A mystical misfit’s travel
Living through 9/11 in New York, Joanna Walden experienced a moment of clarity.
She hikes the Camino de Santiago through Spain beginning the comedy of errors in her search for both purpose and a greater truth.
After the death of her father, she ultimately finds answers right back on her doorstep in New Zealand.
May As Well Add Murderer To My Repertoire
With the looming death sentence being an open license to booze for one and all, it wasn’t long before it became a toxic household. I was having flashbacks to my teenage years, which were equally, if not more, volatile. Devo would make excuses, saying there was a lot to cope with between all the appointments and the special diet, but I was less sympathetic. It was far from a healing environment and seemed to be far more focused on other people’s priorities and not Devo’s.
I went upstairs to his bedroom one day while he was napping and crawled into bed beside him. He looked so frail and ill that I just lay there silently crying, overwhelmed with painful emotion. I missed him already. The old Devo. The Devo I knew. Not this shadow of his former self.
“It’s okay, Jo,” he said opening one eye towards me. “Everything’s going to be okay.” But I knew he was lying.
He held my hand and squeezed it as we lay there looking out the bedroom window at the constantly changing whitecaps hurtling down the harbour.
One day Annie said to me that Devo smelled the same as the dying patients from her nursing days. A week or so later, he suddenly told me that he was going to move to the hospice, “... to give Annie a break.”
“A break? You know if you go in there, Devo, you’re not coming out. It’s a one-way ticket in those places.”
“Rubbish,” he said, brushing me off.
I was furious. Looking back later, I could see that the experience was triggering all sorts of old trauma from my childhood, with Annie as the star of the show. We were not getting on at all. This time, however, I was old enough to do something about it and stand up for myself. I was energetically sound and sober enough to hold my ground despite the hostile atmosphere. I spent most of the months while Devo was sick trying to navigate my way around the politics of personalities in the house. When someone is dying, you don’t expect other people to start losing the plot. But they do, and the results are wild. That probably threw me the most, out of everything. I held my tongue as much as I could, but there were times when I just couldn’t hold it anymore, let alone allow situations to continue that didn’t have Devo’s best interest at heart.
Annie wanted the funeral to be what she was comfortable with, a tiny family affair with her favourite spiritual music and far away from any church. In some twisted way, I understood, but I wasn’t prepared to have some measly service that did nothing to celebrate the life of this amazing man who had touched the hearts and lives of so many. By this point, things had become so ludicrous that I could only laugh.
As Devo got sicker, he started taking the path of least resistance more often through the family flareups, but we managed to steer the plans back to a proper affair so that the hundreds of people who he helped, or who knew, respected and worked with him would have the chance to say goodbye.
Watching someone slowly die, day by day, is one of the most heartwrenching things to endure. The conscious part of me was excited that he was going on a new adventure, an adventure of the non-physical. That he had chosen this experience and this exit for reasons of a higher perspective unbeknownst to me. That it was in fact happening for me and not to me. I knew that even when he was gone, he wouldn’t really be completely ‘gone’. Everything is energy; we are made of energy and therefore it’s just the body that we move on from. Yet my human self was dealing with grief and loss, knowing that he was no longer going to be on the planet in the physical with me.
It was awful to watch him in pain, to see him lose his quick wit and strong mind to the morphine, and degenerate before our eyes. The morphine seemed to have him fixated on all sorts of unusual things that were really just not that important.
I ran a circuit around Westhaven Marina and up College Hill, stopping in at the hospice almost every day. We’d talk about his to do list and I’d make phone calls for him or check emails. Or I’d help him shower and eat. Devo was thinner and less on to it every time I saw him. He hated that the drugs were taking away the sharpness of his mind. Devo was clearly dying, and we were just waiting for him to let go.
We broke him out of the hospice one day in between pain meds and took him down to one of his favourite restaurants for lunch. Despite being famous for his long lunches, he could barely walk, eat or drink but held court, nonetheless, regaling the table with stories and quipping jokes with the waiters. Back at the hospice later that afternoon, I heard him on the phone to a friend, saying, “When I get out of here mate, we need to do that project...”
Yet I knew it was ending.
As the weeks went on, I decided to employ more energy techniques to support him on his journey. We were well beyond a miracle cure at this point. I had listened to a radio interview of Jean Slatter, who had written a book called Hiring The Heavens. The premise of the book was that you could actually hire a committee of spirit beings to help you with whatever you needed, be it selling a house, getting a new job or whatever problem you were trying to solve. Apparently as I had heard before, due to universal law of free will, non-physical beings could not interfere on your behalf without your permission; you had to invite them in.
So, I created the ‘Devo Transition Committee’. Yes, I hired a team of spirits essentially to help Devo die. I hired a Spiritual Transition Guide to manage the entire team, a Spiritual Physical Specialist to help him detach and let go of his body, an Emotional Specialist to release any fears around dying, a Logistics Manager to show him where to go when he crossed over so he didn’t get lost, a Welcome Team to make him feel at ease on the other side, a Soul Connector to put him more deeply in touch with his soul self and a few others to round out the team like the Spiritual Mixologist to make him a decent G&T when he arrived. I did a small ceremony to officiate the committee and state their mission:
To help Devo transition into the other side quickly and easily, without pain or fear. May he easily and swiftly leave his body behind and go where he needs to be. May this team please help all involved in his transition here with masses of love, light and grief support.
While I was at it, I created an ‘Annie Management Committee.’ I needed a LOT of specialists for that one! As soon as I did it I noticed an immediate difference in her demeanour towards me, and behaviour which was miraculous.
Only a few days later, I was with close friends and family gathered around his hospice bed, I was telling Devo it was okay to let go, that he was going on a big adventure, of which I was very jealous and that it was going to be bloody amazing. It was probably better than this earthly existence anyway, and he had better come to me in spirit so I had some evidence, since he was the first of us to go.
We were all emotionally exhausted after six months of living through this. We had a barbecue at my brother Mike’s house that night, where I finally laid into the wine and let go. When my brother dropped me back home to Devo and Annie’s it was after midnight and I stumbled down the bottom of the garden to my pad to crash out. Not long later at 3am that morning, there was a knock on the door of the boatshed where I was staying. I opened the stable door in a dehydrated daze to see Mike, who said that Devo had passed. He and I went to the hospice together to see Devo one last time and say our final goodbyes.
One night the week after he died I was lying in bed and the entire boatshed was filled with the smell of cigar smoke. I was confused looking for an open window to shut out the smoky neighbours, before I ascertained all the windows and doors were in fact shut. It took me a few more moments to realise it was Devo, famous for his indulgence in the finest cigars on any given occasion. It wasn’t the last time I was visited with the scent of cigars, and I’m sure there will be many more.
It would be two years before I finally told Annie about the ‘Devo Transition Committee’ and that days later, he was gone.
“What!” she shrieked dramatically. “You killed my husband?!”