Loss

I am thinking a lot about loss these days ... a good friend in New Mexico failing in her battle with cancer, another friend suffering brain damage as a result of chemo, the intimacy I hunger for with another like-minded being, a lion hunted down in Zimbabwe and decapitated, the massacre of the magnificent elephants in obscene numbers, the loss of flexibility and reliability in my body, even the loss of my mother, and all the old stories of my past that I can't tap into now because they are like dust.

How do I hold loss?  How do I ride out the journey of continuing to lose what I love? This is a hard one because it demands that I stay steady and willing inside the lightening speed momentum of this life, not looking behind me or in front of me.  I've been reminded time and time again that there really is no past and no future, and much of the time I agree, but I am still likely to float into these realms out of habit.  So, what do we (I) do?  I guess we (I) try to understand what it feels like to lose.

I haven't lost a good friend recently so it's hard to know how to talk about it.   I have been lucky in this, as most of my contemporaries are still kicking.  We all know that losing one another is around the corner, but we don't often talk about it... and we go on our way trying like hell to live in present time.  So, I'm faced with the "idea" of losing, I guess, that projection of an experience that will undoubtedly come, one that will feel sad, empty, achy and bleak.  And once I cross that landscape of grief, I'll be left with nostalgia, looking back at the good old times when none of us ever gave a thought to mortality.  I remember my grandmother in her late eighties talking about losing all her friends, about feeling terribly alone in the world and less hopeful about what lay ahead.  In some way she was telling me she was ready to move on.  Our friends provide a sacred community of people whom we have chosen and with whom we have rich and interesting things to share.  Now that I'm seventy, I understand as I never did before what she was saying about the void left in life with the departure of old friends.

When I gave up my last "romantic" relationship that had soured quickly and yet drove me to endure, I knew that I would probably live out my days without a partner.   When I set out on my own,  I didn't give it a thought, but now I do.  Now I watch couples in restaurants and on the street and I feel a tugging in my heart.  I want what they have.  Closeness, laughter, understanding, a life together.  The more I look back on my story the more I realize I am ill equipped for intimacy, that what my mother modeled and what I embraced in my twenties and thirties and beyond, had led me to a very distinct place of renunciation.  I was sure I wasn't good at intimacy and speaking about love, and therefore I needed to content myself with the solitary journey of an elder woman.  There is loss here, yes, and sometimes there's acceptance, as well as deep sadness.  But there is also the pleasure of old age wisdom!

The wiping out of wildlife in Africa has been breaking my heart lately.  Like a sponge, I tend to absorb all the news, and I speak to others about it when it makes sense, and yet it remains one of the deeply troubling pieces of being alive in this world at this time.  Animals have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and I think I have always felt as though I was related to them, part of their family, whether they were cats, dogs, birds, or even the epic elephant roaming East Africa.  So when I read about the murder of elephants and lions, I feel as though someone in my family has been ripped away.  There's heaviness in my chest, a weepy feeling inside.  And a whirling sense of outrage at the injustice of it all.  What then?  I must hold this, not look away.  I need to speak the truth, and try to believe that humankind has the capacity to become more humane.  That is all..

I am seventy years old and my body is starting to become unreliable.  I've been told it is strong and vital, and that deep down I am healthy.  This makes me feel lightheaded for just a while, and then I return to the stinging pain in my ankle as I walk, the clicking and wobbling of my knee, and the occasional feeling that I am standing on a very unsteady surface, and it is then that I understand what I am carrying.  The body is speaking its truth, and what is good about all this is that I am finally able to listen to what it is saying.  If I'm lucky this paying attention brings good will and compassion, as long as I'm able to stay in the present moment.  The past houses the narratives that are blurry and distorted, and the future holds only random dreams and dark fear.  So instead of mourning loss, I can attempt to offer love to my aging self.

The loss of my mother still lies heavily on me.  You'd think I would have outgrown or moved on or something, especially since she had always been such a shadowy presence in my life.  How do you mourn the loss of something that was never really there?  There is an idea I hold about her as a mother, and then there is the mysterious relationship that actually unfolded starting in February of 1945.  In fact, there's a lot I don't know.   There was always hunger and yearning and a sense of being in the shadows, but there had to have been other times of sweetness, or so I tell myself.  No way to know now.  I do know that I still feel this deep dark relationship to her, and I suspect I'll be stuck with that for the rest of my life... In narrating my own story I have unearthed this intimate connection between the two of us, this complicity in secrecy and self destruction, and in the telling of it I have felt her come alive in a way.  But everything that is alive does wither and die, and so there is that path to experience a loss of love, imperfect as it was.   I surround myself with her bold paintings, some pretty furniture and decorative pieces, and find myself more times than I can count speaking in her tongue, using her vernacular.  "Bob's your uncle!" she used to declare, and I love saying this too.  I'm not quite sure why...  Am I calling her back, or just making way for her to show up every once in a while in present time?   I don't know.   This is a heavy loss still, and I am still trying to figure out how to live with it.

Memory has given me problems for some time now.  I can't see the texture and substance of much of my young life:  living in North Beach when I was in 6th grade, going to the mountains for my 10th birthday, what I did with my friends at Miss Barrie's in Florence, or those beautiful sunny afternoons I went horseback riding in the Sonoma countryside with my great friend Sue when we were self-conscious teenagers; there are so many other little scenes that don't come in clearly, and all I see is the sweep of an experience, much like the floating smoke from my mother's cigarette ... When I decided to write a memoir, I wanted to be able to flesh out some of these small chapters of my childhood and tell vivid, detail-filled stories, complete with lots of interesting dialogue.  As I cast my mind back, I rarely saw the particulars, nor did I hear the conversations.  I became frustrated, I worried about memory loss, and then finally decided to fabricate here and there in order to offer a story, and this usually worked.  Aside from the challenges the book offered me, there is a much larger conundrum, that of ultimately losing the bulk of memory and becoming unhinged and confused.  Yes, I'm thinking of that elephant in the room called dementia.   A total loss of personhood.  The ultimate nightmare, even worse in my imagination than losing my eyesight, which I used to believe was the worst possible deprivation I'd have to face.  I used to play different word games in order to sharpen my brain power, and I persevered with piano study because I've learned somewhere that playing a musical instrument may be an antidote to Alzheimers.  No, in truth I play the piano because I love the sound of Bach on the keyboard of my grandmother's piano, and feel proud to offer it up ...  But now I do take solace in the notion that the discipline of piano practice might be therapeutic for my overworked mind.  I think I know how to live with this loss:  just stay in my life fully, attending to what comes and holding all the difficulties with love.  No other way...

What is going to happen to me will happen no matter what decisions I make, and today has its share of wonder and beauty that must be seen and felt.  Because we are very lucky to be alive in this strange and complicated time, adding our own portion of goodness.