Published in slightly edited form August 27, 2014 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette
This past Saturday we communally celebrated the life and mourned the loss of our friend Jim Chlebda in Springville, where he lived and worked during his days editing Southland Magazine and publishing South Valley Arts. His Springville “peeps” (as he called his friends) set up the memorial at River Ridge Ranch, a wonderful environmentally-run cattle ranch with full conservation easements lightly developed for open air events. A cool morning breeze skittered cottonwood leaves around our feet and rustled them in the air. The smells of dry grass and fall coming centered us in the moment.
Patti Torrey, Springville’s remarkable, warm-hearted singer, emceed and sang; Kathy Everett and a host of friends spread tables of food and drink. Jim’s favorite Grateful Dead recordings accompanied our conversations while we ate. His beautiful sister Karen and brother Rob came up from Down South, as did his best friends Adam and CindyLou with their two incredible children. The only thing that could have made the day better would have been to have him there.
I had my first encounter with Karen and Rob, as well as many other members of Jim’s family, at his funeral the Monday before, held at Mission San Fernando del Rey. The clear love and dedication of this family to each other and the world helped me understand where Jim came from, that it’s possible to live on earth as it is in heaven (or at least worth trying.) The mass in that ancient church, given by a Franciscan priest, ended with the singing of the hymn “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” from the prayer of St. Francis. The burial of his ashes in the cemetery there, in the same grave as his father, whose birthday he shared, and his sister who died at 20 of cystic fibrosis and who would have turned 50 that day - all of it brought the Divine Presence into the very air we breathed.
The air had a different quality there at River’s Ridge: more natural, less personal, freer and to me, at least, more frighteningly real. By celebrating what we had when he lived among us here, I think we sensed our loss more acutely, the days past truly gone. As the mid-day temps rose, we began to pack up and disperse early. A few of us re-grouped where Karen and Kathy were staying to say goodbye.
That’s where we got to hear the Cherries Garcia story. Karen’s husband Bob had told part of it to me at the cemetery, so I asked Karen to repeat it for the others. On Jim’s last night, Bob had to pick up his son Dan at the airport. Before he left, he asked Jim if he’d like something, and Cherries Garcia ice cream was the answer. So Bob and Dan scoured late-night stores until they found some. When Jim heard their voices in the hospital hallway, he came awake. They put on some Grateful Dead and danced while Jim woofed down his ice cream. Late, they finally turned out the lights.
Sometime in the early morning hours, Jim took off his oxygen mask, his lifeline. Karen said they protested, but then she saw that the mask was not going back on. A couple of hours later, he was gone.
I have written that he was heroic in the way he lived. Now I’m adding that he was just as heroic in the way he died. He had lots of help and support for both, which is an important part of the story. But I have been surprised to find that heroism has brought me to tears over and over. Though it’s been a month since his death, I’m surprised to find that I’m still crying.
The Quaker poet Ellen Sophia Bosanquet, wrote this beautiful poem about the work of grief:
“Since
you have vanished from my eyes,
Since
I have lost your blessed touch,I own continual surprise
To find, in spite of loss, how much
Of all I cherished still remains:
Your thoughts that set my mind on fire,
And ever flowing in my veins
The urge to do what you require.
Is it that death has more to give
Than love-companioned life can show?
And only as we learn to grieve we learn to know?”
With 20/20 hindsight, what I’ve
learned firsthand from Jim’s life, and now second-hand from the story of his
death, is that he was a conscious channel of the Spirit. He knew the Light within and made use of
it. What I’m learning from my grief, however,
is that I want to grow in that direction.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a writer who lives just one watershed west of Jim’s. You can send her your channeling stories c/o
P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below. The Bosanquet poem is quoted in Catherine
Whitmire’s Plain Living: A Quaker Path to
Simplicity, Sorin Books, 2001. Visit www.river-ridge.net
to view their offerings and see a video of Patti Torrey singing “He Don’t Like
Love Songs,” which she wrote for her husband Jared, another one of Jim’s
closest friends.
