Joni Mitchell was mostly bang on when she asked,
don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? But I’d like to add a slight refinement to that sentiment – sometimes you can’t actually enjoy what you had
until it’s gone and remembered instead.
I can’t speak for others, but I know I live with a kind of fore guilt about a particular family member’s death. I know I will miss that person terribly and will wonder why I didn’t just suck it up while they were alive and spend more time them, despite a lifetime of painful experiences doing just that. But I also know that once gone, joyful memories will eclipse painful ones, which will likely make the mourning that much more excruciating. In other words, that particular death will be a double whammy since I already feel the loss of connection in life, so in death I'll feel loss upon loss.
My beautiful guru tells me that nothing is wasted. I attended a memorial service last weekend that made manifest this idea: experience – painful or sweet – always offers abundance. Last Sunday at the Quaker home in Toronto, Ian’s family and friends gathered to mourn and celebrate his life.
During the last ten years of Ian’s existence (post his marriage break up), he mostly lived inside a profound depression. Ian was also diabetic, so he was at double risk for early death – people with diabetes have to take extra care of themselves to stay healthy. But when you’re depressed, caring for yourself is pretty much the last thing you care about.
Ian was not the easiest person to relate to. My first introduction to him was via a family photo. He was a beautiful boy. I fantasized about becoming his future wife so that I could not only be his sister, Rosemary’s, best friend forever but also her sister-in-law …
forEVER! I was 18. As it turns out, I did not get to know Ian in the flesh until almost two decades later when I worked for his best friend, C. It was Ian who got me the job. I remembered this amazing fact last Sunday as I sat in a room in a house belonging to Quakers -- a place I would have never expected to visit in my lifetime, much less attend a memorial.
If you’ve not been to a Quaker funeral service before, let me tell you it’s the only thing that will ever make sense to me from now on. The guests gather in a semi-circle in what the Quakers call a meeting room, which you enter in silence, and where you drop further into meditative, or prayerful silence once seated. The quiet was gently broken when one of the Quaker friends got up to explain the service ritual: everyone sits quietly until those who feel moved to speak do so. That’s it.
In that silence, I thought about how Ian did not know me well when he told C to hire me. He just knew C needed an editor, and he knew Rosemary’s friend, me, was one. But with this chance recommendation, Ian effectively launched my editing career.
Ian’s depression often took the form of talking up grandiose plans while complaining about the various obstacles in his way, never counting his own anger and bitterness among the obstacles. Strangely enough, Ian also had an optimistic streak that allowed him to dream big, beautiful social-justice-y dreams of traveling to underprivileged countries to help children in abject poverty gain computer skills. He did just that with his wife in Nicaragua. But when the marriage ended, so did that work. Unfortunately, his brand of optimism had a belligerence to it, which made him hard to listen to. During the time I worked for C, Ian shared the same office space. I was on the brink of my own depression, so I shut Ian's out. Looking back, I’m sure I unconsciously feared seeing my own fast-approaching nosedive mirrored in Ian’s fully-blossomed depressed state.
My turn occurred a few months after I started working for C. Had C not been Ian’s best friend (and an incredible human being who has become a dear friend of mine), I would likely have lost my job. Instead, C sent me home to where I could work in ten-minute increments between bouts of sobbing. Incredibly, my work minutes somehow added up to a 300-some-page marketing manual for home inspectors that C and I co-wrote. Because of Ian and C’s friendship, C treated me the way he treated Ian: like family. I have Ian to thank for that, no matter how tangentially.
It’s the tangents, it turns out, that end up bringing us the most surprising things in life. About three years ago, Ian joined the Quakers, following in his other sister’s footsteps. Even through the blackness, Ian sought the company of others, which I admire because I do the opposite: withdraw. In the week leading up to Ian’s memorial service, one of the Quakers gently encouraged Rosemary, Ian’s executor, to hold a celebration of Ian’s Life. Rosemary and Ian had not lived in the same city for decades, so her experience of him had largely been one of seeing a man almost totally disconnected from others.
She could not imagine who would come to the service apart from family and two or three friends who had known Ian before his slide down. But the tangential tentacles of Ian’s person had reached into unexpected places Rosemary had not heard about. Until Sunday, that is, at which point she was given the most exquisite gift of being wrong.
The room was filled to capacity. And there was not much silence because everyone had something to say about his or her connection to Ian. Had Rosemary and her family held a traditional service in a church, more than likely presided over by a minister who did not know Ian, they never would have known just how much Ian touched the lives of others.
Here's what happened for me in the service. I’ve known Rosemary for twenty some-odd years, and, through her, I’ve known her childhood friends as well. On Sunday, I saw them all with their own families, their children now having reached the decrepit old ages of 6 through 12. One of the things that generally arises at family-gathering occasions, mine or other people’s, is the bubbling up of my sadness around that missing part of my life. It didn’t help that Rosemary’s father’s second question to me (the first being my name since he remembered my face but not who I was) was if I had a family. His tone was rhetorical, expecting nothing else but a yes. In his mind, how could it be otherwise.
As I sat listening to the stories about Ian, my sadness taking up all the available space left in the room, I realized that as little as I knew, or related to, Ian, we shared the experience of sadness. In this way, I was able to connect to Ian’s pain. He had loved his wife utterly. That loss was one from which he never recovered.
A few weeks ago, my doctor -- a woman so shiny and new I’m convinced she graduated from med school yesterday -- spoke to me as if I were a crone in palliative care. Scrunching up her eyebrows into an upside-down greater sign, she said, “Liz, let’s be honest here, what are the chances, really, at this point in your life, that you will have children?”
When I was able to speak, I said I was not ready to close that door just yet. To her credit, she took my response on board as if solving world hunger with an around-the-world snap. She moved the conversation forward with a tidy, “OK then, tubal ligation is off the table. Next!”
I’ve always been grateful that I did not feel my life would be totally incomplete without kids. I wished them for my friends who wanted them. And I just thought instead that my situation meant I got to read more, travel more, run more, have more alone time, have sex whenever I wanted and wherever I wanted, and whatever else one can do sans kids. Still, as much as my friends envy me my kid-free time, I envy them their families. As much as they pity me my solitude, I pity them their lack thereof. It’s always a mixed bag, this life.
As in life, so in death. What Rosemary and her family heard on Sunday was the sad-sweet symphony of Ian’s life. Turns out Ian was not alone after all, but looked out for by his newfound community, with frequent, regular dinner dates and phone-call check ins. Many people had his back and held his heart in theirs. These people spoke of how much Ian meant to them, how much he contributed to their lives, and how much he would be missed. Talk about clean mourning.
My beautiful guru has often spoken to me about the difference between clean and dirty pain. The latter is pain you generate (and experience) when you tip toe around something because you fear causing pain, but what you usually end up doing is acting in dishonest and furtive ways, causing greater pain because the person you think you are protecting picks up on your dissembling vibe. Clean pain is the pain of telling the truth, even if it hurts. It shows respect for both another person and for
sadness itself, which is not to be avoided like swine flu. It is part of our human experience and deserves space to breathe, not to mention our respect.
Recently, I have been feeling a little uncomfortable about my rah-rah, grab-life-by the-balls attitude with which I try to pull “stuck” friends out of their holes and into the sunlight where I believe they will shine. Ian’s memorial service illuminated a far more nuanced understanding of life and death that I often miss in my bull-in-a-china-shop approach to life (and death). There is not one way to live or die. Perhaps “stalled” is where some people are more comfortable, and, therefore, happy. Who am I to try to modify their experience? After all, even I embrace my own sadness when I’m there, rabidly resisting attempts from others to make me feel better.
When my physically hulking grandfather was reduced to a deflated form under a thin hospital sheet, so short of breath he was no longer able to even throw his weight around verbally, my uncle, his son, had a heart-to-heart with me in the hospital hallway re: his sister, my mother. He’d just seen me do something I’ve been doing my whole life: trying to derail my mother's constant train of dissatisfaction. As usual, my attempt to lift her blackness ended in a bicker session, and, as always, in an utterly inappropriate setting, such as beside my grandfather’s deathbed. So, in the hallway, my uncle said to me, “Liz, what makes you think your mother is unhappy?” It was the wake-up-you-idiot! slap Rhett Butler delivers to Scarlett O’Hara. “If your mother didn’t get something out of her pain, she’d make it stop.”
Even writing this down feels like a betrayal. Not just to her but to Ian and to all the people I know who suffer from depression and anxiety. Having been in that chemical soup myself, I know it’s not easy to stop the pain. I struggled with depression on and off for five years. But that time was not wasted. It was my life’s experience. I learned in that time that life happens on a full spectrum of emotions. I also learned that depression did not define me. It was just how I felt and what I did at that time. I am in a different place now. And I will be in a different place again later on.
Ian was no more a diabetic than he was a depressive. He was a man who struggled with both, but neither was a defining feature, even when they seemed to overwhelm his experience of himself, and everyone else’s experience of him.
As in death, so in life. I doubt very much Ian will be remembered as a diabetic or a depressive alone, and perhaps not much at all. Ian is like the elephant that twenty blind men and women try to describe from the laying of hands in twenty different places. All of their descriptions are true for that particular part of the elephant.
But no part captures of the complex nature of the whole. Collectively, however, they add up to the lovable, difficult and everything-in-between human being that Ian still is in our minds and hearts.
To be honest, I cannot say I would have gone out of my way to spend time with Ian in life, painful though that is to write. But I can just as honestly say I’m sorry he’s gone, and sad that he did not find love again, or return to South America to do the work he was born to do. But the children whose lives he did touch when there with his wife, kids who have no idea Ian no longer walks this earth, still no doubt experience his love as tangibly as if he were alive.
And I wonder, is there really a difference between life and death when it comes to how much we love someone and how loved we feel by them?
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