I wanted to share with you the story of Dr. Jacquelyn Kotarac, not for prurient reasons and not in an effort to expose her, or increase her families grief…but rather to examine the potential outcome of the lack of self-knowledge that so dominates our collective and shared human experience…and because… I so relate to Dr. Kotarac’s dilemma and circumstances.
So out of respect for her and an exquisite sensitivity to her circum-stances, decisions, and the results of her ordeal… that has so fired my imagination and caused so much retrospective gratitude on my behalf, I begin with my part of our shared history.
Like Dr. Kotarac, I have above average intelligence, capacity, talent and commitment…but, similar to her, it did not save me from a long and heated battle with self-hatred. Sourcing from my childhood I lived so far outside of myself, that no amount of external gratification could undo what I was doing to myself, in the quiet hours I spent alone. The murdering, soul crushing sound of my self-hatred was so loud, so overbearing, so deceiving, so committed and so constant that it drove me to decisions, behaviors, and outcomes that were much deeper than merely self destructive…destruction was self evident…but the desire for humiliation and self-denigration, was also a potent and very visible result.
Even though I do not know Dr. Kotarac personally, I believe in my heart of hearts that I could speak with some authority on the state of mind, which emptied her spirit in such a touching and poetically painful way. No matter the amount and quality of professional education, acumen, and intellectual ability that she possessed… or that I was fortunate enough to have, the lack of self-knowledge and self-understanding and self-connection drove us both past the brink.
For myself, it manifested in much the same way as it did for Dr. Kotarac. The need for male companionship was more than a biological drive, it was a soul deep hunger…a kind of imperative that fueled my mistaken beliefs that if loved, wanted, desired and valued by a man in some magical and mysterious way, I would stop wanting to kill myself…somehow…someway…if a man could love me, then finally and surely I would/could be saved.
And thus, like Dr. Kotarac, my focus landed on one such man. His name was Rick Craig, and I thought him an exquisite example of male beauty, and valor, and spirit. His heritage was “Black Irish”… dark hair, high cheekbones, exquisitely carved features and the most amazing icy gray...not pale blue…but pure gray eyes, which I have never seen the like of since. (Not all my friends agreed, it must be noted…he was quite short – but I have always preferred short men). I loved him fierce, but mostly…I wanted him to love me.
I had no shame when it came to seeking his attention. When we fought and he threatened to leave me, I begged, cajoled, pleaded, pushed, or prodded…whatever seemed like it might work, or stem the tide of rising fear and anxiety I felt, at the thought of having to live without the warmth of his embrace.
One particularly harsh fight, after a night of legal and illegal substance intake, led to his storming off and canceling my hopes for the future with an off-handed and very abrupt….”That’s it, I have had enough…it’s OVER.”
I left… streaming tears, driving erratically, desperate for some other outcome…some other potential than to face the loss of my savior, my lover, and my hope for a future. I began calling him the moment I got home, midnight…1am…2am…3am, he wouldn’t pick up the phone and I just knew, he knew it was me. Desperate for him to change his mind, desperate for one more opportunity to be whatever it was he wanted me to be. Desperate in every way, that desperation can take hold of you, I was twenty-three years old and not sure I could survive the loss… given the state of mind in which I hid the resounding insanity that populated my life, when I was not in the company of others. (Now in the sober light of retrospection, I am sure he had merely turned off the phone…having been the recipient of my desperate phone calls before this, he probably had just unplugged and hit the sack.)
By 4am I’d worked myself into such an aggrieved and grieving state of mind, that the only course of action that seemed open to me and therefore quite reasonable, was to go over and make him talk to me. I pounded on every door, window, bedroom window and shouted his name, crying and hysterical…and finally…I broke into his house destroying a window screen and finding entry thru a small crack he’d left open for ventilation.
He was passed out on his bed, and when I joined him there…he was not even surprised…
We broke up finally and forever a few weeks later, and this, along with many other very painful episodes is what started my spiritual journey and the lifelong commitment that has resulted in a sane, settled, quiet, silent, self-kind, and harmonious internal reality. Somewhere along this path, I unknowingly and unwittingly chose celibacy, which is now more than two decades old, and like a nun who has entered a cloister… I dedicated my life, my path, and my journey to the Inner Realities. I became committed to the healing that was necessary to save my sanity, and to add my small contribution to the movement of sanity, that may well, one day save us all.
Dr. Kotarac, was forty nine and still adrift in the belief that “a man…the right man” could save her and give meaning to a life that was clearly not satisfying or meaningful, despite the fact that she was lauded by her colleagues and a much sought after Internist. The hole in her soul was a pounding and dramatically real emptiness… and she believed, as I once had, that finding romantic love was the only source by which she could find the happiness she so clearly must have yearned for.
The newspaper story that brought her to my attention included a picture of a lovely blonde woman, aging well, and clearly comfortable in her role as a physician, caregiver, and healer. In her picture she wore the ubiquitous stethoscope round her neck, which for her was as common an accessory, as is a hammer for a carpenter. She appeared relaxed, comfortable, and capable…and like many appearances…it was entirely deceptive. With that picture, a reporter logged this story…
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (Aug. 31) -- ”A doctor involved in an on-again, off-again relationship with a Bakersfield man, tried to force her way into his home with a shovel, and he not wanting to engage in a confrontation left by the back door, unbeknownst to the Doctor. She then climbed a ladder to the roof last Wednesday night, removed the chimney cap and slid feet first down the flue, Bakersfield police Sgt. Mary DeGeare said. Her decomposing body was found there three days later. No foul play is suspected.”
I cannot begin to imagine the suffering and difficulty of Dr. Kotarac’s final hours. At first - she surely must have wiggled to free herself from the confinement, she had unwittingly caused, she must have felt very foolish, sheepish, and embarrassed…but not overly concerned, not at first…
Perhaps it took many minutes or even hours to understand that no amount of calling out, pulling with her fingertips and pushing with the tips of her toes, was going to dislodge her body from the encapsulating brick. It must have been dark, dank, and smelly in the chimney… and overhead… a tantalizingly bright rectangle of blue with perhaps wispy white clouds, so close and yet worlds away.
When her rash decision, and the weight of its horrible consequences fully presented itself to her mind and heart, I can’t help but imagine, that she saw and felt the absurdity of needing or wanting companionship, to the degree that she would surrender her life for it. No doubt with her life on the line, the confusion that so many of us carry around our necks, like that ubiquitous stethoscope she wore in her last portrait, lifted… and clarity came rushing in.
He could not have been that special or important for her to lose her life over him, in such a sad and sorrowful way. Of course the physical suffering, before the final release came, must have been agonizing and horrible. One can only hope that unconsciousness found her relatively quickly, and spared her the worst of it.
I remember - very clearly - the quality and thickness of that type of confusion, like seeing thru coke bottle bottoms and moving thru gelatin. A kind of befuddlement that belies the intelligence, necessary to master eight years of higher education and three years spent in residency and internship. Higher education, valuable as it may be, for preparing us to master and excel in the world of achievement and accomplishment, provides absolutely nothing, to prepare us for the only achievement that matters…namely Self Understanding, and Self Awareness.
It may even be a strong and damaging deterrent to the flowering of Consciousness given the number of years necessary to accomplish a higher University degree, and the very strong way in which formal education shapes and contours a world-view. I remember Eckhart Tolle’s description, in the Power of Now, of his University mentor whose intelligence and philosophical acumen was the pinnacle of achievement, as far as the young Tolle could see…only to be deeply challenged as the saving grace he hoped it could be, upon hearing of his mentor’s suicide, over a long weekend break in his class schedule.
There is a vast difference between education and wisdom.
Wisdom requires of us a willingness to find and follow the darker, frightening depths of our being. We will not find wisdom along the light-filled trail of goodness that so captures and enchants us. It is not to be found in the desire to do good, or even the desire to be seen as being good, that is so alluring and beguiling to those of us on the Spiritual Path.
Wisdom is a product of facing ourselves…of transcending ourselves…of aligning ourselves, with the willingness to drain the pus and cauterize the inherited wounds, of being born into the human condition. It is found in the capacity and ability to lift ourselves above the confusion…the mesmerizing complexity of the conditioned mind… and find for ourselves, and by ourselves, the pure stream of non-thinking, intuitive existence, that predates our birth and will survive our death.
Blaise Pascal 1623 – 1662, French Philosopher and Mathematician, said…”All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
There is no doubt what-so-ever, that Dr. Kotarac would be alive today if she had been capable of “sitting in a quiet room alone.”
The interior movement toward the deepest Self is one that brings with it the sacrifice of some, or perhaps even all, of our most cherished beliefs. The unconscious beliefs that charter our course and choose our decisions…ones like, tomorrow will be a better day, or if someone love’s me then I will be okay, or if I am “good” then I will be protected. All of these and more than I can describe or contain herein, are the unwise, sentimental, and superstitious blind alleys that hem in a Mind and with it, close off a Universe.
It is true that in the beginning of self discovery, you must have a Teacher, a being whose commitment is not to self gain or self display…but one who is willing to set your sights on a higher and more righteous - (right-use-ness) - horizon, than the one you are capable of seeing for yourself. But soon, and decidedly, you must strike out upon the dark sea for yourself…and by yourself. There is only one person who could have saved Dr. Kotarac from that chimney; it is my fervent hope that she met that person there in that dark and confining prison. For to meet the Self, for even a few hours or even a few precious moments, is to have lived well and truly…
Length of stay is not the important or salient point, but rather depth of Being, wins the day.
May you find in yourself the courage to meet your destiny prior to the Death that will eventually come for you, as well. May you live as though that day may be today. May you do so, for the benefit of all that share the same air you breathe… and are waiting so patiently for you to Awaken.
Adayre R. Miller
9/6/10
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