Erik and I had been preparing for the day when he would no longer be so embodied. With a 21 year age difference, we knew that someday he might be bedridden or unable to use his body, his beautiful hands, to be with me.
And so we started to prepare. We used Tantra. We learned the energetic exercises.
When I saw Sex, Love & Goop on Netflix, I thought: Yes, that’s us. The energetic. Learning to go into the energetic to make love.
We had some experience in this. Once, early on, I lay in a nest of pillows on the kitchen floor while Erik made dinner. He was cutting onions, sending his energy to me with each onion slice. There in my little nest, with him a few feet away, I came. We were delighted.
Often after these experiments, we were proud of ourselves, proud of what we’d done.
We practiced energetic kissing for weeks and weeks. It became a staple of our lives. We would stand across from one another before one of us left the house, sending our energy to one another, to one another’s lips, to one another’s whole being. And leave the house tingling and giddy.
I use those skills now in a way I didn’t expect. I imagined I would use them with him on his death bed. Using sweet orgasmic energy to play back and forth. So there would be no loss.
But when the biggest loss came, I saw that we’d prepared for something even bigger. To use that energy that we’d created together, that we’d learned to play with, for my own survival.
It wasn’t that I made love with Erik after he was gone, although I love that idea of Erik coming to me like a cosmic lover in his ethereal form, like cupid, like an angel, visiting me in my bed.
I love that idea but that’s not what happened. Instead I used those skills over and over on the image of him hanging from a tree.
I asked myself over and over: where is the eros here? Where is the eros?
Can I bring even this image into my body? Can I hold this image with tenderness and love like an energetic kiss?
This image that, at first, woke me in the night with a sense of horror.
I felt into that image over and over until the image sweetened. My Lover hanging from a tree out in nature. My Lover simply in another form. My Lover. Still my Lover.
There was nothing orgasmic in this. But it was powerful alchemy. To transform that which is immobile, that which can’t give back, that which is dead and gone, that which could be horrifying and haunting for years… into an image of sweet tenderness. So when the image rose up before me, I could say: Hi Lover, I see you there. Hi Lover.
And even when he laid in my arms when we cut him down, some part of me knew how to feel in. And though his tongue lolled out of his mouth, and his skin was rubbery, I could touch him and feel the sweetness, I could feel the softness of the energy, the sense that he was at peace. That he was no longer suffering.
Erik had wanted to teach me so many survival skills. How to make a fire in the rain, how to identify trees by their leaves and bark. But the thing that helped me survive was this daily practice we did of feeling into the energy, making love in the air between us, without touch.
What helped me survive was preparing for his death, for his old age. Of knowing there’s more, knowing that the energetic, the ethereal, is real, is a gift.
Erik would tell people: I love energetic kissing even more than real kissing!
He would say it with a voice that had some astonishment in it.
Who would of thought?
Who would have thought the energetic could be so powerful?
