Recently when I learned that the I Heart Sapph Fiction website was featuring my novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage (Thorned Heart Press; 2022) in its addictions category, I began reflecting on my own journey with addictions. Loving Artemis is fiction but it does reflect some of my own experiences with addiction. I deal with the pull toward addictions for most of my life—which included both food and alcohol addictions. Then five years ago, I went to a plant-based diet for health reasons initially—but a short time later had a consciousness raising about the animals and the planet. Several years after going to a healthy vegan diet, my addictions lifted. This wasn’t why I went to a healthy vegan diet, and I remain rather amazed at the subsequent feeling of freedom. I was inspired to re-post this memoir excerpt that details some of my journey and was published in BeZine.
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I am delighted to share this excerpt of my memoir in progress–LOST: a daughter navigates father loss and discovers what it means to belong–that was published recently in the literary magazine, BeZine.
Transcending Myself | Janet Mason
Posted on June 29, 2023 by The BeZine Editors
After my father’s death five years ago, I began examining my life in ways I never thought about before. Two years after he died, almost to a day, I had a medical emergency that put me in the hospital. This was the first time I had been hospitalized overnight. And a subsequent infection that nearly killed me and landed me back in the Emergency Room. After a few months, I went to a plant-based diet on the advice of my acupuncturist and began to feel so good that I never looked back. After a few years of eating differently and walking nearly every day, I lost so much weight and felt so good that I realized I had undergone a major transformation. I felt like a different person when I woke up in my new body every morning. But was I?
I had to remind myself that although I had lost my addictions—from both food and alcohol—and changed in the way I looked and felt, I was still the same person. For starters, I was still my father’s daughter. The stubbornness and the strength that fueled me in becoming vegan came directly from my stubborn father. After going to a healthy plant-based diet I had a consciousness shift in my thinking about all animals including humans and about lowering my carbon footprint through veganism which is connected to the future of the planet. My father ate the Standard American Diet, but he died at the age of ninety-eight, outliving all his siblings and most of his friends. I was in my late fifties when he died, and despite having created a life that worked for me, was greatly saddened by his loss. My grief was greater than I dreaded it would be. Perhaps it was because I am an only child. Maybe it is because our lives overlapped for so many years. Or it could be because my father was my last remaining parent. My mother had died decades earlier. When my father was still alive, he was my psychological barrier to mortality.
Despite the sensation of having a new lease on life, I cannot deny feeling immense sadness about the death of my father. I feel the sadness in my chest, stomach, and legs as the tension coils down to my feet. As I sit, I realize my body is tense. My toes curl toward me. I take a breath and let go, releasing the sadness that will always be with me.
After much Buddhist meditation, I have come to understand that my father lives on inside of me. This may be true, but I have had to let go of my actual father, the man whose body formed me. In a way, his death was like my death. I had to let go of a physical being, someone who had formed me and been with me so long he had become an extension of me as much as I was an extension of him. I may have been holding his arm, guiding him, and holding him up for a lot of years, but he had been guiding me for my entire life, even when I didn’t know it. The sadness of losing him will always be with me, even when my toes are not so tense they curl upwards. I sit with this sadness as I now realize it is part of me. Sometimes the awareness is stronger, other times it is just a dull reality. Even though I now realize he a part of me, this is a reality. My father is gone.
When I was younger, in my twenties and thirties, my father would kiss me goodbye after a visit and say, “Be good.” When we got into the car and it was just the two of us, my long-time partner, Barbara, used to joke, “You’re always good.”
This became a running joke with us.
But my father was sincere in those years—although at some point he stopped telling me to “Be good,” when I left.
He was watering the good seeds—an expression I often think of in Buddhism. I try to water the good seeds in myself and others. I didn’t think of it before, but this is my way of remembering my father. He was good and created good in me. I may, at times, struggle at being good—like most people, I am tempted to return negative comments—but I force myself at times to retain my equilibrium, to stay true to my goodness. At other times, maybe most, I don’t struggle with doing the right thing. Goodness just takes over. It gets me out of the chair to help even though I could just sit there and do nothing.
It is not theoretical, this feeling of my father living on inside of me. I feel him in my bones. More than ever, I remind myself of him. Often when I do my yoga practice, which I do at night, I lay on my mat in my office and stretch my legs out in a bicycle motion to strengthen my long core muscles in the center of my tall body. I remember seeing him start his day by pumping his legs, very similar exercises to what I do in my daily yoga practice. Like him, I relish the feeling of blood pumping through my body.
Since going to a plant-based diet, I feel more compassion in my body. I have long been a Buddhist but since going to a plant-based diet I feel more compassion and a new stillness inside of me. This might be because I no longer have the suffering of animals in my body from the food I’ve eaten. Maybe it is because I have the satisfying feeling of feeling full after every meal since the fiber in vegetables and fruits fills the stomach more than the unhealthy elements of the Standard American Diet. Barbara and I have gotten to know some of the animals who live at a local farm connected to an agricultural high school. Several of the cows seem to know us and are happy to see us. We have adopted two cows and they now live at a farm animal sanctuary we visited last year several years after we went vegan. The cows are an important part of our plant-based journey. So, perhaps I feel more compassion in my body because in thinking and talking about the animals, I have a purpose transcending myself.
Maybe it is the accidental weight loss accompanying being healthy which has put me more in touch with the compassion in my body. The compassion connects me to the universe and radiates love to all–toward the planet and all its beings. I feel compassion for my younger self in dealing with my father’s illness and his death. I was lucky to have had my father for as long as I did. And I was fortunate to be able to express my emotions even when I felt like a mess, when I was crying in the bathroom at the hospital, and particularly after his death. The emotions have lessened but I take a breath and realize the feeling of undeniable sadness is still there.
This piece was included in the Waging Peace, Summer 2023 issue of BeZine. The read the issue, click here: https://thebezine.com/portfolio/summer-2023/
For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here.
Janet Mason, author 