Three Year Memoriam

Our Parisian Honeymoon, July 1996

photo D. Sippel

Martijn died on July 25, 2008, three years ago. During these three years I have deeply and fully experienced the shock of my significant loss. Now, on the eve of this anniversary, I can say that I have passed the cocoon stage of grief's depression, emerging like a butterfly to taste the nectar of life. Previously I mused about the relationship of deep rest to depressed. Though my body has been in physical motion during this last year, relocating from my cherished Maastricht to my new home in sub-tropical Pompano Beach, my emotions continued in deep rest - allowing time to process. Now I am resurfacing. I gulp the moist air, plant gardens in Martijn's honor, create nurseries for Monarchs and Gulf Fritillary caterpillars who soar as butterflies to remind me that this is what he wanted for me.

It is time to organize and perhaps memorialize in a different way. I hope to write books, stories of loss and regeneration that at once capture the uniqueness of our love yet speak to the universality of all love.

Granted the creativity, I hope to distill and transmit to many, the quiet wisdom and profound generosity that defined Martijn's life and even his death. He managed in dying to help others feel alive and unafraid of that which we undeniably each shall experience.

Dear friends and readers, I want most of all that you know I move on a stronger, deeper, more fulfilled individual because the "Usness" Martijn so believed in is REAL. All you need do is to take quiet times, meditative moments, allowing yourself to understand that there is no life without death, no joy without sorrow, no movement without stillness. And should your life be graced with a love so transforming to be called an Usness, rejoice even when life parts you, cleaves you in twain, for the resulting pain is nothing more than a gift of memoriam. If you are in balance and can find your center, the pain will melt leaving you even more Whole as a Two in One.

I repeat here (please see: http://schaefermillennium3.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-usness.html) the translation of the final note Martijn left for me. It is a passage from his beloved philosopher, Ludwig Binswanger from which he was intending to use to complete his thesis about art and love beyond time and space. Read it slowly and rest assured love lasts:

But how are things when death does not meet

You but Me?

Even then, as your You, I am not dying;

even then the Usness in love does not decay.

I can only die as an individual, but not as the You of an I.

When I die as an individual, then yet in dying,

I am more than ever Yours, part of our Usness.

As I received “my life” from your hands anew –

from yours as the hands of the lover

as much as only through you,

the being in Usness “opened up” for me –

I put it back into your hands when dying.

I do not die the “heavy” death of an isolated “I”,

but say goodbye to you knowing

that even in this parting is still presence

because the lover as someone who was here

is still here in the sense of the existence of the Usness,

a Here that rips open the depths and abysses of existence even more;

that calls it even more into the eternal presence of love

and allows it to exist within that love.