The 4 stories of awe

  1. The scientific -
  2. The cultural
  3. The personal
  4. The growth that Awe can bring us when we face hardship, uncertainty, loss and unknown.

The death of Rolf

Rolf was lying in a bed downstairs, which he had retreated to in his last weeks. He lay on his stomach and right cheek, his head tilted slightly upwards. My dad held his food. I leaned in near his midsection. My mom was at the head of the bed, stroking his tin hair.

Rolf’s face was full and flushed. The sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks caused by colon cancer were gone; the tightened, sagging skin around his mouth smoothed. His lips curled upwards at the corners.

I rested my right hand on his left shoulder, a rounded pertrusion of bone. I held it the way I would the smooth granite stones we used to find near the rivers we swam in as young brothers.

The cycle of breathing slowed. He was listening. Aware. Listening to Rolf’s breath, I sensed the vast expanse of fifty fiver years of our brotherhood. Roaming Laurel Canyon in the late ’60s, spying on rock-and-roll neighbors and skateboarding through Volkswagen-lined streets. In our adolescence, walking the wild foothills of the Sierras, and playing Little League on Penryn’s, me pitching, Rolf, a long haired lefty, on first , a mischievous light in his eyes saying Man, this is fun! As young adults, on wild trips to Mexico, dancing in clubs, wandering in the high Sierras. And then in graduate school, buying wedding suits and being each other’s best man, becoming teachers and fathers to daughters.

I sensed a light radiating from Rolf’s face. It pulsated in concentric circles, spreading outward. touching us as we leaned in with slightly bowed heads. The chatter in my mind, clasping words about the stages of colon cancer, new treatments, lymph nodes, and survival rates, faded. I could sense a force around his body pulling him away.

Watching Rolf pass, I felt small. Quiet. Humble. Pure. The boundaries that separated me from the outside world faded. I felt surrounded by something vast and warm. My mind was open, curious, aware, wondering

…And then the stories tapered off and we fell into a silence. A church bell rang, stirring a spiral of blackbirds out of the trees, rising into sky heavy with dark gray clouds. We shook hands and hugged and then walked quietly out of Rolf and Kim’s home.

In the grief that followed, I would regularly jolt awake before dawn, gasping. My body ran hot. I ached physically. I dreamed dreams unlike anything I had experienced before. In one, I was walking up a dark, winding dirt road to an illuminated Victorian that resembled our childhood home in Penryn. Rolf burst around a corner in yellow shorts, running in his high school miler strides. He stopped, smiled, waved and moved his lips, uttering words he knew I could no longer hear. I experienced the hallucinations that Joan Didion describes in the Year of Magical Thinking. I saw the outline of Rolf’s face in the shifting boundaries of neighboring clouds. On on walk on the Berkeley campus, I saw his chem-exhausted eyes in the spiraling bark of redwood tree. I heard his voice in rustline of leaves, his sigh in the wind. On two occasions I was so convinced I had seen him that I followed strangers whose shoulders, foreheads, freckles and jawlines looked like his.

Our minds are relational:

  1. we see life patterns through our shared experiences with others,
  2. Sense life’s significant themes in the sounds of others’ voices,
  3. And feel embraced in things larger than the self through others’ touch.