Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go by Cheryl Krauter
Publisher: She Writes Press, (July 20, 2021)
Category: Memoir, Grief, Loss, Healing
Tour dates: August-September, 2021
ISBN: 978-1647421328
Available in Print and ebook, 168 pages
Description Odyssey of Ashes by Cheryl Krauter
Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go begins with the sudden death of Cheryl Krauter’s spouse. Five months later, in a stroke of irony and magic, her husband wins a long-desired guided fly-fishing trip in a raffle―and Cheryl decides to go in his place, fulfilling a promise to scatter his ashes by a trout stream. Part I of this memoir is an account of the first year after Cheryl’s husband’s death, where she becomes an explorer in the infinite stream of grief and loss, a time traveler between the darkness of sorrow and the light of daily life. Part II concludes with stories of the poignant and humorous adventures she had during the ensuing year. Tying it all together and woven throughout is Cheryl’s account of the creation of an altar assembled during the three-day ritual of Los Días de los Muertos. Poetic and mythological, Odyssey of Ashes is a raw story of loss and the deep transformation that traveling through darkness and returning to light can bring.Odyssey of Ashes by Cheryl Krauter
Guest Review by Laura Lee
Sometimes, from ashes a greater understanding can rise. Cheryl Krauter lost her husband, John suddenly. In the middle of the night, John woke with back pain. Only minutes later he had collapsed on the floor and was not breathing. Completely devastated and unsure of where to turn next, Cheryl began doing the things that we all do when we experience grief—trying to take things one day at a time. While she was trying to rebuild her life, she learned that John had won a raffle that he had applied for before his death. The raffle is for a once in a lifetime fly fishing trip. After some internal debate, Cheryl decides to go on the trip by herself, and bring John's ashes along with her to spread across the river. Madison river in Montana is a well-known spot for fly fishing. Because John was a devoted and skilled fly fisherman, the couple had been to Madison river once before, in 1988. Now it was 2017, and Cheryl was arriving on her own, with her husband's ashes. To say that this memoir touched my heart would be an understatement. I definitely teared up a few times while reading this, and I challenge anyone to keep a dry eye while Krauter remembers her life with her husband and their son. Many of us have experienced grief in our lifetimes, but not everyone can write about it with the grace and tenderness that Cheryl writes with. Her prose is both touching and heartbreaking, while sometimes also being funny and lighthearted. In 'Odyssey of Ashes: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Letting Go,' a full picture of a life, friends, family and hobbies is created in order to honor the man that Cheryl Krauter loved, and I cannot think of a more fitting tribute.Excerpt Odyssey of Ashes by Cheryl Krauter
In fall 2018, a year and a half after returning from Montana, I gather photos, sugar skulls, bones, and other mementos for my Día de los Muertos altar that’s become a tradition over the past several decades. Each year, I celebrate the Day of the Dead by honoring all of those who have died, who have crossed over into other worlds.
Times passes on, as it does, and with each year there are more photos and mementos to lovingly place on the altar. The spirits of those who have traveled to the other side are invited to return, lured by favorite treats and a bottle of whiskey (a drink once heartily enjoyed by many of those represented in the tableau of the dead). I imagine them feeling enticed to cross through the veil between the living and the dead.
Black candles burn to light the way for the dead on their journey from these unseen realms to visit those of us left behind, still bound to the earth. I continue creating the altar. In one photo, my mother and father stand together, grinning at the camera and holding a sunflower as they stand in front of an old copper- hooded brick fireplace in a home whose cottage walls, long ago knocked down, have been replaced by a gaudy, brownish-orangish stuccoed two-story mansion overlooking the ocean. My mentor, my teacher, dead nine years now, is still present with me; at times, it seems he’s just over my shoulder in my psychotherapy office. As I stand in front of the altar, he looks on from his perch on the mantle. His kind but always-searing gaze, burning with uncomfortable questions and keen insights, follows me around the room.
Gently, carefully, I place photos of two young cousins, tragically gone—one from mental illness, the other from an overdose that took him too young— next to each other. Drugs and alcohol being contributing factors in both deaths, in a fit of dark humor, I question their seating arrangement—directly next to the whiskey— on the altar. Such are the inner conversations within me as I hold each photograph in my hands, looking at faces and places once so familiar, now distant memories. Grandparents, friends, and my first love, taken early by ALS, line up next to one another, a collage of the troubled and beloved departed. Callie, my faithful dog, who had to be put down a month after John died, sits forever beautiful beside Lucy the cat, my familiar—the two joined together in death as they most certainly would never have been in life.
I sit with these souls who have traveled on, remembering stories, images of moments spent laughing, crying, and screaming, times that will never come again but that live deeply within me. This evening, I laugh, cry, occasionally scream, alone. I tell my dead loved ones stories of my life, of what has occurred for me since they left. I think that my critical mother would be pleased with me, and that my sensitive and troubled father, who always wanted to write a book himself, would be proud of my two published books.
Night falls; it is a silent and respectful ritual. John in his baseball cap, smiling and waving at the last game his son pitched, looks out onto the room, and his eyes seem to find mine as I light each candle and sit in front of all those who are no longer here. In the months since scattering his ashes that violent, stormy day in Montana, I have felt his presence fade, and I imagine him flying about in some universe or other as he explores a territory that I cannot enter. His photo goes in the center of the altar, and I place my hand over his waving one, as if a touch, a word, a plea for contact might actually draw him back.
I do not linger too long, however, as the ache in my heart begins to crack open into a gaping hole. I move between gratitude for the time we had together and a strong, surreal disbelief that John is actually on an altar for the dead and not in the next room in our home. Día de los Muertos is a celebration of those who have died, a colorful festival that sends encouraging missives to departed spirits for the success of their journeys. It holds both mourning and celebration of those who have died, but I feel no celebration in John’s passing, only a mournful emptiness that longs for his return . . . and again this strange sense of unreality overcomes me. Will that ever change? I wonder.
Two years after John died, less than a year after my trip to the Madison River, my friends Bill and Shash gave me a gift: a personal mythology created for me by a Celtic storyteller. The myth chosen for me was the story of Mis, who, while little is written about her, is known as the original wild woman of Irish mythology. Mis was the daughter of Dáire Dóidgheal, a powerful ruler from Europe who set out to invade Ireland. A fierce battle raged for a year and a day until Dáire was eventually slain, which brought the battle to an end. In the days that followed, Mis came to search the bloody battlefield, looking for her father. Upon finding his dead, bleeding body, she became overwhelmed with grief. Casting herself over his mortally wounded body, she began to lick and suck at his wounds like a wild animal trying to heal him.
Unable to bring him back from the dead, a madness came over her, and she rose up into the air and flew away into the heart of the Sliabh Mis mountains. Mis lived in the mountains for many years. Over time, she grew long, trailing fur and feathers to cover her naked skin, and great, sharp claws that she used to attack and tear to pieces any creature or person she met. She could run like the wind, and no living thing was safe from her. She was believed to be dangerous, and all feared the wildness of her grief. It came to pass that the king in those parts, Feidlimid Mac Crimthainn, offered a reward to anyone who would capture Mis alive. For fear of her, no one accepted except for one man, a gentle harper by the name of Dubh Ruis. Dubh Ruis was able to entice Mis out of hiding and make love to her. He coaxed her into a pool and, over a period of days, washed away the dirt and scrubbed away her feathers and fur.
He combed her hair, fed her, and made a bed for her. Eventually, he brought her back to civilization and married her, and Mis then lived a long, full life. Mis is the archetypal madwoman who lives within each of us. She screams the rage we are afraid to express, she wails the grief that threatens to swallow us whole, she expresses the unacceptable inner voices we suppress out of fear. At the heart of Mis’s story is the need to honor mourning in all its wild expression of rage and grief so that one can once again open a broken heart to love. In Ireland, this expression of mourning is called Caoine, something the rest of us might know as keening or funereal dirges. These primal mourning songs date back to the Etruscans and the wakes held by the ancient Greeks.
They briefly join the mourner with the departed in the liminal space between life and death; through keening, the mourner can let go of the grief and return to daily life. Returning from the wildness of Montana and the Madison River memorial, I was called back from the underworld to reenter the upper world of my day-to-day life. I was living in two worlds, one an urban scene of responsibilities and schedules, the other an inner wilderness that flowed constantly beneath my feet like a river as I walked through each day and night. Disorienting and unpredictable, it was exhausting work to keep track of myself as I simultaneously struggled with a sense of unreality and negotiated my life as a responsible human being residing in the world of the living.
No one really knew the depth of my struggles— living in the land of the dead even as I paid taxes, laughed at parties, and then drove home alone in the dark. Somehow I managed to continue my daily existence even as, like Mis, I wailed and raged in an imaginary mountain cave.
About Cheryl Krauter
(c) Nan Phelps
CHERYL KRAUTER is a San Francisco bay area psychotherapist with more than forty years of experience in the field of depth psychology and human consciousness. A cancer survivor, she is the author of Surviving the Storm: A Workbook for Telling Your Cancer Story (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Psychosocial Care of Cancer Survivors: A Clinician’s Guide and Workbook for Providing Wholehearted Care (Oxford University Press, 2018). She lives with her personal assistant, a cat named Amie.
Website: http://www.cherylkrauter.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CherylKrauter
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