During the taping for the upcoming film on Love, Death, and Transformation, we experienced many visits from winged creatures, spiders, and a baby rattlesnake. In this case, a tiny spider landed on the shoulder of Corey's oldest friend. Corey and Patti met in second grade and remained friends forever after. As I positioned the camera, Corey's friend Emily noticed the spider and came forward to blow it off, but it somersaulted and clung to Patti in any way it could.

I don't know how, if at all, I will be able to give voice to this phenomena in the film, but many of us know that unusual visits from living things are part of the death and after-death process. A certain bird swooping or landing at a penultimate moment, a butterfly or dragonfly making itself known, a wild creature appearing in your path. These become a steady stream of unusual and unexpected moments accompanying the loss of a loved one. We don't know what to make of them, and yet they stand out as gestures that are both inner and outer, known and unknown. Without knowing what a moment like this is, we somehow have the sense that this moment is more than it seems.

On Good Friday, Chelsea and Cynthia come out. Chelsea bursts into the big kitchen with paper grocery bags and pulls out fresh halibut, Swiss chard, cold ginger beer. She knows where the frying pan is and gets cooking. She is like the wind, breezing around the kitchen walls. I move more slowly but stay on task with her: we will make food, then she and Cynthia will talk to me about Corey.

Food is the thing we do while the rest of our body is preparing itself for the waters of grief. Fruit and root and green and meat, we touch and rinse and chop and heat and stir and fold them into our bodies, and their life force gives us renewed strength to sit with loss. There is an unwritten groundrule: because there is loss, we must have abundance. Because something precious has been taken away, our healing requires abundance of food, abundance of time, abundance of hugs, abundance of stories. We must have stories to heal.

We eat on a round table under the old Douglas Fir, and I don’t remember what we talk about. I enjoy the food, I want the food, and at the same time it is a necessary vehicle to get to the stories. We clear away the dishes and settling into chairs again I am struck with the bravery of these women, who—against all defense mechanisms—have bravely presented their bodies and souls before the video camera, willing to talk about my daughter, and knowing that tears will be a part of it. And that is when it hits me, how much courage it is taking for all of these young women to show up for this project.

They are coming because they loved my daughter and, with Corey gone now, her mom has shown up with this question: will you tell me Corey stories? They have come because they refuse to deny the presence of love, even when sadness and tears are its unwelcome companions.

I am fed by the stories—details of this day and that night, what Corey did and said and how they laughed together or moved through a difficult time together—and those stories become the bricks and mortar of my own memories. You cannot possibly know the precious gold that you give me when you give me your memories of my daughter. I know it isn’t easy. Together, showing up for the love and the stories and the tears, we are turning grief into gold.

The tuxedo cat Corey so loved--I call him Dooomie--relaxes with me and a snack (must-have-chips) under a tree as we wait for the first of many of her friends that I hope to spend time with here. Yesterday as I was writing about how the cat delighted Corey, how he made her giggle and laugh, he jumped into my lap and purred...which made me weep, because I could feel how her love for him lives on in him, emanates through him, is one of the ways that she is still present in undefinable ways.

One week from today, I will leave for California. Three weeks living in Corey-land, Calistoga and Napa Valley, which she loved so deeply. I planned this trip, like everything else since June 2013, through the gritted teeth of grief. The Corey film I am making—whatever it manages to be—is something of an excuse, a vehicle through which I expect to work with grief: mine and that of others. 

The more I live through grief, the more I view it as god-like: mysterious, impossible to describe, a set of invisible forces that influence us in ways we do not choose. I often think of Christ before the crucifixion, pleading, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will but thine be done.”

That is the way of the soul: a daily attempt to center into what is greater than us while at the same time feeling all the nagging desires of the self. I want this, I wish that, God I need you to answer my petitions for health, joy, love. And above all, God, don’t make me suffer. 

But anyone who is giving so much as a one-eyed glance at his or her own suffering can plainly see that in the pain we move more quickly toward our own souls. In sadness and suffering, we cleave to the soul life we ignored while life was flying past in a blur.

I despise that this is true, but I do not deny it. I have told God thousands of times that I am completely willing to learn all my lessons through bliss, through abundance, through community. But in the end I know that God does not offer the E-Z course of life. It is always more like God musing: How would you handle it if I threw THIS catastrophe at you? 

God the beautiful, God the cruel, God the lover, God the deserter. 

As part of the Corey Transformation Film we are making this year, this was the second "Corey Weekend" where we gathered to celebrate Corey, to tell stories and laugh, to hold each other and weep, and to take a few moments to also speak bravely to the camera about where we are now with our process. I had planned a list of questions to ask, but what happened was that we just cried and talked about anger and sadness. We walked in these awesome Appalachian Mountains and found some healing and solace there by the Swannanoa River.

As part of preparing for the film, I also brought into a folder various audio files from my iPhone, including this one of my cousin Candace and I singing in the Asheville airport before she boarded her plane to return to Kauai last September. So, this is my wish for all of you, and it is my wish for Corey, and I believe it is her request of us as well. Click on AUDIO link below.