The Lesson in the Sunset

This is the week when I always remember my late daughter Teal in my writing. It was eight years ago that she collapsed from a medically unexplainable cardiac arrest, and died six days later, August 20. 

In the eight years since her death, she has been my muse, my inspiration. My teacher. Mainly because unlike so many of us, her values and her integrity were crystal clear. Teal knew just what really mattered in life. And it began with slowing down and becoming present. 

Here I’m sharing a piece I wrote back in 2013, and it remains one of my favorites. Such a powerful lesson for me to learn. May you enjoy it. And glean as much as I did.

(This photo was taken by Teal the year before her death. It shows the Pacific just beyond her neighborhood at the time, Outer Sunset.)

***

One night several months before her death, my daughter took me aside. At that moment, I was packing up my apartment to move and had little interest in any of her good suggestions. Still Teal prevailed, just as she usually did.

“Take a minute and watch the sunset tonight, Mom,” she suggested. “It’s so incredible from these windows.”

My apartment had a sweeping view of the western half of San Francisco, over which the great Pacific sunset rose like a majestic queen.  But I was full of hubris then and thought my time was much too valuable to spend on a sunset.

“Honey, I’m just so busy –” I protested.

Teal gave me a disapproving look. “Mom. Have you ever watched a sunset in the year and a half that you’ve lived here?”

I was silent.

“Just as I thought,” said Teal, shaking her head. “Come on, Mom. Just do it. And watch the whole thing, right up until dark. No sneaking away.”

She started to go out the door. Then she stopped and turned around.

“Call me when you’ve done it,” she added. “I’ll be waiting.”

The door closed with a click.

I sighed. Unpacked boxes were scattered on the floor around me. Watching the sunset was about the last thing I wanted to do. Still, something that night made me stop and listen to my daughter.

I quieted my usual frenetic self, sat down and waited. After a few moments, the sunset began.

A subtle shell pink spread out from the horizon as the molten lump of the sun slipped away.

I relaxed. I felt myself soften and let go. So much had weighed on my mind lately, impossible things like whether I should be moving in with the woman I called my partner. I knew it would be a fiasco, but still I kept on plodding steadily forward, ignoring the many red flags waving wildly all around me.

The sunset spread throughout the entire sky, deepening pink, radiating peach, then blue, purple, even streaks of green. Every color of the rainbow passed before my eyes in this massive lightshow at the edge of the city. But I couldn’t truly feel the beauty of the sunset.

Not yet.

At that moment, my life was a mess. The successful spiritual marketing business I’d come to San Francisco to build two years earlier was suddenly ending. What stood in its place was something far less reliable and even downright sketchy.

I called this new work ‘The Spiritual Diet’ and I honestly had no idea what it was.  I just knew, from all my time as a marketer that this brand would sell. And I knew I was charismatic enough – and ‘spiritual’ enough — to sell it.

Yet outside these windows was the true expansion, the purest wonder of God. Outside these windows was the spirituality before which we are dwarfed, as Teal so rightly knew.

Outside these windows was my salvation, but it would take three years and the worst crisis of my life for me to understand this.

I sat on the couch and watched as the sunset spread just beyond my reach. The buildings of the Castro and the Haight grew peach, then pink, then rose, their windows iridescent glimmers in the sunglow.

A small part of me was still awake enough to see what Teal was showing me—that I had become lost in a cloud of delusion. I sighed and closed my eyes and tried not to feel the pounding of my own heart.

What in God’s name had I done to my life?

The sunset continued, consuming the sky in its own sweet time. I eyed the boxes all around me, empty and waiting. Dully I regarded the sky one more time.

I really couldn’t watch a sunset. Not now.

I got up and mechanically began to fill boxes. I had to stay busy. Keeping my head down, I glanced over once more at the sky. The deepening red now filled the corners of the windows in a triumphant climax. A blanket of lavender-grey fog had begun to roll in around Twin Peaks.

Tears sprang into my eyes as I kept on packing. I couldn’t let my heart catch up with me; I just couldn’t. There was far too much to lose to tell the truth in this particular moment.  A year and a half earlier I had wiped the slate clean. I’d left my marriage of 25 years, come out as a lesbian and crossed the country to begin anew.

Teal busking at the Champs des Mars in Paris in 2011

If these last, pathetic vestiges of love and respect—the empty framework I called my new life—slipped away, then I really would be lost and utterly alone.

Alone, that is, except for Teal.

Pack, I thought. Just pack. Head down I continued, as tears poured down my face.

The phone rang a moment later. It was Teal. “So?” she asked. “Did you watch it?”

“Magnificent,” I said, trying to sound as normal as possible. No one could know that I was falling apart. Not even my daughter. “Thank you, honey,” I heard myself say. “Thanks for making me do that.”

“You’re welcome, Mom,” she said lightly. “Love you.”

But of course, Teal knew I was falling apart and that I needed to. She knew far more for her 22 years than most people learned in entire lifetimes. This light-filled being, whose deepest love was her love for others, would soon be returned to dust. And I would become humble again in ways I couldn’t currently imagine.

Teal was my healer and my teacher, though at the time I was too blind to see it. First she would have to die. Then part of me would, as well.

So we would both be reborn in completely different ways.

The path to the true magnificence had already begun.

To learn more about  the life of Teal Barns, visit her About Teal page.

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