Sunday, March 19, 2006Naming deathI went to my step-father's memorial service today. As my son, Taylor, succinctly put it: It was pretty good, except that Tony is dead.Except for the death part, yes, it was a lovely ceremony. I had a chance to reconnect with some of my mother's friends, whom I love just because they're old and sweet. And I was able to hold my mom's hand and hold the hymnal for her and run interference on getting the checks to the right people and finding more chairs for people to sit on. In short: I did what I do best in a crisis... I made things work. Death is tricky. It forces us to create a story to sum up an entire life. It makes us take complex relationships and reduce them to simple sound bytes. "He was an honest man." "I will miss him." That pretty much is what 86 years boiled down to today. The church was down in Laguna Beach and the presence of the ocean was palpable. On the way there, Taylor and I stopped on one of the side streets jutting out from PCH, dead-ending on a cliff above the water. We parked and walked to the end of the street, where steps led down to the rocks and sand. The smell of the ocean is intoxicating to me. The water roiled about some rocks about 100 yards offshore. The sun was brilliant and lit the water with glints of light that filled me up with pure joy at being alive. Someone had carved out a garden beside the stairs. It was bright with flowers and a sign said "Garden of Peace and Love." A little bench was tucked under a trellis. It was perfection. Eden. A place to be completely happy. I forced myself to breathe while we stopped there, just before the service. Life IS a good place to be sometimes, I thought. There IS so much good to be had within the space of our years on the planet. My life these days seems to be consumed with working and slogging, and I'm reminding myself more and more these days to remember that it is possible to spend these precious hours of life NOT working, NOT slogging. That it's possible to relax and breathe and have good things happen. We got up to the service and it was lovely (except that Tony was dead). As people spoke about what he'd meant to them and stories they'd shared, I thought about the way we create our realities after the fact, and make them convenient to understand and to live with. My mother's relationship with him was troubling, to me. His children weren't at the service because of the bad blood between her and them, and that was a source of great sadness for Tony. But even despite that, and the bickering, and the way they seemed only to be hard of hearing to each other's voices, I knew they loved each other. Underneath all the back and forth of their daily conversation, I realized that the fact they were having a conversation said it all. They annoyed each other frequently. But they were engaged. And she will miss that engagement most of all... not his honesty or his goodness or any of the other words that were said. She will miss the way she could get annoyed with someone and thus prove that she was alive. On the way home I was listening to my favorite compilation of songs -- ones created by my dear friend and partner in crime, Scott, for his erstwhile radio program up in Davis. It's a bunch of tracks from the San Francisco music scene in the 70s and one of my favorites -- Find the Cost of Freedom -- by David Crosby came up. Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground. Mother earth will swallow you, Lay your burden down. The first line suddenly reached out and gripped me. Tony was now free. From a body that was failing. From a wife who never embraced his kids. From his kids who never embraced his wife. He told me the last time I saw him, a few days before his death, that he was having dreams of walking around in the world, without tubes and hindrance, in a body that was mobile and easy. He was free of all that burden of a body that was old. But the cost of that freedom is complete. He is completely free from all the strife; it is gone, behind him, not remotely his concern any more. To get that elevation of thought, though, he sadly had to become completely dead. He found absolute freedom on all sides. And the cost of that freedom is a bit too high, for most of us. I want to linger in that Garden of Peace and Love overlooking the sea for a long long time. But do I want the ultimate freedom that would come with being there permanently? Supposing that incredible garden is what that next part of our journey is all about. I long for that serenity and absolute joy, but I also am not ready to go there. Not yet. Not forever. I will take up my burdens again tomorrow, after I get some rest. And maybe the legacy from a day such as this, and a life such as Tony's, is that it enables us to go forward with a bit more joy in those burdens. And to look more deeply within to a place of freedom inside that might be available while we're still alive. That we can visit when we'd like, without taking up permanent and irrevocable residency. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 10:33 PM  
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