Life Goes On

   The other day my wife and I attended a celebration of life, a wake of sorts but unusual for our area, our country.  It was meant to celebrate the life of a co-worker and friend who had passed, years ahead of his time and perhaps due to a misdiagnosis or, as presented, a delayed one.  In many other countries, mourning is something left to private moments and in private places and then a party begins, a time filled with laughter and the recollection of good times and a life well lived, a wake (as in an awakening).  It's the way I would want to be remembered, to see my friends and family recalling the good moments, the times we all shared, my life summed up into a tiny black hole of memories and then...poof.  Sometimes such events are quite somber, the echoing halls of churches and gravesites almost casting its own dark cloud on the closure; and that may be necessary.  As author Judy Blunt wrote of her grandmother when attending her funeral: ...the whole of my father's face simply turned and came apart, like an old wall falls one hard brick at a time...at the big supper they all said they thought better of him for a few tears, and if not here for chrissake, among friends, then where?

   At the event it was somewhat like a school reunion, at least for us.  Once you leave a workforce then keeping in touch with once-fellow workers becomes about as frequent as when you left your days of schooling.  Your paths diverge and life changes (for most, anyway).  A ten- or thirty- or fifty-year reunion is about the best you can expect and it tends to fill you with both dread and anticipation.  Who will be there, how will they have changed, how many names will you remember, should you even go?  And to be fair, we knew this person being honored and eulogized primarily as a co-worker, enough to know a bit about his kids and the ups and downs of his relationship with his wife and work and struggles to make ends meet; and then his discovery of a lump in his neck.  No big deal the docs said, but two years later he was gone.  The seeing of people was fun, the faces all a bit older but the personalities and names coming back as easily as the last time (for most of them, this meant six years ago).  And after things had calmed down some, food being eaten and drinks consumed, the eulogies began.  Bear in mind that this was in a beautiful outdoor setting, a club facility large enough to allow seating for several hundred and still have standing room for several hundred more; so while some listened attentively others mingled and jostled about, or watched the slide show of his life casually repeating on an endless loop as if willing him back to life for the rest of us.

   For many speakers at such events, it seems to start with a basic outline or notes or maybe even a speech.  But here, the talks were funny, and tearful, and heartfelt.  Some got quite choked up while others took us way back in time to earlier days when youth and partying seemed eternal.  All of this, unless you were in the front rows, was mixed with people walking by and stopping to just smile and say hi but usually pulling out a chair and sitting down for a bit (unlike a church setting, the tables & chairs fanned out vertically from the speaker's podium which allowed for easy comings and goings without disturbing the person speaking or those listening; this allowed easy bathroom breaks and drink refreshing).  Of course, the end result for my wife and I was mixed, hearing a portion of each eulogy and doing a good deal of chatter with friends we would likely not see for another six years or, as was unfortunately pointed out, at another funeral of a co-worker.  It often takes something like this to get a random collection of people together, and even then there is a lot of work involved by those doing the organizing...the booking of a facility or church or hall or service, the arranging of food and drinks and music, the doling out of invites and notifications and finding addresses and phone numbers, the putting together of photos or music or memorabilia.  For family events, especially if the person was very close --a sibling or parent or child-- the thought of doing all this and making it all come together is simply too much.  The timing is off, the service is too soon, the grieving isn't anywhere near over.  In our friend's case, several months had passed and it took quite a number of people to offer to take just a piece of the puzzle and help put it together.  Bravo to them...it turned out well.

    Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea mentions a bit of this as she sits at a secluded island beach, that of finding the moments for oneself: Time to look at the stars or to study a shell; time to see friends, to gossip, to laugh, to talk.  Time, even, not to talk.  At home, when I meet my friends in those cubby-holed hours, time is so precious we feel we must cram every available instant with conversation.  We cannot afford the luxury of silence.  Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day's last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star.  Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words.  I had to reflect on those words at that "celebration," the gaiety of the crowd contrasting with the reality of the speeches and photos; when we all face that moment would we want background noise or silence, tons of co-workers or just a few close friends?  And in trying to shift the thought to my own demise, I (at this point, anyway) would probably want both, those closest to me at my bedside or gurney and then, perhaps some months down the road, an almost-riotous celebration, one where people would be loose enough to let loose and share both the good and the bad so that I could bless or curse them from above (that is, assuming one is still ghost-like and floating around and possessing some sort of Harry Potter-like energy).  Not really, but you get the idea.

   In the end, I think part of the fear of leaving this world of laughter and nonsensical fluff talk is the alone time.  On one hand, we seem to need it and on the other, fear it like the plague.  Again, here's Lindbergh: How one hates to think of oneself as alone.  How one avoids it.  It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.  An early wallflower panic still clings to the word.  One will be left, one fears, sitting in a straight-backed chair alone...We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen.  Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio or television to fill up the void...It is difficult lesson to learn today -- to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week.  For me, the break is the most difficult.  Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time.  It is like an amputation, I feel.  A limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function.  And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious.  Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.  It is as if in parting one did actually lose an arm.  And then, like the star-fish, one grows it anew; one is whole again, complete and round -- more whole, even, than before, when the other people had pieces of one.

   Some nights I try to conjure up my mother (she passed away nearly seven months ago), something I used to be able to do rather easily.  But it seems no longer.  She is gone, and not in a bad way.  It is as if she stayed in my head just long enough to make sure things were okay, that my own life was moving onward and without speed bumps.  Of course, she will always be there, ethereal and blended into my being; but oddly I feel even more at peace with my inability to just pull up her image as I fade in or out of sleep.  Perhaps it is as Lindbergh implies, that, like my friend and my mother, they faced being alone only to find it fuller, a brief pause as they left a physical world and moved beyond into who knows what...energy, imagination, other dimensions?  My world was indeed briefly severed but perhaps necessarily so, part of life's lesson.  No one lives forever.  Added Lindbergh: It is not the desert island nor the stormy wilderness that cuts you from the people you love.  It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.  When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too.  If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others...Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover.  And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.  It is something I am also discovering, that no matter how much you wish you could reach that clock and stop or slow it for a moment, to tell the rest of the world that something has happened and that it should pay attention and can't it hear you yelling?  Well no, you can't...life goes on.