This
poem is about an encounter my grandmother had with Eleanor Roosevelt.
In college, my grandmother was assigned to interview the First Lady for
the school paper. When she actually got to sit down and talk with her,
Mrs. Roosevelt asked my grandma about herself, what she was studying,
what she was interested in, etc. By the time the interview was over, my
grandmother looked down and realized she had nothing written as a
result of the interview -- she had done all the talking instead of Mrs.
Roosevelt! My grandma carried this memory with her and learned to follow Mrs. Roosevelt's lead and always be more interested in others than herself.
Last month my friend said July was just plain awful for her and she couldn't wait for it to be over with. August started and she was relieved. Days later, I was stricken with strep throat. 104.3 degree temperature, enormous tonsils, the works. Not pleasant -- but little did I know, that was merely the beginning of the month that I would soon wish to be over.
A couple days after recovering from strep throat, I got a random text from a friend I hadn't heard from in a while telling me to call him and that it was important. After seeing the text, I realized that he had tried to call me earlier, but not recognizing the Colorado number, I didn't answer. So I dialed up the Colorado number expecting my friend to have an immigration-related question for me to help with (generally the reason people from the past contact me out of the blue these days is to answer or help with a random immigration situation). Unfortunately, that wasn't the case at all this time. Jason got right to the point: "Peter Bausch died today." Peter was a friend of ours from my law school days. He was my age and had two little boys about the same ages as my girls. He was fit and healthy and his life was on a good path. He had gone up to Michigan to participate in a bike race that weekend, and something happened between the start and the finish of the race -- his body was found just about a mile from the finish line.
Beat.
Impossible to process. There are no words. There is no way to understand. There's just sadness and loss. Brain wracking for memories of things said, moments shared... Pulling out photo albums. Remembering. Helplessness. Watching his widow who looks like she could be me sobbing down the aisle behind a casket. How can this be happening to a friend my age?
Two days later, my sister called to update me on the outcome of a doctor's appointment my dad had. He's been dealing with blood issues and after multiple tests we finally got a diagnosis: myelofibrosis. With no treatment, he'd have 3 - 5 years; the only "cure" is a bone marrow transplant that only has a success rate of about 50% and an unsuccessful transplant means death.
Beat.
And now my brain tries to process. I try to be positive about my dad with the perspective that at least we might actually have time, as opposed to what happened with Peter where it was just -- BOOM! Gone. But how do you cherish those delicate moments of time without being depressed?
Me? Depressed? No way. But then it started coming over me. The proverbial dark cloud. The lure of the notorious black hole to crawl into. There was inexplicable fatigue and an ache - a literal ache - in my chest. I could turn up a smile on the outside. I could dutifully answer "Good" to the classic and empty American greeting, "How are you?" But the pain and sadness and futility of everything was there, begging me to just curl up inside myself.
Fortunately, I saw it and I didn't like it. It wasn't a place I wanted to be. It wasn't me. I reached out. And then and only then was it pointed out to me how much I keep everything in. In college my friends used to call me "bottled". I didn't think it was something I still carried with me until a conversation last week with my husband and a counselor. I just don't tend to talk about what's going on with me, I don't share, I don't expect people to want to hear about me. Even writing all this is so very hard. But I realize that's not okay when there is so much sadness, so much hurt. If I just keep it in, it starts brewing like a dark batch of coffee, burning from the inside.
So it's something I'm going to work on. Expressing. Sharing. Opening up. Essentially, what it comes down to, when I really think about it, is being vulnerable. Showing my weakness. Showing that I can't always just handle everything. But it's also about acknowledging that my feelings are worth sharing. Believing that others really do care. Accepting that I need the support of others to get through things that are beyond my own comprehension and capability.
The good thing, I suppose, is that now I do "know my problem -- I keep it all in", so it's something I can be aware of, work on, and hopefully improve.
In the meantime -- I miss my friend, I'm desperately sad for his wife and kids, and I'm so very scared for what my dad will be going through. There's nothing anyone can do about any of those feelings. But there. I've put them out there.
This past weekend a friend of mine died very unexpectedly. This is third death in the last two years of people who were close to me and not at all what is normally considered "old". How to process it, how to live with the knowledge of the very precious and precarious state we are in each day here on this beautiful planet? One piece I've read that's given me some solace through each of these deaths is the essay below by Aaron Freeman on why you want a physicist to speak at your funeral.
"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him/her that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let him/her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her/his eyes, that those photons created within her/him constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly."
--Aaron Freeman
***
I try to keep these words in mind when I think of those who have passed. I look to the stars, feel the wind and the warmth, and seek to find those I loved -- just a little less orderly -- around me, still present, and still possessing their own unique energy.
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me." (1967, 3–4)
