Random Acts of Kindness

Every time there is a mass shooting because of senseless gun violence, it breaks my heart and shakes me. I don’t like guns. I don’t own one. I’ve never held one.

I’ve had one held on me. That was life-altering. Metal is cold, like the cowards who hide behind them while pointing them at another being, as if any life is other than sacred.

If you like guns, I don’t have a problem with you. I have a problem with people who own guns and think they have a right to take lives with them.

What happened in the Orlando nightclub is devastating. Forty-nine people of every age, celebrating life and being alive, gone so quickly. It took me three days to get through all the victim’s names and their known stories. So many couples were taken out together, a mother died saving her son, and a son’s last text to his mother before his death was heartbreaking.

That seismic a loss is too overwhelming to comprehend.

I have new skin from my skin grafts. It’s baby butt smooth and just as sensitive, discovering sensations for the first time again. The emotion that comes over me when I read the names of the dead literally makes that new skin crawl. It’s painful. My new animal skin understands better than my grown-up brain how very <wrong> the loss of people-I-don’t-know is.

My animal skin understands that murder is never okay.

Gun violence. It happened here, in the city where I live, in 2009. We are one of the statistics that come up in the news every time there’s a mass shooting. The shooter had barricaded the back door of the American Civic Association with his father's car, so no one could escape, and went in the front door. I wasn't there. But I was a few blocks away. I lived there and still do.

It was surreal. Shots had been heard. The shooter had gone in through the front door and shot the receptionists, he went into his old classroom and opened fire. He never said a word. He shot four more people than he killed, and he took thirteen lives.

It happened in my city. Blocks from my house. We were downtown when we heard the final news. We were helping to prep for an art opening, but the tone was somber and sober under the sounds of helicopters above. Even at the art gallery, we were just two blocks away.

Thirteen people were murdered. It seemed unbelievable.

I walked home after the all-clear was given. I walked home through the throng of people waiting outside the ACA, waiting to hear the fate of their loved ones. The shock and grief were palpable. Everyone was crying, both those wailing and those stone silent. I didn't feel anger, just stunned unreality. It was so quiet. Everyone was holding each other up.

I barely made it through them and when I did get home, I collapsed. When I <keep hearing> about these mass shootings with semi-automatic weapons, I think about that wave of grief and pain that comes in the aftermath...

What I know of gun violence is that it can happen anywhere. I have an idea of how stunned Orlando is by what happened there. Like everyone, I feel helpless. I am at a loss of understanding.

How could one person be responsible for so much pain? Does it matter why he did it? Will that erase the damage? Will knowing waken the dead? No. There is no answer or discovery the police could uncover that will offset those lives taken, or give peace to the grieving families.

This shadow side of our world is so ugly, it hurts. I have seen the ugly. I have lived the ugly, and in response, I chose love and kindness. It was not easy. It was a hard and difficult journey to get there. But it was a choice. I live it every day.

Violence breeds violence. It is never an answer.

You can't just sit in grief. No one can. Not for long. You have to find a way to transform it into something useful, or you're just multiplying grief, and sending that out into the world. You have to transform it. Transmute it. Turn darkness into light.

I will honor the forty-nine innocent lives taken with forty-nine random acts of kindness for strangers. Each time I do, I will pause and honor another name from the list of the dead. I will keep this journey as a mindful exercise as I work to spread love into the world instead of hate.

To Love What is Mortal

Bella the Bearcat  April 1, 2002 – June 11, 2013

 I’m not sure what it is about the first anniversary of a death that weighs so heavy. One year. It’s not like I stare at the calendar and count the days down. It’s more like the day comes around, and life has carried on, but there is a niggling reminder in my brain that the date is important. Only I am not sure why. Then, when I remember, it’s always different, and yet always the same…

Suddenly I remember exactly where I was, how the room smelled, how my heart felt. I remember sitting on the floor of my office with Bella, willing her to lift her head and watching her try to roll her eyes to meet mine instead, holding my partner’s hand. We both remember the moment we knew what was being asked of us. One year ago, today.

Bella wasn’t ready. We weren’t ready. But death and time didn’t much care. It was the right thing that we did, because we loved her.

Yesterday I found a bit that I wrote before we made the phone call last year: For the last two days I have seen small flashes of light flitting about my field of vision. I didn’t think anything of them until this morning. Last week, when my father had unexpected surgery, I prayed hard to our ancestors to see him through it all right. I threw a door open to Spirit. When I saw my cat this morning, my baby, I saw those flashes of light surrounding her and I knew deep down in my gut that something was wrong. As I type this, she is dying. You can see it in the absence of her gaze and the listless limpness of her lounging. She is not in pain. She is not in distress but her light in this world is dying none the less. And we are watching, sitting death side with her. We put on her favorite cello music and brushed her with her favorite soft bristle brush for as long as she wanted. We tempted her with soft food, and she ate some, but not all… which is telling.

And then I couldn’t write anymore. All of the words that wanted to come out were a shadow of what I was experiencing. Again.

For every pic in focus, I have 20 blurry ones.

I remember how she felt beneath my hand. How she was bristley, not soft. When she was a kitten, she slept across my throat at night, her tiny breath dancing against my chin and neck. I raised her, taught her, watched her grow. The thudding slap of her feet against the floor as she stomped around the house always echoed. She did not see well and was easily startled into straight-up-in-the-air armadillo mode. It hurt her feelings when we laughed, which we did, and she’d cry/whine at us in response before hiding from whatever scared her in my lap. I was her wooby. I can recall with perfect clarity the sound of her voice. I used to tease her, calling her cranking cries “dulcet tones”. She understood sarcasm. She wasn’t terribly bright or brave, but she was the sweetest friend. And I know that she will always live in my heart. I know because I hold Luna there, too, who died three years before Bella.

I still call out for her. I look up when I see her ghost out of the corner of my eye and for a moment, I forget she is not corporeal. I live for the nights she visits my dreams and I can smell and feel her again. I think of us as a four cat household, even though two are gone. So, I guess, in reality, death has not removed them from my family. Death did not remove her from my heart.

We are a four cat family. Love adds. Love multiplied my family into something greater than it was. It is that awareness Bella gifted us with in her death. More than the sorrow and the loss and the tears I shed while writing this, wishing I could hold her one more time… more than the sadness, today I feel that love.

What I remember about that day now is the strength I found to step outside of my selfish human heart and let her go. To answer the vet when they asked the question of why we were putting her to sleep. I remember the strength I found to hold her head and her gaze as she died, so the last thing she saw was the love on my face for her. The last words she heard were us telling her what a good girl she was and how much we loved her.

I remember how strong my arms were when I picked her dead body up afterwards. She was still warm and yet the feel of her was gone. We stood at the window and watched the murder of crows in the field, the ones who came to shepherd her transition. I remember how hard it was to just lay her body down and walk away from it, knowing I would never hold her again, my hand hesitating on the door before I closed it shut behind me.

Love multiplies. At night now, I tell Mara stories about the sisters she didn’t get to know. I tell her how much it meant to us that she picked us, how heart-lifting her appearance in our lives was. And I think I understand now, what it means to know that neither Zami or Mara will be with us forever. There are no guarantees.

I could feel angry at the losses of Luna and Bella at such young ages and barricade my heart against such sadness again. I could. I could do that. But I can’t.

I think I’d rather be grateful for the time our lost friends gave me. I’d rather carry that gratitude into continuing to be grateful for the time our living friends give me. I am grateful for all the little lives I have woven into my own, each one so very different from the next. I will love them all until they leave me, and then I will love them still. Surely the best way we can honor those we lose is to continue to share our love. To take that love and share it with the living who need it.

excerpt from In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver (28-36):

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Thoughts on Senseless Violence

A week ago this last Monday, I came home from a restful, fulfilling, and blissful retreat in the mountains. Later that night I checked the web, to see what I’d missed while away. The news of the killings in Isla Vista was a harsh reality to come home to. Six people murdered, thirteen injured, and a perpetrator’s suicide. All that pain and grief happened while I was listening to the music of Lithuanian singers.

It feels like so much senseless death. Even my own town has had its trauma. On April 3, 2009, a few blocks from my house, Jiverly Voong, 41, opened fire at the American Civic Association. He killed thirteen people and wounded four more, before turning the gun on himself. I was a block away when it happened, helping prep for an art show that evening. We didn’t understand all the helicopters overhead but it was clear something was happening. I had to walk through the crowd of grieving families to get home. I can’t even think about it without wanting to cry again. The pain of the aftermath was tangible. That kind of violence lingers and becomes its own ghost.

You would think that we wouldn’t react with such shock to events like this anymore. And some people don’t. But a lot of us still do, which tells me that we feel fundamentally that violence is wrong. And that is important! Our bones are telling us it’s wrong. Our magic is telling us it’s wrong. If this is not the world we want to live in, we all need to learn to listen to that voice.

Most of the time, we are left in the dark as to ‘why’ this kind of violence happens. Not this time. I read Elliot Rodger's 'manifesto', all one hundred and thirty-seven pages of it, chronicling his life from birth to just before he was ready to enact his 'Day of Retribution.' He put his plan in action to punish all single women for not giving him sex and all men who were having sex for being given something he was denied. That's the nutshell, and mostly in his own words. He goes on (at length) about how women do not deserve the rights they have because their brains are wired wrong and they should all be eradicated (through torture), except for a few who will be hidden away to propagate the species. He believed that men would be better off in a fairer world where women could not make it unfair. He says he knew he had to do it when he realized his ideal world was never going to be possible.

He started planning this event when he was seventeen years old. From the beginning the plan always included him taking his own life to escape punishment afterwards. I don’t think his words will give better answers to those left behind in grief.

There is no 'thing' that happened. It was clear in his own story that from a very early age the way he perceived the world was off. There was nothing that really stood out, except for the stories he had where someone was 'cruel' to him, where he was traumatized and scarred for life- incidences he, of course, never played a part in creating. And it isn't until near the end where you begin to understand how all of these perceived slights created a world in his head in which he was entitled to things he perceived all men as having, and angry at the world for not giving them to him. It was chilling.

Entitlement. This is where the line blurs. Entitlement from women, as if they were all supposed to want to be with him because he was a good guy. In his mind love is giving men sex. Period. He would go out in public and sit somewhere by himself and get angry that no woman came up to him or smiled at him. So angry, in fact, that he jumps to wanting to kill them and skin them alive- his words- for being attracted to the wrong men. He dropped his college classes because he could not bear to be ‘tortured’ by watching the pretty blondes flirt or kiss their 'oafish' boyfriends. He was sexist and racist, despite the fact that he was not white himself. I kept forgetting about beneath his rantings. He was shorter than most men and he had the napoleon complex that comes with it in our culture. That alone can make men violent. It happened to my brother when he was a teen, four years older than me and a good foot shorter. It humiliated him.

What I read painted him as a sociopath. If he hadn't done this act, it would have been something else. To read his story, he could have easily become a serial murderer, taking out young girls and men here and there, a la Son of Sam. He was a man on a path of violence. I feel for his family, for all of the friends he had in his lifetime that he rails against in his manifesto, calling them his 'enemies' even while hanging out with them.

The scariest part for me is that he is not alone in the way he thinks about women and what he perceived their place as in the world. Misogyny still exists. I have my own list of men and women who turned violent or abusive when I dared to say no to them, no matter how pleasant I was about it. There was a man in college who was my friend, who suddenly decided that because I was nice to him, I owed him a date, so he could prove to me that we were supposed to be together, despite the fact that I was happily dating someone else. He called me every night, trying to force me to go out with him, "just one time." It ended with him grabbing me by the throat and lifting me up, jacking me into a wall in front of his buddies, telling me, "All you need is a real man to show you what you're missing."

It was not the only time I have heard a man say that to me. Other times I did not get away so easy. In that instance I didn't know what to do. I ran to my friends and they, in turn, cornered him and threatened him with bodily harm if he looked at me again. He thought that was unfair. He came back at me asking me why I ruined it, why I did that... and if you ask him now, he doesn't know why I stopped talking to him. In his world, like Elliot Rodgers, I emasculated him with my rejection. 

The difference is that man has a family and his own daughters now. He moved on and matured. I still cross the streets at night when I see men walking towards me, and I keep to the shadows and avoid the street lights. If I practice misandry, it’s because the world taught me I had to. I don’t think one can call caution misandry, but I have been called a man-hater for it. And that is the way that misogyny hurts both men and women.

I am not alone in that I have a list of assaults and attacks at the hands of men who thought they were owed something from the world, to whom my sensitive, pacifist nature made me an easy target. I have suffered the questions from authorities of what I was wearing and how much I was drinking when I actually tried to report incidences. I gave up trying to tell other people. I was complicit in my silence. We all are.

I don't want my nieces to ever feel like they have to make up a boyfriend just because the guy hitting on them won't take no for an answer. And I don’t want them to have to worry that they might be shot for doing so. I don't want to believe that so much violence could come out of moments like that. For the victims of Rodgers, it was as simple as women he never tried to speak to never looked at him. And that was an assault to him. An offense. He kept saying, in his own words, “it traumatized me." And his world was unfair and it angered him to violence.

I know a lot of wonderful men who would never think or dream of hurting a woman. That's important to me. But I also live in communities with men who think a lot like Elliot Rodgers. Reading some of his more harmless thoughts was startling in that I have heard those words come from the mouths of men I know. 

People are going to challenge his mental health status. I don’t think that matters. I lived with a man once, in a house full of people, who was a bit stand-offish, but social enough. We'd all been close friends for a few years in college. He was weird but we all were in our own way. One day we discovered that he was a sociopath. He assaulted and tried to rape one of our housemates- one of his friends- and everything we thought we knew about him turned out to be a lie. All of us who lived in that house are still haunted by it. I imagine that's what Elliot's family is feeling right now. No matter if your gut tries to warn you, your heart can’t believe someone you care about could ever be capable of something so horrible. 

How do we engage in dialogue with people whose thoughts and words border on a tone of violence against other people? What do we do with people who honestly believe they deserve better than those around them and are willing to take lengths to get it? For me this isn't about gun control or mental illness. What do we, as a society, do with people who don’t care about the rights, dignity, and worth of their fellow human beings?

You can’t take lives and be a good person. You can’t act against people you perceive as less than you and be a good person. Doing some good deeds does not make up for the cruel choices we make. We have to hold everyone accountable for their cruelty, no matter how poor, no matter how powerful. Because true repentance means you will not do wrong again. Anything less than that is unacceptable.

I found a glimmer of hope in the wave of anger that spawned the #yesallwomen stories that have been pouring across the internet. It doesn’t bring back the dead, but it is good to hear that people are raising their voices in the wake of such violence. There is hope in the number of people railing against it.

We need to teach people who raise arms, figurative and literal, against other humans, that they have no worth, no matter what gifts and special skills they have. We need to teach each other to put people first. When politicians abuse their spouses, they should lose their positions. When a man rapes, he should forfeit his rights as a citizen, because he took “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” from another. When teachers take advantage of their students they should be fired. When our family members do wrong, we should love them, but we should tell them what they did was not okay. We vote for what we believe with every dollar we spend, and we vote for the world we want with our words and our silences. Nothing is so important that advancement should overrule the needs of the people it is meant to serve. Our actions today decide what kind of ancestors we will be remembered as.

We all have two wolves within us, to use the Cherokee legend. One wolf is angry and hurtful. The other wolf is loving and kind. They are always battling between each other, inside of us. And the wolf who wins will be the wolf we feed. In the wake of such atrocities, we must pour our love into the world, for love is truly the way to peace.

The Silver Lining of Regret

Last year I came across an article written by Bronnie Ware, about the five things people on their deathbeds regret most:

• “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
• “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”
• “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
• “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
• “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

How simple these thoughts are. Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care, improving the quality of life for patients with life-threatening illnesses. Her list gave me pause to reflect on my own years and the choices I’ve made. More than anything, I wish to meet the end of my life with as little regret as possible.

It’s not easy to make choices that go against expectations of society. In our culture, it’s not easy, nor often acceptable, to give yourself permission to take time for you and your passions. Our culture does not value emotions, and in many cases, actively frowns upon anyone who is emotional as being overemotional or overreacting. We see tears as weakness. We pride money, status, and material things over happiness and love between humans.

In your life, it is not easy to own all of your choices. Sometimes we make choices that we later would not have made. It happens. These are lessons for us to learn. Sometimes we make necessary choices, decisions that are right for us, and still, we incidentally hurt others we care about. That happens, too. Those choices are not ones we should regret, but if we have love for those who were hurt we need to acknowledge it. It isn’t about fault or blame. You are not to blame for their hurt. But if you love them, you apologize for the hurt that was caused, though no reparation is needed.

Still, sometimes we make choices that we regret. Sometimes immediately, often not for years, not until we can see the repercussion of the consequences we wrought. Why carry that around with you when the easiest answer is that it’s not too late? If you are living and breathing and walking the world, it’s not too late.

If your regret involves other people, and they are alive, it is definitely not too late. Maybe there won’t be resolution. Likely things will never be the way they were. You can’t undo what is done. You cannot walk with eyes open and pretend a thing has not occurred. But there might be peace. The only actions you can control are your own. But if you can say you did everything you could to make amends, you can let go of the regret you carry.

If your regret involves those who are no longer living, it is not too late. You can make offerings to the dead and explain your regret. You can wish them peace as well. You can do good deeds, some random acts of kindness as a way of making amends, of paying forward the fact that you had regret and are releasing yourself of it.

I speak mostly of small regrets. I should have… I could have… In these cases, amends aren’t about repayment or restitution. That’s important. I am talking about the human experience of being alive and loving other people. I am not talking about the materialistic culture we live in where people think nothing of taking friends and family to court over trivial matters. At the end of the day, it is not things that make our worlds go round. It’s people. It’s you and me. It’s those who came before us and those who will come after.

I want to mention, too, that especially in dealing with loss I hear many stories of regret wrapped around how the family members poured their sorrow into controlling the disposition of the deceased and their things. It seems all too common for families to displace their sadness into squabbling over material items, as if death equals inheritance rather than grief. I have seen families splinter and separate, as if they never were. It’s never too late to heal those rifts.

We owe it to ourselves to face that fear we feel swirling in our bellies at the thought of admitting our weakness. Our society tells us we are saying we are wrong by admitting regret. I say we are freeing ourselves and cleansing our spirit, our soul, by purging that shadow within us.

Sometimes all we can offer is, I made a choice and I am sorry for the unexpected consequences of that choice. I did not mean to hurt you. And our hearts will be lighter. And those we hurt will know we feel remorse, and perhaps they can find their own lightness. And there’s always hope that in that common place, there can someday be peace between peoples.

Four Years Gone

Time loses all meaning in death. Time ceases to matter to the dead. Whatever comes next does not follow the trail of suns across the sky. For those left among the living, years can pass and still… a word, a song, a smell can open the lid off your sadness. That’s what grief does, it ebbs and flows like tides coming in and out. It’s a natural rhythm, a natural process. The ebb is important because it gives you time.

“Time heals all wounds,” is a common phrase. But until you live it you don’t understand. It doesn’t heal in the sense of you “get over it.” I hate that phrase. You don’t get over death. You don’t get over hurt. It changes you and eventually, it does not sting as hard. You will never again be the person you were before the loss. You may come close. But not the same.

So the ebb is important, because it gives you time away from the reminders so that you can move on with your life, and put feet in front of feet, moving forward. Blindly or not, forward is important. That way, when the flow comes again, and the wave crashes in, it’s not as hard or sharp. The grief is there but it doesn’t break your heart. And one day, when you realize that, that awareness of it will be what breaks your heart. And the next time, it will bring you peace of mind, because you will know you are over the sharpest part.

That doesn’t mean you’re over the loss. You’re just over the spike of grief. Then comes the sadness.

Four years ago, we put a beloved friend and pet to sleep, unexpectedly. Her death and my ensuing grief amidst my ancestor work were what prompted me to start this blog online. Making offerings to my ancestors is easy, as they are mostly names of people unknown to me. When you lose a family member, someone who was a piece of your heart, it’s hard to find any comfort except in the knowledge that you are not the first person to lose someone… but that’s where the comfort ends.

Four years and 188 posts on my ancestor work later, it hurts less to think of her. I can talk about Luna without crying, but not without my heart welling. We’ve lost a second cat and gained another, and the joy our remaining pets bring us holds the sadness at bay. The only defense in the face of grief is love, and to keep loving what is still alive.

I remember how uncertain we were when we adopted Luna, never guessing at what a friend she would become to us. She slept on me and would dreamwalk with me almost every night. She would often appear in my meditations and journeys, only to discover her curled up beside me after I was done. Any time we held a circle, she would run in and sit quietly for the duration. When I am lucky, she comes to me in my dreams still, and I wake feeling her rabbit-soft skin beneath my fingers. I used to cry for grief. Now I smile in gratitude.

This afternoon, Mara curled up for a nap on Luna’s favorite cushion. And it seemed fitting that the spaces Luna enjoyed, sunk her energy into, are enticing places to the other cats, as if those who never knew her can sense the echo of her in our lives and in our home. It speaks to me of the depth that those who came before us walk the earth with us in reverberations of life and love. On the anniversary of one of the hardest decisions of our lives, we put treats and catnip in Luna’s old food bowl on the ancestor altar, and we lit a candle for her, speaking her name... 

We love you, Luna, Lunabelle the Jackalope cat. I still see your ghost turning around corners and curling up in the corner of my eye. We miss you, every day, and we share that love we had for you with other special cats who had no one to love them. We will see you again someday. Until then, I'll meet you in our dreamings.

Answering for Our Ancestors

What happens when you discover an unsavory character attached to your family tree? It’s a topic that comes up during discussions about ancestor work, as if that discovery re-colors the shade of who you are. It doesn’t. Who you are hasn’t changed. What it does do, is add depth and dimension to your family history, of who your people were, and how they evolved over generations. How would we see the light without the darkness, too?

The reality is that many of us, were we able to trace our family lines fully enough, would find ancestors who fought against native peoples, owned slaves, fought against the suffragette movement, treated their wives and children like possessions, signed documents telling the local Jewish communities to move on, spent time in prison, etc. Serial killers have families, too. Everyone’s family history is riddled with ne’er-do-wells, because once upon a time, those things were the way people were in the world. They were accepted and normative of society. Slavery existed long before people started using other cultures instead of the weak and poor of their own. It doesn’t mean it is okay. But the fact that we believe slavery to be rightfully wrong now, doesn’t re-write how it was or what happened. I would love to believe that my family members have always been righteous, good people, who weren’t afraid to buck a bad system, but it’s just not true.

I expect to find some black sheep, and there probably are more than a few among the names I know already, but census reports and land deeds don’t tell you about the quality of a man. I know that if I were to discover, for example, that one of my wayward ancestors was a soldier who carried out the massacre at Wounded Knee, I would be heartbroken. I would feel as if some of that wrongness was part of me, in me.

That’s what makes free will so important. Our days are filled with choices and actions we take that could lead us along the light path or stray us towards the dark side of being human. Sometimes people fail and their presence in our family tree serves to remind us of that truth- sometimes people fall. And they encourage us to be the best version of ourselves we can be, now and here.

That’s the line of thinking that shapes my ancestor work. I believe that the early colonial settlers were wrong to come over, treat an indigenous culture like they were inferior, and take their land. Simply because my pilgrim ancestors believed they were appointed by God to be here, an entire indigenous population was almost exterminated. In this era, I would never agree with something like that. So what I take away from that chapter of my family history is that I shouldn’t treat other people like they’re beneath me or inferior to me just because they’re different. And I shouldn’t take anything that doesn’t belong to me just because I want it.

I honor those ancestors who came before me. But how do we accept these blemishes from the past and move forward?

I would hope that in this day, we would all agree that slavery is bad. The first slaves white men used were other white men who were poorer than them. And then when they started travelling and discovered white men who looked different from them, they became preferred resources for slaves. And then they found men with other skin colors and they became a preferred resource. And so on. Our ancestors used to treat people as less than them, just because their skin color or belief systems were different. That’s a very simplistic view of all of that history, but if we can look back on it and see those actions as faulty, as a wrongness that shaped Western thinking, we need to bring more tolerance and understanding to our cohabitation on this planet. That’s something we can do as individuals and as a people.

I don’t believe that we, personally, should take on guilt for the choices our individual ancestors made. That would be an exhaustive wave of guilt that would drown most of us out of living our own lives. We’re supposed to be living to make this world a better place. So if you have an ancestor who did a deed so horrible that it makes you feel ill inside, do something for yourself to find closure with that act if that’s what you need.

No one wants to know the blood of a murderer flows in them. Maybe the knowing suddenly feels like a curse. If it does, do something in your life for the world that feels like an appropriate counter-curse. Think about it like relieving that specific spirit of their burdens- whether that ancestor felt guilt over their own actions or not. Break the blood spell and put that family baggage to rest. Do something to better the planet as a means of learning from the mistakes of those who came before you.

The Bigger Picture

We can look at history and see patterns of behavior repeating over and over again, with different groups of people on the receiving end of discrimination and oppression, and in some cases murder and genocide: anyone who wasn’t Roman, Jews, Native Americans, Africans, Japanese-Americans, Jews again, Women, African-Americans, Interracial children, Homosexuals, etc. We slowly move through the pattern of understanding that our way of thinking is wrong. Slowly. I believe that by now we should be much more tolerant of the fact that we all share this world together and trying to force anyone to believe exactly what we believe is futile. Why do we need others to believe what we believe in order to believe it ourselves? We have to stop using what is different than us to define who we are not. Learn who you are, instead.

            I can also apply this pattern-weaving to my own family tree, watching the generations follow their forefathers and then suddenly make a change, move a great distance, switch vocations completely, or something that alters the static course of my bloodline. I am Sarah, born of English Kings and Knights, born of Norman Invaders and Viking warriors, whose own lines faded into merchants and tailors, woolcombers and carpenters, who merged with Irish farmers and Polish woodsmen to break ground in a new world. I am Sarah, born of English Kings, born of indigenous men living in caves in France, whose lines blended with the English and Dutch as refugees fled France, whose lines faded in the growth of a Canadian country and merged with indigenous blood, whose lines later merged with German and Irish immigrants, canal workers and day laborers, breaking their bones to build a new world. All of them, trickling down through the years, leading me here, in this space and time, sharing my work.

May we break the cycles of dis-ease with our fellow men, and find a way to peace and tolerance, that we may all work together to heal the earth that provides for us, without which our lives would fade into nothing more than memory.

Autumn Crossroads at Equinox

We are turning into autumn and the last of our tomatoes and beans are fruiting. The morning glories herald the dawn in vibrant hues of violet, periwinkle, and fuchsia. The white moon flowers are twined around the rail, their buds thick and strong. They are ready to burst open and hail the darker days of the year. Silence stills the land here, one year into recovering from the horrible flooding that made headlines in the news. The first of the geese flying north to south in migration have trumpeted across the sky.

Smells turn crisp and quick as leaves dry, drop and decay, crunching against the bottom of our feet as we walk through the brush. Garden fruit and vegetables that missed their harvest will rot and fall. They become mulch and nourish the earth for sowing in the spring. In autumn, layers of bone, earth and leaves cover the world, dulling the sharp piquant of summertime. We bed our gardens and add bulk to our bodies against the funneling twist of leaves lifting in chillier winds. The beauty of life is migrating onward, disappearing into the earth and ether. The world outside us prepares to sleep. The world inside us softens into rest, too.

We have toiled through the languid heat of our longest days and the changing landscape heralds the lengthening dark that will descend soon upon us. The Equinox is my favorite time of year, symbolic of the crossroads. It is at the point where the breathing world joins with the spirit world. It’s a place where two conflicting truths can stand equally as firm and where balance is born. It is the place where the gateway exists. It is a gateway that lives inside you.

As the point of balance floats over our land like twilight fog, obscuring lines and blurring edges, we have the chance to touch the other side without walking through it. On Equinox, I pause to catch a breath. I stand between the long days of light and the long nights of dark. I stand at the crossroad and pay homage to those who have stood here before me, to the pause in the passage of time, and to those who will stand here long after I am gone. On this day I can see into the future as far as I can see into the past.

We stand in the tipping point, the grey space, the limbo, the in-between. Equinox is a time for feeling and reflection, a chance to catch our breath before moving forward. This is the time of year when I pause my search for more lines of my family tree. I wrap up my current work and make notes of where to look next. I will spend the winter months researching what names I have, reading old tomes and histories so that I might discover what I can about who my ancestors were and the places they inhabited.

The genealogical research is easier for me to do in sprints, following one line through till I hit a wall, then fleshing out that line, giving it form and story. In this way the act alone is a study in my own history and I am the eternal student. By using this method, the names and dates imprint on my memory with context. Every winter my living knowledge of my family grows stronger. In my dedication, the threads between me and my ancestral dead grow thicker.

We are about to enter the labyrinth, going underground like the mythological Ariadne, under and inward. I have been practicing my embroidery, in remembrance of my Great-Grandmother Minnie, and her mothers, whose scraps of sewing craft I treat as sacred objects from a line of women I never knew. In my nightly meditations I have been embroidering labyrinths, moving into the dark to come out of the dark. It takes two full lines, two lengths of needle and thread, in at one end and out at the other, to create the full labyrinth, which is made up of two roads, crossing at the key. In this ancient tool, duality and balance snake into forms that do not lose their symbolic origins.

If I unwind the labyrinth, the four arms of the equinoxes and solstices spread before me. We stand at the crossroad, facing autumn, knowing that as we step onto the road it is already turning towards winter. The crossroad lies near the heart of the labyrinth. We turn inward to find center at Solstice, and roll outward, retracing steps to find the sun again next Equinox. In walking the labyrinth, we move like the waters of our body move to the currents of the ocean, rolling in and out, each turn in moving us closer to healing and wholeness. As life continues through the shorter days and my body moves daily through the world, I carry the peace of the labyrinth inside me, as an anchor of stillness, walking it quietly within while the world moves loudly around me.

As the leaves dry and fall, I find some of this peace in the act of showing honor to those long gone. I walk the local cemeteries, picking up trash and litter. It is such a small offering made to the memory of those gone before. They may not be my ancestors but they belong to someone. These dead shaped the town that I live in and they had lives filled with hopes and dreams, just like mine. To me the cemeteries feel most like parks, with spirits wandering here and there. They are some of the quietest spaces, full of the grace of those who lived and those still living who remember their names.

Experiencing Death V: Suicide

This week is National Suicide Prevention Week. In this time when our society is still laden with bullying and inequality, it’s important for us all to recognize that for some people, this door may feel like the only help left to them. I don’t say that lightly. Suicide is a choice that has touched the lives of most of the people I know. It’s a choice we don’t talk about. It darkens our days and we hold it at bay, unwilling to face the truth of a decision our loved ones made.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is a wonderful organization that attempts to aid those left behind in the wake of such a misunderstood choice. Choice… decision… action… it feels hard to pick the right word on this subject. Bear with me while I navigate through this. In my own life I have lost nine friends to suicide. That’s nine family, friends, and classmates over the course of twenty years who have chosen to take their own lives. Three more who have passed from shady drug overdoses that may or may not have been purposeful, but that answer was lost with them. Some days, that is too many for my heart to bear.        

I have tried to write different posts on this topic but it is such a dangerous one. I cannot speak specifically to any suicide that has touched me, for the others who have been left behind still feel those wounds deeply and I would not cause them more pain. The things we cannot face become sharp instruments that wound us in their memory. And to those of you who understand that sentiment, I say from my own experience, face the memory and see its truth. Once through the pain, there will be peace.

The first suicide I faced was when I was 14. One of the reasons I exited the institution of the Catholic Church was because the priest could give me no comfort. I was trying to understand the mindset of my friend, who sought me out after months of no communication just before he took his life. I didn’t understand and I blamed myself. What I thought was him reaching out to me was him putting affairs in order. Not that either of us could have known that at that age. But the priest gave a young girl who needed guidance dogma, and buried the hilt deeper into my chest.

There is always anger with suicides. There should be. But for me, under the mountain of loss, I come back to compassion. Anyone who has known their own darkness, anyone who has stood at the edge of such madness and felt the desire, even for a moment, to drop over the edge, must be the shepherds of compassion in the wake of suicide. For we have all been there. But those who take action are those who fell over the edge of madness into despair.

On the other side of that line, what we see as rational is colored differently and changes shape. I believe that some suicide is chosen out of a wish for peace, for quiet, for relief. I don’t believe suicide is about anyone but the person who takes that road. It’s not done to hurt anyone left behind. At the point of falling over the edge, it’s not about anyone else. I imagine it’s like tunnel vision. The people I have been close to who took their lives were all in a spiral of chaos beforehand. Even if we couldn’t see it until afterwards.

I believe that if they thought of us at all, that they believed they were doing us a favor by removing their chaos from our lives, so that it wouldn’t touch us anymore. But more importantly, I think to their sickened minds, it was the only door left to them that promised a measure of peace. It’s what I hold onto at night, when the darkness comes. In the silence of the night I wish them peace.

There is no way to ever prepare yourself for the loss of a loved one to suicide. I think the best thing you could do is accept that there wasn’t anything you could have done. Don’t torture yourself with what you could have/should have done, for we can never go back in time and change what has occurred. Honor their memory and their struggle against their darkness. Love them. Move forward in your own life and live. Each breath you take is for them. Each joy you feel is in their honor.

According to the AFSP website’s recent statistics, a suicide occurs in the U.S. every 14.2 seconds and almost a million people attempt suicide every year. Men commit suicide four times more than women, yet women will attempt suicide three times more than men. They occur most often in adults between the ages of 40 and 59.

Reasons for suicide can include a known psychiatric disorder (depressive disorders, schizophrenia, alcohol or drug abuse, post traumatic stress disorder, and personality disorders), a past history of attempts, a family history of suicide, and individuals with impulsive behaviors. There can also be a state of suicide crisis, where there is a precipitating event, like some kind of severe loss, whether personal or financial. There can be a sudden and abrupt change in behavior including things the person says, actions, and the loss of their ability to function.

Warning signs include consistent low moods, pessimism, hopelessness, desperation, anxiety, psychic pain, withdrawal, sleep problems, increased alcohol and drug use, a rise in unnecessary risk taking, wishing to die, giving away prized possessions, and unexpected rage or anger. According to their website, the AFSP says that most suicidal people have some form of depression, which can be described as severe and consistent sadness. It can also be described as a withdrawal from things that once brought the person joy.

While one statistic said that a majority of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable psychiatric condition when they take their life (of which depression is included), another statistic says that most people being treated for a diagnosed mental illness do not die in suicide, insinuating that with proper care and treatment the suicidal thoughts will go away.

If you believe a loved one is in danger, get help. Talk to them if you feel you can. Give them examples of behaviors that are concerning you. Let them be honest and don’t judge where they are emotionally. Try to avoid cliché statements like “You have so much to live for” or “Think of what that would do to the people who love you.” Anyone in crisis is in a fragile place and adding guilt and pressure to them could just make them shut down.

If you are having suicidal thoughts, tell someone. I would encourage you to be honest about where you are. Don’t be afraid. If those thoughts persist, get help. You are not alone.

·         If you or someone you love is in an immediate and dangerous crisis of taking their life, call 911.

·         If you or someone you love is having serious suicidal thoughts but is not in immediate jeopardy, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). It is available 24 hours a day, toll free and confidential.

·         Specifically for the LGBTQ community, call the Trevor Lifeline at 1-866-488-7386 to speak with a trained counselor. The line is open 24/7. All calls are confidential and toll free.

To those of my heart who are no longer with me because you took a door that only you could see, I may not understand, and I accept that I may never know why. My anger does not diminish the joy you gave me or the love we shared. I remember the good times and the laughter and the beauty in you that you might have seen if things had been different. I call on that light to outshine the unknown that clouded your mind and as I step into the world, I carry you with me, always.

May it be so.

Relevant Posts:

Experiencing Death: The Unborn Baby (published May 16, 2012)

Experiencing Death II: My Father’s Father (published June 13, 2012)

Experiencing Death III: Squirrel in the Road (published July 11, 2012)

Experiencing Death IV: The Body at Daggett Lake (published August 15, 2012)