It's scaring me a little how quickly and definitively my brain produced "Coming Home." The other two had some competition, but apparently Tom Kieffer can drive my car anytime.
I'm keeping Utopia Parkway on here although no artwork can be found for it for some strange reason, because the song on the album of the same name is awesome for summer time or anytime, and it's perfect driving music.
It's a perfect song for a pretty day with the windows down, and Over the Rhine makes me think of Ohio, which makes me think of hours and hours on Interstate 70.
Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Everything remains as it was.
The old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no sorrow in your tone.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effort
Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was.
There is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around
the corner.
All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting, when we meet again.
My sister found that awesome poem while planning my grandmother's funeral program, so we put it on there. It has been comforting to me, challenged as I am by Catholic concepts of the resurrection and death in general, in this 15-month span of time where it has confronted me on a few occasions and colored my experience so much.
It was my grandmother's time to die, yes, I truly believe. Her body was exhausted and she was exhausted. She was in pain there for the last few days and pain was nothing any of us wanted for her for one minute. She died after the first dose of hospice-administered morphine, she calmed down enough to slip away.
My grandmother and I were best friends and I've written about that before. This was her birthday post from last year, when we all went to lunch and she started eating her brownie sundae without a utensil because there were no utensils on the table.
This year I left for California on Thanksgiving on morning and was out there for her birthday, so I stopped by the day before the holiday to spend time with her and bring her a little jacket. She was very spruced up, pearls and all, and we had a great visit. I took some video of her and only got one on YouTube yet. I'll post more when my heart can take it.
I'm going through my archives, so grateful I kept a record of her last few years. Case in point, Valentine's Day, 2007. I was so blessed with her. She was my babysitter and my roommate and my friend, my friend, my friend. She loved me unconditionally and whereas it is a beautiful thing to live for a good long time and have so much love in your life, it is still so difficult to lose that life, for you and for the people who shared it with you. That's where the grief comes in.
My life has been coming at me at such a rapid pace in the past nine days, populated with so many people from the past 40 years. I have never felt this tired, wrung out, which my sister and my mother and I reminded ourselves last night was due to the holiday season, graduation, a family reunion we planned for 125 people the last week in December, and for me a bout with the flu that started the week before Christmas.
Besides, my grandmother and I had a lot of preliminary conversation that in many ways prepared us for the possibility that she would eventually not be here, but that was pretty much intellectual. The reality of it is so weird, and so emotionally draining I can't even explain it. The aftermath was full of seeing all the people who cared so much for all of us through the various stages of our life, watching the priest who baptized me lead prayers at the funeral home, putting her sunglasses (see above) on for the two-hour break between viewing times and making my dad's cousins laugh who got there before we got back, watching my little cousins watch their father lose his mother, watching my father lose his mother, walking through this with my sister and my parents like I walk through pretty much everything, sitting like a stone in the funeral home so that the last person there would not be a person who didn't have a close tie, because I'm overly protective of some people and situations.
I've cried a lot. When I saw her for the last time on Dec. 28, we had some important time together and I told her that there were not enough tears in the world for her. There aren't, although they're slowing down. I believer very much in celebrating life, but gratitude and joy will need to learn to share space with sadness and loss, because that's just the way I am, the way people are, if we're honest with ourselves. I feel, in this most significant loss of my life so far, that I am in some ways grown. It keeps coming into my mind, that thought, and I don't really like it as much sense as it makes. I'll never be the same, in some good ways and some bad.
In that last talk, she held my hand as I cried, she comforted me, saying "Whatsa matter? Whatsa matter?" over and over as I told her I was so worried about her, I didn't know what to do, and she knew there was nothing to do, but for us to be there together. I wish I'd spent more time, but I'm grateful for the years of it, for the time we spent and the time we appreciated, because honestly I don't know of many pairs who appreciated each other more. What more can you ask, from this world or from anyone?
I wrote this for my father to read at her funeral, because I could not:
There are some people who will fix games so their grandchildren will win. They’ll pick the bad cards or count up the points wrong on purpose. Sis White was not one of those people. If she got a hole in one at mini-golf, which she was prone to doing, and beat you, she'd throw her club in the air and laugh out loud, and only then give you a pep talk about it if she wasn’t already on to the next hole. If she got Yahtzee first and, again, beat you, she yelled YAHTZEE annoyingly loud and you had to settle for her making you something to eat to soften the blow.
It was nothing personal. It was a game, and the objective, as she saw it, was to win. If you did, great, and if she did, that was greater. And as those of us who have witnessed her fight to continue drawing breath for the past 12 years against often very difficult physical circumstances can attest, she approached her earthly experience with the same fighting spirit. She may have believed with all her heart in a heaven, but she was determined to wait until the last possible second to get there. There is some comfort in the knowledge that she achieved this goal
And years later, it may have occurred to those of us on the losing end of those games to thank her for teaching us that as many times as you might win in life, a lot of times you lose. It’s helpful to know how to handle it, and better that she should have been one of the first ones to teach you how to deal.
Born 87 years ago to an Irish-German Catholic family in Washington, D.C. Marie McGrath White’s life was service – to her home, to her family and to her God. She found necessity and happiness in the every day – her hands in the dirt in the yard, in the sink, in the washing machine, in the sand – wherever she happened to be. She was the rare person who never did anything, to my knowledge, with an expectation of reward or gratitude. If it was there to do and it needed to be done, she did it, the majority of the time for the benefit of other people.
She enjoyed her life. She liked Maryland basketball, Orioles baseball and church, going to the beach and dancing. She liked dogs and for many years she watched All My Children every single day. But regardless of what she was doing, her primary interest was people. First of all her kids, and then her grandchildren, daughters in law, nieces and nephews and friends. She wanted to know what you were doing and when, certainly who you were doing it with and how long you expected it to take. She wanted to know if you’d done it before and if you planned to do it again, and if you’d be stopping back by the house when you were done. She was extremely interested in your physical condition, whether you were sick or well, and what you might need to either make you better or keep you in good shape. Most of all, and ironically for someone who showed so little interest in her own food, she wanted to know if you were hungry, and if she could feed you, repeatedly.
She liked things to have a point and she liked action. Not much of a recreational reader herself, she was a self-taught children’s book expert and an uncertified preschool teacher who could pack a kid off to kindergarten with all the basics well in hand. She was, for a number of years, an unofficial Channel 4 Bob Ryan weather watcher, and at the New Hampshire Avenue house and then later through other screen doors and windows, she spent countless hours predicting whether or not it would storm, estimating humidity levels, and checking on the condition of vehicles in the service road. Many, many nights in the winter she’d announce to Bill that there was ice on the car, for no reason than to keep everyone apprised of the situation, because the vehicles were one of few things she didn’t handle.
Through the many happy years of parenting and grandparenting, of beach trips and church functions up to the last decade of other things not so fun and much more painful, what she had was a faith in the unknown and the unseen that carried her through personal losses and finally the loss of her own physical abilities. She somehow knew where she was going even when she nor anyone else had any idea, and in those times she trusted only that around the next bend she'd have a hallway to maneuver her wheelchair down, heading to dining rooms where she wouldn't eat the food but would poke around for some conversation and maybe even stir something up at a couple of the tables.
And even though the last 12 years with her “bad side” as she called it, were difficult, she, like many people of faith, saw it as part of the program, something to be handled. She rebounded not only from a debilitating stroke but several bouts with illness that many in her life thought there was no way she could possibly survive.
It has been our privilege to see her through it, to turn her over to the Jesus, Mary and Joseph she called upon every day, and now to be grateful that she watches over us and has given us all that we need to live our lives with even a fraction of the grace and spirit that she brought to the proceedings.
The hardest people to let go of, no matter what their age or physical condition, are the people for whom it is unthinkable that they will go anywhere, and the hardest people to thank are the people who don’t want it or ask for it. And they are the ones who deserve it the most.
I'm going to try to post more in the coming months, and probably will move the blog to somewhere or something else like I've been threatening to do for two years now, just because I think it's time to put down the sippy cup and get out of my toddler bed where this content management thing is concerned. But for now this is where I'll stay because let's face it I'm a lazy bitch and dude, it's cold outside. How hard can I be expected to work?
I've been reading all kinds of resolution-y posts and e-mails, round-ups of memes for the first day of the first month of the year, and I really feel that I ought to participate in some way. Every time I read them, though, I just get overwhelmed. Which one do I do? Do I do the one where each resolution starts with a different letter of the alphabet? Assign them all a color? Jesus I don't know.
I didn't have a very mentally positive year last year and my hope this year is that I do. I want to be in better charge of my situation. I want to organize my life and get it in a shape I actually like and admire. I don't want to be capital-K KRAZY all the time, running around meeting odd deadlines but accomplishing nothing.
Today I went to my meditation group's new year's day gathering, a most outstanding fire ceremony where we wrote the stuff down that we want to get rid of first and put it in the fireplace and then our intentions and values for the new year and burned those up too. My group is populated with a number of intensely beautiful inside and out Persian women who constantly astound me with their way of expressing themselves, their way of walking in the world. I feel instantly better when I walk into this house, when I sit in this circle with other people who are open and true about what they contend with in this life and their utter commitment to making it better.
This was the best possible place I could have been today. My paper with the stuff I wanted to incinerate was packed with scribble. There is so much I want to let go of and break off and torch. Putting it literally into the fire and watching it crumble felt so good. My intentions for the year were a little bit harder to articulate. There are several things I want to do, priorities I want to get in order. I might write a bit more about them this weekend as they shake out in my mind.
*lost my dog. *Went to Vietnam. *Graduated from journalism school. *Spent three months "working for" a person who made me dread walking into the room every day and resolved to never be the person to make others feel like that or to spend any stretch of time in someone else's room who did. *Did not exercise beyond travel-related walking. *Ate a very strange, erratic, borderline-unhealthy diet. *Had some significant problems with money. *Told my ex-boyfriend I still loved him and meant it and walked through the fire of knowing it was pointless while tragically hoping that it wasn't but I needed to get it out of my system anyway. *Had moments of extreme despair and worry over the state of my life and the potential state of my future. *Was recognized for my work on some very nice levels, by people whose opinions matter to me. *Sat on my grandmother's bed in her nursing home and told her that she
was my best friend, that she was my heart, that I could never repay her
for all that she has done for me, that there were not enough tears in the world for her. *I met my old friends from high school because of the internet. *Watched Barack Obama accept the Democratic presidential nomination from inside Invesco/Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado, a night that I will remember for my whole life. Indelible. *Related: Sat on a media platform and watched 100,000 people in Virginia rock that state blue for Obama on Nov. 3, chilly, the night before the election, and therefore did for the first time see the intense localized power of change *Made some wonderful friends in my graduate school program, whose lives and careers I'll follow for a long, long time. *Read a post on stage at Blogher which was really cool but also extremely nervewracking. *Did not settle into my own space in any way at all whatsoever. *Lost my blog mojo, big time.
It was a hard, hard year. I did not feel joy, for the most part. I felt loss. I grieved for my grandmother, who is not yet gone but is barely holding on. I felt so incredibly passionless, in the human-meeting-human sense. I let go, BARELY, of the love of my life, the boy, resisting it and resenting it the entire time. Grieved intensely for my dog - the not-human love of my life - who died when I was in Vietnam. I miss him now. I will miss him always. I dealt with people who didn't get me, at home, and thousands of miles away. I was alternately wealthy in loan money and broke down to the wire.
I felt lost, pretty much, most of the time. I believed this degree was the right thing to do and within this experience I found some wonderful people and some pretty cool experiences. But within that experience I felt lost and alone. I felt, often, that this was another stopgap, a confusing thing. I kept coming back to Mike that in that experience I was vaguely whole and outside of it I never would be although that's an inherently stupid thing to think. I felt bad about myself for the things I thought about the woman who ran the Vietnam trip and about the news bureau person although in retrospect they feel entirely justified.
I loved the people of Vietnam. I loved the pictures I took there, even if not that many people saw them. I felt like I was swimming against a very angry tide. I kept coming home.
I don't know what 2009 holds. I have no idea. I guess I keep walking this path alone, for now, for the forseeable future. I see a whole lot more letting go. I go back to work. I'm happy to do that although I'm not very happy. I hope it's happy. I don't know whatever in the world I should do with another bad year. I don't have the strength in my heart or head for it.
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