grace

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Grace

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May grace shine its light on us.

I started Writing Shed nearly 10 years ago. I was on a quest to change my story, to live the story that beats with the rhythm of my heart, listens to the sound of blood coursing through my veins, feel the expansion of inspiration and contraction of expiration as I breathe in then let it go.

Pay attention to your breathing that ubiquitous, anonymous “they” say to calm down, establish yourself in the present, be here and now. Be alive. Or maybe, be with life.

I have two friends that died by suicide, Sheila and Sally. They were both determined to die by suicide. They made the decision to not be with life.

Sheila was 36.  She was disappointed that life had not lived up to her expectations, but I don’t know that any of us knew what she expected other than that she couldn’t control its outcome. She wanted to disengage from her husband (who was also my friend), but insisted he remain married to her. She insisted that her friends support her in her view of life, considered it disloyal if they disagreed with her.

I met her and her husband Alan in 1975 in San Francisco when Sheila and I worked at Langley Porter, the psychiatric center of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. I was a secretary basically. Sheila was a postdoc fellow, studying positive and negative ions. I think the negative ions made things positive. I don’t remember for sure.

Eleven years later, Sheila descended into despair. She moved back to Philadelphia where she and Alan grew up, met, and married. She had worn the long white billowing dress to please her parents, moccasins to please herself.

She blamed California for her despair, claiming that people were shallow and disloyal. But, for whatever reason, she did not find the anchor she had hoped to find in Philadelphia. She found a friend’s gun, but for reasons that aren’t clear, maybe it jammed, she failed to end her life with a gun.

So she got on a red eye to return to San Francisco, spent the flight writing long letters to her estranged husband and a friend, landed, took a cab to deliver the letters, leaving them at their front doors, then had the cab driver deliver her to the Golden Gate Bridge.

The friends called me. For several hours we called and combed the City looking for her. Though she had not said the Bridge was her destination, we called the Bridge to alert them that she might show up.

But, by that time, she had already flown off the Bridge. They let her husband know that someone had seen a woman jump, and that her body had been recovered. I was part of the group that went to the coroner to identify her.

I remember the small article in the paper that said a woman with long dark hair and wearing a brown jacket and jeans had died after jumping off the bridge. How many times I had read such an article. The anonymous nature of a newspaper article about another suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge.

At the impromptu memorial held at my house, my friends despaired over her suicide, wrung their souls wondering what they could have done, the dark cloud of guilt encompassing them.

I comforted them. Then when they left and I was alone, the weight of it all fell on me. I had no guilt to salve my pain. It was clear to me she had made her choice and done it in such a way that no one could stop her. The pain for me was different. She had not found a shadow of or hope for love for herself to make life bearable.  I understood why for her, in that moment, escape from life was her only way out of the pain.

It devastated me, her pain.

Sally’s story was different. She was just a few days shy of 70 when she died by suicide. She had planned it for at least 2 or 3 years. She had told me of her plans over dinner one night, very matter of fact about it. The women in her family declined after 70, she didn’t want to go that way.

She was 68 when she told me that. I decided not to try and talk her out of it, but let her know that if she decided to change her mind, give it more time, that would also be fine with me.

Because I didn’t try and change her mind, just went with it, I had a rich two years of friendship with her. She was an iconoclast. She took her vibrator to Mr. Fixit in Mill Valley. Bi-sexual, she told me that intimacy is what relationships are about and it’s as complicated with a woman as it is with a man. The only difference between living with a man and a woman, she said, was that when you live with a woman you go through more toilet paper.

I drank in my friendship with her. She taught me the courage of iconoclasm. She was the mentor who taught me that it’s not so much that nice girls finish last, as that nice girls don’t even get into the game of life. Nice. Schmice. Be real. Be outraged because there’s a lot to be outraged about. Be outrageous in standing up for your outrage.

My last dinner with her was in late January, 1994. I knew her birthday was coming up the next week. “Is this goodbye?” I asked as we parted ways outside the restaurant.

“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” she said and smiled. And yes, there was a twinkle in her eyes.

A day or two later, it might have even on her birthday, I received the letter. She had sent it to selected friends. She wasn’t in despair she assured us. She had enjoyed her life, but as good gambler knows, there’s a time to fold them.

She wanted us to enjoy her eptitaph: Toujour soixante-neuf.

Sheila’s and Sally’s stories came back to me when I heard the news about Anthony Bourdain. I’m embarrassed to say that I had only thought of him as one of those celebrity chefs until I heard the depth of grief from his colleagues and reaction of my friends who had been smarter than I had been.

I found eight seasons of his shows on Netflix and began my binge watch. I was fortunate. They had been scheduled to be taken down on June 16th, but fans deluged Netflix with pleas to continue it.

I had no idea who he was. I had no idea that he was such a gifted storyteller, and that he looked for and told stories as he searched for and expanded his own life story. His stories were rich in the quest to discover what it means to be human, and how meals connect us as a human community.

Even given my experience with Sally and Sheila, it is unfathomable to me why Anthony Bourdain ended his life. It’s not so much he had so much to live for, as that there was so much more to taste, so many more people and cultures to explore, so many more stories to discover and tell. He held babies in shows with the comfort of a man who loved new lives. He had a daughter who he clearly saw as a future. And he had recently fallen in love.

One of the most moving moments was when he had dinner in Hanoi with Obama. Is it going to be okay, he asked him, knowing they both had daughters they cherished and who had changed their lives. Obama assured him that though it might be rocky, eventually it would be okay.

I am the age now that Sally was when she informed me of her exit plan. It is not a plan that resonates with me. But I am aware that there is less time before me than behind me, and physically the trajectory is towards decline, rather than upward. It is unpredictable and something to reckon with.

What I had not planned on reckoning with was the dark cloud of living death that has descended over us — Donald Trump. He has the destructive jealousy of Iago, but without the passion. He is a man sick with jealousy of anyone who has an experience of life and love. So sick that he is willing to destroy life, and has the tools at hand to do it.

It feels like the country is heading towards death by suicide.

And yet, there are so many meals to enjoy, food to explore, stories to discover and tell.

It occurred to me yesterday that in deciding to change my story, I have actually found it.

My story is that I tell stories. That I have the courage, when necessary, to look into the darkness, see what’s there, write what I see and experience, and have the patience to see it through to the light. To feel love and write the truth that to love is to be alive, even though we have no control over love’s outcome. To live without love is a living death.

I’m not sure how to get through this next chapter in the story of my country. It looks pretty dark. I wonder if that’s why Anthony Bourdain asked Obama if it would be okay.

But, my story is that I tell stories. And there are so many meals to enjoy, cultures to explore, love to feel and stories to tell.

That’s my way through it. Stories.

Perhaps, Anthony Bourdain’s legacy is he graced us with stories that showed us we were connected by a passion for embracing the grace of everyday living.

May grace shine its light on us to show us the path out of the one this jealousy-fueled, passionless Iago is putting us on.

NOTE: I in no way want this post to romanticize suicide. Death by suicide leaves a hole in the hearts of those left behind. You cannot undo it.

If any who reads this feel that despair, I encourage them to reach out: 1-800-273-8255. 

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Falling Into Grace

IMG_1045 (1)Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is a day in which the very ordinary—a meal, can be turned into the extraordinary—a meal. It is a time to transform surviving into thriving. A time for gratitude.

But, today is much like a Thanksgiving more than a decade ago when I could not see my way clear to feel that. I could not muster up gratitude no matter how hard I tried.

So, I did a meditation where I invited gratitude in. She took me through a dark tunnel that formed after the lava from a volcanic eruption hardened into black rock. It was not comfortable making my way through through the tunnel. It was the blackest darkness I had ever experienced. But there was an end to it. It led me into a cave covered in paintings that told the stories of those who had lived eons earlier.

I placed my hand on a painting of a horse and heard a chorus of voices say, “This is what it means to be human.”

That’s how I found gratitude that year.

All over Facebook I see messages that encourage us to be thankful, assure us, or maybe demand from us, that there is always something to be thankful for. I’m not big on that. Sometimes, there is just too much in the way. And I think we have a right to feel the grief we feel and the despair that accompanies it. It is the black-dark tunnel we must walk through to find our connection to being human again.

This past year has been one of grief and despair. Some of it from an accumulation of losses that fell one after the other over two decades with no time in between to give grief its due. And then there was the election and the pall of meanness and cynicism that has descended on our country.

More than once, I had to pull myself out of my own La Brea tar pit.

So this Thanksgiving is a subdued one for me. Tom and I used to host dinners for as many as 12 people. I miss that. But, Tom and I have found a way to honor the holiday with just the 2 of us. We are grateful for each other.

I think the most difficult thing about grief is it feels like we have fallen out of grace. I don’t think we actually do, but it is certainly a loneliness of the soul that is part of being human. It’s what makes us unique and connects us to eons of being human.

I like this definition of grace: the unearned gift. It is the life spirit that allows us to thrive regardless of our surroundings.

I think my time for grieving is drawing to a close. It’s time for me to venture out into the world where grief becomes a distant memory rather than a constant companion. What I learned from my journey through this latest tunnel is my own tenderness. My natural inclination has been to be a warrior—to fight for the higher purpose. So I’m not sure what it means for me to be tender, disarmed and without armor.

But, I’m certain that the tenderness of being a warrior is as powerful as the warrior wading into battle. Both require banishing fear from my workshop.

Maybe the only thing in the way of grace is fear.

Joy and sorrow are flip sides of the same coin. We really can’t have one without the other. That’s what it means to be human. Why we must treat each other with kindness. Banish fear of each other so we can let grace through.

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Thanks for the Mammaries

“Thanks for the mammaries.”

That was on the inside of a card I gave to my mother for Mother’s Day. On the outside was a drawing of a blissful mother nursing her baby.

My mother hadn’t breast fed me. I was born in 1949 when it was out of fashion, and she had taken some kind of drug that had dried up the breast milk. She had taken it for an infection, she said.

I am not upset that my mother didn’t breast feed me. It just sort of fit with who she was. Not cold and indifferent – just not sentimental about being a mother. Thus, she enjoyed the card I gave her.

I liked that about my mother.

Mother’s Day wasn’t terribly important to her, so it was always pretty low key. Since I did not have children, it wasn’t particularly on my radar.

And then I became a stepmother.

I think the word “blended” family is misleading. It is often more like a Cuisinart family, in which a wide variety of volatile emotions get churned by the sharp blade of confusion about who loves who, who can love who, and whose love counts. That the human heart is both fragile and muscular is evident in the delicate navigation through the whitewaters of relationships in a stepfamily. Children are hardwired to want their parents’ love. A stepparent has to earn it.

The hidden rocks and whirlpools in my journey through this experience comprised my not having children of my own – yet wanting them – and the very challenging dysfunction of my stepdaughters’ mother. I sometimes referred to her as my step wife.

I helped my stepdaughters make presents for their mother my first Mother’s Day as a stepmother. They left and a hole the size of the Grand Canyon opened up in my heart as I realized I would not be acknowledged for the love I was investing in this relationship.

So much for Mother’s Day not being particularly important. It was a bit of a humbling experience.

Because of their mother’s dysfunction, I became something of a covert mother for them, but always taking the back seat when it came to being recognized as the mother. It was a rollercoaster of pain, followed by acceptance, followed by pain when it happened again.

I never blamed by stepdaughters. It was just the way it was. Their need for their mother’s love was primal, and so loyalty went to her.

I remember the first Mother’s Day I received a card from one of my stepdaughters. She was in college. I don’t know how to describe what I felt. The only word that comes to mind is grace.

That I did not have children has always been a bit baffling to me. I always wanted them, thought I would have them. We tend to get along well, children and me.

There are two “reasons” that make “sense” to me.

First, there was a history of abuse in my family. I wanted to make sure I resolved that so I didn’t pass it on. My one conception was the result of an abusive relationship. After careful feeling, I decided to terminate the pregnancy – I just didn’t feel that I had it in me to overcome the abusive shadow that hung over it. I have no regrets about that decision.

Second, I wanted to avoid the wrath of the women in my family. They were chained to the belief that women had to make a choice between being a person, or being a wife and mother. If I chose both, it would have ripped open their wound caused by their perceived lack of choice. They were somewhat justified in believing they had no choice – it was the time they lived in. Their message of wrath was unspoken, but deafening in its delivery nevertheless.

Over the past year or so, my oldest stepdaughter and I have become particularly close. She was eighteen by the time I came into the picture, so I was never her covert mother. She was eight years older than my middle stepdaughter and had her own experience being her sisters’ covert mother. Our journey to connection was not an easy one. And yet we arrived.

She has seven-year old triplet sons who she has no problem with my referring to as my grandsons. They call me GrandKaren. I suggested that early on as there were two grandmothers in the picture, and it seems appropriate given that she and her sisters call me Karen.

Over the last couple of months, I stayed with them when she had to travel, then stepped in for daily duty when a bout of the flu put her down for the count for several days. My theory got proved: the day-to-day care of children opens your heart like nothing else can. What I didn’t know was that it opened theirs to me as well.

Because of the peculiar legacy of women as the “sacrificers” that the family I grew up in held, they did not seem to understand that my actions were out of love – they thought it was simply me performing my duty. If one cannot see the heart behind actions, one cannot cherish the heart that delivers them. I have written about this before in the Writing Shed. It ripped my heart out, but I finally had to let that family go. It was a source of constant pain.

This Mother’s Day, I picked up my grandsons early. They greeted me with cards (including one from my stepdaughter) and a dozen pink roses. We shopped for flowers and ingredients for the breakfast they wanted to make for their mother, and then collectively made the breakfast, set the table, and presented her the flowers they had picked out earlier that morning.

That afternoon, they all came to my house for a Mother’s Day bar-b-que.  With great enthusiasm they took part in every step of the meal preparation, including setting and adding a leaf to the table, and helping Tom start the bar-b-que and me make home-made tortilla chips.

As I scooped the last batch of chips out of the cast iron skillet I understood. This was what I had always longed for – a family that understood my heart.

I started the Writing Shed three years ago on the day before Mother’s Day. I started it so I could change my story. That story that I started from, the one that I had learned to live, was about not trusting the light that was in my heart.

My story has changed.

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Numbering our Days

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
Psalm 90:12

The bearded man speaking on the cell phone at the airport looked familiar to me. I was returning from Washington where I had attended my 100-year old Uncle’s memorial service.

“Polly will be there,” I heard him say as our paths converged, and then knew that it had to be Steve. I’d gone to high school with Polly and Steve, though I’d only seen them once, eight years earlier, in the more than forty years since we graduated. They had come to the memorial service for our high school English teacher I had organized. I knew he lived in Washington, she in Oregon.

He hung up the phone and I tapped him lightly on the arm. As we made our way through the airport I learned that his father had been injured in a tractor accident. It was serious. His father, who had been a physician, had become a vintner late in life.

We parted ways as he left to find his ride.

Livermore was a smallish town back when we were in high school. And ours was the new high school. It started with just freshman and sophomores. Steve, Polly and I were among the first students. But even though it was a small high school, we gathered in groups, pretty much hanging out with whoever was our designated group. I liked them both and knew them enough to wonder about them over the years, but not well enough to have a way to keep in touch.

Their father died in November, the day before Thanksgiving. The memorial was last Saturday.

This has become a familiar experience for me, acknowledging the loss of my contemporaries’ parents, a life passage. It brings with it a mixture of past and present. The buried memories of who I thought I was and who I thought they were back then meeting the reality of who we had become and the life paths that brought us to where we were today.

The grey rainy skies that had been the previous week gave way to one of those weird late Fall California days on Saturday: bright-blue skies, the sun casting its warmth over leaves still clinging to the trees and the vines in the vineyard.

As I listened to the generations read their tributes to Father and Grandfather, the yellow leaves of the tree by the porch drifted down. Sometimes it was a lone leaf weaving its way through the air, other times a flock of them descended to become a part of the autumnal tapestry gracing the ground.

Be a renaissance person, the grandchildren remembered their grandfather telling them. Both generations drew from Shakespeare and Emerson and Dylan Thomas in their eulogies, though they had written them independently of each other.

As the day drew to a close, the sun set behind the vineyard, turning the surrounding trees into silhouettes against the darkened sky, its warmth turning to that bright sunset red you see at the edge of the world the moment before it disappears.

But this time, it lingered. Or so it seemed. I don’t remember a sunset lasting as long as this one did, a waning ember that glowed in the dark.

It’s not so much that time stopped as it slowed down so we could acknowledge its passing, as if to let us know that though our days are numbered, they are enough — if we live them deeply and follow the beat of our own hearts.

“My head keeps hitting the ceiling,” Polly said as we talked about what it’s like to lose a parent. It’s true. There is nothing between you and the ceiling as the generations above you die.

Be a renaissance person.

That command came from many sources in the years Polly and Steve and I were in high school. Our teachers encouraged it. The high spirits and optimism of the sixties encouraged it.

I think it is a command we need to bring to the forefront of our culture. I think it is the way we can find our way again in a world that has been turned upside down by fear, greed, and solipsism.

We don’t quote stock prices at significant life passages. We quote the likes of Shakespeare and Emerson and Dylan Thomas because they express what it is to be human — enduring truths that don’t vanish in the burst of a bubble.

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Wisdom Matters

I did not know Elizabeth Edwards. And yet . . .

I have not written a blog for over two months. I wanted to write something before the last election, but it was as if the cat got my tongue. I wanted to write that To Kill a Mockingbird was a fitting metaphor for the country right now; that Sarah Palin and her followers are like the Ewells. Sarah Palin, like Bob Ewell, claiming victimhood and using love of family as a weapon, revels in the power to destroy lives. Her followers seem like Mayella Ewell, who is at the mercy of her rapist and physical abuser—her father, Bob Ewell. Even greater than the rage she has for her father, is that she feels for the town people who turn a blind eye to her plight.

The only power the Ewells seem to have is derived from the conceit that being white entitles them to more than if they were black, regardless of character.

I was not able to articulate that in October. Then the election happened, and the cat seemed to disappear with my tongue.

People, I think, are feeling powerless over their lives right now. As the gap between the haves more and more and haves less and less grows greater, survival fears creep in, which provides fertile ground for tyrants—those whose pathological need for power has no boundaries or decency.

And then, there was Elizabeth Edwards. Pundits and commentators reported that she had lost her battle with cancer. When reminded that she did not look at her impending death as a battle lost, they lost their veneer of objectivity. They seemed to let in the story they were really telling: a life had ended, and though they did not yet understand why or what, she had taught them something about living.

I’ve been sorting through why I can claim the right to pause at her passing, how though I never met her, I feel affected by her life.

She was the same age as I, so perhaps that is a part of why it hits close to the bone. I admire that she took a route that was new to women when we were younger; going to law school. She embraced her entitlement to her aspirations. It took me another twenty before I even recognized I was entitled to them.

When her son was taken from her, she didn’t lose herself in work. Instead she lost herself in grief. I think that’s healthy. I think that’s why she found her way out of it. It also says to me that though she had stepped into a world that was defined by a cultural stereotype of being male, she did not become enslaved by it. She did not man up, she womaned up.

Losing the 2004 election had to be disappointing. On the same day, she learned she had breast cancer. I think the fear of being diagnosed with breast cancer lurks in the dark corner of women’s lives. Dire news about cancer returning coincided with revelations about her husband’s infidelity. The betrayal became public humiliation as it played itself out in 24-hour news cycles. What was most difficult, she said in an interview, was that all through their thirty years of marriage she had been able to turn to her husband during bad times. That’s what she had lost with his betrayal.

If anyone might feel powerless, and bitterness at being powerless, one could understand her feeling that way.

Whatever route it took her to get there, she chose grace over bitterness and powerlessness.

Women like Sarah Palin and Sharon Angle declared that their opponents needed to man up. They are enslaved to cultural stereotypes of being male, a stereotype that might provide the illusion of power over others, but ultimately carries no genuine power with it. They apparently never met Atticus Finch.

Elizabeth Edwards showed us courage and grace in the face of humiliation, disappointment, and death. We all have the power of courage and grace, regardless of what life throws our way.

She showed us how to number our days so we can apply our hearts unto wisdom.

We need leaders who know how to number their days.

We need them to woman up.