This morning in my A.A. meeting I spoke about having lost Bob, and my emotions came to the surface and I became teary as I spoke about this remarkable man. Our history as friends goes quite awhile back, nearly 30 years, and I’ve had the pleasure of knowing him on several different levels throughout the years. I remember giving him a ride home to his abode in Fullerton on the back of my motorcycle – that was the first time I think we really got to know one another, and it was a process of knowing one another that has continued for years.
Bob had a sense of humor as well as a deep concern for worldly affairs. He would write email after email about the political scenario, world events – and though he lived in Argentina, he cared about what is and was happening in the United States. As I was involved in my own turmoil of adjusting to homelessness, adjusting from being a computerphile to having one that I cracked the screen on in my backpack, we kept touch as I’d go to internet coffee shops and libraries to use computers. Our friendship was maintained by writing to one another, sometimes serious, sometimes jocular as he had a terrific sense of humor. Bob was perhaps a paradox in that he could write and be so serious, and then write some wonderful jokes. Many of his jokes I’ve told others.
But it is not a source of jokes that I will miss (and I surely will), but what happened for me was important and helped me get in touch with my spiritual side. Bob was very much about spirit, devoted his life to teaching yoga, making pilgrimages to India, and took his teaching skills to Argentina as he was following his path with a heart. I remember him coming over to my apartment prior to selling me his little blue VW bug festooned with sayings and stickers about yoga! I’d put together an assemblage of news clippings (I think it’s called a “kalauge”) and he remarked about Paramahansa Yogananda’s inclusion in my “artwork.”
Perhaps it was through our mutual adoration of Paramanha Yogananda that we connected on a deeper, often unstated, way. I studied yoga with a teacher named Kalidas at the Yoga Center of Costa Mesa, both the hatha postures and some of the higher yogas (raja yoga). When I told Bob about him, he laughed and told me how they had been together in the ashram and studied under Yogananda.
Last week we wrote about “saints,” what makes for one and I quipped that perhaps I ought to apply for an “unsaint” status! He kidded back and told me how it was his impression that to be a saint, one first had to consider making Catholicism his religion. And, of course, most saints are only voted to have that status after they have passed away. He signed the note “St. Bob.” And here one week later, his dear wife, Susana, wrote me of first his illness and then subsequently his passing.
As I’d prayed as best I knew how to have God intervene and help Bob to recover, I felt a combination of emotions when I learned that he had died. I was once again angry at God for not granting my wishes and prayers. It was part and parcel of the same emotions I felt when my mother was ill with lung cancer and I desperately went to her minister at her church. I asked him, “What should I do? How can I face her and know she is terminally ill and not fall apart emotionally?”
He responded and encouraged me to just let myself feel the emotions and express them. What good advice that was!
Perhaps in the A.A. meeting this morning, I used it to feel and express emotions that I might have done with a therapist earlier in my journey towards being a therapist myself. I felt good about expressing my feelings, that it was and is part of my emotional package that is me. I find I’m also a bit angry, snapped at a cashier unnecessarily here at the coffee shop, and I guess I might say that I feel a “chip on my shoulder” with regard to having not been heard by God.
What is my quest is to quiet the needs of my ego, wishes and wants, and learn to accept the wisdom and will of God as I have come (and am coming) to know him. Bob’s lifetime here on the planet involved him following his spiritual path, and as he chose to do that, the woman he chose to be his partner was delightful and he told me so in many ways. One terrific picture I recall (and they often are worth a thousand words) was of the two of them dancing in what looked like his library – many of the books he had read as part of his doctoral degree studies.
His light-heartedness along with his deep understanding of life with its joys, sorrows and mysteries are what I will remember about him. He was a friend in the deepest sense of the word, and I thank God for having him be part of my life, to be part of my mentoring process – and encouraging along with questioning when I chose yet another way to go in my path of careers and not finishing the one before.
“One door closes and the other opens.” Tuesday I am speaking to the director of a homeless shelter about teaching a basic yoga class (one of the things Bob encouraged me strongly to do), and it would seem that the A.A. Promises are beginning to occur in my life these days. And when I consider the people who have contributed to my life in the way Bob did (I call those friends my “A Team), I feel such gratitude for him and for having a “family” of people this morning with whom I could let my feelings show.
I think this process of grieving is so very important, important in that once I grieve a loss, I “reconnect” with the spirit and memories (good and otherwise) of the person who has gone on into the world of spirit that remains ahead of all of us. I believe that those of us who have been fortunate enough to do their “inner work” may see a deepr connection with others and have an attitude towards one’s own journey forward into the unknown world of the hereafter that may be different, and in a good way, than others do.
