After Losing Everything, What Remains?

“Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Music is the silence between the notes.”

Claude Debussy

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I live in Redding, Calif., where, along with a thousand of our neighbors, our home was rudely and suddenly consumed by a wall of fearless flame and summarily reduced to rambling heaps of sad ashes and shattered shards of her previous pride, scattered and strewn about carelessly in the solemn space that once comprised our ordered, routine and predictable life; and the only word I can use to describe our collective nightmare is surreal; an intense, fantastic, irrational dream, a horror that should not exist…and yet it does. Improbable, unstoppable, ungraspable.

A trio of cypress trees stand sentry in front of the remains of the Craig home after it was destroyed by the Carr Fire.

Surreal.

How do we do it? How do we carry on? How do we cope with the loss of our splendid, secluded sanctuaries; how do we process the monstrous, malicious murder of what was once the sweet, safe embrace of home; that precious place that nurtured and mirrored our family’s shared self, the sacred space that retained and reflected the memory of us and our love?

How do we let go of the objects that connect us to our deepest values and dearest loves?

How do we rise from this? How do we find wholeness when our souls have been ripped in shreds and we float aimlessly like listless boats, unmoored from focus, purpose and design? Where is the sense in this journey when the path abruptly ends? Where is the coming back, the returning, the repairing and restoring of what lies broken within that we can’t see but can feel crying, inconsolable, betrayed?

The memories of lost parts stab like knives in the dark of night: the videotapes of our children, my mother’s childhood Bible, the brass bottle opener I bought in Germany 40 years ago while still a teenager, hitchhiking, happy and free.

This special beer opener was found in the ash of the Craigs’ burned home.

The box of Hummel figurines from when we lived in Germany in the ’50s and ’60s. Thousands of books, CDs and record albums collected over a lifetime of inspiration and learning. They keep coming to the mind like ghosts, the long line of cherished treasures that held such marvelous meaning and formed the foundation of us, our unique history – who we’d been and who we became – all erased with such ferocious, violent ease like tissue paper in a barrel of burning trash.

And me? Utterly lost and dead inside. Or am I? Is this true? Is it? My home is gone, and all it contained, but am I gone? Am I lost? I’m still here, aren’t I? Aren’t I?

I once found myself pausing in the pristine perfection of an alpine meadow on thin skis, long wooden blades happily holding me secure above a depth of several feet of carefully piled snow that blanketed the surrounding terrain while crisp winter turned my breath into puffs of vaporous smoke and I marveled at the majesty of it all beneath the brilliant blue sky bowled above me.

But what entranced me most was the silence, how it held everything in its spell, how even my shouts were no match for its towering presence. Noises came and went. A bird cry. A barking dog. A child’s laugh. Distant announcements erupting and falling away, ephemeral, impermanent, and frail. The silence stayed and stayed. It never wavered. It remained. Constant, eternal, true.

In the midst of my pain, the silence remains. I get quiet sometimes and listen to it beyond my sorrow and loss. I have my despair and shame. I have the unfillable void. I have the self-blaming thoughts. I am crystal clear on what I should have done, what I could have done, what I would have done if I only knew what is now seared in my soul and mind. And some part of me will never forgive me for the choices I made when time was short and the fire near.

I suffer deep, fathomless pain that would have swallowed me whole by now if I did not have my sacred others to rescue me from me: my wife, daughters, siblings, cousins, friends, clients, church and yes, my insurance company. In the midst of callous destruction and incomprehensible loss I have found an abundance of life all around me and genuine love. More love than I knew was there.

Hard times are here for many of us now. I will fall back into its darkness repeatedly in the months to come, I’m sure. I know the drill of loss, its relentless returning and burning. But I also know none of it is bigger than the silence of great love that surrounds and fills us all. The silence that holds the world, our souls and hearts. The silence that whispers I am. The silence that is bigger than the stories we tell ourselves or the sadness that threatens to bury us in its hopelessness and fear. The silence within that is always there to turn to. The silence that wraps around a friend’s words of love and shines from their tear-filled eyes. The silence and warmth we feel when someone hugs us or squeezes our hand.

All of this remains. It is who and what we are. We can never lose this. Fire can’t burn it away. It is what all our stuff comes from and points to. The silence. The love. The truth of being. The connections we all share with one another and our community. The commitment we have to one another and our common, confident and inevitable recovery. We are here for one another. We can’t ever lose that. We never will.

A message emerged from the ashes. “Believe.”

We will arise. It is already happening. We have lost much. And yet we are gaining more. We just need to trust the silence, one another and ourselves. We will arise because it is what we do. It is what we must do. It is why we’re here. To bless and be blessed and never forget what is most real in all of us. The unburnable, indestructible, unspeakable, silent beauty of improbable, unstoppable, ungraspable love. Trust it. Embrace it. Believe it. Be it. And savor it. Now. Here. Always.