I was posting regularly, getting Temple Mercury off the ground, and then I just up and disappeared on you. Here’s what happened:
It has been a rip-roaring six months, let me tell you!
In mid-February my mom, with whom I lived and whose caregiver I had been for three years, had to go to the hospital because a scab on her scalp would not stop bleeding. It turns out that it was extremely infected and she had to stay in the hospital, fighting the infection, for more than a month. During that time, she got extremely depressed and decided to stop eating. Nothing I nor any doctors nor her friends nor even her church’s bishop could say or do would make her eat. In fact, the more we pushed and pried, the more stubborn she got. Nonetheless, the hospital deemed her safe to be discharged, so toward the end of March I had her placed in a board and care facility because she had gotten too weak from malnutrition for me to take care of her at home.
This time was so stressful for me with her illness and all the terrible emotions involved in watching her kill herself through slow starvation that I began to wonder what happens when my body and/or brain just couldn’t take it anymore. After another trip from the board and care back to the emergency room, I remember holding my phone in my hand, shaking, and thinking what happens when it is literally too much?
A day after I got her settled in a new board and care facility, I found out.
On March 23rd, I went to the emergency room with severe chest and abdominal pain. It was the worst pain I have ever felt by far. They gave me morphine and fentanyl and more morphine and more fentanyl and nothing even remotely touched the pain. I was praying they would just knock me out. I didn’t care what they did to me, I just wanted desperately to be unconscious. It turns out I had a perforated ulcer and had to have emergency surgery that night. I spent three days in the hospital crying because I felt I had let everyone, especially my mom down. What would she think if I just stopped showing up to visit her? Would she feel abandoned? Would that make her give up on life even more completely than she already had? Would me getting so severely sick cause her to die?
The day after I came home from the hospital, I had to put my mom on hospice.
Her church friends were troopers and visited her almost every day while I was in the hospital and convalescing where it was too painful to ride in a car the half hour it would take to get to her. They said they explained to her what happened to me, but when I finally was able to visit her, she said she didn’t remember them saying anything about it. I’m sure they did and it just didn’t register. She was still refusing to eat and her mind was steadily leaving her.
By the end of April, she was beyond recovery. I sat with her in her room playing her favorite hymns and Beach Boys songs, crying at her bedside. She had been moaning in her stupor when I came in and the music seemed to calm her down, but I was not calm. I couldn’t believe it had come to this and all because she so stubbornly refused to eat. By that point, she wasn’t even drinking water. They had to use tiny sponges to wet her mouth. She survived on nothing but that, morphine, and Ativan for more than two weeks.
I had our dog Kismet with me that day, whom she dearly loved. One of the last things I did before I left her was hold her hand with our pup’s paw in between. We did that at home sometimes and called it “the circle of love.” I had this feeling that would be our last circle of love in this life.
Two days later I got the call. “Mom passed sometime in the night.” I knew it was coming, I thought I had prepared myself, but still the news was devastating. I sat up in my predawn lit bedroom and sobbed. My heart was broken. My mother who had professed to love me so much successfully killed herself by starvation. No one can prepare you for that. The aftermath of losing a parent is complicated enough, as is losing the person for whom you were a caregiver, but being the survivor of a loved one’s suicide adds another layer of indescribable pain. How did I fail her? What more could I or anyone have said or done? How could I have reached her? What would have been that one magic thing that would break through? Was it my fault because I got sick?
My fault my fault my fault…
I am only now beginning to let that go.
At her memorial service, everyone shared stories of love and humor. Had my mom only known how much she meant to people, would that have made the difference? We all tried our mightiest, but it just wasn’t enough.
As the grief settled down on me in May, I began to have extremely painful complications from my surgery and also, cruelly, I began to have severe pain in my teeth. I was falling apart. Again my answer to the question: what happens when my body and mind physically can’t take it anymore?
May and June were agony. I had two more trips to the emergency room. On the last trip the doctor said he was “out of ideas” which is an extremely scary thing to hear from a medical professional when you are in pain and distress. During this period, I also had seven, count them seven, dental procedures. Most of which were also very painful. I would just sit on my couch with some rerun or other on and cry from pain. There was nothing else I could do. Medicine was “out of ideas.” Between the tooth pain and stomach pain, I lost thirty pounds and my hair began falling out. I saw no light, no end to it, next to no hope.
But the worst of all of this?
I lost my faith.
I had started this Temple Mercury dedicated to helping people connect with their gods in “joy, gratitude, and passionate faith” and here I was with a faith all burned to ashes. I thought about my beloved Temple during this time, but how could I even begin to approach this work when I was faithless myself? How could I reconcile the immense amount of pain with the idea I had of gods who really loved me and took care of me at every moment and in every detail? How could I begin to trust them again… ever?
I believed my Temple, along with my faith, had also been burned to ashes and would never rise again.
The loss of my faith was by far the worst of it. My faith and my joy in my faith was my foundation. It was the solid earth I walked upon. It was my every breath and heartbeat. I didn’t know who I was or even how to begin living without it. I would try to get in the headspace where I could open my channel and my heart to my gods, then searing pain and grief would flood in and all I could see was that pain. The faces and voices of the gods seemed to be completely beyond my power to see and hear. And why would I want to when it appeared they had been so callous and so cruel to allow the illness of my stomach and my mouth to mount to such an extreme at the exact same time as my mother was dying her terrible death?
But I couldn’t live faithless for long. The nothingness of it was too much to bear. I began to seriously consider ending my life. One day, suicide was all I could think about. “Intrusive thoughts” is what they call it. I was obsessed with it. My mind raced with it and would not be still. I had to do something or die.
I chose to do yoga, which had worked mental health miracles in my life before. And then I chose to say the rosary prayers I wrote to Demeter and Persephone, (even though I wasn’t sure any of my gods were listening or cared anymore), because I know prayers work miracles. And then I chose to go back to twelve step meetings, as the twelve steps had also worked miracles.
I needed a miracle to keep me alive, so I reached for one, and kept reaching, and a miracle did begin to happen.
Before too long, I felt spiritually strong enough to do a small spell in the spirit of Lammas, which is, perhaps weirdly, my favorite Sabbat. I got the basis for this ritual from the book, “Wicca, A Year and a Day” by Timothy Roderick. I highly recommend it as a basic primer for Pagan and magical practice. I had started into it again because I felt I needed just that. Basics. If I were to rise from the ashes, I had to start from the ashy soil.
The spell is about bringing blessings into your home, but I adapted it a bit. In the spell, you are to light a brown candle and walk it across your threshold with a piece of produce that represented qualities you wish to manifest in your life. I didn’t have a brown candle, I had an orange one, and I didn’t have any fresh produce, but I did have a new oracle deck that was delivered to the front porch that hadn’t entered the house yet. So I used what was on hand, which is the best sort of magic, and I did the spell this way:
I stood outside on the path leading up to my front door and lit my orange candle, saying hail to Hestia as I always do when lighting a candle as she is the Goddess of the Spiritual Flame without whom no spiritually would be possible. We humans wouldn’t even think of it.
So I lit my little orange chime candle in the name of Hestia, then turned my mind toward all my gods as I would need each and every one for what I was about to ask, which was that my faith be restored. I stood there on the path and asked that what I bring into the house was a restored faith.
A breeze came up and blew the candle out. I could not get it lit again and my heart fell. So this was the state of my faith? Dead and cold.
But then I had the thought, perhaps step up on the porch where the breeze may not be able to reach you, which I did. I flicked and flicked my cheap blue 7-11 lighter until I finally got a little flicker just enough to re-light the candle. I asked again for my faith to be restored, grabbed the new oracle deck, and started to step across the threshold. As I did, the flame appeared to go out again, and again my heart fell.
But just then I had a thought like a flash:
My old faith COULD NOT be restored. My old faith really WAS in ashes, and if the faith was of such a quality that it could all be burned down, perhaps that’s not the faith I wanted anyway. What I needed and what it was time for was a NEW, stronger faith which could only happen if I let go of the old.
I gave up on re-lighting the candle and stepped across the threshold. The flame came up again as if by magic, which surely it was. The flame of my faith had been there all along, I simply had to get out of the wind a little, (out of immediate peril and pain in life), and let go of what I thought it was in order to allow it to be something new, better, and potentially much stronger. Maybe even fireproof.
From that day, my new faith has continued to grow. I still believe in the multitudes of gods across all pantheons and have special love and affection for the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon. Hermes Mercury is still my best friend and beloved guide. I still turn to my gods for help and direction, but I believe even more strongly than I used to in a unifying All Goddess/God that is everything and everyone—human, god, animal, plant, cosmos and everything else, and that I should seek to align myself utterly with Her will and Her ways, the way the gods themselves do.
Hermes Mercury once told me that the gods do pray. And to whom do they pray? To Her. Goddess/God. The One. The All.
And that has led me back to Temple Mercury and to realizing the vision I was inspired to write at the beginning of the year: Serving our fellows and helping them connect with their gods in joy, gratitude, and passionate faith.
I can pursue this vision honestly again as I have again found joy, my heart is once more full of gratitude, and my faith-passion has reignited in full flame just as my little orange candle did when I crossed the threshold that early August evening.
I know what it is to be reborn. (Am I born again Pagan? Let’s not go exactly THERE… )
So… was all the pain worth it?
I’m not far enough away from it yet to say yes, though I hope to be one day. I hope one day this new faith will burn so brightly and become so deeply joyful that I will be able to say yes, all that pain was worth it. But until I can, I am willing to put that question aside and move forward on hope that it will be answered in the affirmative one day as I seek to align myself with Her will and as I also seek to do Her great work—which is helping and serving my fellow travelers along their various and sometimes painful paths through this life.
We are here together to do this life together that we all may be uplifted, together.
Tomorrow I will share my vision for what I would like Temple Mercury to be in the physical and practical sense. It’s exciting stuff, I promise. The IRS may even get involved. Spooky.
Until then my friends…
-M.
Priestess Devotee, Temple Mercury
PS
I talked a lot about some very dark things today including suicide and deadly anorexia. If you need help, here are some resources. You can also call 988 for immediate suicide prevention help or reach out to me at TempleMercury@gmail.com
National Suicide Prevention Hotline
OA Big Book Solutions Group
Eating Disorders Anonymous
Pagans in Recovery
Temple Mercury 