SoulScript: Journaling My Way to Self-Discovery and Love

By Hugh Roberts

Through the pages of his daily journal, 75-year old Hugh Roberts shares his journey through grief following the death of his wife. Haunted by indecision, wondering what he should do now to live a new, “abundant life” full of meaning and passion, he joins a small healing-through-writing group for people who have suffered from the impact of cancer. As he writes and reflects on what his soul reveals, Hugh learns to accept himself just as he is. Now he must weigh the risks of falling in love again. Is it too soon? Or is it too late?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543901672

Book preview

manuscript.

Preface

On November 23, 2002, my wife died of cancer. We had been together for twenty-one years. Her death came too soon. She was only 59. I was 74.

Six weeks after Patsy’s death, the old year also died. A new year dawned, and I wondered what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had to do something. But I knew enough to realize that I must first deal with my grief. I decided to do what I had done many times in the past when faced with a crisis or a turning point in my life: I picked up a new coil-bound notebook and began to journal.

Too soon did the light of my life fade away.

My sun, so bright, so warm, so basic to my day,

Encountered the horizon between life and death

And slowly, reluctantly, inexorably sank beneath.

My world turned dark with grief.

Too soon.

Too soon came the busyness that trails in death’s wake:

Cremation, memorial, arrangements to make;

Instructions to be followed, certificates to be filed,

Bequests to be honored for every grandchild.

And then it was finished. It was over.

Too soon.

Why poetry? Because I wanted my grieving process to involve my heart as well as my brain. I made a commitment to myself to sit down with my journal every morning, fresh cup of coffee at hand, and write.

At first my daily journaling was a way to organize my thoughts and release my feelings. There were times when I felt tired, stagnant, out of sorts. I joined a healing-through-writing group called SoulScript, which met weekly with a facilitator who used various prompts to inspire us to write from our souls. And through my journaling I began to reach out to Spirit who, under many different names, dwells within every living being. At least that is my belief.

It wasn’t long before I found that asking, listening, and then heeding the advice from the still, small voice of Spirit/God opened doors I never knew were closed. Slowly, gradually, my grief subsided, but my journaling continued. Grief recovery evolved into self-discovery and love. I discovered that I am a whole person, and have been all along. I am the sum total of all my parts, every one of which is an essential part of the authentic me, and every part containing a spark of divinity.

If you, dear reader, have suffered a life-changing loss, especially the loss of a spouse or a loved one, or if you have ever wondered how you would cope with such a loss, may your reading of this spiritual memoir bring you hope. You can live through grief, and recover from it. Write. Talk to God, by whatever name or concept you know Her/Him. It is never too late. After all, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?

Prologue

I was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes one Saturday morning in late November 2002 when our friend LouAnn knocked on the door. She had driven up to our log home near Chama, New Mexico, two hours north of Santa Fe, to sit by Patsy’s bedside. Ten minutes after climbing the stairs to the second-floor bedroom, LouAnn came back down to the kitchen and asked, How long has it been since Patsy has spoken? Or had anything to eat or drink?

About three days, I answered with a sigh.

She’s in pain, Hugh, she said gently. She’s moaning, and thrashing her legs. I think she needs more morphine to make her comfortable.

She’s already had her morning dose.

Why don’t you call the doctor and see what he says?

The doctor agreed to let me give her more morphine. I placed a tablet under Patsy’s tongue and she calmed down within a few minutes, but her breathing was labored and raspy. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it before.

I went downstairs to prepare a simple cold lunch of roast beef and salad for LouAnn and me, which I carried back up to the bedroom. We ate in silence, until LouAnn looked at Patsy, then at me and said, Patsy’s been so courageous. She endured all the chemo and radiation for… how long has it been, almost four years now? She’s had all the possible drugs, and there’s no other treatment left for her. It’s time to let her go, Hugh. I think you should give her permission to die.

I thought about it for quite some time before I finally found the courage to say the necessary words. I held Patsy’s hand, and began to cry as I spoke to her. Although we had talked about her dying many times, I hadn’t realized until that moment how very close to death she was. In fact, even then I was still in denial. Patsy lay quiet and still beneath the homemade patchwork quilt, looking very small in the queen-size bed. Gracie, one of our three cats, lay at the foot of the bed, snuggled against Pasty’s legs. Suddenly Gracie jumped from the bed into LouAnn’s lap—very unusual behavior for this shy creature who normally avoided people. It was as though Gracie was trying to tell us something.

As I was reading aloud some of the many cards and letters that Patsy had received, the phone rang. It was her brother-in-law, Ron, in California. I sat on the edge of the bed with my back to my wife and began to bring Ron up-to-date on her condition. I had only said a few words when LouAnn touched my arm. Hugh, she’s stopped breathing. She’s gone.

***

Three and a half years earlier, Patsy had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Lymph nodes were removed, and chemotherapy followed. Nine months into her chemo I had my annual screening for prostate cancer, and a very small malignant tumor was detected in a biopsy. I soon began radiation treatments at St. Vincent Hospital Cancer Center under the same doctor from whom Patsy was getting her treatments. For six weeks we passed each other in our faded green hospital gowns, Patsy exiting the treatment room just before I entered.

On my second day of radiation, I was told of a woman—a United Methodist minister—who was doing an internship at the Cancer Center as part of her training in counseling. Because Patsy and I were also United Methodist ministers, I was hopeful that she could be of help. I stood in the doorway of LouAnn Asbury’s tiny office and introduced myself.

I understand you’re the new counselor. My wife and I are both in treatment for cancer. I need counseling.

I’m glad you found me, she replied. I’ll be happy to work with you. Would you like to meet weekly, or more often?

We began meeting every Tuesday morning. At the end of our first session, LouAnn said she wanted to meet Patsy. We walked out of her office and found Patsy sitting in the waiting room, her scarf-covered head down, reading a book. This was a familiar sight—Patsy was always reading while she was waiting. Waiting for treatment, waiting to find out if the current treatment was slowing down the progression of the cancer in her body. As I introduced LouAnn, Patsy’s face lit up with a smile. She was glad I had found a counselor to help me cope with the stress of our journey through this extremely difficult part of our lives.

Over the weeks I shared with LouAnn my feelings about my cancer, about Patsy’s cancer and the possibility of its recurrence, and about my need for a support system. With her help I came to believe that my cancer offered me a rare opportunity to change my life—to be grateful for each moment of every day.

Apparently Patsy had been having similar thoughts. On the last day of her radiation treatment she told me that she had been thinking about her new life. The cancer in her body was no longer detectable, so she had decided to plan two years of joyful living. Patsy described herself as being in a transformative stage, and suggested we make the year 2000 a Jubilee Year for both of us—a year of simply enjoying life. She was on medical leave from her ministry and I was retired. Why not?

I confess that I was less than enthusiastic about Patsy’s suggestion because I was still receiving radiation treatments five days a week. So Patsy concentrated on regaining her strength, began acupuncture treatments, and joined a cancer patient support group led by LouAnn, the counselor I was seeing weekly. Thus began not one Jubilee Year, but two and a half Jubilee Years in which Patsy traveled as often as possible. After my body recovered from the collateral damage the radiation had inflicted and all traces of my prostate cancer were eliminated, I was able to travel with her. But Patsy’s cancer recurred that summer. Her doctor ordered another fifteen weeks of chemotherapy.

In the fall, we finally moved into our log home in the northern New Mexico mountains. The construction had dragged on for almost two years, most of it while we were in treatment. We had completed our counseling sessions with LouAnn, and she accepted our invitation to come up from Santa Fe and visit us in our new home. As three United Methodist ministers, we found we had much in common. Our friendship deepened, and LouAnn came again to spend Christmas weekend with us.

Although our 2002 Jubilee Year was interrupted twice by recurrences of Patsy’s cancer and their subsequent courses of therapy, we were able to take a number of trips that included travel to the Netherlands and Belgium, camping along the coast of California, participation in our third Sierra Club service trip at the Grand Canyon, and attendance at a wedding in Florida. Our last trip was in October, when Patsy had decided it was time to choose her final resting place. We traveled to the central California coast. Just south of Big Sur, I pushed Patsy’s wheelchair into a forest of towering redwoods. As a long-time member of the Save the Redwoods League, she had made arrangements to choose the grove where her ashes would be scattered. Having accomplished her last task, she returned home and spent her final six weeks in bed.

After Patsy died, I realized how easy it would be to become paralyzed by grief. I remembered that, during my counseling with LouAnn, she had assigned me homework: to make lists of what I did well, what I enjoyed doing, and what I would like to do; to make up some affirmations that I could use; to work on my dreams; to do some journaling.

At the dawn of the first year of my new life—a life without the woman I’d loved for over twenty years—I made a commitment to myself to start journaling every morning. Those journal entries comprise the sixteen chapters of this memoir.

Chapter 1

January 4, 2003: A New Journal

A New Year! No, I have not made a list of resolutions to be forgotten, ignored, or discarded within the next week or two. But I have made one: to spend some time every morning with this journal recording my thoughts and feelings, my hopes and fears, and my struggles with making decisions.

Six weeks ago today Patsy died, and I realize that I am beginning not just a new year but a new life—another one. It seems that I have been blessed with that opportunity several times during my seventy-four years; I am both grateful for that and aware that I have not used those opportunities to change myself along with my life. I hope and pray that this time it will be different.

I am amazed at the tremendous effort I have put into not grieving over the past six weeks, although there were certainly moments when the grief hit me in spite of my busyness. I don’t want to avoid the grief, at least that’s what my brain says. I know, intellectually, that it is essential that I work through the grief process, and that may take a couple of years. But my unconscious is saying what so many men say in this situation, Keep busy and it won’t hurt so much.

Yesterday I did take some time in the morning to start a pattern of daily reflection. I unearthed a book Patsy and I had used for daily meditations ten years ago: Touchstones: A Book of Daily Meditations for Men.¹ I read the pages for January 1-3. Then I turned to Romancing the Ordinary: A Year of Simple Splendor² by Sarah Ban Breathnach (pronounced Bon Brannock.) I was surprised, but not turned off, to find that it is written specifically for women to encourage them in a sensate life. The author calls them sensuists—people who revel in life’s sensory experiences. I can go with that!

This morning’s reading from Touchstones was on getting in touch with Spirit/God by being receptive—keeping one’s senses open to see and hear (and, adding some input from Sarah Ban Breathnach, to touch, smell and taste). It ended with the affirmation, I will be open to the Spirit on its own terms. That is, however Spirit is manifested to me this day. Sarah Ban Breathnach’s message for today was Throughout the day… echo as a private Psalm: ‘And yes, I said yes, I will. Yes!’ So yes, I will…what? Be open to Spirit. Yes, I will. And I will use the daily readings from Touchstones and Romancing the Ordinary for inspiration.

January 7, 2003: On Risk

This morning’s passage in Touchstones is about the necessity of risk-taking in order to fully live. The author questions, Does an opportunity seem like a problem because of the risk involved? I think that some opportunities do. If I had the opportunity tonight to sleep with a woman, it would be a problem for me because of the risk of involvement. I would not take the opportunity because of that risk.

Well, what about all of my efforts so far this year to balance my income with my projected expenses, my new budget? I could have decided to forget all of that and take the risk of having to dip into capital that I want to conserve, taking the opportunity to relieve myself of a lot of work and yes, worry, in order to live more fully. But I am not much of a risk taker. I tend to minimize risk in my decisions.

The religious/spiritual aspect of the risk issue is summed up in the simplistic dictum: Let go and let God. Touchstones is somewhat less simplistic: Let me not be so tied to what I have or to what I want that I cannot lean on God’s love and take a risk for growth. I just realized, while writing that quote, that I have missed the point! The risk to take is the risk for growth.

I am remembering some thirty plus years ago quantifying risk as a mathematical function of probability of occurrence and magnitude of potential loss; i.e., what does one stand to lose, and what are the chances of losing it?

What if I tried to apply that analysis to involvement in a relationship? The potential loss seems to be of some degree of freedom. Why is that so? Do we not have control over how much freedom we give up? For me, it seems that I have always felt powerless to maintain my freedom in a relationship. Looking back at even my best relationship, my twenty-one years with Patsy (this is hard, trying to be honest here), my need for her to love me drove me to be much more concerned for her wishes, her pleasure, her happiness. I tended toward the romantic your wish is my command attitude, even to the point of my deciding (without asking her) what her wishes were. Over the years she taught me that doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is self-centered and destructive to a relationship because it assumes what others want is what you want.

Going back to let go and let God, I think I understand this phrase to mean that I must let go of fear and trust God to be with me while I take the risk involved in opening myself up to growth-promoting experiences, i.e., moving me along toward becoming all that God created me to be. I sense that is the truth.

That leaves me with the question, In what way do I want to grow today? How would I like to move toward becoming just a little bit more of what God created me to be? I don’t know. I think I need a compass.

February 16, 2003: Falling in Love

I’ve been reading Sarah Ban Breathnach’s book every day, and this morning she continues with the romantic theme for February. She is speaking specifically to women, of course, but I can relate to her message. She asks about our feelings and actions when we are falling (or have already fallen) in love. How do we feel when we do what we want to do for ourselves in order to enjoy our beloved? Then she points out that we don’t need a beloved in order to do those things. For instance, I can dress attractively, put on aftershave (as I did the other day) and enjoy how I smell, go to an intimate restaurant taking along a good book for company, file my nails, floss my teeth, use a scented deodorant, listen to love songs and sing or hum them to myself. And as Sarah suggests, find myself smiling at strangers, doing extra good deeds or being kinder, because you just feel so good that you want everyone else to feel that way too.

I am remembering my feelings and actions when I was falling in love with Patsy twenty-three years ago, and am trying to separate out what I can re-create that does not depend on her or some other potential lover. Those things that I listed above certainly do not depend on someone else for the doing; but which comes first, the feeling or the doing? The chicken or the egg? My addition of the chicken or the egg suggests that I know there is no answer. The question is irrelevant.

I remember almost dancing down the street in Manhattan after my last meeting on a Friday afternoon in 1980 repeating to myself, I am going to see Patsy. I was headed for my hotel to check out and catch a plane for Denver where she would be waiting for me. A weekend together!

And I remember driving east on I-10 in my old VW camper, singing Desperado along with Judy Collins (He’s driving in tonight from [California]). I sang The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye with Roberta Flack, and with Linda Ronstadt, Love Is a Rose. (...and you’d better not pick it; you lose your love when you say the word ‘mine’.) This singing was accompanied by feelings of both anticipation and desire, as well as wistfulness from the realization that this affair might not work out for the best in the long run. But it was so exciting in the present. Riding my bike up the hill on the way to work in Santa Monica I imagined Patsy waiting for me at the top (although, of course she would not be there; she was hundreds of miles away in Tucson), but I used my imagination to drive my legs to mount the hill.

I just noticed that my eyes are wet from the remembering. Which reminds me that yesterday, as I was deleting some old letters from the document file on the computer, I came across one that contained enough of Patsy’s thoughts about her life with cancer that I couldn’t delete it. It had Floating in the River appended to it, the essay Patsy wrote for The Cancer Monologue Project. And as I re-read it I cried hard, again. Reading her words has always generated tears.

I am tired of writing, but reluctant to give up the feelings. Also, I am reluctant to stop without coming to some conclusion. I can’t bring back the past. I couldn’t bring it back even when Patsy was alive and with me every day. But those feelings of being in love are such highs—so sweet, and often bittersweet. How I would like to have them again! How they would enrich my life!

So what if life is the sweetheart? Can I fall in love with life? Sarah suggests I can. All I need to do is to begin to woo life. I will probably have to act before I feel the feelings. But if Sarah is right, the feelings will come if I act as if I already felt them.

So how do I start? First, yoga. I have to keep my body in good shape if I am going to be an effective lover of life, to get the slouch, that aged stoop, out of my posture. Then the shower I was not going to bother with today. No, a bath—a long, luxurious, soaking bath with fragrance in the water and bubbles, and candles burning. Yes, that will take more time, but what the hell, it’s Sunday. Then a fancy brunch—a smoothie, fruit salad, pancakes and sausage. And maybe some of the old tapes on the stereo—love songs to sing along with. It’s only 9:30 a.m. Let’s do it!

February 18, 2003: Loving in Sorrow

I seem to be dealing with a lot of strange feelings lately. Maybe opening myself the day before yesterday to the gamut, from dancing to crying, allowed everything to come to the surface.

I find it hard to describe the strange feelings—not surprising, given my limited vocabulary for describing feelings. There is a sense of aloneness with a love/hate response to it. The freedom of my aloneness feels good and isolation seems attractive, but I fear the danger of un-involvement and possible depression. I realize that, even though I have this sense of release and relief from the expectations of others which feels freeing, I am not without the responsibilities of relationships—with Suzannah, Patsy’s daughter from her first marriage; my own three kids, Eric, Karen and Ross; Patsy’s sisters; the friends who have been so supportive; my brothers…And my feelings about that are very mixed—anger that I can never get free of responsibility for relationships (Lord knows that I have tried over the years by ignoring them), and gratitude for the relationships that are there to support me and to enrich my life.

I am also becoming increasingly aware that I am reaching the end of all the tasks that needed to be taken care of as a result of Patsy’s death. Oh, there are still a number of them left, but none seem particularly urgent now. And that is leaving a hole (a vacuum?), which is an opportunity, but for what? To do something new? To experience life at a deeper level? To seek out my passion? To romance the ordinary a la Sarah Ban Breathnach? Or to just sit and read escapist books?

God, the snow is beautiful as it falls. Thank you for such a blessing. I have also been feeling some joy this morning (not a strange feeling, but an uncommon one), singing In the Early Morning Rain (although it is snow), and Morning Has Broken. But also, in the back of my mind, another song is bouncing around, one that I never entirely learned from the Judy Collins tape:

"If somehow you