A couple of years ago a friend of mine was murdered by a stranger for no apparent reason. She was sitting in her car with a friend whom she was on helping find a place to make a new home in the Southwest. They were just south of Sedona.
I was too furious to attend her memorial.
She was a happy person, a positive and loving person, and most of her friends were very much glass 1/2 full types, always looking on the bright side, and I knew it would be a celebration I couldn't participate in, bring anything to or derive any comfort from.
That may not have been true, but it felt true.
All I needed to trigger my resistance was hearing of a comment a dear friend and music partner of hers said about her probably being happy to be free of her body and to dance in the light.
I thought of her children and her grandchildren losing a one-of-a-kind grandmother and the community losing a voice and a witness. I could not square the two ideas, though I really felt, later, remembering her, that wherever she was she didn't harbor regret or rancor.
It is rare to know someone who is interested in seeing through the hazy smear of the masks people wear, and I miss that about her.
By now I see how little I have noticed of the essence of anything, that life moves too fast to understand more than a surface, a representation or symbol of a narcissistic construct.
I regret this.
I regret that once someone has died, the chance to follow a thread any further is snipped. I regret how much protection I still seek from feeling.
A friend of my daughter's was found in a pool recently, there's not much being said about it in the news. First it was being treated as a suspicious death, then the paper announced it was being called a suicide. I'm not alone in the opinion that it was a suspicious suicide.
Here it is again, though - the idea of a Deity [or not] and why a young woman who has been working hard to straighten out her life, and had made great strides against huge odds is a footnote in the tsunami of global and local bad news.
A friend of mine said " I guarantee you that if it was [insert name of person of income and influence here...] daughter who was found, the cops would be all over it and it would be on the news."
I wish I did not believe this, but I do.
When Carol was murdered, I lost whatever shreds of religion I might have still had hanging around, and I realized how much the white noise of mainstream Christianity had seeped into my belief system, even though I knew it was bullshit. [All Christians freak out here.]
I see that there are some rules that some men concocted to sooth the people they wanted to control, to get their money and their cooperation. Nice touch to call it the word of God. Hard to argue with an invisible being, [invisible and non-existent, looking rather a lot alike].
The Christian Scientists speak of Father-Mother-God, and frame it as a principle of Divine Love, and that is about as close as it gets for me, though I have felt a gag response whenever I have tried to read Mrs. Eddy's work. Maybe there's some set of dynamics, laws of physics - rules we will never be able to apprehend with our brains which are so clearly designed for things that are simpler, like getting needs met according to Maslow's order of importance.
These days, not too many people seem to get much further than forming communities of friends, and I'm barely up to that myself.
The ideas of intervention, intercession, substitution, or sacrifice make less sense to me than ever. The questions are the same, the answers are the same, and both are itchy and unsatisfying. One doesn't have to go very far to see how bad things are for people in huge numbers, everywhere in the world. But there has to be some real good news, and I don't mean Jesus.
Grief is a wound that changes people. Grief is the Stygian sisters dancing through our lives until the thread is broken. Whatever is left is a story we tell ourselves.
I was too furious to attend her memorial.
She was a happy person, a positive and loving person, and most of her friends were very much glass 1/2 full types, always looking on the bright side, and I knew it would be a celebration I couldn't participate in, bring anything to or derive any comfort from.
That may not have been true, but it felt true.
All I needed to trigger my resistance was hearing of a comment a dear friend and music partner of hers said about her probably being happy to be free of her body and to dance in the light.
I thought of her children and her grandchildren losing a one-of-a-kind grandmother and the community losing a voice and a witness. I could not square the two ideas, though I really felt, later, remembering her, that wherever she was she didn't harbor regret or rancor.
It is rare to know someone who is interested in seeing through the hazy smear of the masks people wear, and I miss that about her.
By now I see how little I have noticed of the essence of anything, that life moves too fast to understand more than a surface, a representation or symbol of a narcissistic construct.
I regret this.
I regret that once someone has died, the chance to follow a thread any further is snipped. I regret how much protection I still seek from feeling.
A friend of my daughter's was found in a pool recently, there's not much being said about it in the news. First it was being treated as a suspicious death, then the paper announced it was being called a suicide. I'm not alone in the opinion that it was a suspicious suicide.
Here it is again, though - the idea of a Deity [or not] and why a young woman who has been working hard to straighten out her life, and had made great strides against huge odds is a footnote in the tsunami of global and local bad news.
A friend of mine said " I guarantee you that if it was [insert name of person of income and influence here...] daughter who was found, the cops would be all over it and it would be on the news."
I wish I did not believe this, but I do.
When Carol was murdered, I lost whatever shreds of religion I might have still had hanging around, and I realized how much the white noise of mainstream Christianity had seeped into my belief system, even though I knew it was bullshit. [All Christians freak out here.]
I see that there are some rules that some men concocted to sooth the people they wanted to control, to get their money and their cooperation. Nice touch to call it the word of God. Hard to argue with an invisible being, [invisible and non-existent, looking rather a lot alike].
The Christian Scientists speak of Father-Mother-God, and frame it as a principle of Divine Love, and that is about as close as it gets for me, though I have felt a gag response whenever I have tried to read Mrs. Eddy's work. Maybe there's some set of dynamics, laws of physics - rules we will never be able to apprehend with our brains which are so clearly designed for things that are simpler, like getting needs met according to Maslow's order of importance.
These days, not too many people seem to get much further than forming communities of friends, and I'm barely up to that myself.
The ideas of intervention, intercession, substitution, or sacrifice make less sense to me than ever. The questions are the same, the answers are the same, and both are itchy and unsatisfying. One doesn't have to go very far to see how bad things are for people in huge numbers, everywhere in the world. But there has to be some real good news, and I don't mean Jesus.
Grief is a wound that changes people. Grief is the Stygian sisters dancing through our lives until the thread is broken. Whatever is left is a story we tell ourselves.
Love those thoughts- and the grief thing is so true- It is trying to get the story straight that can be tricky
ReplyDeleteYour last two sentences there are lovely.
ReplyDeleteH