“The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them.” - Helen Macdonald, from the book H is for Hawk
Sitting in my room tonight, feeling a deep and intense sadness, my thoughts rested on a practice I used to take a great amount of comfort in: writing ... here online ... in journals ... sometimes professionally.
For many of you who know me, you know that I've got opinions upon opinions, and that, often, I have trouble keeping things "succinct" when I get rolling on a topic. Somewhere along the way in my 20s, however, I got the feeling that I was often speaking out (and up) about things I really didn't know enough about. I also started wondering how much else I was missing out there--among my peers, among my neighbors--due to my desire to have my voice heard. I've never really considered myself a "writer," but balancing the need to listen and reflect with the often palpable need to express/emote/convey an idea on the page is a tricky balance, as I see it. I'm not saying that writing is tantamount to not listening--far from it. I am saying that I believe there is a flow, a healthy space, where a person's self expression can operate like lungs, in a way, with regard to the intake of ideas and the output of expression; when it's working, you get insightful, sharp, necessary works of art and commentary. When it's not, you get a lot of rasping, wheezing garbage. You get shallow, inadequate breath.
Anyway: I was starting to feel like I was writing just to be heard, and that's never a good place to be, as I see it. My emotional, expressive lungs were out of shape, I suppose.
With that said, I've been engaged in a personal project for quite a while now to try to curb that tendency and to bring my self expression more in line with my heart and the things I most value in this world.
This project began when I noticed, sometime around the second year that I was in Peru for the Peace Corps, that the dynamics of learning a new language had forced me to shut up and listen MUCH more than I had ever previously done. My Spanish was awful when I arrived in Peru, so I simply did not talk. Month after month, I found myself realizing that I was (and remain) an exceedingly slow learner when it comes to languages, and that I had better listen more carefully when people were talking (to me, around me, on the radio, whatever).
Epistemically, it was a super interesting time: I felt like I'd sort of stumbled upon the perfect setting to humble me; or, perhaps more accurately, the perfect setting to at least get me to reflect more on the way I was moving through the world. In the process, I had the deepest, most transformational period of my adult life. I learned Spanish. I made incredibly deep, lasting relationships that mean a great deal to me (both with the people of the town where I lived, and with some incredibly cool other volunteers who lived close by). My older brother always says, "Happiness is something you remember", quoting something I've long since forgotten. And I think there's a lot to that. However, that time in Peru was the most sustained period of present, palpable happiness I'd ever felt--magnified by an understanding that the walls of my world had stretched and, in some areas, blown open to reveal new vistas.
So what?
So I guess all that came up just now as I realized that I haven't posted a thing on here since 2012.
A lot has happened since 2012. My life has changed and shifted in some incredible ways since returning to the U.S., and I am very grateful for the opportunities and changes that have taken me to this point.
Yet throughout these past 4 + years in Baltimore, I guess I've shifted so far in the direction of listening and learning and just trying to observe other cultures that I lost the feel for how to express myself. And sometimes in life, I think, you don't notice a loss until many others are piled on top of it.
Roughly one year ago today, my family discovered that my Mom had a large brain tumor on her right temporal lobe. The night before I was set to graduate from social work school, we found ourselves in Johns Hopkins emergency room, learning that she'd need surgery in the near future. Sitting in my cap and gown the next morning, surrounded by so many ebullient people, having never gone to bed the night before and doing everything I could to hold back a rush of tears, I felt like the world had exploded.
They got the tumor out that same day, and my mother made an incredible recovery. Some other time, I'd like to write about how special the next 5 months of my Mom's life were for me. Back then, I didn't know that's all we had with her. We were terrified, but my siblings and my Dad and I, I think, clung to a dogged hope that this cheerful, wonderful woman would somehow overcome this awful illness. I cannot write about that time yet.
My Mom passed away two days after her birthday last year, on November 5, 2015. She had just turned 65. She had retired just two short years before that. She had an incredible energy for life--she was, is, my hero, alongside my father, as they've both been the most incredible parents to my siblings and I. My Mom was determined to brighten people's lives, day after day after day, and time and again in the days, weeks, and months that have passed, people have blessed me with stories of how much they loved her kindness and the soulful way she lived life. I love my Mom dearly, and her passing has, if anything, magnified that love. I can feel her moving in things, now.
In the interim between that time and now, I've done my best to try to claw back whatever normalcy I could find in my daily routines. I've thrown myself into my work, as I know that my Mom would like nothing more than to see me active and engaged with the students and families and staff in my building. She was a Teacher, dedicated to the profession, and one thing I am profoundly grateful for is that she lived to see me find a job I could invest myself in with all my heart.
But it's been a while now. Work continues to challenge me, and I will continue to try to keep my Mom in the center of my thoughts as I go to work each day. Somehow, though, the sadness has caught up to me. In the months after her death, I found out that I have some of the most wonderful friends I could ever ask for. People brought me meals, invited me out for drinks, came over just to talk. I felt a richness and a solicitude and a closeness with people that I was desperately in need of. I have tried, also, to just be with as many people in my family as I can, as often as I can, because I find that it brings me a degree of comfort that I do not feel elsewhere. And despite the friends and the family, the sadness has caught up with me. It has caught up and taken hold, and, on some level, I know it's natural and good that it has.
Because here's the thing: loss, I'm realizing, is everywhere. Once something happens to you that bowls you over and topples your emotional defenses, you start to realize just how many other people around you are dealing with their own losses--many of them privately, quietly, and without adequate support systems to cope with it in any reasonable way. My Mom's little sister, my Aunt Peggy, passed away just over a month ago after her own battle with cancer ... and I felt like I was reeling. It was too much. I felt like whatever faint winds I'd been riding on had flown from my sails, and my energy just sort of slackened.
I'm reading books on grief that my friends and family have recommended, and I guess I sort of knew this was coming. I cried myself to sleep each night for the first couple of months, don't get me wrong ... and the tears still come rushing to the surface at the weirdest moments: but my energy stayed up, somehow. My spirits would rebound as soon as the crying jags were over.
We all live in cycles, I know that. And I know now that the hard work of learning to live in a world without my Mom is just beginning. The good thing about coming through a family like mine is that I know the benefits of good therapy, and I intend to finally get myself in to see someone on a regular basis. My intention here is not to worry anyone--simply to communicate, and connect, as was the original intention of this blog when I started it way back when I was an undergrad.
IF, by chance, you're reading this, and you know someone who is grieving, please pass along the following link. It is a guided meditation on grief, and it's what spurred me to write some of this tonight. I'm trying to be present to my own grief ... and part of that presence, for me, entails letting others see it and telling others about it. We're all in this thing together, after all.
http://www.onbeing.org/blog/encountering-grief-guided-meditation/4983
"May I be open to the pain of grief. May I find the inner resources to really be present for my sorrow."
-Joan HalifaxAnd about that quote at the top of this post: it comes from one of the most powerful books I've read in a long, long time, which deals directly with one woman's grief upon the loss of her father. I found the author's words and style immensely comforting:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/12/16/h-is-for-hawk/
