Alison's Bench

She was one of the holy ones. We knew it as we sat in my living room week after week, hearing Alison Bermond read fresh new words from the many pages she'd filled during our thirty minutes of writing. The stories she wrote were like luminous quilts, passages of deep spirit and ancestral memory set against each other just so, not unlike the lovely fabrics she chose to wear. Her modest heart would look up after she read to our circle, almost apologetic or embarrassed, wading through the stunned silence as we let her language flow through us and then stuttered out some form of response. She sat rounded sometimes, bent like Ghandi, over-quiet, filled with a fierceness of belief, a heart large, overly-brave, exploring her life of devotion to beauty and the divine, to seeking a path to language and creativity, to piercing the truth.

There were so many surrounding her: spirit-brothers and sisters who held her with profound love. And we women of her writing group knew we held a special place in her life, and that our embrace was one of the things holding her up.

Just a year ago, she died. Alison Bermond, the author of two beautiful essays in Sisters Singing–and countless other poems, stories, essays hundreds of paintings and drawings–was gone before she and I could revel together over a stunning dream I had about her a week before she left. Her death was sudden–and of course it was not. She had lived with metastasized cancer for 18 months, longer than many, and had written achingly beautiful pieces about the place and metaphor of illness and cancer in our world. All of us sharing the path with her knew that her chemotherapy had taken a difficult turn. But still. She had begun to seem like that wild phoenix, always rising, and her last year had been joyful, with horseback riding classes and African dance, walking at the beloved ocean where she lived, spending time with deep friends, writing.

It seemed possible she could ride this last turn as well, squeeze more time out of the hour glass, though we’d recently seen her gaunt body and swollen ankles, and knew the signs. Still, even death that is not sudden nonetheless often is. So it was that one day she was out lunching with her wonderful step-mother who was visiting from London, after a blood transfer and a “good day." And the next she was asking to go to the hospital, that last place anyone ever asks to go. When she emerged a few days later she had begun that passage that awaits us all. Her last blessed hours were surrounded by her nearest beloveds and family in her home.

As fate sometimes arranges these things, our writing group had our regular meeting the day of her death. In our great grief we wrote, filling the page: about Alison, about death, about life. Then we went to stand around her body as final blessing. She was surrounded by candles, flowers, altars, incense, beautiful textures and cloths. She looked like the holy woman she had always been, and her face was serene. She had a small inward smile, as if she was acknowledging a pleasing private thought. She’d tripped that crazy portal, joined the light.

Again and again we learn this truth: we have to relinquish our most cherished beloved ones. One day, it is inevitable. They move farther beyond us on the path. And one day, we too will relinquish our bodies. When we do, the ones who love us will likely come together, in order to remember. So it was that a circle of twelve or so stood last Sunday at Seabright Beach–Alison's beach, just a block from her home–to bless a wonderful physical artifact erected in her memory. Not a tomb stone, not a building or an institution–but a place to sit. A place to gaze at the sea, to write a poem, talk with a friend, to think.

We were at Alison’s bench. And inscribed along the top was the following:

ALISON R. BERMOND
1953 -2007
With love from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the stars

Bob Jaffe, Alison’s beloved, had arranged it all, inscribing words Alison used to say to her daughter Serena. We gathered together and made a circle around the bench, situated at a sweet corner on Seabright Avenue across from a popular beach on a busy street. The day was bright like summer, and our circle stood drenched in warm sunlight. Behind us enterprising kids set up an old-fashioned lemonade stand, calling out LEMONADE! LEMONADE! so as to let the scores of people streaming by with chairs, towels, and beach umbrellas know there was sustenance to be found. An ice cream man on a bicycle trundled over towards the beach and up the road, twinkling his little song. Above us pelicans flew by, again and again in formation, so that they became a sign.

Two weeks before she died, I dreamt that Alison and I were at a spiritual retreat, and the leader, a small holy man from India, paired us to work together as a team. We stood before him, and he showed us the image of our beds moved together foot to foot, so that our sleeping spirits could dance in the night. We looked at him, a little shy, questioning how to proceed. He smiled reassuringly, held his arms out to touch our shoulders, then said simply, “You are to cherish each other. That is all.”

Cherish each other. Standing at the bench together, Bob told us that at first the City of Santa Cruz had said another bench was simply not possible, the park was full, it couldn’t happen. And Bob had told the Parks employee of his love and cherishment of Alison, his sweetheart. Then something shifted, suddenly there was an opening, a possibility, let me call you back–and after the paperwork and the waiting, it happened. We were there surrounding the bench, and Alison’s name was inscribed to the stars, under the great sky, before the sea.

In the circle we each spoke a small tribute of love. Some put flowers on the bench, some sang. Miriam Chaya, who had helped to organize the day, spoke of the pelicans above, soaring with Alison. I read the last stanzas of “Four Quartets” by T. S. Elliott, one of Alison's most beloved poems.

Then I read from “Tiferet,” one of Alison's essays in Sisters Singing. Raising my voice to be heard, I read her words among the cars spinning past and people calling to each other on the beach, the lemonade kids behind us making a sale, and yet another band of pelicans soaring by. As I read, I noticed that Bob had brought his cell phone over towards me. On the phone was Ed, Alison’s beloved friend and ex-husband, who had cared for her in her last year in the same way he’d loved her for so long: gently, fiercely, calmly, a stream of devotion so wide, clear and tender it had engulfed us all. Ed was in Brazil, half-way around the world–but with us too in that moment, listening as Alison’s words rang out into the air, piercing everything, raining down upon us, upon her bench, as benediction:

TIFERET

...I ask myself what is the place of beauty for me? Is it the arched windows of my house, the way the light moves across the floor, the vivid colors? This is only a part, like the sequined shoe of the tango dancer. The dance itself is something else. I know that for me it is the voice on the end of the phone trying to tell me the story and it is my ability to listen, to hear between the words, that vast silence.

Sitting at Sara's table at night, a candle burns. The traffic rushes past outside. We have eaten foods from her island, food from a culture that no longer exists, that perished in the ovens of Poland with those who died. Leeks and spinach bourekkas and her special rice with pinon nuts. She is telling me about her life, about the time when she fell into an abyss, when all seemed lost, all was taken away. She tells me about the men in her life who treated her badly, but mostly she speaks about what sustained her and continues to do so. The operas, the music, the poetry. How she and her husband would sit weeping together as they heard La Traviata, La Boheme. She is sharing these jewels of her life with me. I am in awe. We are laughing as we speak, even of the sadness. Time has vanished.

As I hear her words, I am at the feet of my mother and my grandmother and my great grandmother. I am drinking in the connection with life. The connection with this mystery, with the traditions of my people: the ragged cloth, the worn bag carried from place to place that holds the tallit and the tefillin. Blue velvet like a desert night embroidered with gold. I am here in this dark place that holds the trees at night glistening with fruit.

Inside I am a dancer. I wear a costume of black lace. I wear the strap shoes with a heel of the flamenco dancer, a shawl with red flowers. I move to the sounds of hands clapping and the voice of a singer who cries like the wind. I am in the heart of the meeting in the words not spoken but clearly heard. I am in the touch of the hand in that place opposite my heart where there would be wings.