All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [197]
I continued to sleep well, almost twelve hours a night. I enjoyed the weight of my worn daily meditation readers in my hands every morning, and had resumed reading the End of Sorrow, Bhagavad-Gita for Daily Living where I left off. Ekneth Easwaran, the great teacher who inspired my meditation practice, would have said I had a golden opportunity to take my practice deeper than I ever dreamed possible, but that it takes consistency to ride the waves of consciousness to arrive at the still, deep ocean floor, where the rubies and diamonds are. But I still felt very sick, and not over the reentry. I decided to see a psychologist I knew in town. After we spoke a while, she offered that what she was observing in me was mostly grief, not trauma, and reminded me of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She said “You are still grieving, Ashley, and sometimes you sound like you are in the bargaining, too. And the only way out is through. I imagine you’ll kick whatever is making you feel like you are sick, when the emotional part is purged.”
Her words were all it took for the dam to break. I began to cry. I could not stop. The force of it propelled my chest forward, which came to rest on the tops of my legs. I sat that way, folded over, limp but for the sobbing, for a while, until the old shame crept up on me, the lie that my feelings are a burden. I began to fear I was wasting her time, excoriating myself for driving forty-five minutes to pay someone so I could cry on her sofa. I glanced up and apologized for being a dork. “You’re doing good, Ashley. You are doing so good,” she said softly.
I sensed there was double meaning in her offering: the work abroad and taking care of my grieving self within the work. Touched by her encouragement, I let go for good, and cried it out. This was the woman, after all, who after my very first trip with PSI all those years ago, had said, “You know, the little girls are always going to get to you.” Though my eyes had filled spontaneously with tears, I had been baffled by what she said.
Soon, indeed, I began to feel better. A sense of something invisible being lifted occurred, and I was no longer dragging around, pushing myself, struggling to stay upright. I flew with Dario to his race in Pocono, and on his bus did some laundry from previous races. I paused, though, and registered in my body how it feels to do two loads, separated by color, with chosen water temps, and custom spin cycles, on a bus. I was physically better, but I retained the awareness of, the sensitivities to, the ridiculous abundance of our lives. When it came time, I could not put our clothes in the dryer. I just couldn’t. I took them outside and spread them on chairs. I wondered how Dario would feel when he came back from qualifying and all the wash was hanging in plain view of the driver’s paddock, a veritable neighborhood filled with racing drivers, their families, team members. He is a natural boy, I suspected he wouldn’t mind.
I heard the cars on the track, and I wanted to watch. In spite of trepidation, I decided to experiment, and walk to the pits. If it was too much, if I could not be kind and patient, if I wanted to explain to everyone who asked for an autograph, “No, but have you heard of Rwandan genocide? Are you aware there are more slaves today than at the height of the nineteenth-century slave trade?” I could just return to the bus.
I made it to the pits, and the absurdity, the insane luxury, of putting so much time, attention, and hundreds of millions of dollars into being .001 second faster than the next car—the sums, hundreds of thousands of fans pay each season to sit and watch cars go in a circle could provide school for … I couldn’t finish the sentence. I put it out of my mind. This was my husband’s life. In my sleep that night, I found another way to look at it, to frame it as one of the many extraordinary things humans can do with their potential when we are freed up beyond merely