The “Chantry,” a synchronistic obituary for Lynne Alvarez

Jerry Kroth

Four days ago I learned that an old girlfriend of mine, Lynne Rottenberg died. That was her real name.

She died four years ago. I was shocked. I felt a huge sinking in my heart, even though we were boyfriend and girlfriend over forty-seven years ago.

I guess my heart has a long memory.

We lived together. The first time I ever did, or she ever did. Quite nouveau for the times in the early sixties.

We broke up after living together for almost a year. We did indeed love each other, but not “enough,” I thought.

We planned the date of our break up. I planned to go off to Europe to teach. It was a very amicable parting.

I just graduated from the University of Michigan. She was still a junior majoring in Romance languages. She showed me a short story she wrote once, and I liked the dialogue. That’s all I remember from her incipient creative side.

She was kind, gentle, nice, clever, witty, and shy.

She was seeing a psychiatrist periodically. She felt that it helped her. But one day her doctor said she should break up with me, and that living together was not in her interest. I think he wanted her to date more, and to get into university life.

I asked her if that’s how she felt.

She said “No.”

But then she brought it up again a month or two later, and I started to think, maybe she wants me to go, actually, and maybe I should go, and maybe the psychiatrist is right and—to myself I said secretly— “and, after all, you don’t love her enough to marry her and this is not your destiny, so maybe you really should say goodbye even though you like this life, its comfortable, and a lot of fun.”

So I said goodbye with tears. She didn’t cry, I remember. She kissed me goodbye and went off to class.

I left in September of 1965, I think.

I wrote her long letters when I was teaching abroad. Lonely. The next time I contacted her was by phone in 1967.

She graduated from U of M (at 19!), and was about to be married to a Mexican diplomat and move to Veracruz, Mexico.

I never saw her or talked to her again for the rest of my life after that call.

She must have married her diplomat and changed her name. But I always wondered what ever happened to Lynne Rottenberg?

Over the years, I started to remember certain things. I wondered if she was secretive and hid things from me. I noticed that I was never introduced to her parents or any of her extended family. She met mine, but I didn’t have that opportunity.

As years went by, I increasingly found myself puzzled. I didn’t meet any of Lynne’s college friends either, and a lot of things just seemed to pass me by. We were “cocooning” then, and I think maybe we were cocooning a bit too much to realize that other things perhaps were not happening, like friends, and parents, and college parties. Maybe the psychiatrist was right, and maybe she needed to get involved in college life more.

So, as the years progressed, occasionally, I would look her up, but no “Lynne Rottenberg” ever appeared online.

Finally, five days ago, in February of 2013, I saw “Lynne Rottenberg’s” name online and for the very first time. It was her high school Facebook page of all her

classmates. I got excited. This was the first “Lynne Rottenberg” I ever saw on the web.

I wrote to them. They replied that her name was “Lynne Alvarez” and, unfortunately, she died four years ago! I was shocked. My heart submerged itself into instant grief.

I started researching “Lynne Alvarez” and discovered—wow, behold—she was famous. She was a great American poet, a novelist, a playwright, an icon among women writers and feminists. She won awards, and published a book of collected works. Her plays were performed in New York.

[You can see her bio at http://gurmanagency.com/sga-clients/lynne-alvarez/]

I was so proud of her, and so sad all at the same time, all in the same day, all in the same hour.

All her dreams of being a poet and a writer just came true, and now she was dead. Gentle Lynne left this world at 61, way, way, way, too early.

I have maybe one picture of her at home. But this is how she looked when we were together.

I told my wife, Anya, about this, and how disturbed I felt inside.

What I have learned so far, in just the last few days, is that Lynne died of a brain tumor and moved to Dallas for the last two years of her life to seek specialized treatment. It didn’t work.

She had two husbands. Apparently the Mexican diplomat didn’t work out, or perhaps he died. I don’t know.

She married a man in New York who I still haven’t been able to contact. He seems to have cared for her a great deal, and when her brain cancer hit, he

and his extended family appear to have moved to Dallas where she was undergoing treatment. It looks like they were with her throughout the ordeal. That made me feel a lot better.

She wrote a final play called “The Snow Queen.” It was produced just before her death. Her speech centers were going, but she still consulted on producing her final play. The director of the theater company wrote to me that Lynne’s association with her was life-changing for her, and that they were very close.

So, that is all I knew, and that is all I could find out by today.

Now I am going to tell you the remainder of this story which is quite mind-boggling, and I would like to do it in chronological order. . . the last four days, that is. I hope you will stay tuned.

I am 71 and live in Mexico in the winters, and I was bothered by this whole story. It was still stirring around inside me. I felt proud. I felt sorry. I felt sad. I felt that something was missing. I didn’t have any closure.

There is a big cathedral here in Puerto Vallarta, and sometimes I go inside. I’m not Catholic anymore, but sometimes I remember my loved ones in there. I try a visit, now and then, as a kind of meditative experience. I even would light candles to remember my departed souls until they switched to electronic candles. Not quite the same feeling.

At any rate, there I was walking the beach in my bathing suit, and I decided to put on my shirt, walk into church, and say a short meditative prayer for Lynne. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon.

Synchronicity

In Jungian psychology, “synchronicity” means meaningful coincidence. When synchronicities happen, it is important not to just say “Wow, that was a weird coincidence!” but to try to plumb the meaning of the association and find out what it is trying to tell you.

Well, the meaning of the synchronicity I am about to tell you really came to me today, but since I am going chronologically, let me just report, simply, that I entered the church of Guadalupe and was going to sit down.

Except that when I entered, I came in smack dab in the middle of mass, in the middle of the most important part of the mass, the Eucharist, where the miracle of the bread and wine putatively becoming Jesus’ body and blood occurs.

Communion is the word.

This whole story, in fact, is about a very strange unconscious variety of communion and about miracles too. But I’m way ahead of myself.

All the people in church were standing, and I wanted to sit, since I was a bit self-conscious in my bathing suit, but I stood, because they stood, and they were singing—in Spanish— so I started to sing, but I didn’t know what they were singing, so I just started singing lyrics for Lynne.

I have no idea what I sang, and I actually never ever do this, but there we all were all singing in church, and so I was singing out words under my breath which no one could hear. . . stuff like. . .

“Lynne I remember you, and you were good and kind to me,

and I feel sorry for you,and I loved you,

and I’m so proud of you, and I’m so glad your talent came out in your life,

I’m so happy your dreams came true, I hope you didn’t suffer.”

Not very poetic. And, actually, I’m not sure those were my words at all. But it was close. And I kept singing something as long as all the Spanish folks were singing, and, whatever my words were, no one could hear them, except me.

Church of Guadalupe in Puerto Vallarta

So there I was, in my bathing suit, looking up the Virgin Mary on the ornate altar, making up spontaneous lyrics for Lynne and crying when I sang them.

In ten minutes I paid my visit and was gone.

Didn’t stay for any sermon if there was one.

The meaning of this coincidence of walking right into the center of the miracle of the Eucharist and singing will come clear shortly.

Ordering her last words.

So, the next day, I decided to order “The Snow Queen” her last play. I wanted to read it. I downloaded it on my Ipad and read the whole thing cover to cover in two hours.

There is a character in the play called Analiese, and that was the Lynne I knew, childlike, kind, shy, playful, and weird in the nicest way.

And then there was her childhood love, a character named Christian. And I wondered “Was that me?” But it was, after all, forty-seven years ago, and maybe a sign of great art is that everybody says “Is that me?”

The play ends with an unattractive woman named Nina—a person who is just simply not very nice. Nina is the Snow Queen. For a moment I wondered if Nina was Lynne’s mother whom I never met.

But now, today, this morning, I am sure that it wasn’t.

Nina was Lynne’s professional voice: the poet, the artist, the seer, the playwright, the person I really never met, because we parted ways long before she achieved her vaunted career.

All I knew of this Lynne was the incipient bud of a flower that had yet to blossom and couldn’t yet be identified.

So Nina sings at the end of this play. This is not just the end of the play, folks. This is also the end of Lynne Rottenberg. This is her last play. This is what she produced at the close of her life after her brain tumor had taken away her ability to speak.

So, I’m reading the last words of my Lynne Rottenberg, and I can’t stop crying when I read them. And I still don’t know why. I still have no closure. I’m still wondering what is going on inside me.

Now, please remember things are getting kind of amalgamated and fused and mixed and variegated at this point, so let me sort of summarize: I’m in church. And I’m singing. Nina is closing out the play, and Nina is singing. Lynne is dying, and Lynne is having Nina sing for her. And the curtain is closing on the play, on the Snow Queen, and on Lynne, so everything is getting more and more psychologically condensed and packed with meaning.

Here are those last words, and the song which Nina sings, the last words Lynne ever wrote, and then the play is over and the curtain falls—and Lynne actually dies in real life:

“When you've woken at midnightAll tangled and cold

You've looked in the mirrorAnd seen your grey soulSeems your life's overBut your story's untold

I'll be your voice in the dark.

If you're looking for troubleCause that's all you've knownIf you harvest the whirlwindCause that's all you've sown

If it seems like you'll never, ever find home.I'll be your voice in the dark.

A voice in the wilderness

A cry in the nightDeep eyes of a womanYou can't get behind

Who's lost too much loveTo be silly or kind

I am the voice in the dark.”

So that is Lynne’s song, and Nina’s song, and the end of the Snow Queen and the end of Lynne’s last play that she ever composed and the end of Lynne’s life.

Every time I read those words yesterday, I cried. Every single time. And I had no idea why. I didn’t consciously understand her poem. I just cried like a baby.

Today, I have more presence of mind and am more conscious and aware. In the first stanza Lynne is representing herself as the voice of a meaningless life. In the second she is the voice, in the dark, of the lost soul searching for grounding and a home. And in the final stanza, she is no longer “your” voice but “her voice,” the voice of abandonment that lost too much love and had too much pain to be silly or kind.

I sent that poem to my daughters, and I thought I was getting closure on Lynne’s death, and then I went to sleep. . .

and then everything started instead of ended. Here is. . . .

The dream that changes the world.

Last night I had a dream. And I dreamt that I was in a library and someone wrote a book. The book was called “The Chantry.” And in the dream a voice says you know “You should really read the book, The Chantry.” I don’t know the meaning of the word, “Chantry,” but I find the book, a small book on a library shelf, and it is a book about my mother. Only it is a video book. My mother is on the pages, but she is moving. All of this is in the dream.

My mother was shy, and modest, and weird, and crazy, and always nice, and here it is a book about my mother and her life where she is portrayed exactly this way.

She is noticeably shy in this video book, but also noticeably cute and funny too.

My mother was all of that plus weird and a talented pianist.

In the dream, I leaf through The Chantry and realize the author of the book had a very intimate knowledge of my mother. I thought the author could have been my daughter, Maya. It portrayed my mother, her grandmother, in her shyness and her wittiness cleverly and sympathetically. Whoever the author was, they knew my mother very well.

When I partially awakened, I said “Chantry?” That’s fucking nonsense. Don’t know ‘Chantry.’ I’m going back to bed.”

But I couldn’t sleep, so I wrote down the word “Chantry” and then returned to bed.

I thought it might be a clue to something.

When I awoke, today, at 7am, I looked up “Chantry.”

The word Chantry is a medieval word referring to the dead. It derives from chant-ing and refers to singing. It effectively means to sing mass for the dead.

That’s right.

Are the hairs on your arm rising just a little?

A mass said for the dead which is sung is known as a chantry. A chantry is also an “endowment,” like a monetary trust for the purpose of saying a mass on the date of the person’s death. The more masses said, the more it helps the departed soul. A chantry could even be a location in a church dedicated to this departed soul and singing this mass is part of the meaning of chantry.

Weird!

So, here is a dream about a book about my mother, who is dead, and the word “Chantry” is used, a word I never knew, never encountered, a word outside my psychological world entirely, but a word which captures my trip to the church to sing in a mass for the dead. . . to sing for Lynne in a mass for the dead. . . to sing spontaneous verses at the center of the Catholic mass for the soul of my dead and departed Lynne Rottenberg. . . to sing a chantry and in a chantry for Chris-sake!

And if that isn’t enough, the dream decides to dump a little more meaning into the pot of my fragile and frayed consciousness: I never realized how close in personality Lynne was to my mother: both were shy; both were clever and talented; both were kind and accepting; it was totally easy to talk to and to be with both of them. Both were quite petite. And strangely—and regrettably—I kind of ‘took both for granted’ more than I should have.

I never ever drew a parallel between them in all the forty-seven years that have ensued. Never. Not until this morning.

Curiously, they both died about six months from one another, Lynne at 61, and my mother at 99.

Lynne’s last words in her poem is a statement of almost maternal, protective kindness, that she is the voice in the dark for those suffering existential meaninglessness, that she is the voice in the dark of displaced and rootless persons who ache for a home, and that she is the voice in the dark of the soul who has lost the love of their lives and been abandoned.

That is Lynne’s role, her last statement of who she is, and what she was, and it is expressed as a song.

The curtain falls on the Snow Queen. An owl flies away. An owl is symbolic of a seer that can see in the dark. . . Lynne’s voice in the dark.

That fact that I went to a church, uncharacteristically ended up in the center of a mass, and then, from the weirdest impulse, started singing for Lynne, was exactly what is captured by the title of the book, The Chantry: A song for the dead in a mass for the dead chanted by a crying man in a bathing suit.

And the fact that it was a book about my mother, and not Lynne, provided an unprecedented archetypal insight that Lynne really was a very close psychological approximation of my mother, and their similarities totally and entirely unknown to me until this morning.

Last night, I contacted some source. I communed with an entity outside myself, some psychic field beyond my own, because, in my heart of hearts, I know I never ever encountered, or read, or learned, or memorized, or came across the word Chantry in my entire life. It is a symbol that comes from outside my psyche which perfectly captured and expressed everything that was happening in my soul.

Call it contact with universal consciousness if you are into Buddhism and meditation and see things that way.

Call it a paranormal experience if you will.

Call it contact with the collective unconscious if you choose.

Right now, today, still raw, I call it a miracle.

May they both rest in peace.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor Emeritus from Santa Clara University and the author of Psyche’s Exile: an empirical odyssey in search of the soul. He may be contacted at his website http://collectivepsych.com