Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.
—Toni Morrison
On April 21st, I was among Donimo’s chosen family who witnessed her passage out of this world. On that day, Sarah asked us to write down our experiences so we would always remember. So I wrote it all down, not just what happened that one day, but also some of what I learned from supporting Donimo and Sarah in these last few months, and from my friendship with Donimo. Today is May 19, 2020—exactly four weeks after D’s passing— and it would have been her 55th birthday. So it seems fitting that I share a story about gifts.
During our 12-year friendship, Donimo gave me many wonderful and thoughtful gifts. Gifts that made me feel seen and even made me a bit anxious to up my own gift-giving game. She and Sarah both had an exceptional ability to choose gifts that were uniquely perfect for the recipient—they both have that ability to see people. (And you should have seen the gifts they gave each other: each one a testament to their deep understanding of and love for the other.)
This tribute is about Donimo’s last gift to me.
It was mid-March and Donimo had been home for a few weeks after a difficult hospital stay that yielded no new solutions for her condition. It was a stressful and scary time as Donimo’s pain escalated and she increasingly saw no way through it. Vancouver was in the process of shutting down due to COVID-19 and my cold symptoms had me temporarily benched from giving in-person support at Sarah and Donimo’s place. I needed a job I could do remotely, something that would provide genuine relief for my friends whose suffering was so extreme, and that would keep my own feelings of powerlessness at bay. Donimo and Sarah asked if I could research quotes, prose and poetry on beauty and spirituality. It was hoped that such meditations would be soothing to D and would also help her to decide whether to pursue and, ultimately go through with a medically assisted death (MAiD).
I accepted this assignment but with some trepidation—I joked with AJ, Emet and River (the other chosen family members supporting Donimo and Sarah) that the last person you want researching spirituality is me. I was the least spiritual person I knew. And what’s the intersection of beauty and spirituality? Turns out it’s nature—at least in every piece of writing I found. This is important to note because it’s a running joke among my friends that I am the only west coast lesbian who doesn’t want to camp, hike the West Coast Trail or do other nature-based shenanigans.
So I did not expect that this task would become one of Donimo’s greatest gifts to me.
Partway through this research process, my two weeks of self-isolation lifted, and I resumed my visits to Sarah and D’s house. I would walk the 13 blocks with my dog, along the way picking flowers and plants for Donimo. At first this foraging stressed me out—I was always in a hurry to get to their place so I could do the “real” work of cooking, massages and listening, and I had a vague worry of getting yelled at by homeowners for taking cuttings of blossoms and leaves. I worried even more about all the possible COVID germs moving between my knife, dog leash, keys and the bouquets I’d ultimately bring into my friends’ home. Looking back, I see these worries as probably quite helpful containers for the heartbreak and anxiety of witnessing my friend’s suffering and preparations for her death.
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
—Rebecca Solnit
I kept researching words about beauty, spirituality, nature and, increasingly, death. Almost every day I sent Donimo and Sarah meditations on the simple joys of the world: the qualities of blue, the feeling of moonlight, the movement of light through leaves, the mysteries of darkness, and water and breath’s shared rhythm. Some of these joys were no longer available to Donimo who had been bed-bound for months, unable to access the interactions with nature that I so casually spurned. (The only time D got impatient with me through this process—haha, that I know of!—is once when I complained about my imminent bike ride home that involved rain and a very steep hill: “Never take motion for granted, Terra.”)
As the weeks wore on and we approached the chosen date of Donimo’s passing, I found myself treasuring my walks to her. Even if I was running late, I took my time on the walk over, looking and really seeing—for what felt like the first time—the beauty of spring unfolding. Some of what I observed would end up in a bouquet for D, but I took it all in: distinctions in leaf formations, the crooked line of a branch, different stages of blossom, the many shades of green.
As April 21stloomed, Donimo became increasingly focused on spiritual preparations for her death. She asked me what I think happens after we die. What immediately came to mind is a passage from Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass and now that I’ve looked it up, I’m realizing it’s actually two:
All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything…. you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
[later]
He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air…and then he was gone, leaving behind…a vivid little burst of happiness.
Donimo expressed to me that she was not entirely comforted by the idea of dispersal—the notion that, as I expressed to her via Pullman, the energy that comprises our souls will dissolve into the world, becoming “part of everything.” She preferred to imagine that at least some of her energy and consciousness would still be intact in some form. Now, most people reading this have met our Donimo, and anyone who has met her understands the strength of her will. I therefore have no doubt that if D intended to keep intact and definably present some of the energy that made up her soul, then so it shall be.
But for me, this idea of Donimo’s atoms joining with the world to live in the sky and birdsong and variably shaped leaves—it comforts me, and has proven to be my anti-nature undoing.
On April 21st, Emet, AJ, Sarah’s father Rob and I drove to Lynn Headwaters Park in North Vancouver. We were the advance party, tasked with meeting Ngaio, the funeral director, to set up the site Donimo had chosen for her passing. Donimo and Sarah would arrive by medical transport, with River, Roni, Harper and Jackson following.
It was a cloudy day that threatened to rain and, I learned later, the last hours of a waning moon. Park staff were waiting for us at the gate and showed us to the spot behind the field house where we were to set up. There were a number of preparations to make. Ngaio set up the tent that was required to block the public from view, and Rob, Emet, AJ and I laid out a tarp, mattress, blankets, pillows and a circle of chairs. The site was directly beside the rushing waters of Lynn Creek, and the noise of it at times made it difficult to hear each other. A soundtrack that held us.
Donimo had requested that we fill a silver bucket with stones and water from the river so Rob and I set out to do this. As had become the norm for my increasing interactions with nature, I was surprised by how energizing this task was, in spite of the sadness that had settled over me. It was difficult to choose from the countless beautiful stones, made all the more so by the clear river water. I would’ve taken that whole goddamn riverbed if I could.
It’s difficult to describe my emotional state in the months and then days leading up to this moment in which I found myself gathering rocks for my friend who was about to die. There was the pain of seeing her and her partner suffer physically and emotionally, pain that I was largely powerless to alleviate. There was the stress and worry of whether Donimo would be approved for MAiD—fear that she would be approved and fear that she would not. After she was approved and the date set—and rescheduled once—I struggled to remain positive during and between my visits to Sarah and Donimo. The work of caregiving was exhausting, and the work of living, isolated, in a pandemic world had also become so. There were days when I felt like a zombie from so many imaginary apocalypses that this was not, weaving through these public and private catastrophes on a kind of auto-pilot. It was the only way to keep going.
And in the week before the 21st, I grew increasingly anxious that Donimo would go to her death anguished. Because she did not want to die. She wanted to live in this world, with her loved ones, reading poetry, making art, tasting honey. She wanted to be pain-free, to live and to thrive. This was one of the hardest things for those of us in her care circle—to hold together this knowledge of her desire to live and her very clear and firm decision to die.
Up until this day, I had not yet witnessed death, and certainly I was scared to do so. But the option of not witnessing my loved one’s passing was inconceivable. I needed to be with her when she left. But as I said, I was scared that she would die tormented by grief. Which brings me back to that moment by the river as I collected stones that, I discovered later, were at their most beautiful and complex when submerged in water.
We were getting regular texts from River on Donimo’s estimated arrival time, so as much as I wanted to linger by the river, I had to keep moving. We finished setting up the area and I took photographs of the stones in the bucket. Then I found myself uttering words that I could barely believe were coming out of my mouth: “Guys, I can lead us in a grounding meditation before they get here.” Wait, what, who am I now?? And so the four of us—Rob, AJ, Emet and I—stood together, and I spoke of each direction and asked my friends to notice the ground on which we stood at this site of Donimo’s choosing, the wind moving through the trees, the feel of the sun trying to emerge from the clouds, and the sound of the river. I breathed in these knowledges. The medical transport arrived and we dispersed to greet our friends.
Donimo walked onto the site and immediately went to the river. Far from the anguish that I had feared, she was calm and grounded, loving and attentive to each of us. Of the physical arrangements at the site, she said that everything was perfect, and I was so relieved. As we stood and then sat by the river, Donimo said to me, “I feel good, I feel open, I feel ready to go out there.”
[You] will be [one with space] that knows no bounds and with the ocean that has no shores; [you will become] that undying fire, that ever-gleaming light, that still air or that violent storm, those clouds charged with lightning, thunder and rain, those rivers merry or sad, those trees in bloom or shedding their leaves, those lands that rise up into mountains or slope down into valleys, those fields under seed or lying fallow.
—Kahlil Gibran
As Sarah described in her beautiful letter, there were two rituals that Donimo wanted to do with us. For the second ritual, each of us sat alone with her and the silver bucket of water and stones. When it was my turn, she held in her hands two stones for me to choose from. One was a small, black, almost arrow-like rock, and she suggested that this spoke to the ways in which I am a crusty badass—bless her for celebrating these qualities that I’m sure many find less than endearing. The other was a larger hexahedron with soft edges and corners, triangular from some angles and trapezoidal from others. It was a bluish dark grey, shot through with darker striations, and accents of rust over patches of white. As much as I wanted to be the badass that Donimo saw, I chose the grey stone. And Donimo said, “Yes, because of your layers.” I held this stone in my pocket for the rest of the day, its weight a silent comfort. At home it sits on my bookshelf and when it’s dry it doesn’t look remarkable. But when I place it under water and can once again see its complexity, I am transported back to that moment by the river with Donimo where she once again exercised her superpower for seeing and connecting with people.
You are a pool of clear water where the light plays.
—Jeanette Winterson
The first ritual was a gift from each of us to Donimo: we were asked to tie a piece of blue string around her wrist so a part of us could travel with her. I tied my thread to her and then fretted that I hadn’t done it “right”—it was too baggy and loose! She reassured me it was fine. Now that I write these words I can see how this exchange—my anxiety for perfection and her calming words—was a perfect capsule of the Terra that Donimo knew so well, and the Donimo that I treasured. I then told her all that she meant to me and I confess I only remember pieces of this, such was and is my grief-muddled brain. I’m sure I must have told her that I will always admire her incredible strength and groundedness, her gentle but direct honesty, her personal style and aesthetic sensibility, her boundless compassion and fairness, her ability to say no in a way that taught me to respect my own boundaries, her generosity and dry humour, and all the ways in which she was a fierce, queer punk. I know I told her how much she taught me just by being, and how much she inspired me as an artist. And I know I thanked her for her final gift to me: a renewed connection to the natural world and an exponentially growing sense of spiritual wonder.
And I tried to express to her a new understanding I had of her. Because, in these last hours of Donimo’s life, I saw that, even while being completely present with each of us, she was already on a different plane. I used the word “superpower” earlier and I know it sounds trite, but that day I witnessed my friend become something more than mortal.
When the doctor arrived for the procedure that would finally and with finality end Donimo’s suffering, we all gathered around where Donimo lay. At her request, we laid down cedar boughs and cherry blossoms and there she was: surrounded by her family and pieces of the world that she had so longed to be in. I held her right hand and I will never forget the feel of it, somehow cool and warm together. We told her over and over how much we love her. The doctor administered the sedative and as she lost consciousness she arched forward slightly and said, joyfully, “I’m going, I’m going,” while her eyes blazed with the electric blue sky that was suddenly visible behind the clouds that had just parted.
I wrote earlier that Donimo preferred to imagine that her spirit or consciousness would remain intact and present in some way. And I do feel her presence. Not only do I see her in the brilliance of the sky, the light between the leaves, and the magic of twilight, I think her spirit is in these final gifts she gave. For me, she is in my renewed appreciation of my natural surroundings. Her spirit is not only in the atoms that move through and among all life, it’s in the new energy I have for that life. Her spirit is love, and I am feeling it in everything.
