The last post

This is the last post for Peggy's Journey. The first was in June, 2009, When she was about to undergo major surgery for the disease that would ultimately end her life. When I held Peg's ashes in my hands and felt them fall to the ground, I had a deep sense that our time with her on this earth had finally come to a close...and fittingly, that the blog needed to come to a close as well. It's a new life for me, and for Zoë. Peggy's journey is out in the universe (or several universes) where she's truly free. And we have the rest of our lives- here- to create in new and unpredictable ways.

Peggy is gone from this earth. Our family life as we knew it is irrevocably changed. But Zoë and I are still alive, and life in the larger sense is filled with infinite possibilities.

It's been healing for me to share this journey with you. I'd like to close it with a quote from Joseph Campbell, someone who inspired Peg, and inspires me still:


“If you follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.”

Namaste.

Peg's ashes: where to find the spot

https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&q=40.071070,-105.591067+(Peggy)

Or, enter the following latitude / longitude coordinates in a GPS navigator for location:

Lat: 40.071070
Long: -105.591067

It's a beautiful walk to a beautiful spot, next to the little creek that flows into Long Lake. It's about 30 feet off the main path toward the lake.

Tour de Colorado

This is the Batmobile, the Mustang convertible we've been flogging all over the state. We only put the top up to lock it up for the night.  Zoë is my DJ, providing the soundtrack for our travels through her iPod. She's a fun traveling companion.

We did an early evening hike in the Maroon Bells near Aspen, one of Peg's favorite spots on earth. She was very much on our minds...but, as you can see, we always pack our silliness as a companion for our solemnity.

Tomorrow we'll do a longer hike there, then head over Independence Pass and back to Denver.

Ashes in the mountains

We hiked in about half a mile in the mountains above Nederland to a place called Long Lake (Leann and husband Pete, Kent and wife Diane and their two youngest, Zoë and me). Just below a field of wildflowers, beside a swiftly-flowing stream is where I spread Peggy's ashes.

It's a place Peg probably loved the many times she hiked this area in college.

My hands were shaking as I opened the box. Another emotional hurdle. So thankful our friends, who were so close to Peg for so many years, were there with us.

The grey powder that was Peggy's body, cast in and near the stream, will eventually wash into the lake and become softly embedded into the silt. A final rest after a long, tiring journey.

We'll spread Peggy's ashes tomorrow morning

Flagstaff Mountain, overlooking Boulder, is restricted to local traffic due to wildfires. It's where we'd originally planned to spread Peg's ashes. I think Plan B is a blessing.

Brainard Lake is where she loved to hike with her longtime friend Leann, who suggested this might be a beautiful place to spread her ashes. This will be the final resting place for the wisps of ancient stardust that comprised Peggy Smith's body.

Peg's Colorado Memorial next Saturday, July 7

Here are the details for the gathering to remember Peggy and celebrate her life.  It's an informal get-together at the home of her sister, Marianne Taras:

8842 Eagle's Nest Lane
Highlands Ranch, Colorado 80126

Saturday, July 7, 2012
1-4pm

There will be refreshments and light snacks. If you know someone who might want to come, please share this blog with them.

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Something I'd put off thinking about--until two days ago-- was how, when and where to scatter Peg's ashes. Our friend Diane knows a place not far from Boulder, where Peg went to college. It's up the side of Flagstaff Mountain, a place with a beautiful view of the valley. It's also a place that's clearly marked for anyone to return to and know they're in the right spot.

We haven't finalized the details, but it'll be around midday or early afternoon this coming Tuesday, July 3rd. I'll post the specifics before we leave for Denver on Sunday.

This photo was taken in front of Ruth and Joe Piper's getaway cabin, a place Peggy loved and returned to many times in college and beyond. She and I stayed there for two days after our wedding. Peg cleaned Ruth's house in college and she became sort of an "adopted grandmother." Peg was the only one outside of Ruth's family who had permission to stay there. I thought about scattering her ashes there...but Peg loved so many places in the Rockies. Whenever we'd drive past the foothills west of Denver and started seeing the peaks soaring above the treeline, she would put her hand to her heart and tell me again how this was home to her. Every place she walked--from Steamboat Springs to Marble to the Maroon Bells, Eldora to Estes Park, Independence Pass, Bailey, Durango--was, for her, sacred ground.

There will be a specific spot where Peg's physical remains will be scattered. But her heart was, and forever will be, everywhere in her beloved Rocky Mountains.

Peg's garden without Peg

Volunteer kale in front of the steps, right in the middle of the pathway. Something purple and pretty growing randomly where it's finding water from the drip irrigation system. That's our "vegetable garden" this summer.

Where there was zucchini and hat squash, there are fragrant alyssum and nasturtiums. And random plants that are fun and interesting, though they very well be weeds for all I know. The strawberries are going great guns, but it looks like the squirrels and various critters will partake before the fruit's on our radar. The entire garden has literally gone to seed.

No tomatoes for the first time in several years. Zoë and I won't be around enough this summer to harvest them, and I think it's too late to plant them anyway. This was Peg's world...she knew so much about what to plant, and when, and had an orderly arrangement for the whole garden. Last summer we harvested the things she'd lovingly planted almost every day.

A year later, nothing has been planted. Nothing to pull out of the ground. But there is a quiet peacefulness in just letting the garden rest this year, as plants go to seed and volunteers pop up. I let the peas run rampant over the herb garden because the fragrance was so wonderful. I love seeing the nasturtiums appear randomly wherever they find root.

The harvest this year is the appreciation of the beauty of this space, and the wonder of how life continues to grow in unexpected places.

Love after Love

Still going through hundreds of bits of Peg's life. A photo slipped into a book. Receipts from a thousand years ago. Cryptic notes in her frequently undecipherable shorthand.

This was taken in May 1984 (I know this because Peg compulsively wrote dates, locations and the subject on the back of almost every photo). Today I ran across the photo and a Derek Walcott poem she had framed on the wall of her office, where her patients would always see it:

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.

Spontaneous creation

Hired someone to fix the pocket door in the middle bathroom, which has been half-broken for over ten years. Today he had a doctor's appointment.

Zoë and I decided, since Russ had taken the day off, to paint the middle bathroom.  It's been a bland grey for over 20 years...nondescript, "acceptable," ...meh.  She said, "Hey...what if it was an electric blue?"

We picked out some swatches, brought them home, and within five minutes were drawn to this wondrous shade of blue. Tonight we have a new bathroom. It was over 100 degrees in Sacramento, a perfect day to be inside and do something fun with the music cranked up to eleven. Makes me happy every time I walk through the bathroom into the kitchen and see this glorious, vibrant color that we collaborated on.

New color. New life. Good stuff.

Peggy's Colorado memorial

We're having a get-together at Marianne's house on Saturday, July 7, the day before Zoë and I return to California. Everyone is welcome. I'll post the details later, but it'll be pretty low-key and informal....kinda like Peg.

Her heart was firmly rooted in the Rockies. We haven't sorted out how and where, but we'll take her ashes deep into the mountains during our trip and leave them there as she asked us to do.

Hard to believe we leave in less than two weeks. Zoë reminded me that as much as she was looking forward to driving a convertible through the mountains, you're not allowed to drive a rental car if you're under 21.

I told her that we'd evaluate the consequences vs. the joy. I'm guessing the consequences are zip and the joy is immense. We'll be enjoying the fireworks in Aspen on July 4th, even if we have to sleep in the car. A real Colorado adventure.

Back from the beach

First Father's Day as a single dad. First camping trip with just the two of us. Life goes forward.

Spent the first night near Fort Bragg, at a private campground that's one of the few places left in California where you can camp on the beach. Zoë set up her one-girl tent just100' from the surf.

Patrick's Point was sunny but cool (as opposed to Sacramento, which was 110 degrees yesterday). Four wonderful days with Paul and Chris Andre and their two daughters, hunting for agates on the beach and enjoying each others' company. After the many camping trips our two families have shared, it was a real shift not having Peggy there...but we will never forget those memories, even as we move on and create new ones.

This is so Zoë, nimbly creating her own resting place in the cleft of a rock, spontaneously and without instruction. Finding balance and joy in a hard place.

First camping trip without Peggy

Tuesday morning, Zoë and I are headed up to Patrick's Point, way up on the coast near Trinidad. The Andre family will join us there for four nights.

It's one of our favorite spots in California. And it was one of Peg's. This photo was taken just last year, when we hiked all over the trails and overlooks at Wedding Rock with Paul, Chris and the girls.

The photo at the top of this blog was at Sunset State Beach, Peg hanging out the back door of the camper. After the first two or three years, packing what we'd need (and more importantly, didn't need) got to be routine and we could just enjoy the experience. She loved hanging out in front of the campfire until late, trading snarky stories and making up goofy songs.

I think she loved the simplicity of it.  As much as she loved this house, there was peacefulness in not being surrounded by the ten thousand Things To Be Done.

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Zoë took her ACT exams in Yuba City (about an hour north of here) this morning. That's it for academics until we do the college tour after our July Carlsbad State Beach camping trip: UC San Diego, CalTech in Pasadena, Harvey Mudd/Scripps in Claremont, UC Santa Cruz and Stanford.

Peg knew early on--even without knowing the cancer would take her before the summer--that she wouldn't have the stamina to hopscotch all those campuses...so this is a trip Zoë and I would have made solo regardless.

This will be a summer of Daddio-daughter adventures. Most fathers don't get the chance to spend that much time with their teenage daughters. In that, we are blessed.

Peggy remembered as a therapist

Paul Aikin, one of our area's leading therapists, wanted to add a voice from the therapy community about Peggy. He didn't have prepared remarks at the memorial, but in an email today asked that I distribute his thoughts to family and friends.

A Memorial Tribute to Peggy Smith

I had the privilege and honor of being one of Peggy's teachers. We met every other week in a consult group for 12 years. Peggy was an unusual psychiatrist. She loved doing deep relational psychotherapy. She had a gift for it. Peggy was a quick study and eager learner. While many therapists shy away from processing directly the therapist’s impact on the patient and the patient's impact on the therapist, Peggy became very skilled in tracking these moves between her patients and herself.  She would wade right into the relational conflicts and help her patients connect with what wasn't working for them-- creating corrective relational experiences.

In recent years we have come to know from attachment theory and research that the therapists’ love of their patients is essential in healing insecure attachment wounds. Peggy was way ahead of her time. While many therapists still felt that it was inappropriate for a therapist to love her patients, Peggy grew to be comfortable with it. The loving, exuberant, mischievous and warm Peggy described by so many friends and family here at the Memorial today entered into her psychotherapy as well. She did not need to hide behind the role of being a psychotherapist. She was able to be the real, transparent, authentic warm person we all know and love in her position as psychotherapist while at the same time keeping the relationship therapeutic.

Peggy had a message on her answering machine saying that her practice was full many years before she stopped working. She was known as a therapist’s therapist. From time to time I would prevail upon Peggy to take on another therapist. (We all know that healers need healing.) She never turned me down. Many of those therapists have expressed how eternally grateful they were to have had the privilege of being touched and healed by her awesome level of attunement, presence, caring, courage, warmth, and authenticity.

Just as it is such a loss for friends and family, the therapeutic community of greater Sacramento has also lost an invaluable friend and colleague. She is irreplaceable. She leaves an incredible hole. We all miss her so much. And at the same time, she is already part of the lore of our relational therapeutic community. She leaves a shining light of what's possible.

Paul Aikin

--
Paul A. Aikin, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Licensed Marriage, Family Therapist
Certified EFT Couples Therapist
EFT Supervisor-In-Training

When Love Comes Home/The Rose

Bruce Patt shot both of these yesterday. Knowing how much Peg loved it, seeing Laura Sandage and Katie Henry (the songwriter) perform "When Love Comes Home" was a real joy. And then three dear friends, Karen Farwell, Mary Patt and Estelle Kinsella, performed another of Peg's favorites, "The Rose."

The stillness after

Peggy's memorial was memorable...beautiful...and a fountain of love. About 150 people, some of whom I hadn't seen in many years, all gathered in Marilea Wolf's beautiful back yard.

Bruce Patt took this photo of Marianne, me, Jeanette, Mike and Jay just after Mudlark performed "When Love Comes Home." I'll post more photos (and the video Bruce shot) tomorrow. Still processing all the hundreds of little moments. And there were so many wonderful moments.

My heart is full.

Memorial tomorrow

This is Marilea's backyard, where tomorrow's memorial will be held. Paul Andre (pictured) helped me deliver the rental chairs. We'll set up to the right, in the shade--that's where Mudlark will perform "When Love Comes Home," Estelle, Mary and Karen will perform "The Rose," and Michael Irwin will officiate.

It'll be a little cooler tomorrow, for which I'm thankful. It was 100 yesterday. I'm hoping no one feels the need to dress in black or wear a suit and tie; it's not a funeral, it's a celebration of Peg's life.

Peg's brother Jay, brother Mike and his two adult daughters, sister Marianne & Mark and their two girls, Greg and Jeanette are coming over for lunch in a bit, so I need to sign off for now.

Please feel free to spread the word about tomorrow:

Where: 5901 Hoffman Lane, Fair Oaks
When: 10am-1pm
Who's invited: Everyone
Light refreshments provided--just bring yourselves (and maybe a sun hat)

Planting for the future

Yes, this is the same 60' tree that Zoë climbed for years before she got too big for the branches to support her. We planted four of them in 1991. This one is called "Zoë's tree" because it was her favorite. If you look waaaaaaaaay up through the branches you can see her little paper "landmarks"--special names for certain branches and lookouts, written on small pieces of paper and enclosed in packing tape. They go within ten feet of the top.

Talking with her sister Jeanette tonight about what to say at Sunday's memorial. There were so many aspects to her life, but one (of many) that made a lasting difference was her caring and dedication as a psychiatrist. She got many letters toward the end of her life (and afterward) from former patients. All expressing gratitude.

Peg's planting this tree is a metaphor for her approach to psychotherapy. She was willing to go deeply with her patients, to truly help them reclaim their divinity... and their lives.

An old Jewish proverb from the Talmud recounts the story of an old man  planting a sapling by the road.  He's asked why, since he won't enjoy the shade or fruit in his lifetime. His reply? The tree is not for him. It is for his children, and their children, and their children's children.

That was Peggy.

Expecting to fly

Friday I took off my wedding ring for the last time.

I'd only taken it off once before, about 23 years ago, to fix the sink. Felt strange to have it off, even for one hour.
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I was alone in the house. The late afternoon sun was warm and soft through the living room window. I put on "Expecting to fly" by Neil Young, a song Peg and I listened to over and over when we were first together in 1986.

There you stood
on the edge of your feather,
Expecting to fly.
While I laughed,
I wondered whether
I could wave goodbye,
Knowin' that you'd gone.
By the summer it was healing,
We had said goodbye.
All the years
we'd spent with feeling
Ended with a cry,
Babe, ended with a cry,
Babe, ended with a cry.

I sat on the couch for a long time, on the spot where I took off her ring just after she left this world.  I held the rings tightly and spoke to her before placing them on the little dragonfly shrine  on the mantle above the fireplace.

When I walked out into the sun and air, feeling the Delta breeze come up from the back yard, I looked at my hand again. I thought it would feel strange not to wear my ring-- like it did when I removed it the last time-- but this time it felt right.

Solar eclipse: my traveling astronomer

Zoë went with Olivia and Suzette, Olivia's mom, to Reno Sunday to see the full ring effect (Sacramento is too far south). We created a cool 6' long by 1' square viewing device to supplement her telescope and dark glasses, and she spent the day up in the Sierras.

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Between yesterday morning and this afternoon the chain link fence on our side yard has been replaced with a beautiful redwood 6' privacy fence. The space between the two trees is in shade all day, with a wonderful breeze coming up from the bottom of the hill. The last time we used it for anything was maybe 13 years ago, when Zoë's sandbox lived there...hidden behind a big deck,  a jungle of container plants and low-growing redwood branches.

I've spent a lot of time going through the pantry and kitchen cabinets, simplifying and organizing. Zoë and I do not need 30 mason jars, or decorative orderve toothpicks, or a candle snuffer, or four different kinds of leather treatment creams-- or a lot of the other effluvia we've just gotten used to being crammed into the forgotten recesses of a drawer or deep shelf.

While I'm organizing the kitchen, this office looks like an Office Depot supply truck crashed through the window and exploded, spraying cameras, computer equipment, cables and papers everywhere. In some ways, life here at the house is pretty simple--but underneath there's still a lot of chaos left over from everything we've dealt with the last few months.

Need to do a lot of things to get ready for Peg's memorial next weekend. Seems easier somehow to completely redo the yard and the kitchen.

Another Peg sighting?

This is a screen grab from yesterday's blog entry. Notice Steph's expression and the angle of her head...then look at Peg's on the header. And there's the dragonfly in the stained glass. When I see things like this, I wonder if it's a wink and a nod from Peggy.