Forever 21

Dee over at Always Remembering Amy wrote a post about trusting life that got me thinking. First a word about her. She is amazingly kind and compassionate – and she’s a giver. I love and admire this woman whom I’ve never met and probably never will. She knitted a prayer shawl for me, which I cherish; and when Pippin died she sent me a condolence card. She breaks my heart for her suffering. I wish I could take it from her but it’s not up to me to say what people should go through. I am not God.

I’ve never trusted life. I’ve lived in deep argument with it, like it was something outside myself, a dark and implacable presence hovering over me. Philip died when I was finally learning how to make peace with it. How to make peace with myself. The argument was being absorbed by a slow and steady knowing. When I stopped resisting I felt full and calm. Like I’d been an outline of a character in a coloring book that someone – that I – finally filled in.

That’s what Philip wants from me. That’s the work he meant I needed to keep doing when I heard him say, “Mom, you gotta go deeper.”

Life is benign – in that, I trust. I don’t think it “does” things to me because that implies I’m the center of the universe. I am not singled out – it’s not personal. Awful, horrible, terrible things happen to people all the time. Some of them we cause, some of them just are. Our worst tragedies involve death; but since death is an absolute, we need to find a way to reckon with it. I can say Philip shouldn’t have died, but who am I to say what should happen and when? Of course, that doesn’t change the fact of my grief. The way I think about his death creates the way I feel about his death. Sometimes I make it worse by telling myself I will never get out from under this. That is my monkey mind dancing in the graveyard. There is a difference between the stories I tell myself about Philip’s death and just feeling what it feels like to have lost him that way.

None of this means I think I don’t have trials ahead of me. “Trial” doesn’t nearly get at the depth of what I deal with every day because my son – my son – has died. Never have I known this kind of desolation. And I’m not safe from having more of it. I have a daughter – it is entirely possible that she, too, can die before me. Yet I don’t worry about Natalie – it’s not in my nature to do so, and Philip’s death hasn’t changed that. I am simply saying it because it’s true. If you think death is something you need to be shielded from, you will one day find there is no protection from it. So maybe we have to stop looking at it as the tragedy we feel it is.

We are all going to die. Every single one of us. How do we live in the face of that? You can spend your life worrying about it, you can try to acquire power, money, friends and possessions to avoid it, you can make every day count because of it.

Or, like me, you can be confused and unsure how to live with it and maybe make a hobby of withdrawing. At least for some of the time. I do well at work, am able to enjoy other people. I laugh when something’s funny. I love. But I also feel deeply alone and grieved and just don’t know what to do with myself. I mean that literally. I don’t know what it is I want to do when I have time to myself. I write, I knit, I mourn. But I’m restless and unhappy. I have a sense there’s some next step and I can’t see what that is or what it is that’s holding me back.

I need stay present to Philip’s death, which means not to resist it. It means gratitude for the connection I have with him, for his loving presence and the way it manifests every day. Except it’s difficult to remain there when a whole chunk of me feels gone, when I feel so deeply and irrevocably alone. When I feel like I need but I don’t know what I’m looking for. Maybe it’s because when I am not in the presence of someone I love, I lose all connection to them. Funny how I can remain connected to Philip who’s gone and died, but feel so distant from Natalie the minute she walks out the door. Every time I see her there’s a shock of love, a relief from my thoughts. You’d think I didn’t see her often, but I live with her. We spend a good amount of time together. She is who got me through the worst of Philip’s death, tending to me until I could begin again to tend to her.

There is only one thing that needs to change for me if I really want to find some peace. And that is my relationship to my thoughts. I am not my thoughts, I am the thinker of those thoughts. I can learn to recognize the background noise in my head and dismiss it, I can look at the stories I tell myself and change them. It’s believing the clamor in my head that keeps me bound and helpless.

Eckhart Tolle says it simply: “The more you make your thoughts and beliefs into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.”

© 2015 Denise Smyth