'Live with Courage' - an open letter by Deniz Reno
I still often see the same dream. I’m standing on the cliff beside the man I love, right before he makes the jump that will ultimately take his life. He’s adjusting his wingsuit and I’m trying to reach for him and tell him how the lives of everyone who loves him will never be the same if he does this one. Not this one. I have always had the outmost faith in his supernatural ability, but he needs to sit this one out. He turns and smiles at me with his million kilowatt smile and says “don’t you know that none of this is real?”, bends his knees and takes his final leap into the mist below. And I wake up in a world where he’s been gone for three years.
“Are you ok now? ... that time has passed”, a question often asked by virtually everyone I know. The answer is complicated. Should I smile and put them at ease or tell the truth? Many people can’t handle or accept the truth in its entirety, nor would I wish the darkness of the journey I’ve been on for anyone. So I thank them for asking and politely divert the conversation to a lighter subject.
I have accepted and surrendered to what happened, for that is all you can really at the end of the day. The cause of all suffering is attachment and resistance. The great teachers of our lifetime are all rather correct in encouraging a healthy sense of detachment to minimize the tragedy of being human and living in a physical world that is so very perishable.
I am an artist. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I put my heart and soul into everything I create. When I love, I love with my entire being. I feel everything. I feel too much sometimes. It can be quite triggering. Can you ever be ok if a part of your heart is missing? We are quick to accept and sympathize with the permanent damage of a physical injury, but less so inclined with invisible wounds. In all history of humanity, mental health has only recently been featured as an integral part of an individual’s wellbeing, and we still have a long fight ahead of us. In the physical world, what we cannot see we are vastly unconscious of. Cuts and broken bones can heal. Unaddressed emotional trauma can be lethal. In the past three years I have come painfully close to understanding how sorrow and perpetual feelings of emptiness can result in depression and thoughts of suicide. It is all too real.
Through my experience dealing with and healing my own grief I have become a master at growing the seeds of collateral beauty. I am a warrior by nature. I do not seek out conflict or confrontation but rather look to transform the energy of pain and suffering into forms of expression that I see as being of benefit to myself and others. It is a form of mental and emotional martial arts that has inevitably become a big part of my life since Graham’s passing.
When I was 12 my mother enrolled me in aikido - a Japanese art of self defence that focuses on harmonizing with your opponent’s energy in order to bring peaceful resolutions to situations involving conflict. It was there that I learned that moving and transmuting force is much more powerful than resistance and entering into head to head combat. In aikido, you learn to neutralize and redirect the momentum of the opponent’s blows. The philosophy of what I learned all those years ago has not only helped me deal with people, but also with life. When it took my fiancé, I learned to move with the pain, to channel the heartbreak, to dance with grief without allowing it to sit on me and beat me into submission. It has not been an easy journey.
People have this idea that grief has some sort of an expiration date. The truth is, grief and love are two sides of the same coin. To care for someone so deeply is to miss them for the rest of your life. Some days you believe that it’s getting better and then there are days when you want to stand on the edge of a cliff and scream until your vocal chords snap and your heart explodes into tiny little pieces. Witnessing grief makes people uncomfortable. It serves as a reminder of the inevitable impermanence of all our lives. For me, grief has been a sobering reminder that my days too are numbered and that I better step up to the plate and really make the time count. If anything, the realization of my own impermanence gives me comfort. I look at life now as a school term that I have to complete, learning and serving to the best of my ability.
Friends and family are sometimes worried that by keeping the memories of the one I loved and lost so close to my heart I am closing myself off to the possibility of new love. I tend to look at this as a false premise. In a world that’s constantly looking for connection through others, I have found it within myself, through creative expression - my art and my music. I feel as though what happened catapulted me into a new stage in my life, where I have learned to look within for the things that I have prior sought out in my environment or from the people around me. I think that when you have lost a partner, people inadvertently project pressure on you to move on with your life by finding someone to fill that space. When you have lived through most people’s worst fears, they want to believe that there is some sort of an alternative ending to be had. In the west, we have been raised on films and fairytales with happy endings. I often have to explain my philosophy on love. What if at this moment in time, my ‘happy ending’ is not to be sheltered under the canopy of someone else’s love, but to be a canopy for others who are healing from heartbreak? To be able to truly relate to someone’s else’s pain is to have gone through it yourself. There is nothing more profound than to hold someone’s hand, look them in the eyes and say, ‘you’ve got this’, and to have them look back and believe you and believe in themselves because they know that you know what it feels like. Love comes in many forms. You do not need to ‘move on’ to someone else in order to heal or feel love again.
I wrote this letter to shed some light onto the complexity of grief. To be honest I am not sure that it is something that can truly be understood unless it is experienced, nor can I suggest the recipe for healing a broken heart. The only way you can do that is by honouring your own truth and to be gentle with those who know what it’s like to have lost. When wildfire ravages your life and burns everything to the ground there is nothing left but ashes and scorched earth. The rains come eventually, new seeds grow. Nothing is ever quite the same. All we can trust in is the great and vast continuum of life which does not discriminate in life or death. In this world we are all children, seeking some sort of safety, the illusion of permanence. We create identities and play out our little stories and dramas and it all seems so very serious. Perhaps grief is there to remind us to be mindful in our choices, in how we spend our time while we still have time. In a life where only death is guaranteed, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I have known great love. How good is that?
‘Brightest’ was the first song I wrote when I was finally able to open up enough to touch the piano again and sing. I wrote it for him and I. I wrote it for anyone who has lived through loss and can’t find the words to express the enormity of the love and the pain and everything in between. In the same breath, I have to mention my immense gratitude to my longtime producer and dear friend Mike Schlosser, who arranged, produced and transformed the acoustic version of ‘Brightest’ into a studio recording, giving justice to the spirit and integrity of the song like no one else I know can.
So, I shall leave you all with this thought on grief.
Please live with Courage.
I wish for you to find the courage to go about your days with grace and compassion despite a world that guarantees only one thing and that is to eventually take it all away from you. The courage to consciously choose to love, imagine and experience as much beauty as you can allow yourself in the space between, here on this silly floating ball of a planet we call ‘earth’. Love boldly, forgive fully and do yourself a favour and surrender attachment to any ideas of what life ‘should’ be.
Love,
Deniz