Living in a Monastery: Grief as a Portal

A memoirist’s daily life at the edge of the wild.

Death is not a stranger in my monastery. She visits uninvited, always on her own time, rearranging everything. She enters not through some mythic gateway, but through the back door, while I’m washing dishes or scattering bird seed. She doesn’t ask permission. She doesn't need to.

There was a day in 1981 when Death arrived holding my brother Jay’s bike—twisted metal, bent in half like a punch in the gut. I was sixteen, barefoot on a hot sidewalk. The bubbles in the kitchen sink were still floating, catching the light. I returned to them, pretending everything was normal. I scrubbed a glass and plunged it into the murky dishwater, my body floating with it, suspended in disbelief.

Jay had told me, not long before, "I will die young." He was right. That moment cracked something open in me—and I have never sealed it shut.

My life today is a devotion to what split open. I live in a house across the street from Lake Monona on the east side of Madison, Wisconsin. It is my monastery. Not a sanctuary from pain, but a place built from sacred attention. Holiness is everywhere.

Each morning, I wake slowly in bed, wrapped in warmth. My three dogs are nestled beside me. Sheeta is stretched long and alert near my knees. Holiday Napkins sleeps at my feet. And Blue, my black-and-white pitsky with blue eyes, lies beneath the covers with me, his presence a soft, steady heartbeat pressed to mine. We stay like that, in silence, until the world calls us forward.

We walk. We stand in awe of the turkey vultures riding the wind waves. We study mud puddles. We kill raccoons.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity—and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive."

Later, at night, after the lives and deaths of the day, the dogs sleep and I sit at my upright Yamaha grand piano. I’ve just learned to play “Across the Universe” by the Beatles—every word, every chord a prayer. I'm also relearning Chopin’s Mazurka in A, letting my fingers return to an old grief, an old joy, the muscle memory of both.

It is all for God.

My brother Jay’s death was poison. But it has also sweetened my life with unbearable beauty. With clarity. With a willingness to be broken again and again by love.

My teacher, Marc Gafni, speaks of the sacred text of reality. He says, “Reality is not merely a fact; it is a story. A CosmoErotic unfolding. We are the universe, a love story."

My monastery is that unfolding. When I play piano, when I notice light touching the wood of my windowsill, when I walk Governor’s Island with my dogs, I feel that unfolding inside me. Along the edge of the forest, towering over the sandstone cliffs above Lake Mendota, where I’ve been in communion with as many as twelve bald eagles keeping watch. Their dark wings stretching across the sky like scripture.

I feel the field and the forest and the lake as both pack leader and mystic. Every photograph I take is part of that evolution. I follow the light, knowing it has no time of its own. It leaves the sun and arrives in me. It reminds me: the Real is not a clock. It is a love letter, emergent possibility.

My dead brother knew something. My book is titled What My Brother Knew because I am still learning it.

Living in a monastery means being willing to be split open by love, again and again. It means cuddling under covers with dogs who remember how to grieve. It means remembering how to listen to grief, to light, to joy. It means watching blood turn to sunlight and still walking through the field, heart first.

This is not just my monastery. It is ours.

Let us remember together. Let us evolve our consciousness.

You can preorder What My Brother Knew and explore more of my work at kristinaamelong.com.