Twog 2: The Subject is Death But Really the Subject is Life

(A Twog is longer than a tweet
But shorter than a Blog).

People die. Everyday. That’s what we do—eventually anyway. Death is an idea until that idea is attached to a person we know. Then it is no longer an idea but something very real—and very painful. We experience the death of those we know, those we love in very specific ways—and those specificities matter. I lost my mother ten years ago. Her death was one of the most intimate, painful, and long-lasting traumas of my life. In very profound and important ways, my mother’s death is how I come to understand all deaths.  The experience of losing her came to define the word “death.” ’

Death is always personal. And our experience of losing people is as painful as our capacity to love. The pain and the grief we feel is directly in proportion to the kind of relationship we had with the person who has left us. Death feels that way—we feel in some ways abandoned. We weren’t abandoned. I just feels that way. When my mother died, I not only felt abandoned but I felt alone. But I wasn’t alone. I had brothers and sisters and friends who aren’t like family, they are family. It was the overwhelming wound of losing her that made me step away from a consolation I desperately needed.

I was lost for a very long time.

*
 

Two weeks ago, I received an early morning call from Susie, a woman I adore and whose father was a close friend of mine. I’d known he had stage four cancer having that knowledge did not prevent me for being unprepared for his death. I don’t know that anyone is ever prepared to lose someone they love. As long as they are alive, we still have them. Why should we let go before we have to? When I heard Susie’s voice, I already knew what she was going to say—but when the words came out, “Ben Blue, my father died late last night.” My response was immediate and the tears and the ache in my heart arrived in an instant. Like a reflex. Part of that reflex had to do with inconsolable sorrow I heard in that woman’s voice. But there was more than sorrow in that voice. In addition to the sound of her wounded heart, there was the sound of her warmth and her kindness—and her compassion for me who had loved her father for more than thirty years. Sobbing in the face of grief and its attendant pain seems like a natural response—but not everybody has such a response. And its  absence is not an indicator of their grief. These matters do not involve thinking or reason.

Tears are a spontaneous reaction to an emotional trauma that come sat you like a hammer hitting a nail. But a nail does not feel. Sorrow takes the body prisoner. I found myself crying as I sat on a curb off a street in Santa Fe.

I cried all morning, unable to make myself stop. And when I finally stopped, I laughed to myself. What a strange thing to do—to cry all morning. But it is a decision the body makes for you. Those teras falling from my face came from a place inside me that is impossible to locate and impossible to control. Their presence is as powerful as any experience as I will ever have. Because it comes from a love that had taken root in my body. And what is it, anyway, this, this awful thing, this love thing whose absence or presence seems to matter more than anything we can ever own or attain through success.

            I caught a plane and flew home.  
            I needed and wanted the comfort of the place where I woke every morning, my Yorkie right beside me.

I wanted to write something about him, my friend, Bobby. Because that’s what I do. That’s how I piece my world together when it fall sit apart. I sew the torn fabric back together with words. And I did write something about him and what he had meant to me. But more than anything I wanted to hear his voice one more time. I wanted to hear the tenderness in that voice that reflected the great affection he had for me. But why hadn’t the affection he’d given me all these thirty years been enough since he was not a man who withheld his affection?

We never have enough love. We can be so greedy. We want what we can’t have: we want our friends to live forever. We were friends for so many years, Bobby and I. Forever. We like to say that about our old friends with a kind of certainly that does not exist. Let’s just say that I’d known my friend long enough to call it forever and that he had become an essential part of my life.

            I loved him.
            I loved him. And now he’s gone.
            This is not the first time I’ve lost someone I’ve loved—and it won’t be the last.

With each loss, my wounded heart rages against the inevitable deaths. With each loss, I get angrier at God. And I’m not sorry for my anger. I’m sure he can take it. I often ask myself why this God that we refer to so often puts all these people in our path? We learn to love, to love these people. And sometimes that love was difficult and hard earned. And there he is, this God, ripping them away from us. We fall to our knees, trying to hold and comfort ourselves. Nice guy.

Each time I lose someone, I think my heart will break. It never does. There are times I wished I didn’t have a heart or wished that I could exchange this heart of flesh that wounds so easily for one that more closely resembled a stone. But 1) that’s not going to happen and 2) I like the heart I have, wounds and scars and all. Sometimes, I am in wonder of the human heart and how brave and beautiful it can be. My own included.

I carry the names of the people that I’ve lost somewhere inside me. You’d think their names would be a burden to carry—but they’re not. I loved my friends---and when they died, I never let them go. As long as a fragment of their love remains somewhere in me, speaking and urging me to use my voice—then they aren’t dead. They can’t be dead so long as a piece of them is alive in me.

            They will die with me, and they will be buried next to me.

 I’m thinking of my own death. I’m thinking of the life I have lived. I am thinking of all the people I’ve loved. I will not waste my time thinking of the hurts I inflicted on them or the hurts they inflicted on me. Hurt is an inevitable part of our lives, and no one goes through life without hurting someone and that includes the people we love the most. I’m spending these days of grief recalling the faces of the people I’ve loved—those who are living and those who have died. I can hear their voices, their laughter, the look in their eyes where I sometimes saw the unmistakable love they had or still have for me. I’m sixty-seven years old and I may yet have many more years to spend with the people I love before my energy is transformed into an energy that no longer needs a body.

I know we all know this. And I know we say this all the time. But love is the only thing that gives real meaning to our lives. I’m glad that I have always had the capacity to tell people that I loved them. I don’t think anyone should go through life apologizing for the affection they have for other people. That’s, in effect, what we do when we keep that affection and bury it so deep inside of us that we cannot express it.

And I want to say this: grief is an expression of our ability to love and because this is true, it is always transformed into joy. I am not afraid to die because I have been deeply in love with being alive. And I have lived. I have really lived. But just because I do not fear death, does not mean I will not grieve the faces that I will never see again. I will grieve the voices that I will never hear again.

            To love and to have been loved. And to have lived your life with the intention to love, with the intention to be loved.             Tonight, my wounded human heart is overwhelmed with gratitude—and yes, that thing called joy.