My journey is one that I never planned, and which has been taken without maps. It is a description of the winter landscapes of the soul, that far country where I found myself after unexpected, sudden, and shattering losses. In this landscape there really are no maps, no markers to plot the course of grief. Here I’ve been forced to find my own way.

In August of 1986, my dearest grandmother closed her eyes after a few weeks of hospitalization, which was my first contact with serious illness and death. I was 10. She was supposed to be discharged the following week while medical staff had done nothing for her continuous abdominal pain. Everybody was desperate and insane. Why did she have to die? Three months later, my sweet brother left me alone after 5 years of living with a life-threatening disease. He was only 9.

            I never forget the day that my brother vomited black blood on a yellow wooden floor while my family was watching television. He was 5. Since then, he’d been in and out of hospital until his life ended surrounded by his family, relatives, and medical staff. In his last morning, I was about to go to school when my grandmother told me that we had to go to the hospital. Once I saw my brother, I immediately realized that he was soon going to die. He looked painful and was in a comma, breathing heavy with his shoulders. I burst into tears, knowing there was no hope to play with him again. Crying, I told him: “you will soon get better. Then, we will go to school together.” I needed hope that he would recover in order to prevent myself from going crazy; his sudden death was not acceptable to me. In response, amazingly and unexpectedly, he opened his eyes and looked at me for a few seconds before he closed his eyes eternally. He came back in order to say good-bye to me, and then returned on his path. He was fading, becoming less and less distinct, drifting backwards, moving farther away from me, into a dark place. He officially died soon after, but I knew in those first moments that he was gone, that in passing beyond that veil he had passed into another place. I can never forget that moment of our last contact.

            After the two deaths, I started talking to my grandmother and brother in my bed every night. I told them what I did and thought each day, and they listened to every word carefully. They did not speak much, but their voices seemed to surround me, and what I noticed most was the tone with which they called me. Their voices had the same qualities of love, tenderness, and compassion; both voices had the soft feelings of an embrace, as if the sound itself had a texture to it. They had loved and warmed me since I was born, and now again they were warming and loving me through their deaths, summoning me to be awake.

            In January of 1995, my uncle died alone at a hospital. He had lost his voice after surgical resection of his tumor. He was depressed, but nobody, not even his family listened to or supported him. When he wrote down “I want to die”, his family got angry and told him that he should not say that again. His family was afraid of facing death much more than my uncle was. Even though I lived far away from them at that time, I blamed myself for not being able to be with him. 

Throughout my work on my thesis, I have entered into another intense grief period. My small room was silent except for the rhythmic ticking of a clock on the wall. It was cold, the chill in the apartment not yet warmed by the feeble early morning light. But I was accustomed to these moments before the day began when I took simple pleasure in wrapping myself in a bathrobe and blanket to sit still and motionless. Waking early in the morning, I always sought refuge in this quiet oasis of solitude.

            I loved these moments and the setting, and I especially loved the melancholic mood which marked these occasions. I felt a kind of sad peace in this melancholy, a feeling which seemed to be composed of two real parts. On one hand, I always felt as if I was seeing things for the last time, as if I could sense in the very presence of things, their fading. On the other hand, in the early morning light, I also felt as if I was seeing things for the first time, as if I was witnessing not only the start of the day but also the true origins of the world.

            I believe, now, that the loss of my family members opened up not only a sorrow about my own personal origins, about our past together which now had no longer a future, but also reopened those earlier moments of an origin beyond a personal history. I believe now that melancholy is a kind of crucible where loss and origins blend together, where grief and its cloudy, liquid sorrows are momentarily clear, and we get a glimpse of our true home and catch a brief vision of the face we had before we were born.

            As I look back now, I know that in those moments it was not I who was sitting patiently waiting in the stillness and silence for the return of that something I once had but had left behind. In those early morning moments, when the light was still soft and vulnerable that it broke the hardness of my heart, the melancholic companion of the soul in grief sat still and motionless.

            On some of these mornings, the waiting was accompanied by the reading of a book. To be more precise, I was not exactly reading a book; the book was more like an occasion for slipping into a state of reverie, in which my conscious mind fell into the dreaming state of the soul. Gaston Bachelard says of reverie: “We were reading and now we are dreaming,” and I can attest to this power of reverie to dissolve the boundaries between the world.

Between these places, I would find that I was a part of what I was experiencing, rather than apart from it, and safely ensconced in the small chambers of my own ego-mind. It was a happy place; I inhabited the world in such a way that the taken-for-granted parameters of space and time temporarily disappeared. I was never surprised, that through this occasion for reverie, an entire morning would slip by. How pleasant it was to while away a whole morning in the solitude of reverie, to discover that dawn had brightened into a yellow sun in the afternoon.

My relationship to music

            My mother started teaching me piano when I was 4. Practicing piano was my duty and was something with which I could please my mother. In order to become a good performer, I was obsessed with finding techniques and being honest to scores. I never improvised on the piano. To me, playing the piano was not at all a tool to express my feelings. One high school day, I thought of applying to medical school so that I could be someone who helps people suffering from illness and death. However, I ended up back to the path to music college.

            Practicing piano mindlessly was the tool to get a ticket to enter one of the most prestigious music colleges in Japan located far away from my hometown. At that time, I was overwhelmed by relatives’ voices saying that I had to live my brother’s life too. I needed air to breathe. I needed to find my life.

            After I entered a music college in Tokyo, I began to think what was the quest of my life. When I was again considering medical school, I happened to attend a Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Workshop. It was full of improvised music filled with emotions. This is it. I thought I could integrate my musical background and my long time desire to work with people who were in need. I applied to New York University, and came to New York in the fall of 2000.

Grief experience in a Guided Imagery and Music (GIM) session

A powerful GIM session experience drove me to get into its training program. In June of 2002, I had my first GIM session in which my grandmother, brother and I united in my imagery. It had been a long time since the last day we met. In imagery, we were surrounded by a radiant white light and they increased well beyond the physical dimensions of their former earthly life. They had already taken on the form of their angelic existence. Their voices comforted me, and when I saw them they were different, larger than life and enveloped in a different form.

In the final analysis, the attuned heart may be the necessary condition for the Angel to appear. In grief, the heart’s song is one of sorrow, a song of lament. Maybe the Angel is especially receptive to me in my moments of pain and sorrow.

Over the course of the years I saw my grandmother and brother in this guise mostly at night before I slept. In addition, as the process of mourning gave way to melancholy, I saw the faces of the Angel many times. I have come to believe that like the Orphan who stands at the abyss, the Angel waits at the edges of the world to escort me beyond my own personal sorrow, beyond the state of psychological inwardness and isolation. The Angel waits to escort me into a realm which I can only describe as one of cosmological connectedness, into that place where even in that early moment of grief, I feel connected with and held by forces beyond the human realm.

I return to the sense of being a part of all creation when I look at Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night. What must he have felt in those moments under the canopy of all that brilliant light? I find joy and sadness in that painting. Joy, and even a note of celebration comes from recognizing that we are a star, that something of this heavenly light touches us.

Sadness occurs in recognizing how far away I am from these moments of connection with all of creation, and how my life here is always punctuated with loss and sorrow. Yet, in those moments when I saw the Angel, I knew that my deepest and most painful sorrows can have a spiritual intensity. Through the Angel, I learned that personal grief and loss can be moments of potential spiritual transformation.