Remembering

For most people, tonight is a night for costumes and candy, bobbing and begging, tricks and treats.  For me, however, this night, Samhain, represents a time to reflect and remember those who have gone before us, honoring the souls of the loved ones who now reside in the spirit realm. This year has been especially raw because just yesterday, my deceased mother's birthday, I had to put down my sweet red Dobe Baron who suffered from lymphoma and heart disease, not quite a year after we gave this last gift to his Dobe brother Titan. And, my step-father now enters his fourth week in the hospital, steadily deteriorating from advanced cases of cirrhosis and COPD and not realizing that he will never, ever go home again. 

Tonight, as I do each October 31, I lit a candle in my front window to guide those departed spirits should they want to lift the veil between the worlds and make their presence known.  Tonight, I will say prayers of blessing for the loved ones who have gone to spirit before me and will greet me when I arrive. Tonight, I will pay close attention to my dreams.

I will look for the grandfathers who died the year I was born, and the grandmother I barely knew whose death from colon cancer didn't come to light until a random phone call from a cousin two years later.  I will look for  the grandmother who raised me and had a stroke when I was 11 followed by seven years in a nursing home bed where gangrene finally took her life.  I will look for my father, the parent I found and lost and found again, who waited for me to get to New York before falling into a coma and dying from AIDS in 1988 at the beginning of the epidemic. I will look for my father-in-law who never came off of the ventilator after surgery in 1998 for an aortic aneurysm and in whose hospital room I spent four months writing my dissertation before he finally decided to have his ventilator removed and let us send him on.  I will look for my mother who died two weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2006, and I will let her know how it haunts me to this day that I had to be the one to take her off of life support.  I will look for Adam who took his life the night before my birthday in 2008 and whose absence is at the edge of my awareness every single day, and most especially on those days I spend with our Hayli who still talks about the daddy she lost when she was two.  I will look for my mother-in-law whose fierce independence was ripped away by the stroke from which she never recovered, and I'll let her know that I wished I could have ended suffering when she begged me to do so.  And finally, I will look for every animals I have loved and lost whose shadows I sometimes still see and whose weight at the foot of the bed I still feel some nights. 

Tonight I will let the tears fall, take time for silence, and most of all...remember.

Preparing to Hibernate

This time of year, as the days grow shorter and the light, when it shows up, is uniformly gray, I feel the urge to store up and hunker down.  I gather everything in from the garden, fill the freezer with pre-made meals and baked goods and get my house just so, lining up inside projects that will keep me occupied for the next several months of darkness.

This year, however, my hibernation preparations have expanded to represent my life at this point in time.  I have gathered in all of my scattered belongings from the places that I used to be.  The totes from my last cubicle are stacked neatly in the garage, and the personal items in my current office can all be rolled out in the one wheeled case I have there in the closet.  I am gathering myself into one place, the home I have created over the past thirteen years. And the honest truth is...I really do want to hibernate.  I have said many times over the years, "I just want to quit...everything."  This year, that is a reality.

When I left my last job at the end of August, I knew I had a safe place to land at the university where I spent eight years as part of the university "family."  But four years has made a great difference.  Now, I see the institution through the eyes of an outsider, and although I dearly love my friends, I am not one of them any more.  I am an outsider, an interloper.  No matter how much I am enjoying spending time with my colleagues, I just don't belong.  You really can't go home again.

The truth is...I don't want a full-time job, and even this part-time job has demanded a great deal of the time I thought I would have for myself this autumn.  I am happy to be welcomed back so enthusiastically, but I don't want my tenure back; I don't want a full class load; I don't want the responsibility of the almost 90 student teachers I will have in the spring and all of their emails and texts and phone calls.  I just want to quit...everything.  At least for a little while.  At least until I figure out what I really want to do.

There have been novel ideas swirling around in my brain for quite some time, but I have never had the time or energy to even give that a try.  Now, I really want to.  I want the freedom of not having ANYTHING external on my calendar for long stretches of time.  I want to wake up without an alarm EVERY day.  I want to sit on my window seat and  read the books that have been accumulating on my shelves. I want to finish the painting that I started months ago and print out all of the photos I have taken that are inspirations for future art projects.   I want to fit and sew the pants that have been hanging out on my cutting table for over a year and needle felt the jackets I have had hanging in the closet for two years.  I want to learn to play the guitars and ukulele and piano that sit and wait for me.  I want to build a raised bed garden on my deck.  I want to cook out of the cookbooks I have gathered for almost 40 years.  I want to hike, and bike and kayak and walk the dogs.  I want to listen to music and dance and do yoga and move my body in ways that give me pleasure.  I want to travel and actually see the people I love. And...I want time to do absolutely nothing.

Since I have committed to next semester, I will have to wait a few more months, but I know now what I didn't know in August.  I don't have to be afraid not to have a job.  We have saved and been smart about our money and have everything we need.  I will not be one of those women in three overcoats pushing a shopping cart full of my worldly belongings. After a lifetime of being in survival mode, I know that I am safe.  That is a huge step for me.  It is one thing to leap into the void, and another thing entirely to know you will land safely wherever that may be.

Last May I gave myself a year to do what I needed to do to bring joy back into my life.  In August, I quit the job that was sucking at my soul.  Now, I am on the home stretch.  By this May, I will be done with an external job and all of my other professional commitments I am in the process of eliminating.  I don't need another thing to add to my vitae.  In fact, I don't need a vitae at all.

Now, I think I'll have a cup of tea.

The Illusion of Control

I think that I am finally understanding that I have been delusional for most of my life.  I spend a great deal of time plotting and planning and orchestrating so that things turn out the way I think they should.  Sometimes it happens.  And it is those sometimes that feed into my delusions, fueling my notion that I actually have control over life.  But when I stop and look back...really look back...I see that the only control I have is over myself, and even that is subject to circumstances far beyond my control.

For quite some time, just when I think I have it all figured out and am ready to start the next phase of my plan, I hit a major bump in the road that has set me back, and that bump is usually accompanied with pain--physical, emotional, psychic.  I am beginning to wonder if this life is about learning that, in fact, I don't have control, and that I need to let go and not hold so tightly to the plans I have made for myself and the people around me.

I have gotten better at this as I grow older, but even now, I experience the sting of disappointment over things that I know I cannot change, but desperately want to.  I have been a "fixer" for most of my life...another of my coping mechanisms, because if I can "fix" whatever is wrong, I have taken control of the situation...or so I think.  I the past five years, however, I have had far too many instances where I have been blindsided by circumstance, providing a regular reminder of my own impotence.

My son's suicide four and a half years ago dropped me to my knees.  As a parent, you think you know your children, and even though my children came to me through marriage, I had been their parent since they were small children, and in the years before his death, Adam and I were very close.  He came to me with his problems and asked for advice.  He opened up about his hopes and fears; he talked freely about his struggles.  Or so I thought.  The Sunday before his Monday night death, he was here with us and his daughter, sharing pizza and his latest problems with the woman he was seeing. Late Monday night, those problems came to a head, and he chose to end his life. We got the call Tuesday as we were coming home from my birthday dinner.  From that moment and for the next several weeks, I was on autopilot because the enormity of what had just happened was just too much to comprehend.  And it still is.  As parents, we both keep asking ourselves what we could have done differently, what we had missed, and what finally drove him into his bedroom with a gun as the only solution.  And we just have no answers.  We could have helped, could have maybe "fixed" some of the problems we found out about later, but those options didn't exist because our child was an adult who ultimately made his own decisions.

Now, as parents, we struggle again with circumstances beyond our control.  Like most parents, we wanted better for our children...better than we had, freedom from the struggles we faced early on, an easier path.  And like most parents, we tried to teach and model how to get to that place in life.  But adult children make their own choices, and whether we agree or not is irrelevant.  We can only sit by and watch how things play out.  We have no control.  And what we want for them is irrelevant.  Yet, we still ask the same questions with no answers.

So, once again I sit on the sidelines, hurting for my child, but not in a position to change anything.  My therapist tells me not to "futurize," and that is difficult for me, because I still plot and plan and orchestrate, even though I recognize I can only do this for myself and ultimately, my outcomes are hit or miss depending more on circumstance...or planetary alignment...than anything else.  The illusion of control is still very pervasive in my life, even with eyes wide open.  Burns knew this long ago...

The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!