Lyssa Black Fassett

ALIVE IN THIS WORLD

2022 IPNE Book Awards Winner!

“There would be no moving on; instead, a diving into the center of the storm with eyes open. None of it is what I thought it would be. All of it required new frameworks of understanding. The motion I rode was like a lightning bolt that took me deeper and deeper into the Mystery rather than beyond it. The healing I found wrapped itself around a scar so deep I can’t imagine my life without it. I have learned to love and honor it. My son’s death didn’t break me. It didn’t diminish me or condemn me to a lesser life. It broke me open, and I found him there, in the space between.”

Lyssa Black Fassett is a writer, musician, former researcher, and lover of the natural world. She has had a lifelong interest in spiritual, religious and philosophical thought, experimenting with various practices such as insight meditation, shamanic journeying and goddess traditions, eventually leading to a master’s degree at Harvard Divinity School. But none of this remotely prepared her for the sudden death of her 22-year-old son from a heroin overdose. Her story details a kind of “archaeological dig” of a transformation born of traumatic grief, years of struggle and grace, a perceptual shift pointing the way home to herself, and to an altered, yet unbroken relationship with her son. Lyssa lives with her husband in the small town northwest of Boston where they raised their son.

ALIVE IN THIS WORLD

Darby left the planet just before his twenty-third birthday. Kind, funny, exasperating, compassionate, lonely, creative, sad, and a keeper of dark secrets, he was a beautiful soul.
He riffed on his Kurt Cobain Jag-Stang guitar, loved adventure, and pushed boundaries of experimentation to the breaking point. We found this poem in his journals after he died; we took it as a message to us:

From the shallow wail of doves
to the silent whisper curled tightly
let go, I say, don’t forget
wade into the water and gently glide me

You illuminate my life with your loving presence every day. Your light shines on, my sweet boy.