Kalina is.
Many would say the title above is grammatically incorrect.
That once a being experiences the event the world calls “death”, they are to be referred to in the past tense. In this case, “Kalina was.”
I am unable to do that.
Not because I am yet in acceptance of a dear friend recently moving through that experience. I know intimately that she did move through death, as she did it while being held tightly in my arms. The reason I am unable to refer to Kalina in the past tense is because I am experiencing a greater truth. Kalina is here. Present. And not only present, but present with great agency.
When a presence has such prominence, that it has potency to continuously, moment by moment, impact the course of one’s life — how we must now see what truly is, what we must now take responsibility for, who we must now forgive, what we must now ruthlessly cut away, what we must now choose into no matter how uncomfortable, what agreements we must now break, how quickly we must now act— is that being a “was” or an “is”?
If it is acting so powerfully in our now, then surely it must be an “is”.
Kalina is.
Over our journey together, especially those months when advanced ovarian cancer moved her closer to that place where the world shelves us as “was”, especially those final weeks when I had the privilege of serving her as caregiver in the 5–11PM shift, Kalina placed her self in me. Again, at this point many might seek to correct my phrasing and politely suggest a change, (as if I wasn’t purposeful in the deviance of my choice of words) with, “Well, you don’t mean her “self”, but perhaps her thoughts, her ideas, her wisdom..?”, and then smile and nod as if doing that will somehow help me see the error of my ways. And again, while all those things were also placed in me from Kalina, it would be disingenuous for me to abide with the correction. I am not trying to be contentious, just being as true as I can be to what I am experiencing. Based on that experience, I just cannot define her self as the world might — as the baby-fresh post-chemo hair on her head, the toes swollen from disease-induced lymphedema, the sharp nose that would peek out from her down jacket collar as we’d walk through the mist of Venice Beach nights reversing the falling dominos of catastrophic thinking, the petite bird-like frame that would teach me and our mutual friend, Sandra, qigong under Kalina’s favorite Sequoias high in the Sierras. It’s true, she did wear those things — the hair, toes, nose, and frame — she wore them proudly and fully— but they were not her self. Because the self cannot be the common and passive adornments shared by millions of other bodies that in the end make no real difference in the world. Instead, the self must be that uniquely acting agent, the version of which only we have, that is truly causal to our unique creation here, and causal to the nature of our impact on the relationships, and the hearts and minds, of all the other selves we somehow touch.
Kalina’s self did not waste time impacting those areas in other selves. Especially when her illness went parabolic. To spend ten minutes with her at that point was to be changed by her.
My blessing was to have been given permission by her to spend more than ten minutes, and to thereby experience her self taking root in me like the sequoias she adored with growth ring after growth ring of wisdom still expanding inside me. I will be sharing that wisdom here because it feels much too valuable for just me to have, and so that you might have the gift of Kalina’s self as well, and its wisdom make your life an even richer, more profound experience, as it is mine.
My very first and very last conversations with Kalina were both about “letting go”.
We had been mere acquaintances for a long time until one day, many years ago, she asked if she could get some help on something. A day later we were walking around the pond of the Lake Shrine north of Los Angeles. Kalina was struggling inside on whether to fully leave the security of a previous vocation and to go all chips in on her true love, being a therapist and helping people heal. Helping people in crossroads like this is a lot of what I do. As we walked, I really didn’t have to say a lot. I just had to reflect the wisdom that was already coming through her which was to let go of her ego’s fear of uncertainty, to let go of the ego’s false polarity of “it’s this way or that way”, and to simply trust her self and build an off-ramp from the old and on-ramp to new. I now see how elegantly reflective this first conversation was of our last so many years later.
We became closer when she joined a gathering I had started called “Rumi’s Field” — based on the words in Rumi’s famous poem, “…out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” When Kalina was diagnosed, she would come every week like a soldier returning from the front, complete with burns, wounds, and the stories of those who didn’t make it, to give a personal update, sometimes in tears and sometimes in joy. True to the purpose of the gathering, we would wrap her in healing love to bring her back to the truth of her self not being her disease, and her fears about the future not being the reality of the now — her being seen by a circle of souls and surrounded by nothing but loving. And when we brought our own “stuff” to the circle, she would bring such phenomenal insights and healing to us — never through advice or dogma, but through Kalina’s true super power: insatiable curiosity and inquiry.
After Rumi’s she and I would take long walks to talk about where she was inside with her disease. I had been there in my own cancer experience with a terminal prognosis at age 18 that I somehow managed to squeak through. What amazed me is even during the darkest conversation, her super power of curiosity about everything would interrupt multiple times with Kalina stopping wide-eyed, and exclaiming something like, “Wow. Kirk — look at that tree, see how it bends over that way from the wind, but its leaves face the other way for the sun — isn’t that the most astounding thing?!”
Those wonderful bursts of super-power curiosity never diminished — even as I began to do my caregiving shifts with her. While 95% of these shifts were spent tending to her immediate and physical needs — from changing bandages, to helping her bath, to administering pain meds, all of which was the true gift and privilege of being there, the conversations were more like short, beautiful, random shooting stars. However brief in their birth, I can feel their diasporas widening in me and others even as I write these words.
There was the time I told her there were so many people out there loving her, wanting to play a role in helping her. And she, always the scientist, in full Kalina-style, challenged me on my statement of there being more people caring for her than anyone would normally have in a similar situation. I stood courageously in my position nonetheless. And so, seeing that as a fun challenge, she then asked me why there would be more for her. I said I thought because she always made people feel incredibly heard and seen, and always made them feel loved exactly as they are. Always the scientist, she demanded an example. I shared a time from Rumi’s Field when someone spoke of a very abusive childhood and being so constantly told they were trash, they began to believe it. Kalina was present and looked at this person intensely in silence for a while, then smiled and said,
“Thank you.”
“Thank you for what? I was just telling a horrible story…” replied the person.
Kalina said, “I am thanking you because you have totally changed how I see my world now. You were told you were trash and that you came to believe you were trash. Yet I am looking at you and all I see is such blinding inner and outer beauty, and how I never knew trash could be so beautiful and perfect. I know now that whenever I see trash I’ll look for the beauty and perfection in it and see it. What a gift you’ve given me — a world where even the trash is all beautiful!”. The person lit up with a giant smile. They knew they had been so seen by Kalina, and beamed with a new sense of worth in giving something of value back to her.
Kalina smiled at that example. We both knew I had her with that.
Then was the time I arrived and Kalina was clearly waiting for me as she was up in her wheelchair and raring to engage. She asked me to close the door and sit down. She got right to it — right to the biggest it:
“So, Kirk, I am tired and I want to die.”
This was huge for Kalina to express, because she was not afraid of the fight and never wanted to talk about surrender of any kind. Somewhat in shock, I said, “I understand, Kalina. Is there anything I can do for you in this moment?” Then she said, in that very Kalina superpower curiosity way, “Well, I do have some questions…”
“Oh. Ok, What are they?”
“How do I do it? Is it a choice I have to make inside? Like, NOW I choose to go? Do I actively have to stop loving life? Do I actively have to let go of life? Or is it something else entirely? How does one have this happen? Is there something I need to do?”
I said that maybe there was nothing she needed to do. That like sleep or birth or the emergence of branches on her favorite Sequoias, it would simply come when it was time to come. Perhaps it was just about letting go and allowing whatever is to happen to happen when it is meant to. That perhaps she could let go entirely of the burden of it, as the Creative Intelligence in her and all around her may have all that handled. She asked about what “letting go” means here, and as an answer we did a guided visualization together that had helped me once with letting go. We launched ourselves from a camp as a kayaker on a river, first paddling furiously, then seeing we could take the paddle out of the water and the river would take us exactly where we needed to go with ease and grace, and then soon casting the paddle away entirely, and then slipping out of the boat so we can be in the river, and then out of our wetsuits, and then our bodies, and then free of everything until we finally are simply a wonderful bouncing water molecule in the river that soon arrives in an infinite ocean of loving and compassion. At which point she opened her eyes, peered at me with a devilish smile and asked in great Kalina style, “Ok, but now, how do I get back to camp?” She chuckled at the look on my face. And she took great joy as an answer emerged in her for her own question. “Perhaps the molecule makes it to back to the surface of the ocean of love, and when the Light hits it just right, it evaporates and soars high up into the clouds which return to the land and one comes back in a raindrop to the earth, to your camp, or as a human, or as a possum (her Burning Man “playa name” was “Awesome Possum”), to be whatever you want, maybe… ohhh — a Sequoia?!” Her eyes opened wide in glee at that idea.
One day she spoke of her cancer experience creating a new level of importance to living one’s heart and calling. I thought I got it, but it was a little hard to understand given her very advanced condition and the heavy pain meds, so I reached out and held her hand, and started to say, “Kalina, I think what I heard you say was — ” And she grabbed her hand away from mine, pointed her finger up as if to say “Now you listen to me fella!”, and as clear as a bell, scolded, “No. I don’t need to hear what you think you heard me say. Don’t waste our time, Kirk. I want to hear how it impacts YOU.”
There was no escape from her. I had no choice but to trust the sacredness of the moment and answered honestly even though it was quite uncomfortable for me: “Truthfully Kalina, when I leave here after a night of changing your bandages, helping you into the bath, helping you put on warm clean clothes, making sure you are drinking and eating, giving you pain meds, at first the divine intimacy and realness of it has me feel so connected to the love and the divine inside me, and then when I hit the 101 Freeway and the rest of my life comes back in my mind and all the things I do that are so distant from that and I actually feel nauseous, I feel a revulsion.” Kalina was sitting like a monk on the bed, hands holding shins, eyes closed, nodding a little, with a furrowed brow of contemplation. She then opened those giant greenish eyes, looked right through me, and asked a question that, thank God, has not yet stopped ruthlessly pruning my life:
“Kirk, how long will you keep devoting your precious life’s-energy to sustain the illusion of importance to things that simply aren’t?”
She held my shattered gaze long enough to see the truth of her words alter every cell in my body, and then her eyes slowly closed again. What had to be said and done was said and done.
Then came my last conversation with Kalina. She greeted me with, “Kirk, I have a much better understanding of “letting go” than the one that you said last time.” I said, “Well, that doesn’t surprise me, Kalina.” She said, “All these people who say “It’s ok to let go, it’s ok to leave here now, it’s ok to go” etc, etc., they have it so wrong — it’s actually so alienating. That’s not what letting go is about. Yesterday when I had that bad fall and hit the ground, the pain was so bad that I left my body. I was hovering right over it. I felt a sense of bliss and deep compassion for that body on the floor, and felt I could leave it. But then I felt a need to move back into it, as uncomfortable as it was, because I had a sense of things still yet to experience. In that moment I knew that “letting go” is not about surrendering to death or letting go of life. Kirk, know this — letting go is trusting that there is purpose in whatever is yet to be experienced, endured, enjoyed or imparted. Letting go is not a way to die, letting go is a way to live, it’s a way to be.”
I told her I had never heard a better understanding.
On what would be my last shift, Kalina sat on the bed next to me. Something was different. She would not let me give her any pain meds even though we had gotten far beyond the time when she should. Clenched teeth that she displayed with a certain satisfaction made that an impossibility when I would lift the syringe to try. She would not let me help her lay down nor lift her feet off the ground. She would not allow anything that would diminish her being as present as she could be. I did not understand this as it was actually happening. That would come later. I was only given space to be present. Soon she would reach out to feel where my knees were. Soon she would decide to rest her head on my knees. Soon she would get in a position where I had no choice but to hold her tightly with one hand so she would not fall, and to caress her forehead with the other. Soon she would fall asleep for a while, and then her self quietly leave her body.
Later, when I looked back on what I can only call her masterful orchestration that evening, I entered a place of total awe for this person. What a warrior. She knew the time was arriving and in her new understanding of letting go, she became aware that there was one more thing here to be experienced, and given her unstoppable and insatiable curiosity for all things, there was simply no way she was going to be dulled, diluted, or diminished for the journey into the next beautiful and mysterious stand of Sequoias just ahead. Her unstoppable and insatiable curiosity now running wild with the spectacle of what must dwell there.
Her unstoppable and insatiable self now running wild in me.
And perhaps now in you.
Kalina is.
,
