• MN Coalition for Death Education and Support, Dec 2010 Newsletter
• Renewal, A Journal for Waldorf Education, Fall/Winter 2010
• Book Launch Party Video

• Anthroposophical Society, Rudolf Steiner Branch – Chicago, IL
• Rudolf Steiner College Bookstore – Fair Oaks, CA
• A Room of One’s Own – Madison, WI
• Bramble Bookstore – Viroqua, WI
• Set In Stone – Mineral Point, WI
• Rudolf Steiner House – Ann Arbor, MI
• The Color Shop and More – Wilton, NH

When my daughter Nina died in a car accident in 1996, my two sons, Kevin and Soren, were fifteen- and four-years-old.

The loss of my eldest child and only daughter was devastating for me. My grief was multi-faceted, for I mourned not only for myself, but for my family as a whole and for my sons and this loss that they would carry with them throughout their lives.

Kevin lost his childhood companion and the only other person who shared the same early family memories. Now he would be the eldest without someone else to forge the way before him, to scheme with, and compare notes with in the same way, with Soren being so much younger.

Soren lost a big sister who loved to cuddle, read, and play with him, and would watch over him as he grew up, almost like a second mother.

How was I to tend to my sons’ grief when I was engulfed in my own process?

It seemed easier with Soren. When he asked questions, my husband, Dennis, and I answered them as simply, directly, and truthfully as we could. We told him stories about Nina’s life. Dennis wrote poems about Nina with him, drew pictures with him, and put them together in a little book. We did things together for Nina while we were playing outside in the snow (see pp. 152-154 in my book). We maintained our daily routines, and gave him time to play alone and with friends to express himself in the mode most appropriate to his age.

With Kevin it was less clear. We included him, and tried to address his needs, in all of the activities surrounding Nina’s wake and funeral, by keeping her name alive in our home life, and later in our times of remembering Nina on holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays. We were grateful that his small Waldorf school environment provided him with the peer and community support that is so important to young people. Yet I didn’t know how to approach him emotionally. I hoped that my freely expressing my emotions would allow him to when he needed. It was only later that I learned how difficult it was for him to see his mother crying. His way of processing grief was quite different. After all, he was busy being a teenager.

We did the best we knew how and were emotionally capable of at the time. I have had to be forgiving of myself for omissions or mistakes I might have made.

It was in part with my sons and their life-long loss in mind that I wrote my memoir, Laughing in a Waterfall, three years after Nina died. If I perhaps wasn’t always there for them emotionally, I could at least write about Nina’s life and death, while it was the world I was living in, as a gift for their future.

As it turned out, neither of them read the book until I published it ten years later (thirteen years after Nina’s death). We had been through several pilgrimages to Harlemville, NY, where Nina died, an evolution in our yearly observances of Nina’s death day, a bench dedication and a stained-glass window dedication, and other rituals which gave opportunities to revisit Nina’s accident and the surrounding events. These repeated tellings of the story gave the boys a chance to renew their own perceptions of what happened from the vantage point of different developmental stages as they grew older.

To hear the story from my perspective in the form of a memoir brought further healing around our family’s grief process.

Soren, who read it on a trip to England at age eighteen, told me it brought him to tears several times. Being the same age as Nina was when she died made it real for him. He had no memories of his own of most of the story that happened when he was so young, so it fulfilled my wish to give him his history.

Kevin read it at age 29, when he was married and well on his way in his career. At my book launch party, he shared publicly some of his deepest feelings about moving forward in his life without his sister. Like others of us, he wondered how his life might have been different if Nina had lived. However, he realized that her presence continues to be an influence on his life. Also, through reading my book, he was able to experience how difficult it must have been for us as parents to lose a child, even though at the time he felt overshadowed by our tendency to idealize Nina.

The grief process does not clearly come to an end after a certain amount of time or proceed in a predictable sequence of stages. My family’s experience confirms that there are many layers of grief to uncover, and the process of healing extends over a long arch of time. It is never too late to reach out to someone who has had a loss and talk about it. No matter how much time has passed, looking back and sharing stories and new feelings is an important part of the process and helps us connect in deeper ways.

• – Minneapolis, MN Birchbark Books
• Common Good Books – St Paul, MN
• Micawber’s Books – St Paul, MN
• The Bookcase – Wayzata, MN
• Valley Bookseller – Stillwater, MN
• Watershed High School – Minneapolis, MN
• MN Waldorf School – Maplewood, MN
• City of Lakes Waldorf School – Minneapolis, MN

While waiting for our flight, my traveling companion, Marcia, and I ran into four other conferences attendees. Some of us had not actually met in person during the conference. While sitting around a table in the food court one of these new friends asked me what instrument I played. When I replied that I played the lyre, she looked down at the instrument in its wooden case at my feet. I took it out of the case, and started to play. It was barely audible over the airport and food court din, so I thought. I played a few short solo lyre pieces, then broke into singing some old favorite tunes to lyre accompaniment. My musician friends joined me in three-part harmony: “I’ll Fly Away,” “Swing Low,” and “The Riddle Song.” In between songs, I looked over at the dad of a young family sitting at the table next to us. He was giving me a “thumbs-up.”

When my friends and I got up ten minutes later and gathered our things together to go to our gates, the family was also getting ready to go. The mom, holding a tiny baby, asked “Did I hear someone say they worked in hospice?”

I replied, “Yes, I do; all of us play therapeutic music.”

“Thank you so much for playing. I could feel the difference in my baby right away,” the mom commented as she cuddled her baby close to her heart.

That is the first story.

The second concerns a friendly gentleman who also commented on my lyre case, thinking it held a portfolio of paintings. I didn’t get my lyre out to play for him, but instead found out that he was returning home to Canada from the Annual Symposium of the American Association of Woodturners in Hartford. We admired photos of beautifully designed pieces, and found many other areas of mutual interest to converse about.

On our flight home, Marcia and I processed our experience of the conference we had just attended. There were many different layers to discuss, including the emotional. During this heartfelt conversation, I related how I had connected with a few people who came from Columbia County, New York, where Nina and Kirsten had gone to school in Harlemville for three months before their fatal accident. It turns out Harlemville was only one and a quarter hours from our conference location in Litchfield. The New England landscape evoked in me a bittersweet familiarity.

I found my eyes welling with tears that I could not stop when I related more of my story to Marcia. How could I ever have thought I could come so close to Harlemville and fly home from the conference without also visiting there? Even though I have found my way through the reality of life without Nina in the past thirteen years, and find fulfillment in what I do, being so close to where she last walked and danced and sang, laughed and loved her life, touched the primal heartache of loss that is deep inside me. I closed my eyes and let the tears flow.

My friend did not try to comfort me with words, but was simply present for me. My loss was acknowledged and felt by her.

As I began to come out of my overwhelming feelings of grief, I felt a hand gently touch and press my shoulder on the aisle side. I looked up to see the man we had conversed with in the Hartford terminal walking toward the front of the plane. He did not turn around.

Marcia said he had been walking the other way earlier and saw my tears.

That simple touch on my shoulder was profoundly comforting. To be seen by a stranger. To know that he understood, without the necessity of words. To be connected from the heart.

There are many ways.

“Here we have time.”

These are the words I once read on a little hand-lettered sign posted on the door to the kindergarten room at the Minnesota Waldorf School. How enticing – a place where the schedules and business of the adult world are suspended for the children who cross that threshold. Embedded within the routines of clean-up, bathroom, snack, circle, and story is the substance of the morning: play. The children become masters of the world of their own imagination without interruption or hurry. The holiness of play is honored.

When I walk out to my garden, I cross through my own imaginary gateway with the same sign hanging from it. Time becomes a forgotten constraint when I am close to the earth, surrounded by plants, and enchanted by the heaven-sweet scents and colors of unfolding blossoms. In my full devotion to tending to the life of my garden, the cares of the outside world cease to exist.

Into this peaceful bower, the gentle tones of my wind chime sporadically sound, born on the breeze of eternity.  They herald for me the invisible presence of my loved ones who have gone before, and  I remember we are never apart in spirit.

“Here we have time.”

I am refreshed, and go back to the routines of my life, whole again.

Laughing in a Waterfall

]]> http://www.mariannedietzel.com/order/feed/ 0 http://www.mariannedietzel.com/renaissance-woman/ http://www.mariannedietzel.com/renaissance-woman/#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 18:26:16 +0000 admin http://www.mariannedietzel.com/?p=43 When I told my neighbor that I am self-publishing a book, she called me a Renaissance Woman.

After we moved in next-door nine years ago, the same neighbor called me Pioneer Woman. She knows me from the activities she sees going on in our back yard. I hang out my clothes to dry six months of the year. My husband and I grow vegetables, pick them, cook with them, eat them, and put them up for the winter when there is extra. We gather the unwanted apples from their trees and make applesauce, and use the leaves they rake up in the fall in building our compost pile.

In casual conversations with my neighbor, she has found out some of the things I do otherwise: I play the piano and the lyre and taught lessons in my home for several years. I work as a hospice bereavement coordinator. I sent my son to a private grade school – the Minnesota Waldorf School. I travel to points in New England, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Colorado to visit relatives.

That is not the half of it. What she doesn’t see or hear about are the bulging files on various projects I work on, piles of journals from organizations I am involved or interested in, shelves full of music for various venues I provide music for, drawers of half-finished knitting or other craft projects, incoming emails that require daily organization, and a schedule of meetings and workshops that I am either attending or giving.

Is this what makes me a Renaissance Woman? Does this mean I am different from the average American middle-aged woman? That I have broader interests, skills, and activities than most? That I am the product of a true liberal arts education?

Or does it mean that my plate is too full?

Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier not to be a Renaissance Woman. To not have great expectations for my life. To not pursue my many interests.

But here I am, learning to let go of what I can’t accomplish and lovingly accept what I am able to offer for what it is. This is my life. I feel awfully brave to be sharing it with the world in publishing a personal memoir.

If you read Laughing in a Waterfall, maybe something in your life will resonate with mine, Renaissance Women and Men that I know many of us are.

How can you know at age 23 what the vows and commitment to that one person will bring to your life?

Thirty-two years ago I gave birth to my first child, eighteen years ago to my third, with another in-between. Thirty-two years of parenting, with one more year to go before the nest is empty.

Thirteen years ago, my only daughter, the first child born thirty-two years ago, was killed in a car accident. My mother passed away just three years later.

Ten years ago I finished writing the first draft of a book. To celebrate our 25th anniversary, we took a trip to Europe to visit our son Kevin, the middle child, on a farm in Germany.

Kevin is now married. And I am now about to publish that book.

Laughing in a Waterfall: A Mother’s Memoir tells the story of the most traumatic three years of my life, the part that I never could have imagined when I married thirty-five years ago. But then again, at 23, I never could have imagined I would write a book either.

Dennis and I bear witness to each other and who we’ve become in this marriage and wonder, “What more is in store for us?” Whatever it is, we’re in it together.

And so we eat home-made rhubarb cake to celebrate.

Come to my book launch party and read my book when it comes out in June and be welcomed into our community-of-life. You all bear witness, dear friends.

• Radio Interview from Fairfield, IA http://kruufm.com/node/10993