At ~19:00 on February 28th, 2025, my beautiful wife and companion passed away from complications of open-heart surgery. This was in a good-bye room of the university hospital of Kiel/Germany. It was just the two of us. It finally was very quiet. No more beeping machines. She knew that I was present. She had her turned head fully in my hand. I sang to her the mantra Swami Satchitananda gave her as a young woman. After a while she rolled up her eyes. Her breathing slowed down to impossible intervals. Then she peacefully faded into the next world. I continued with mantras and held space until 3:40 the next morning. Then I went back to my hotel with her small suitcase and continued my vigil for another three days. It was our belief that it takes the spirit three days to fully leave behind all aspects of the physical being. Much is to be said about Ivette. This is my poor attempt being back in Ireland in the home we built together. It is filled with 30 years of shared memories from very many places and countries; and Ivette's art everywhere, from big and small paintings to textile wall art, innumerable decks of lovingly laminated one-up cards to poems, haiku, diaries, sketches, the draft of another book, dolls, umos—unidentified meaningful objects—all her tools, uncountable books, study materials, notes and mementos.
In Vevey during our 8-year Swiss residence.
Ivette was born in NYC in 1951, I in Flensburg/Germany in 1962. We found each other in Santa Rosa/California in probably 1994. Very many years prior, before her first husband, Ivette had a psychic reading with Beulah Brown. Beulah described me as a long-haired musician on a motorcycle whom Ivette would meet "much later". I did indeed wear a ponytail and drive a motorcycle when we met. Being from Osho's spiritual commune of Poona 1 and the ranch in Oregon, I didn't think I'd ever marry. Surely that wasn't in my cards. Yet when I met Ivette, I very quickly knew. I had to tie myself to her in formal marriage to mature. Ivette had been married thrice before, to another man in Osho's community then two in Adi Da's commune in Lake County/NoCal where she lived at the time. I would meet them all. She didn't think she wanted to marry again. Lucky for me, she said yes. Shortly after we met, we moved in together. There was a very strong mutual recognition of having been together before. In a flash of inner sight, I saw myself in her arms bleeding out from a spear in my side. The setting was a tropical rainforest suggestive of Mayan/Aztec times. Ivette had the same recall. We had promised each other then to be together again. Clearly love transcends time and space.
The teachers Ivette sat with in meditation: His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama | A. H. Almaas | Swami Satchitananda Saraswati | Shunryu Suzuki | Osho
Much later we participated in a 1-month workshop in Aegina/Greece. There Osho's personal dentist and devotee Devageet taught a unique method of past-life healing. Amongst many things Ivette discovered there—and later with facilitator Nagesh in Duisburg—was that in her life prior to being Ivette, she had been a Tibetan monk trained as a bodhisattva with special blessing powers for children. Simple and poor families used to trek up to his small mountain hermitage bringing their children for blessings; and small animals or foods in payment. This monk was killed when the Chinese destroyed the hermitage. In a life before Tibet, Ivette had been a Japanese samurai, I her instructor in Budo and the martial arts. To restore honour to her house for a perceived mistake, she committed ritual suicide by sword in front of the members of this house. These living memories explain much, including a series of free-hand drawings Ivette did of Tibetan faces when we lived in Switzerland close to a full-blown Tibetan monastery on Le-Mont Pélèrin or Pilgrim's Mountain. One in particular didn't look like an imaginary face but a living portrait like a magical photo cutting through time. Perhaps she had drawn herself? They also explain why I always felt the need to protect her. I had failed to do so back in feudal Japan. Now the scales of balance needed restoring. It also explains Ivette's abiding immersion in Tibetan Buddhism, the subtle instructions she received from His Holiness the Dalai Lama in meditations. Being diligent and discerning, she eventually found an old book that contained pages with the precise instructions she had received directly. She remembered seeing angels and saints around her crib. This spontaneous gift was literally beaten out of her in Catholic school when a young girl had the temerity to stand in front of a statue of the Virgin Mother and declare happily, "I know her. She comes to play with me all the time." That connection too threads back into a past life she remembered. She even began writing a book about that story but then abandoned it. That life had been too dark and violent to revisit in detail.
Above are the last two line drawings Ivette coloured in Tashi Dhargyal's book of Tibetan Buddhist Art whilst in Germany awaiting surgery. The hope was to replace her mitral valve which had first been replaced 17 years earlier when we lived in Cyprus and now had begun to leak again. The left image is of the Green Tara, "she who saves" and vows to become a buddha in female form. At right is Padmasambhava who helped transmit Buddhism to the Tibetan plateau during the 8th century. The Tibetan monk on his secluded mountain top blessing children then dying a premature violent death had come back as Ivette so a modern-day American woman born of a Portuguese mother and Indonesian father who arrived in NYC with the merchant marines. Ivette's life was all about experiencing intimate relationship in and with the world. Her burning interest which crystallized the longer we lived together was to fuse artistic self expression with spiritual transmission. In her children's book Little Bear's Secret Longing, she mentions being a meditator then having an MA in Transpersonal Psychology from the Edgar Cayce Institute in 
Virginia; a professional diploma from Natalie Rogers' Expressive Arts Therapies; being an educator in Nalanda Miksang, a photography-based modality developed by Chögyam Trungpa, founder of Colorado's famous Naropa Institute; and since Covid and its proliferation of Zoom workshops, a member of Sage-ing International. The latter is a path to self realization created by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi [left].
A core reason why Ivette embraced the risk of her second heart surgery was wishing to continue her work in the Sage-ing community. It was always a point of personal sadness for her that our chosen life circumstances didn't allow her to reach more people. The Zoom workshop platform had begun to change all that. It's the people whom she took courses with and those who took courses from her that have experienced Ivette as the Dharma-transmitting artist. Not many of them will know to share here; and I wouldn't know who they all are and how to reach them to ask for more remembrances. Living very privately, very few in hifi ever got to meet Ivette who was the eternal student. She always learnt and taught herself new things by reading books, taking workshops and later, watching YouTube videos. She took a remote thangka class with a Tibetan master painter living in India only to abandon it halfway through. She was dismayed by the monotonous rigidity of the traditional method, its measured-out exactitude of idealized proportions and allowable details. She was also interested in taking a class in Greek-Orthodox iconography and had identified a suitable instructor in Greece, then abandoned the idea after the disappointing thangka experience. Having tapped into their spirit, she was already beyond squeezing herself into the tight confines of such beautiful but narrowly prescribed traditions. Or as the Dalai Lama told her more than once, "these things are old. They're not of or for today."
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Ivette loved note books of blank pages. She had very many of them to draw in or write. Above are the last seven 'scribblings' she did before her death. What I see in them is a premonition and conscious contemplation of death. I see that she previewed and considered the dissolution of the body into its various gross and subtle elements. Before we left for Germany, an instruction that came to her whilst meditating with the various masters she sat with was to contemplate formlessness. That was her final destination and desire. Ever since her first heart surgery in 2007, Ivette felt on borrowed time. At night she'd sometimes wake up with her heart pounding as though she were running at high speed. At other times she suffered severe arrhythmia. Without complaints, she treated it all as reminders. Death was coming. She wanted to use her remaining time wisely and well. She was most intent on purging old traumas and pains, part of what the traditions call karma. She so did not want to carry their seeds forward into a future life. She actively sought out those memories to let them go. After all, to re-member means to reunite. She went far back into her very early childhood. She routinely crossed past this birth into prior lives. In one of those which became very real during our time in Taos/New Mexico, she had been a native Indian chief. He'd unwittingly led his entire tribe into an ambush only to watch every last member being slaughtered in front of his eyes. The immense sorrow and guilt of that life were still alive in her as Ivette. These types of past traumas and self-perpetuating themes she meant to eradicate. "I don't want to come back and do all of that over again. I want to be free of my past."
Her upbringing in NYC was far from easy. As the second of two daughters, her mother resented Ivette from the very beginning. She had wanted to leave her husband. Getting pregnant with Ivette, she felt she no longer could leave as a single and simple woman of her time. Hence no love for her little girl. Later on Ivette's sister was raped then descended into drugs and self-destructive behaviour. As a still young woman, Ivette managed to somehow pay to have her sister committed to a strict Zen-style rehab facility. Part of the program involved a clean cut of all family ties. Ivette never saw her sister again or learnt what happened to her. Much sadness surrounded that subject which she worked hard to transcend. Ditto that in Art School, Ivette was date raped herself by one of her professors. Her mother blamed the daughter, the father never learnt of it. Despite that pain and other heartache to follow in subsequent relationships, Ivette never abandoned her enthusiasm to love freely and deeply. Nothing could deter her from living in relationship with passion and stern commitment.
Her first husband took her to Colombia to meet his parents. They insisted on a white-skinned bride for their son. Rather than stick by his wife, Kavi abandoned Ivette who refused to crumble. Instead she lived in South America for three years, travelled with an indigenous brujo or folk healer, then financed her return to California with a solo art show at the American Embassy of Bogota which she sold out completely. That was Ivette. Possessed of a passionate heart and guided by a fierce determination, she refused to put limits on anything. I have been blessed that she chose to love me unconditionally and share 30 years of her wondrous presence with me. [At left, Chai Baba, her feline admirer.]
On May 22nd nearly 3 months after her passing, in a book by her bedside table, I found a strip of paper with this hand-written very evocative haiku to Chai who slept by her side and twitched whilst dreaming. He also loved sitting in windows looking at birds and talking to them.
sun-soaked fur –
dreaming of swallows
I too twitch awake
She who was Ivette is no more; but now so much more. During the early morning of the 4th day after her passing when I slept emotionally and physically drained after my 3-day vigil, she suddenly came to me in room 767 of the Steigenberger Conti Hansa. That hotel overlooks the little lake and park of Kiel's old town just a short foot walk from the hospital. The entire room was filled with the brilliance of her presence which we shared in for hours. I shall conclude that like all of us, Ivette was a cosmic being having a human experience. Unlike many of us, she fully knew that and lived her life accordingly. My mysterious beautiful companion had the good death she always hoped for. May we meet again, my love.
