Chapter 15
by Bill Gross
Many years ago during the turbulent Vietnam era of the 1960s, the loss of a president, and the beginning of a time of protest, there was a haven for those lucky enough to live in Rye, New York, in a neighborhood called Oakland Park. At the time it was the home of a beautiful beach, a duck pond, rolling green gentle hills and Oakland Pool. Most of today’s residents and visitors would deny there was a pool, but those who lived in Rye and grew up in the fifties and sixties would quickly correct them. It was there, and it graced the park with its beauty and relief from the long, hot summers of those days.
My future wife, Denise, was then a little girl, and she played in the park, her fantasyland, a wondrous place to explore and a safe refuge from the challenges of growing up. She lived a half a block from the beach and spent pretty much every summer day playing in the water, climbing out on the jetty, and learning to swim at Oakland Pool.
As the years went by, this little girl grew to be a tall, beautiful young woman and a superb swimmer. It was a time when women were mostly relegated to support roles; rarely would one think of a woman as a potential lifesaver, unless of course she worked in nursing. But this woman was a pioneer of sorts and, I’m proud to say, was the first female lifeguard at Oakland Pool.
For endless summer days, she sat atop the guard chair, complete with zinc oxide protecting her nose and lips, watching every movement in the pool. It was, she said, a place of great pride coupled with a sense of accomplishment. One day, she and her colleagues saved a young woman with special needs who panicked and fought them as they gently wrestled her back to safety. In all her humility and humanity, she wore a radiant smile and felt a profound satisfaction that she had helped to save a life.
Denise would often bring me and our children to her special park and her special beach, telling us about the ducks and her wonderful fantasyland. And then she walked us down Dearborn Avenue, past what was once a deli known as Warrens, down to the end where the pool once was. It’s hard to accept change, but she told us many times that despite the absence of the pool, the heart and beauty of Oakland Park remained.
I need to add that she became my wife and for thirty-two years filled my heart and those of our children with her lifesaving nature. Denise LaMedica Gross, a beautiful woman of inestimable warmth and love, passed from this world in April 2008.
But she didn’t leave us.
I know that for many reasons, the most tangible of which came from Roland during a presentation I attended a few years after Denise had passed when he handed me a Purple Paper he said was for me. The words written on it said it all: “Thank you for bringing me to the beach.”
All I could do was nod through my tears. I knew the message was from Denise and I understood its importance to her, to me, to our children. It captured a lifetime of love and lessons learned, and it gave me the courage and the confidence to carry on as she wished I would.
Denise passed as she had lived, in the gentle loving embrace of those she loved unconditionally and those who love her endlessly still. My wife was my best half, the amazing mother of our two beautiful children, a healer in every sense of the word, and a devoted friend to those who had the honor and privilege to share her life. She was fifty-seven years young.
You don’t realize what you have when you have it. That’s probably one of the first thoughts I had after she had gone. The second was that I didn’t think I could ever get over the loss of someone I loved with every fiber of my being. Denise blessed us every minute in many ways and still does. I feel it all the time.
I met Denise when I was twenty-five, fresh off a bad marriage that sent me screaming from relationships. I was a hippie from the sixties and I was a mess. She was a stewardess for American Airlines, sophisticated, worldly, beautiful inside and out, a complex, spiritual woman who knocked me over in every shape and form. I came to her as a boy and left as a man.
I never knew what it was like to be in love before Denise. But as we began our life together, we embarked on what turned out to be one of the great love affairs.
We married in 1976 and began a journey that would take us from Brooklyn to the Midwest and eventually to Connecticut as we followed my tumultuous career in the film and advertising businesses. Everything we did during the earlier years of our marriage centered on me. No matter how chaotic or disconcerting our situation was or how many times I uprooted the family while I chased my dreams, Denise brought it all together for us.
And she did it for years and years without even the hint of a complaint until one day she turned and looked at me and very calmly said, “You need to grow up, Bill, do your job, and become an equal partner is this marriage.”
Here I was out running after acting jobs, while she stayed home day into night with two children, and I hadn’t given a thought to her needs, to what she might want to do for her life.
She informed me that she had enrolled in an English course that met every Tuesday night, and she would need me to be home to take care of the kids while she was out. As it turned out, it not only made our relationship stronger, it became healthier in every respect. The more she followed her dreams, the more she blossomed, and I was more amazed by her than ever.
She began to study Reiki, a healing touch practice that meshed with every part of her. Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. A relatively simple technique to learn, the ability to use Reiki is not taught in the usual sense but is transferred to the student during a Reiki class. This ability is passed on during an “attunement” given by a Reiki Master and allows the student to tap into an unlimited supply of life force energy to improve one’s health and enhance the quality of life.
Denise’s Reiki Master was Roland Comtois, and his teaching gifts extended far beyond the classroom. After attending one of his presentations for the first time, Denise came home completely enthralled. It was like a switch was turned on.
She talked to me about visualization and meditation and Roland, suggesting that a combination of the three could help me realize my dreams of becoming an actor. She even gave me a gift of a session with Roland so I could experience for myself his visions and counsel.
I was not sure I believed in any of this, but to please Denise I went to see him. As soon as I walked into the room, he instantly started to speak of the people he saw standing with me. “There’s a lovely lady here who wants to hug you. She’s light and loving and loves you,” he said.
I knew at once he was talking about my mom. I was born in 1949 to an unwed mother, a beautiful vivacious woman who loved me unconditionally and defied convention to raise me on her own, then with the man who would become my beloved stepfather. I never knew my birth father in life, but I was about to meet him through Roland.
“There’s a man in the room who wants me to tell you how sorry he is. ‘I just couldn’t do it,’ he says. His name is Ed.”
Ed was my birth father’s name. He was an Irishman and that was basically all I had known about him. But that one session with Roland helped me deal with and heal unresolved issues about him that I had carried with me all my life.
After my experience with Roland, I began to better understand what was driving Denise’s evolution to fully embrace spirituality. At the same time, I fearfully wondered if her new beliefs and her Reiki training would take her away from me. In fact, it did the opposite. Reiki became a lifeline for our family and for many others whose lives Denise touched.
She took advanced Reiki training with Roland in Rhode Island, returning home with a gift that gave life back, instead of taking it away. As a Reiki practitioner, she used her healing touch expertise on patients in the cancer center of our local hospital, instinctively knowing how Reiki therapy could help ease their pain, and maybe intuitively feeling an unbidden kinship with their illness.
It seemed almost out of nowhere when the tables turned on her and she became the patient. She was diagnosed with breast cancer not once but twice. She underwent chemo and all the other unkind treatments that ravaged her body. And she beat it … for a time.
She began to feel sick again but refused to give in to the pain. She wanted to enjoy all the positive opportunities that life presented to her. I remember she wanted to go on a weeklong meditation retreat about that same time in spite of her declining health. Her doctor was worried and wanted to check her numbers before she left. After meeting with him at his office, Denise became uncharacteristically quiet and sad. She did not go on the trip that she was very much looking forward to.
Two days later we learned that she had an inoperable mass in her pancreas. There was no hope of recovery.
“I will not make any concessions to this illness,” she told me emphatically after hearing the news, adding that “we can’t let it rule our lives. We, you and I together, will dance at our daughter’s wedding. We will carry on.”
Our daughter was getting married a few months after Denise’s diagnosis shattered our lives. Denise was more than determined not to let her cancer stand in the way. We sought out a second opinion from the finest doctors only to be told that they could not do anything more for Denise. Denise elected to fight her illness spiritually. She didn’t want to, but she took pain medicine to help her get through the days until our daughter’s wedding. Everything about that magical day was truly heaven made, and Denise was as radiant as our daughter was. When the band played and the dancing began, she danced with the kind of happiness that transcends time and place, her face aglow with pure love and joy. She didn’t want the moment ever to end and neither did I.
She passed quietly some months later in the spring of the following year as my heart screamed in agony. Roland visited us the day after Denise died, feeling compelled to comfort and assure us that Denise would always be with us, that the bonds of love were eternal. He asked to speak with me privately and inexplicably proceeded to repeat intimate conversations I had with Denise in the days before she passed. There was no way he could have made up the words he shared with me. I knew Denise must have shared them with Roland from the other side, to send me the message that she would always be with me. It knocked me over.
In the weeks and months that followed, our family was a chaotic mess. I tried to rationalize to the kids, to myself, the reason that Mom was not with us, telling them she needed to be where she was. None of us accepted or understood that, but there was nothing else we could do to change it. As Denise had wanted, I had her remains cremated. The kids and I talked about where we would spread her ashes, where she would be the happiest. We agreed that we would bring her back to the beach where she grew up, to a place where Mom took us all and showed us where she wanted to build her dream house when she was a young girl.
We hugged, we cried, and we prayed as the three of us scattered her ashes to the wind, sand, and sea some days later. I wrote a piece about her love for this beach, a tribute to a young girl full of hope, love, and eternal sunshine, making her an indelible part of the seascape that meant so much to her in life and now in death. I read it to her there that day.
The phone rang just as we returned home. It was Roland. “She’s all around,” he said. “She said you went to the right place.”
While Roland checked in from time to time after that day, I didn’t see him again until I had the opportunity to attend a presentation he was doing in a historic mansion in Norwalk for a TV show. He didn’t know I was coming.
I sat in the audience of forty with my ever-present heavy heart, listening to the people around me get messages from loved ones they had lost, feeling their grief and their emotions as Roland shared stories long past, many of which were written on the Purple Papers he carries with him wherever he goes.
Then he stopped in front of me. “I have a Purple Paper for you.” He held it up. On it was a drawing of a seashore and the words I will never forget: “I love my beach. I love the morning sun. I love standing near the trees at home.”
It gives me comfort to know that we brought her happiness as she did to those who knew and loved her. And I do believe that she is always around us. I sense her presence when I need her the most. I feel her gently guiding me to move forward, take a chance on life again, to love again. I see her every day, in my kids and in my grandchildren. We had a nickname for her: we called her “Vinnie.” Now my grandson shares that name with her. She loved and lived with all her heart, an angel whose time here was just part of a longer journey. She once told me that during one of her Reiki sessions at the hospital, she felt someone come into the room while she was working on her patient. She was pretty sure it was Jesus. I didn’t understand that at the time, but now, considering how she devoted her life to saving others, it makes sense to me. I think Denise was preparing us for her inevitable departure and making us stronger while she was here. She still is.