Last winter was hard. It was harder than I could have foreseen, and I determined to get some tools together to handle this one, but there are no tools to forestall the effects of despair on people you love, and are attached to the positive outcomes of their process. As someone who has danced with depression off and on for all of my life, I feel, that having made it this far, whatever it ends up looking like, I will probably make it the rest of the way.
At 93, my mother killed herself, and though I understand all the reasons she had for doing that, it wasn't the first time she had gone towards death at her own hand. When I was about 16 months old, she overdosed and was taken away, not to be seen again for a couple of months, a long time to a toddler with an unsupervised and angry older family orbiting the event. Again, when I was 11, this time she was gone for longer, and I went to live with a father I didn't know very well, and who had no idea how to handle kids who had experienced trauma other than to insist that we get it together and follow the rules; Victorian rules that he never set aside for any reason.
An old friend, estranged, that my daughter was friends with died this summer, and it was ruled a suicide, though I don't for a moment believe it was, she left behind a toddler and a devastated , family, friends and community.
So to hear someone who is of absolute value to me speak of doing the same is beyond what I am equipped to bear. I can't help, I can't make the pain go away, I can't solve the problems that cause this at the deepest level and I can't do anything about the transitory stimuli. How in the face of this do I recognize that all things change, that life can bring astonishing resolutions, that healing can occur when I live in a state of fear that I am not allowed to express, when I have opinions that I cannot voice and when my own feelings which are tearing up my immune system have no place and no time for expression or resolution.
I know how much I have to be grateful for. I know how tenuous the web is that holds me, that with the loss of a couple of strands I would fall through into a new, unknown and unwelcome reality. How does anyone make another person see this other than tying them to a chair and forcing them to watch CNN for a few hours?
It is hard to sit with this.
Compared to what is going on in the world, the people who are murdered without being heard, the destruction of the only planet we have to live on [despite the science fiction movies that seem to think we can somehow find another one] the random hatred and violence that has no solution, the corruption of leadership, the poverty of spirit, it could be viewed as small potatoes, first world problems.
In the practice of Maitri, joining to the suffering world, knowing one is not alone in anything that is going on, all works so well when it isn't affecting one's personal "special" relationships. I am not in the least convinced that I have the consciousness to navigate a lesson this intense.
Here is winter again, and I know that even if I had the money to run away, I could not. I am standing in the fire. Wave to me.
At 93, my mother killed herself, and though I understand all the reasons she had for doing that, it wasn't the first time she had gone towards death at her own hand. When I was about 16 months old, she overdosed and was taken away, not to be seen again for a couple of months, a long time to a toddler with an unsupervised and angry older family orbiting the event. Again, when I was 11, this time she was gone for longer, and I went to live with a father I didn't know very well, and who had no idea how to handle kids who had experienced trauma other than to insist that we get it together and follow the rules; Victorian rules that he never set aside for any reason.
An old friend, estranged, that my daughter was friends with died this summer, and it was ruled a suicide, though I don't for a moment believe it was, she left behind a toddler and a devastated , family, friends and community.
So to hear someone who is of absolute value to me speak of doing the same is beyond what I am equipped to bear. I can't help, I can't make the pain go away, I can't solve the problems that cause this at the deepest level and I can't do anything about the transitory stimuli. How in the face of this do I recognize that all things change, that life can bring astonishing resolutions, that healing can occur when I live in a state of fear that I am not allowed to express, when I have opinions that I cannot voice and when my own feelings which are tearing up my immune system have no place and no time for expression or resolution.
I know how much I have to be grateful for. I know how tenuous the web is that holds me, that with the loss of a couple of strands I would fall through into a new, unknown and unwelcome reality. How does anyone make another person see this other than tying them to a chair and forcing them to watch CNN for a few hours?
It is hard to sit with this.
Compared to what is going on in the world, the people who are murdered without being heard, the destruction of the only planet we have to live on [despite the science fiction movies that seem to think we can somehow find another one] the random hatred and violence that has no solution, the corruption of leadership, the poverty of spirit, it could be viewed as small potatoes, first world problems.
In the practice of Maitri, joining to the suffering world, knowing one is not alone in anything that is going on, all works so well when it isn't affecting one's personal "special" relationships. I am not in the least convinced that I have the consciousness to navigate a lesson this intense.
Here is winter again, and I know that even if I had the money to run away, I could not. I am standing in the fire. Wave to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment