Rest in Joy & Freedom, Jerry Saltzman

Jerry planted a garden in me.

Jerry planted a garden in me.

On a side table, in my therapy office, I have a framed poster.  It is simply an image of rose bushes, with Grief Can be the Garden superimposed.  Something I bought from an artisan at a south end street festival.  How could she have known that I’d be living in Jerry’s house, standing in Jerry’s garden, next to the very last of the season’s Jerry Roses, when I got the news?

But a garden is about the best metaphor I can fathom for what Jerry implanted in my body.  In the last seven years I have: bought a house from Jerry, emailed and texted quips to and fro with Jerry; received Jerry unannounced many times except for the happy barking of two wild puppies he had inherited; had spirit-shaking conversations and raucous laughter amid perennials blooming and the sun’s beating with Jerry; sat down to dinner with Jerry and Truus a half dozen times (at one of the stops on their ever-moving train of residence, or at our house, formerly, their house). 

Most recently I sat down for lunch in Belltown at their newest condo nest, taking in the acuity of the Needle on one side, and the impossible expanse of the Pacific on the other.  We ate a scallop salad Jerry “whipped up,” and talked about healing and war and we reminisced, spreading nostalgia over the table.  I told both of them, Jerry and Truus, for the twentieth or thirtieth time, how they had altered me and lit up the fogged path of my early 30s, and we agreed to dinner back at our home in the next couple of weeks, back overlooking winter’s descent on what will always be Jerry’s garden.  And then I hurried away for some dumb panoply of errands, as Jerry prepped for the gym, relieved I’d see them soon. 

But all that came later.

In 2012, Jerry planted a garden in me. 

He was the first person to be curious about my (cis het white male) “oppression.”  I was befuddled and a bit pissed off about the notion of my being “oppressed,” but then again I had been recruited and my consent had been informed to participate in a class called “Internalized Oppression”, and Jerry kept laughing at my befuddlement and irritation, and so I sat and wept in front of a dozen of my classmates, who called compassion and love back at me, whenever Jerry asked if they felt it, like a chorus—and one that deeply disturbed and deeply soothed me at once.  Jerry was curious with me about what it like to be a sensitive boy-man in my world, and so I found that feeling with his hand on my shoulder.  He was curious what it was like to believe I was worthless aside from what service I could provide to less privileged others, and so I found that feeling, too, while he used both hands to guide my eyes to his.  

Jerry planted a garden in me that day, and it bloomed.  Is blooming. Has since weathered drought seasons and wildfire smoke and blights, but keeps on growing, more rather than less wild with time (like Jerry himself), moving me incrementally toward the ability to consider love for myself, to insist on being a man and, also: scared; insecure; remorseful; lonely; resentful; lost to the world aside from whatever blazing path I could cut by way of earning my oxygen, in service always to Others, in a world choking with privilege and oppression that I was theretofore certain that I fell on the Bad Guy side of. 

Last night, after talking more to Truus and feeling the sweet stabs of nostalgia and the uncut purity of grief, I quit dissociating, and went to my altar and lit the candles and stared at a printer-paper image of Jerry’s wild, delighted, joyous eyes.  And I closed my own. 

I found a scene that I only got to through years of hardcore psychotherapy, and harrowing psychedelic and shamanic healing: me in the bedroom of my infancy, rocking and soothing my infant Self, at a time where he needed it as badly as oxygen.  As I felt him back against my chest, Jerry simply appeared too, in a rocking chair by a brilliantly lit window, outlined, grinning his mad grin at me, stealing goofy faces at the baby in my lap.  And it came as I know it always does with grief—the searing, sudden clarity that all this unwieldly and non-linear grief, is mine.  Is ours.  It’s the fare we pay for Jerry’s passage on to his version of After, which I imagine has a great variety of roses….

Jerry is free.  It’s just my job (our job) to get freer now, too, by way of the gift he was to me (us).

Grief can be the garden.

Jerry planted a garden in me.