Back Again...

It's been nearly a year since posting. It's been an intense and interesting year. Two prior businesses giving birth to a third, learning real business skills, thinking big...

Feeling the frustrations of working groups and their dynamics. It was useful to check in on another such group online to see that my group is not alone in their fits and starts. Learning to hand over some of the responsibility to another facilitator and trusting that things will progress even more effectively under the tutelage of someone with fresh ideas and not so burned out.

Soon to be marketing at a more comprehensive level than before. Wish I had that MBA I've fantasized about. Oh well, instead I'll work on an actual business. This is the first time my business and I myself have not been exactly analagous. I have a partner now and I love cooperating with her to see how far out and creative things can get.

The shape of my life is changing in still more ways. Family members are joining me in my hometown in north Florida. My aging parents will now live out their lives near me. We cannot keep them safe from dying, but we can keep them close and help them when the time comes. My one sibling is wearing down under the strain of helping them by herself. We will soon be a team around them, and together.

With the growth of the business and the moving of the parents, I've kept my head down to produce. I've not been as in touch with the news as I usually am. That's a very weird sensation.

I have lived the most fractured of lives, and yet I value the notion of stability and continuity. A paradox, to be sure, and one that I am dedicated to ending.

...............................

A close friend of mine became a widow late last year. Now I'm reading a novel about a widow, that my friend recommended. The parallels between my friend and the character in the book are striking. I have been observing in her and in others a special insanity called grief that comes to stay when such a devastating loss occurs. It's like one can just not process all of the meanings of the loss.

I want to wrap arms around my friend and soothe her and move her quickly through the months and years of pain she has and will experience. Give her goals and timelines and all the other "wrong" things. It is so restimulating to see a worst fear come to pass, so stunning in its impact. Everyone handles shock and loss in unique ways. An immovabe fact brought her sudden segue into an unplanned chapter: her husband died. He was dead man walking. A massive stroke one morning and gone two days later. They gave her no hope: none of the news was good.

And then came the aftermath. It's all been aftermath. And it's all been about her life, her loss. Being way too careful with her when I want to scream: "I lost something, too. I lost you, my lifelong friend who is now someone I don't recognize or understand. I want to heal you so I can have you back." But she has no reason to heal. Her child is grown, her parents gone, enough wealth to barely work. No one to get out of bed for. No expectations from anyone to get up and make something of the rest of her life. You have life left, make lemonade.

And she may, some day. Her husband's death made us all face our mortality in a new way. It was a stunning death, at least on the day it began. I'm sure that events caused post-traumatic stress syndrome for her. She was up close and personal with the destruction of the one she loved.

She doesn't talk about this. She experiences it as a lack of him in her day-to-day life. She's been a great believer in friendships and has many. But, on the family level, she is very alone. An only child born to older parents, who then divorced. Who then had only one child.

My own life is cacophanous with many family members. Commitments and activities pull me from any reverie that might set up. I am busy, busy, busy. Maybe it's how I avoid constant confrontation with mortality.

But a member of my community also died of a similar stroke last week. The undertow reached up and took another one down. The community is reeling. Some pockets of this community have experienced unfathomable loss. Children have died in numbers I never experienced in my own childhood. There have been fatal car and motorcycle accidents. Diseases have done their work. There have been deaths from extreme adventures. And even losses of soldiers in Iraq. Perhaps because we know so many people, we can see the panorama.

A few years ago, a teenaged boy's life ended against a tree in my neighborhood. I didn't know him and I was away when the accident occurred. I came home to a new shrine to him, built on the tree. A wailing, screaming mother memorializing his life on the tree that ended his life. All of the holidays were commemorated there. On his birthday, there were balloons and cards. Tinsel at Christmas. Wreaths at Easter. It drove me crazy to have to experience this mother's agony, however vicariously. I wanted to be sensitive, but I am the mother of two sons -- one I brought to earth with my own bodily efforts, the other I have raised for another -- and the reminder of my worst fear confronting me each time I left my home was agonizing for me. I thought of leaving a book about recovering from the loss of a teenager sealed in a ziplock baggy nailed to the tree.

I did nothing. I sat in witness to the mother's need to go slightly insane from the loss of the one whom she, through her bodily efforts, brought to the earth.

If we are not numb, we do not handle this well. If we are not stoic, grief will take us as a tsunami. It will wipe out our villages and change the landscape. We will land on a new planet after the event. But the air we breathe and the gravity we count on will still be in play and the world will want us to become normal again as quickly as possible, so it can have us back.