A (34:28)
Oh, yeah, definitely. And something. Her ethic was just so amazing, so honest. She was just a really wonderful human being, and she treated plants and animals as kindly as she treated people. And like the people that she took care of, they flourished in ways that were very unusual. That reminded me of what Stuart Edward White had said about Betty. Tamara couldn't just feed hummingbirds. If Tamara fed hummingbirds, suddenly there were 200 hummingbirds in the backyard. Tamara couldn't give seeds to nutmeg mannequins. Suddenly, there was a swarm of a hundred of them in our yard. Everything she touched flourished in the most beautiful way. Our house looked like a jungle because her plants would just grow and grow, and it was so beautiful. I don't think she realized the impact she had on people, though, because she would have that impact, and then for some of them, they wouldn't talk to her for 20 years, even 30 years, because she had made this change. But they would follow her on social media and be influenced by what she was posting and what she was doing creatively, but they were all there. And when she got sick, it was amazing for me to see. This was a very rapid thing. It was five days of sickness at home and then five days in the hospital and she was gone. And when she was in the hospital, I asked for people to pray for her, and the response was amazing. She had Tibetans burning butter lamps for her. She had candles lit at the Church of Mary in Glastonbury. She had rituals done for her for a whole bunch of different gods. Asclepius, Jesus, Allah, you know, Krishna, many Egyptian gods, and on and on. I mean, it was basically all over the world, people were responding by reading the hymns of Orpheus in a French forest or lighting a candle for her in some sacred spot and trying to bring healing energy to her. And when she passed, this exploded into these testimonials and continued interest in her and doing prayers for her and lighting candles for her. And most interesting of all, and this is the weird topper to all of this, is that. So here we were. We had just finished, or so we thought, the unobstructed way, this book about Stuart Edward White and his wife Betty. It's a phenomenal book about life after death. And strangely, Betty died just before the book was published, and Stuart had to write an afterword because Betty made herself known, not just to him, but to a whole bunch of people. So when Tamara took ill and passed, I was stunned. Just the fact that this occurred in this way to begin with, and then by the outreach of people that continued to pray for her. But then I suddenly got reports of visitations that piled up and that these included visual, you know, apparitions, they included audio apparitions, they included dream visitations, they included omens, lots of scarabs, lots of butterflies, but weird experiences around these creatures. And so I had to rewrite the last chapter of the book in order to capture all of this and to share with people that this had happened. And that as it happened with Betty, the Tamara had somehow come back and was making herself known to people and people who had never even known her and people who didn't believe in this stuff. And then there were corroborations within the reports, certain things that she did or said or that were common to many of them, and that was really amazing. And she also had a visitation with me that was very powerful. After the first week Because I was broken. I mean, first, the stunning swiftness of it was just unfathomable. And we'd always joked that together we made one good human being. And I really felt like a broken half. And I didn't know how I would live. I mean, I still very much get overcome by grief and by this terrible longing just to be with her wherever she is. It's hard for me to be interested in life. And I knew that I was going to have to, after the first week, face the issues of cremation, and I would have to see her ashes and all these horrible things, death certificates, and just this heartless way that society deals with death. And I was terrified because I was already crushed. And all of my training, all of my meditation, all of my work with the Golden Flower weren't helping me because this amazing presence in my life was gone. And she was smarter than me. She was funny. She was loud and boisterous and wonderful. And every day she was like the sun shining on me. And now it was like the sun had gone out. And I felt like everything in the world was as colorless as her ashes. I certainly felt that I was. And the city, everything just seemed so bleak. And I didn't know how I was going to do these things I had to do. I had to deal with wills and lawyers and accountants and just awful things. Bureaucracy and heartless bureaucracy. People calling me, for example, from the hospital about bills who thought she was still alive. I mean, the hospital didn't even tell them that she had passed. So they were saying, yeah, can I speak to Tamara? And then when I would tell them, no, you can't, because she passed in the hospital, they would say, oh, why don't they tell us that? And then they would tell me a few things and get off the phone with a have a good one. Have a good one. I'd been crying on the phone. And so my friends rallied around me, and that was sweet, and brought me food and told Tamra stories, but I was bereft. Well, one night, she visited me in a very powerful way, and it changed my whole perspective. It was like she imparted to me her perspective, which was things like bodies and ashes and death certificates are trivialities. They're nothing. It was like a saying that she had. She said that we all come to this sandbox to learn, but then in the end, everything here returns to the sand. But we're not only sand, we're also stars. And she gave me that perspective. And that's the perspective of the Golden Flower that's the perspective of the unobstructed universe. It was that. No, what matters is I'm here. I'm here with you. I'm loving you. Do you feel that love? And boy, could I. And we had been when she was in the hospital and she asked me not to spend the night with her because she wanted me to sleep and to take care of the cats. I would say to her, do you feel it? Do you feel me sending you love? Because every night, I'm sending you love. And she was like, yeah, I feel it. So she returned it to me a hundredfold in this one visitation and just surrounded me with an undeniable feeling of love. And the intimate presence that Stuart Edward White had talked about when Betty did that for him. And in her case, there was a. It was almost like she ravished me. I mean, it was almost sexual. There was a union of our souls, in a sense, that occurred that was so powerful in this liminal state. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't reality. It was something more potent than a dream, more real. And so I came out of it, and I said, I want a Tamra. And I felt this wave of love that was just so glorious, you know? And it was her. And from that moment on, I could deal with all those trivialities, which to me, is the ultimate proof that this happened. This isn't simply bereavement hallucination. This was a transformation. She freed my soul and helped me to. As she. The mantra that I hear from her often, well, I'll tell this story. So one thing that's been showing up with dragonflies, with people and weird dragonfly behavior, and she loved dragonflies. And dragonflies were connected, I'm told, to the ancient Egyptian God Ra, or Ra, as some people pronounce it. And Tamra was very proud that her name, even though her parents didn't know it, met the perfection of Ra. And as we talked once about it, she was way into Sekhmet, the Egyptian lioness goddess. And so these dragonflies, as creatures of Ra, were making appearances all over the place, as were these brilliant metallic green scarabs. And I heard a story from somebody about how she was visited by an onyx dragonfly. And even though this was after she lifted me, I was still feeling regrets. You know, we're only human. It always reminds me of what Basho said about the founder of Shingon Buddhism, Kobo Daiichi, that he said that they say that you don't suffer after you achieve enlightenment. But I still cried when I had to say Farewell to a loved one. And so I was still feeling bereft. I mean, it still gets me every day. I mean, the loss, the things that I run into in the house, the experiences I realized suddenly I'm never going to have again. I wake up every morning expecting to find her next to me. I still do. It's a form of denial. Or maybe she's there. And so I was sitting by our pool with my feet in the pool, and I was feeling very grief stricken and thinking, could I have somehow prevented this? Could I have taken better care of her? Maybe, you know, because I had. I wanted to call the ambulance the first day that she got ill, seriously ill, but she forbade it. And she told me, she said, ronnie, I'm Tamra. I want to stay Tamra until I die. I don't want to be turned into something else by medical bureaucracy. I didn't realize what she was saying to me was, I want to die at home now. I couldn't have done that. I simply could not have let her die without any medical intervention. I mean, I just couldn't have done it. And I couldn't have let go. And she actually said to me in the hospital, it could have been so easy. I said to her, tamara, you're not saying what I. You know, I mean, maybe it was weak for me to let you go into the hospital and suffer there unnecessarily. Although I thought she was coming home, and I was told that she would be home in a couple of days. Something went very crazy at the hospital, but she had not seen a doctor in 40 years. I mean, just a healthy, really healthy woman. And like Betty, weirdly youthful throughout her life, still blonde, in the hospital, still gorgeous and young. You would have thought she was in her early 20s. And so there I was, sitting there thinking, what if I'd call the ambulance sooner? What if I'd done this or that. And suddenly a big black onyx colored dragonfly, just like the one in the report that I'd received a couple days earlier, showed up at the pool. I'd never seen one like that before, and started doing tight circles around me and almost landed on my knee. And Tamara loved to sit on my lap or sit on my knee. And so I said. I said out loud, Tamra. And started dancing all around me. And I heard in my head her voice. I love her voice. And that's one of the things I miss the most. That and her laughter. She said, and she's been saying it to me a lot. Live up to what you know, Live up to what you know. And I said, okay. Okay, I will. I promise. And this dragonfly flew right at my face and then up over me and flew away into the sky. And so that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to live up to what I know, because. And this is a challenge for all of us who follow spiritual paths because we read about this stuff, we practice meditations, we even have experiences that give us inklings of what this is about. But when it actually happens, when you lose someone and you face the reality of the grief and of the loss, it can just drown you in grief. And suddenly you realize that the intellectual understanding is not really living up to what you know. And then the challenge becomes, how do we do that? Now, when I can achieve that, I'm trying to stabilize it, but I've not. When I can achieve that, my perspective of life is very different. And I want to share this with people in case people are listening who are dealing with grief. Grief is a liminal state. And so there are various kinds of grief. And the kind that's most familiar has, of course, been described in the stages of grief, anger and denial and bargaining and all that. Which, ironically, was the first book she ever gave me very early in our relationship, because she had read it. She was a Capricorn with Saturn conjunct the sun. So she was into stuff like that. And I understand that kind of grief, and I see it playing in my life. I definitely went through an angry stage where I felt like. Like, how could you abandon me? You know, I'm the. I'm the bat. I'm the dumb one. Like. Like I'm the one who doesn't know how to do anything. And now I've got to learn how to cook, and I got to learn how to, you know, do things and take care of the cats and keep the house running and all these things. I would help her, but I didn't know how to do it. She'd say, do this and do that, you know, And I went through. My form of denial was, I think, is more, as I mentioned, the feeling that she was there, not in the sense of a spiritual understanding, but just feeling like she's going to walk through the door. Feeling like when I wake up in the morning, like she's there. I will wake up from a dream, like I often did, to say, tamara, I just had this weird. And then the loss hits me. Oh, my God. She's not there, and she's never going to be there. She's gone. I Still haven't been able to get rid of a lot of her stuff. You know, I did a lot of house cleaning, but her vanity, for example, is still untouched with her hair in the brush. And Normandy Ellis had this great idea. She said, keep the hair in the brush until spring and then put it in the garden and let the birds make nests with it. That's exactly what I'm going to do. And so there are things that I have kept the utensils I made coffee with for her every morning. And she loved the way I made coffee for her. And I would put the coffee down in front of her and she would say, yum, I can't put them away. I can't get rid of them. They're right there. In fact, her shoes, her sandals with rhinestone decorations are waiting for her at the front door. Weird, you know, but it gives me comfort. I'm wearing her shirt right now. It gives me comfort. I wear some of her jewelry. And so that kind of grief that's, in a way, I think it's not what the book meant by bargaining, but in a way it is. It's. Well, I can have some of Tamra here just by seeing these things. And that kind of grief at its worst, as I already described, becomes a terrible bleakness. You become consumed by the sense of loss. This is something that Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy warned against. He said, if you let this stay on you, it will eat your life and you will never get out of it. And this happens to people. They become lost in grief. And so I felt that so deeply. I would be talking to friends who came over and were being very sweet and supportive and saying the right things, and it was like they were phantoms. And all I was sitting in was this grief. I would look out at the city. The whole city seemed like a giant graveyard to me. And my own life seemed unlivable. I could not understand how I could go on, because even the work of finishing our books, because there's a few that are unfinished, of tending her legacy, which I intend to do, seeing the impact she had on people, I want to make sure that her story is told, that it stays out there in the world. Those things even seemed empty and trivial. And the longing can approach almost suicidal magnitude, where you feel like, I don't care. I'd want to be with her, or if she's in non existence and I don't want to exist, that kind of thing. And all of your training and reading and study and meditation can just fall to the side, because love is so strong. And when love is broken that way, it's this feeling that rushes up in you and it takes away your hunger to live and your appetite for food and your optimism about the world and the future. But grief also, thanks to her visitation, I experienced this higher side of it, which I've been working on so hard to achieve for a long time, and failed to. Obviously, that's different. It's a perspective on life where you feel like, well, I will be with her. Life is a blink of an eye. And I was very fortunate to have this amazing experience. Two souls got together here and got to live this amazing romance and reinvent themselves and stay out of the world of bureaucracy for most of our lives. And we became the kind of not really a good word to use anymore, but bohemians that we longed to be. And we had tremendous adventures. I remember sitting with her not too long before she became really ill. She was exhausted, very stressed. She didn't like what's going on in the world today at all, and she really couldn't find any way to address it. In the past, she had been very active and been able to do a lot of things through music and film. But the way the world has shifted in Los Angeles, there was almost no musicians around because nobody can afford to live here. And Covid had also made it impossible for us to work with musicians that we had known. And films were hard to find because documentaries. I mean, there was no money for anything. The film she worked on, about Standing Rock, which was nominated for an Emmy, was the only project she was able to work on. And that was funded at first all by $25 donations from a GoFundMe from all across the world. And she couldn't really feel like writing was going to do it because not a lot of people read. She used to be able to get involved politically. So when Obama ran, she and Danny Goldberg, who had stayed friends all these years, even though we didn't sign with him ever, in fact, he called her when she was in ICU to talk to her and to tell her he loves her. They work together to bring artists like Bruce Springsteen to key counties to swing the election for Obama. And so that girl who all her life, think of all the things I've mentioned, still fighting bullies, right? That was what her whole life was about. The films that she worked on, the music that she worked on, her writing was all about fighting bullies, about defending the weak and the innocent. And so she was a warrior for justice. And her seeing what was happening to our friends, terrible Things that happened to friends of ours because of what's happening now. Seeing that this was just like this army of bullies unleashed on the world and feeling helpless, stressed her out terribly. And I believe this was a major cause of what happened. The doctors, by the way, were not certain what happened. They knew why she got sick, but they didn't really understand why she died. And I think that on one hand, I do think there may be a medical malpractice thing that happened there for reasons I won't go into. But I also think that she made a decision that she realized that she could not continue as Tamra and that it was time to go, and she didn't want to live through any more of this nonsense that's going on. And so she was somebody who had her whole life kind of that attitude that these things like death certificates are trivialities. And I used to drive her crazy because I would get freaked out about things like that. I have epigenetic trauma, being from a Holocaust survivor family, so I can turn on that trauma pretty quick. But somehow she came into this life, and despite the abuse that she suffered, she had that understanding. Like, she didn't put it into spiritual terms when I first met her, but to her, a plant was just as important a life as a human being. An animal was just as important to her consciousness everywhere. Not that we were superior and everything else is for us. And she treated everything in the world with respect, except people who abused the world. She also had an unbelievable wit. You know, when she was first in icu, she had a breathing tube and she couldn't talk. And within five minutes of them taking that out, she started to talk. And she had the nurses and doctors giggling with the things she was saying. That's the kind of person she was. She would light any situation up, and she would make people laugh, and she just had this joy about her, even though her humor could be very dark and pointed if needed, but always in a way that was intended to wake people up to what they were really doing. And, yeah, it was just an incredible privilege to be around a human being like that for so many years, every single day. I mean, I'll be honest, I hoarded her, you know, like, I didn't want to share her with people. I just wanted to be with her all the time and just drink in this presence, this amazing elevation of spirit that she had.
