I have finally come to terms with Life
We’ve come to a compromise
Instead of me wanting a different one or mine to end
I’m giving myself fully to this one, no holding back
In return, Life agrees to continue to be fully what She is
(And to let me think it’s a compromise when really, She has won me over)
I take a deep breath
Connect to all who’ve been before
Feel my mother’s mother’s heartbeat in mine
What I yearn for
I don’t always understand
Whose dreams am I living
Are they of the present or the past
“Have courage,”
The ladybug whispered to the budding rose
Whose hesitation expressed itself in a tight bud
And just that, that little bit of encouragement
Made all the difference in the world
And with that, she began to bloom
No more lectures
I get it
I’m nothing, compared to you
I see your size
You have the power
At this point
You’re preaching to the choir
Do you feel that small
Need me to know
My smallness next to you
Who would we both be
If you held me up
And let me reach
My full height
I was raised to be mild
All the wild in me tamed
Strong desires in me shamed
Made an adult while still a child
Now at mid-life, the end in sight
I’m awakening my wild
Reviving my inner child
Letting loose my appetite
Hello?! This is your life calling!
Stop acting like you’ve got all the time in the world
That those that you love will be there forever for you to tell
That those people you think about reconnecting with will always be around to do so
Start doing those things you think about doing, dream of doing, now
Every passing moment is one less opportunity
Like that old Nike ad says, “Just do it!”
Just do.
– Me to myself
Today I went to the funeral of a very special person.
And as I sat in the church looking up at the stained glass, I was reminded of the many, many funerals of special people I have been to in the last twelve years.
Wakes and viewings in homes, memorials in gorgeous holy spaces and modest church rectories, wonderful music and laughter, beautiful heartfelt stories of love and life, stoic, structured religious services. Quite a spectrum of final acknowledgements or celebrations of the lives of special people.
The one thing they all had in common was that I was struck each time by how quickly such services end.
Something in me gets so angry: how can a person’s life end this way? It always feels so…inadequate. So lacking.
I want to sit and reflect. Linger. Always, I am shooed out before I am ready to leave.
Even the greatest memorials – which in my book are filled with laughter, love and grief with voices raised and tears shed in full view and community – are over much too soon for my heart.
I leave baffled and bereft, with the sense that something is missing.
Then it hits me: oh yes, something is missing. The special person is missing.
Having buried two parents, a brother, a grandfather, three dear mentor father-figures, and two beloved cats over these past 12 years, I have learned and bourn witness to the truth that literally all that remains after a special person dies, in the end, is how they made people feel.
Yes, it is true, they may leave behind other kinds of legacies too.
But really, all that literally remains is how that person loved the people they came into contact with, isn’t it?
My special person whose funeral was today was not a lifelong friend.
I’d drifted away from our friendship the past ten years or so, for reasons that made sense at the time but don’t now. He did nothing wrong to instigate this drifting – he was an innocent in a part of my life that became lost in a kind of wreckage that was indirectly a result from past events. Our friendship was felled by friendly fire in a war I was waging with ghosts. Yet another tally mark on the side of things I grieve, having lost them.
Because of this, I almost did not go to the funeral. I didn’t feel entitled to.
Then I remembered the old adage about people coming into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime, and I realized that showing up for him as someone who had loved and been loved by him for any length of time is all any of us can do. That his current special people would surely only benefit from being surrounded by any and all of those who knew how special their special person was. That I could go for him, for me, for them, and be one of many who loved this special person for a reason, a season or a lifetime.
And there were many of us there. I have no doubt when I pass I will be lucky to have a handful of people. I have lived far too self-contained a life so far. I am still influenced by a deep-seated fear of people that shapes my connections no matter what I do, it seems. (Although I have been and am working to shift this, to be able to have deeper intimacies with people that I care for and who care for me.)
But my special friend was one of those people whose funerals reveal just how many people their life has touched. All kinds of people from all walks of life were there. And all had lost someone very special to them.
My special friend was my special friend for a season of ten or so very special years. He loved me dearly at a time I did not know how to love myself. He gave me unconditional love and support, and he championed my talents and dreams, and mirrored to me someone who had the courage to truly make their dreams come true.
I have so many happy memories of those years, and he figures prominently in all of them.
These years later, I can appreciate him even more with the wisdom of age. I thought of him many times through these years. Thought of reaching out. I foolishly kept putting it off, thinking I had the luxury of time. Hah.
In many ways, the way he lived puts me to shame. He found the courage to really put his talents out there for the world to see, over and over, no matter what anyone thought. I am still struggling to find that kind of belief in what I have to offer, that kind of courage.
He loved to sing so he sang. He loved rock and roll, so he performed in his own rock and roll cabaret shows. He loved what singing was to him, so he did all in his power to help others to be able to sing as well. He was a champion for many, and a power of example to all artists.
He died a senseless, awful death, one that seems ridiculously unfair and absurd for a man such as he was: one of the kindest, most generous souls I have known.
And so today, I leave yet another funeral, baffled and bereft.
But I carry the gifts of his life forever within me: how loved he made me feel, the memories of the music we made together, the inspiration he will always be to me as someone who just put it all out there for the world to see no matter the reception.
And the kick in the pants to “do it” already, no matter what.
There’s no time to waste.
I hear you, John. I get it. Thank you, my friend. I love you.
And I am so grateful we had our season.
How can I release this grip
This clinging on to everything good
As if my life depended on it
It feels so dangerous to release
All that I’m attempting to control
It is exhausting to hold on so tight
But it’s all I’ve ever known
Learned early to clutch and grasp
At what little good was parsed my way
If I loosen my fingers, if I let go my grip
Will I slide into the Void
Disappear into Nothingness
Or will I float into better climes
And find out what Life really feels like
I carry my hurt as if it were an egg
‘Tis a delicately shelled precious part
In incubation, of me, but of its own, too
And if broken, my pain would spill
Thick yellow yolk to mix with clear
And what it could become would be lost forever
To the hardened mess of a premature birth
For as long as I recall, I’ve carried within me the following line:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
I can’t usually remember what poem it is from. I probably read it in high school English.
But it has stayed with me all of these years intact, the way wonderful writing can. It visits me at times, like an echoed wisdom from an ancestor since passed.
I think it stuck with me because even in high school, I sensed the existence of walls inside me.
I didn’t know it consciously. But often the Frost quote would float through my mind paraphrased as “There is something in me that doesn’t love a wall.”
Looking back, the Freudian slip was prophetic.
Those walls were walls that I’d built to protect me, but they’d also held me prisoner, because I did not know then that they were of my own making, and therefore my own to remove.
Years later, through much personal healing and growth, I’ve come to terms with my inner walls, and I find I am both of the people in Frost’s poem.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
Like the narrator, I, too, find that my walls want to come down.
Though I’ve come to accept them as a part of me to love and find compassion for, they also feel like something that wants to be dislodged, or that needs to disintegrate, feeling like foreign matter in the organic soul forest I inhabit within.
And like the neighbor, some ancient part of me feels them to be necessary. It’s as if there’s an ancestral heritage in place that pulls me to them, at odds with the part within that wants them down.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
I thank those parts within for their concern, and the peoples from which I came who needed walls to survive.
I thank them for their love and care.
I respectfully let them know that today, I choose a different way.
I feel their support at my back as I step out into the Great Adventure.
I lovingly dismantle each wall, and face the leafy, lush green of the world within and without, with my face towards the sun, unafraid of the shadows.
I wonder if Robert Frost was speaking of the walls within, too.
I like to think so. It makes me feel we are connected, like good neighbors can be.
Mending Wall
BY ROBERT FROST
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”
I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
I’m simmering underneath this facade
Of polite, hopeful citizen
I’ve got rage on a low boil
I’m hungry for equality
And an end to the bloodshed
I need to stop stewing
Time to eat or get off the pot
Beyond the Skinny Branches 