feel sure, that I will find something, which I can keep doing for another year or two. Bonnie is planning a vacation with her mother and her sister. I will be on my own for ten days then. I am happy, she is doing this, without me. Her mother is a piece of work. She is very bossy and domineering. Bonnie takes more after her father, who I loved so very much. This hard working, resourceful, modest man immediately took a liking in me. I cherish the wonderful times we had together. He passed away more than ten years ago. He had brain cancer and when they found out about it, it had already spread all over his brain.

 

My father-in-law had a short sick bed, which lasted only a couple weeks. He stayed in a house in San Francisco, where people who are mortally ill could go and spend their final days. The people who worked there were part of a Buddhist meditation center. We all gathered around his bed, when he blew out his last breath. It was such a beautiful experience. We were all crying, but the atmosphere was so serene, natural and honest. After the nurse ascertained he had passed away, we did a ritual.

 

Each of us had a cloth and we washed his body, taking that part from where we were standing. I was near his head and gently rubbed his forehead and cheeks. Others took care of his extremities. It lasted only minutes. It felt intimate and eternal. Although many tears were flowing, we were all very still. Only her brother was overwhelmed by emotion, and he left the room, we were in. You could hear him wail, as he went into the hallway. After her father had been ritually washed, his body was covered with a white sheet, and he would be prepared for his cremation. Something had changed in me, while I was at the deathbed of this marvelous man.

 

I was in the final phase of my psychology study for the Ph.D. and was writing on my dissertation and accruing my clinical hours, as a psycho-therapist. The mourning process made it clear to me, that I didn’t want to go on. I had been working so hard and pushing myself for so many years. Suddenly, I felt, I couldn’t carry on anymore. While Bonnie’s father had been such a great source of support and encouragement, it was not that I couldn’t have continued, I just no longer wanted to. It had been such an uphill battle and I was suffering so much.

 

Actually, there have been many of these seminal moments in my life, in which I knew, that from that time on, everything would be different. It always had to do, amazingly, with some kind of loss and my dissertation was about complicated bereavement. Grief is a natural response to the loss of a loved one. For most people, the symptoms of grief begin to decrease over time. However, for a small group of people, the feeling of intense grief persists, and the symptoms are severe enough to cause problems and stop them from continuing with their lives.

 

It is even a diagnosis now in the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-5-TR), that prolonged grief disorder is characterized by intense and persistent grief that interferes with daily life. At the time, I was doing my practicum and giving therapy to fifteen, to twenty people a week, who were all having severe mental health problems.

 

Inadvertently, I was reminded of my own parents, from whom I have been estranged, for many years. They are very old and are ready to leave this life. I know, because my oldest sister once wrote it to me in a letter. One of these days, they will be gone and I haven’t made any effort anymore, to get talk with them. I have stopped being in touch with my family, as I want to continue with my Embodied Language (EL). They don’t show, they have any interest in it at all. To the contrary, the message I kept receiving was, that I just needed to drop my way of life and adjust or conform to and be with their way of life, which is based on the continuation of Disembodied Language (DL). I have tried to do so in the past, but it didn’t work for me and after many difficult years of frustration and re-traumatization, I gave up.

 

Perhaps, it is because I live far away, here in the United States, that I was able to abandon my own family. I have never been back to the Netherlands, since my immigration in 1999, but it is due to my family, that it is this way. I don’t blame anyone, but I simply want to go on living, the way I want to. My family always seems to believe, there’s something wrong with that. I have recovered from my trauma of being rejected, disrespected, blamed, abused and accused. Nobody is allowed to do that anymore. I continue with my EL and that determines my wellbeing. If I had not found my EL, I would have gone insane. Many people are literally driven insane by other people, because they keep having DL.

 

It took me many years, to understand, that although I was conditioned to have DL, I could leave behind my conditioning history with DL and continue with EL. I doubted my own ability many times, but I no longer do that. I was feeling incredibly tormented as a child, teen-ager and later in my twenties. I had no idea what to do or how to be in this life and I kept failing in so many things. I felt like a total failure.

 

I believed, I loved acting, but in acting school, I found out, I didn’t even want to act, as I wanted to be myself. I loved and still love singing and studied classical singing, but I gave up after one year at the  conservatorium. I studied psychology for many years, but I quit, luckily still with a master degree, which allowed me become a psychology instructor.  I’ve had many jobs, but always liked to do simple work, which wouldn’t involve technical or computer stuff. I have loved landscaping, park-maintenance and even swept the streets of my home town for many years. I just don’t like any complications or multitasking and these years of being a teacher were a real challenge from which I have gladly retired. The coming job will be my last job.      

I am reminded of a poem, which I wrote when I came the United States. 

Now that I am here

I know that for year after year

I have been avoiding my fear

Now that I see 

What is there inside of me 

I let it come out and be free

Now that I know

My trouble was just a big show

I can finally let it all go

Now that I feel

It is not a very big deal

I calmly step out of the wheel  

(I don't believe in language being - deep - inside of me anymore, as I have attained Language Enlightenment, which is based on the fact that all language is overt)