Dear Reader,
I started this letter to Oprah on January 10, 2010. It was my Big Hairy Audacious Goal to get published in her magazine.
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Dear Oprah,
I’m thinking about starting over.
I mean, I’m thinking about the concept of starting over. About how the idea of starting over brings hope to even the most hopeless situations. There’s always this self-saving thing you can do when your world is all wrong. Start over.
As an action, starting over is something I have done more times than I have started a diet, moved homes, changed cities, or even changed my mind.
You could say I’ve had a lifetime of starting over. I barely started to walk in Canada when we moved to Jamaica. Barely started kindergarten in Jamaica when we moved back to Canada. Barely finished grade one in French immersion when we moved to Manila where I had do grade one all over again in English (but the sun shone, and I made deep and lasting friendships while my parents drifted oceans apart). I barely started puberty when we returned to Canada sans dad and I had to make new friends, learn to keep my feet dry and warm, and exercise monk-like patience until the holidays when I could board a plane bound for my father. I barely started a family (just the folic acid necessary to increase the odds) when my so-called life partner left me for a cliché. I barely started grad school when my rebound partner left me for a job, barely on the heels of the first, leaving me to barely hold it together. I barely started to get back on my feet in Montreal, having moved there to start again, when my apartment burned down on the second day of a year that had barely started.
Still, my story is not remarkable – I did not get ravaged by a bear or lose my money, house, or reputation to a gambling habit or a no-goodnick ex. I did not accidentally run down the Nobel Prize winner for eradicating global poverty and spend the ensuing five years in jail earning a degree so that I could eradicate global poverty as penance. Mine is not a story of scaling Mount Kilimanjaro in four-inch heels, beating stage-four cancer with laughing therapy, or swimming across an ocean to save a drowning kitten.
Nevertheless, I feel I have a story to tell. My goal for 2010 is to pitch a piece to O magazine to give back a little of what I have so gluttonously taken.
What do you say, Oprah? I'm asking you to take a chance on me. Alternatively, I could paint your dog.
As an added bonus, I will donate all the proceeds from the written piece, or dog portrait, or both if you choose both, to your favourite charity (or mine).
Please say, “yes”
Love,
Liz
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Starting again: February 17 1:12 PM
Dear Reader,
It’s three weeks since I started this letter, and I want to start over. Why? Because on January 23, a day in a year that had barely started, I stopped typing at 4:21 pm (according to my word processing software) so that I could have coffee with a friend. At approximately 6:15 pm that day, I picked up a lemon pie on my way to a dinner party with other friends. At 10:30 pm, I looked at my watch and wanted to go home. It was not just an idle wish. The desire overcame me with the sudden force of an ocean squall.
At 10:30 pm somewhere between a small town called Lindsay, where my brother, Andy, had flown for what he and his flying buddies call a $100 lunch (coincidentally, Andy’s middle name is also Lindsay, which could mean something, or it could just be a coincidence) and his home about three hours away by car, a search and rescue team found him in the cockpit of the plane he built. The plane was scattered in pieces over the snow in a forested area, except for the cockpit, which was more or less in tact. Andy was still inside it. Dead. Search and rescue called my sister-in-law, Dawn, at around 10:30 pm (was it at the exact time as my sudden desire to be home?) and gave her the news. It’s against protocol for search and rescue to reveal the condition of the person found, but they knew it would take the police another 24 hours to inform Dawn of my brother’s death (it took them almost 36). So when she asked them if Andy was dead, she was told the facts.
As I was sipping coffee with my friend that day, Andy had been dead for almost three hours and still had six to go before search and rescue would find him. That night, I slept well. Dawn had decided to wait until the next morning to tell me the news.
On January 24 at 7:30 am, my phone rang twice in a row. I had just woken from three dreams. In the first, I was in the cockpit of a small plane and saw trees coming at me at breakneck speed. After the plane settled into its final resting place in a tree, I crawled out the shattered windshield, shocked to be alive. There was a man standing in the tree. I was on all fours, crying so hard I could not make out his face. I was saying something about my family having died in the plane crash. In a calm and reassuring voice, the man said my family was OK and that I could go back and save them. I crawled back inside the wreckage and, sure enough, found a woman and two children still sitting in their seats -- distraught, but relieved to see me.
In the next dream, a friend gave me a shadow box made from an old window fixture. The front of it was comprised of many little glass panes. On two of the glass panes, my friend had painted two exquisitely lush miniature trees (my two nephews?). Affixed to the back surface of the box was an assemblage of ferns, twigs, grass and rocks. The overall sense of the dream was that this friend was putting me in direct contact with the most important, profound, and connected aspect of the world: nature.
In the third dream, another friend had just bought a condo in a new building that catered to single and lively forty somethings. He invited me over to see it. When I got there, he suggested I rent a condo in the building, too. I said I couldn’t because I had just bought a townhouse of my own, which is true, but he said I should move into is building for a little while anyway, to surround myself with people (to join the land of the living?).
[a pic Dawn took from Andy's plane]
I woke up feeling an enormous sense of peace. I did not at first remember the plane-crash dream. But I did remember my two friends offering me their respective gifts. That’s when the phone rang.
Three weeks ago, I was still living in the furnished loft in Toronto I had rented after my apartment burned down in Montreal two years before. The thought of replacing all my things after the fire overwhelmed me (I did not have insurance), so I decided to live amongst someone else’s for a while. The bed was in a mezzanine, which meant I could not get down the ladder in time to answer the phone. But when I did get to the phone, I saw it was Dawn. Then it rang again. There had been a time when Dawn and I would talk to each other in the wee hours of the morning, both being early risers, but I was no longer on that schedule. Why was she calling so early?
“I have some bad news,” she said. My mind went blank.
“Andy died in a plane crash yesterday.”
I did not believe her. “No, no, no, no . . .” I repeated like an actor in a melodrama. I was watching myself react, rising above my body, hearing myself say lines.
Since that day, everything I could have said about my life is no longer sayable because it’s no longer true. My brother’s death has rearranged my reality, not to mention my very soul. On the eve of starting my life over in a new townhouse post fire, I did not do that. Instead, I stepped into an alternate reality that included staying with Dawn and the boys for an indeterminate amount of time in the house Andy built.
In the first week after Andy’s death, the funeral arrangements took over. The atmosphere was like a political candidate’s campaign office on the eve of an election. There was an air of excitement as we made grand plans for how to honour Andy. We did nothing by the book. Andy was a maverick his whole life, always pursuing and fulfilling every dream he ever had, each one centred on one life-affirming goal: to have an adventure.
Andy wanted to ride a motorcycle by the age of twelve. He asked my parents for money to pay for a broken-down bike he found. My father said no, imagining Andy zipping through the lawless streets of Manila. My mother said yes, arguing that the experience of fixing it up would be good for him, and assuming it would never be road worthy. But Andy not only restored it to purring order, he brought it up to showroom finish, chroming the fenders to a blinding polish. And, yes, he also drove it.
Ever since I’ve known him, if Andy wanted it, he either made money to buy it or he made money to build it. At 22, he began building his contracting business, starting with decks, and moving to kitchens, bathrooms, and basements. At 25, he built his first house. And somewhere between those two projects, Andy bought a new motorcycle and drove it across Canada in 11 days. At 38, he built his second house, a stunning showpiece. As his contracting business became successful and Andy could relax more, he grew restless, jonsing for a new adventure. This time, it was flying. First he got his pilot’s license, but within a year or two that was not enough. So he built his own plane. What takes most people five to ten years to build, Andy completed in 22 months. His plane passed every test with flying colours and Andy ensured it remained in perfect working order, obsessing over its maintenance before and after each and every flight. His meticulous care in building it, and his calm and qualified way of piloting it, earned him a reputation with the Experimental Aircraft Association as the go-to guy for building and flying advice. How do you memorialize someone like that?
You hold a service in an airplane hangar filled with classic planes (and cars).
Over 400 people attended. Over half of them weepy customers who liked him so much they had become his friends. Andy could make friends with anyone. But the mystery of his life is that he didn’t need them. Andy moved through the world on his own automated walkway, waving and smiling at us as he passed us by, but always speeding ahead.
At the end of the service on one of the coldest days of the year, Andy’s three flying buddies performed the “missing-man fly over" where a number of planes fly in formation until a single plane banks away from the rest and disappears into the horizon. A few days later, Andy’s youngest son said, “I think dad is still flying up there.”
That first week was filled with people, laughter and hope. But as everyone began to return to their respective homes, near and far, I slipped into a sadness I knew was just the tip of the iceberg. While Dawn felt Andy’s energy all around her and worked hard to be strong and make him proud, I felt every shred of my secular spirituality slip away. In my personal work to overcome previous heartbreaks and pains, I had developed a strong belief in a universe that would meet me half way if I focused on manifesting my dreams. Miracles have occurred in my life, or at least, I have chosen to see certain events that way, but that universe no longer seemed available to me. The question that crushed me the most was, “what if Andy is not an energy? What if after death there is simply nothing?”
I am a secular Jew. I do not believe in heaven or hell. And my Judaism amounts to angling for Passover-dinner invitations. But I did very much want to believe in the possibility of other dimensions, of the universes quantum physicists suggest might exist in tandem with our own, just on a different space-and-time continuum. I wanted a sign. I wanted proof. I wanted to believe. But I couldn’t, which meant Andy was simply gone, as if he had never been. Every day I woke up feeling sick.
Meanwhile, Andy had left behind a sole-proprietor contracting business that Dawn now had to do something with, a business about which she knew nothing. That’s when the miracles started to happen. Before Dawn’s brother-in-law returned with Dawn’s sister and their kids to Iowa after the funeral, he dug into Andy’s files and found out which jobs were outstanding, how much Andy’s customers owed him and how much Andy owed his suppliers. Within two days, Dawn’s brother-in-law had called all of Andy’s customers, assured them their jobs would be completed, and collected interim cheques. He also organized Andy’s employees, including past employees, to help finish the jobs, as well as created a list of suppliers for us to call for account cancellations. Finally, he created a schedule for Dawn to follow so that she could manage the business until everything was done. The most miraculous part: Dawn’s brother-in-law’s name is Thor.
Andy’s best friend’s wife is an accountant, which is exactly what Dawn needed when Andy died. She swooped in to help Dawn sort out all the financials while Andy’s best friend did everything else – from officiating at the funeral, to shovelling the walkway. When one of Andy’s employees became a problem (an employee so abusive we all begged Andy to fire him months earlier, but Andy didn’t because he was loyal to a fault), Dawn’s best friend’s husband’s brother, a former labour lawyer, put Dawn in touch with the best labour laywer in the province. Turns out, this labour lawyer’s husband shared Andy’s airplane hangar. She took the case and slashed her fees.
And those are just the big miracles. The small, sustaining miracles have included Andy’s flying friends taking over the sale of Andy’s portion of the hangar and pursuing the plane insurance, while the community came together to ensure that food never stopped coming, enabling Dawn to focus on her boys and getting the business settled so that she could move on with her own life.
By all rights, Dawn should be a puddle on the couch, one step away from being straight jacketed. Her mother died in a car crash when she was 12, her first boyfriend got macheted to death in Somalia when an angry mob turned on a small group of journalists (Dan Eldon was a young photojournalist of exceptional talent; his family published the most breathtaking book of Dan’s work after he died at 22). Dawn should not have had to endure another death of someone she loved. It’s just not fair.
But we don’t get to choose our destiny as much as we do get to choose it. And that’s the paradox I cannot seem to reconcile in my own belief system. Dawn worries that all the worrying she did about Andy dying while he was still alive may have contributed to his early death. That makes no sense to me. Dawn did not cause this. On the other hand, Dawn has equal belief in positive thoughts bringing about positive outcomes. I share that belief in so far as positive thinking usually leads to positive actions, which will surely up your odds for positive results.
But I also used to believe in something a little more than that. The Jungians call it synchronicity – when things come together in a way that simply cannot be chalked up to coincidence. For instance, there was this giant shipping trunk located in the front foyer of my apartment building in Montreal. It just sat there like a treasure chest pulled from a sunken ship. A few months after moving into the building, I was wishing I had more self help books. The next day, someone moving out put all kinds of things they didn’t need/want on the trunk. Amongst them, a pile of self help books. As a one-time event, it would have been easy to call it a coincidence. But it happened many times – things I needed just kept appearing: clothes, shoes, more books, etc., to the point where on my way out to the hardware store one day to replace a burnt-out light bulb, I saw one on the trunk. It was burnt out, too. But it was there.
Many “coincidences” have occurred in my life when I think about it. So why am I now doubting my former connection to things unseen-yet-recurring? Because I want a sign that Andy is somewhere among us so badly that I would rather assume the worst – that he isn’t – than suffer the blow of some scientist confirming that my worst fear is true: that death = nothingness. It’s like deciding the guy you like doesn’t like you before he has the chance to reject you, believing that rejecting him first will spare you the pain of that possible truth.
In an effort to find answers, I bought Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s books on death and dying. Renown for her work with the dying, Kubler-Ross undertook a controversial, global study of peoples’ near-death experiences. It appears the experiences of those who have been pronounced clinically dead and then revived are consistent across age, race, culture, and religion. The person describes rising above his or her body and seeing everything that is going on – the doctors trying to save them on operating table, the accident scene, or whatever occurred when the person “died.” While briefly dead, the “deceased” sees previously deceased loved ones and describes the atmosphere of the “afterlife” as an all-encompassing sense of unconditional love. The skeptics call this experience wishful thinking. But Kubler-Ross counters them with the example of blind people who have been able to describe the jewelry, haircuts and other minute and specific details of the people around them at their “death.” Or children who claim to have seen deceased loved ones they never knew. How could they know that information?
I wanted so badly to believe. I pictured Andy floating above his crash site and then racing through time and space to visit each and every one of us. Did he bring me the plane-crash dream in order to prepare me for the call that would come a few hours later? Did he surround Dawn with his love so that she could find the strength wrap up his business while continuing to walk the earth as a woman still unconditionally loved? She certainly walks among us with an inner glow, despite the pain and anxiety of temporal things, such as life insurance money that has not yet arrived.
Andy was nothing if not pragmatic in all things. The idea of asking the universe to help manifest his dreams would have elicited a sardonic laugh. If he wanted something, he just did what was necessary to make it so. And he achieved his dreams quietly, on his own terms, asking for no one’s permission. He didn’t care what others did or thought. He simply stayed focused on what he wanted.
In my search for some kind of connection to Andy, I went to see a friend’s therapist (the wrong word for this woman, who trades in energy vs. neuroses.) I told her about my need for a sign. On the drive to her office, it occurred to me that Andy might have been sending signs, such as my dream, but that I just keep upping the ante for proof, not accepting what has been delivered to my disbelieving doorstep. After I told the therapist my plane-crash dream, she asked me, "Do you think that perhaps your brother is sending signs but you just keep not believing them?” And that is not the first time this kind of future déjà vu has occurred since Andy’s death. A few days after the funeral, I phoned my own therapist/guru back in Toronto, who encouraged me to encourage Dawn to talk to Andy and to send him love and let him know everything would be OK. I knew I would probably not share this little instruction with Dawn, thinking that such an intangible connection to Andy might only exacerbate her sense of loss. But a few days later when Dawn and I found a moment alone, she said to me, “Liz, I hope you don’t think I’m weird, but I talk to Andy all the time. Out loud. And I send him love so that he does not worry about me and boys.”
Dawn's continued connection to Andy has given me pause. Something is feeding this huge well of love Dawn has not only for Andy, but for her sons, and for herself. Watching her move through the world buoyed by all this love has been the key healing factor for me. I could not have survived losing Andy without Dawn in my life.
Last week, my father had a dream that seemed to come directly from Andy. In it, Andy was driving an Austin Mini (his plane was the aircraft equivalent to an Austin Mini) at breakneck speed on the border between a forest so dark you could barely distinguish the trees and a meadow as flat and manicured as a putting green. My father was in the back seat and Andy was at the wheel, laughing. My father begged him to slow down. He could see a woman in the distance standing at a podium dressed in a tailored black suit with a wide-brimmed black hat. Behind her was a man dressed in white robes with a long white scarf. The woman was delivering a funeral oration. Andy drove right for them, then right past them. He drove until there was no more forest or meadow, just emptiness. Before the dream ended, my father saw a line of text floating in space. It said, " If he made him...then he made all of us." My father said, “I knew in my mind that the phrase meant, if the gods made Andy...then Andy made us all.” That felt right. Not that the gods made us all, but that Andy made us. Andy was, indeed, the leader of our family. He blazed the trails and then came back to get us.
In comedy, timing is everything. In death, timing is also everything. Andy’s humour, for instance, came out of the blue, a sudden play on words when you least expected it, delivered in an understated way that would catch you off guard. His death happened in the same way. Out of the blue, catching us all off guard. In both cases, Andy was not trying to be the centre of attention. He was just doing his thing, toying with words or toys, testing them until something happened that even he did not expect, never satisfied with the world until it he had tried it out for himself.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the role the English language plays in the life/death paradox. My brother died. That’s clear enough. Something happened in the past. But, “he was alive.” The verb speaks of a time that is past, yet the noun speaks of something that lives. And then there is, “He is dead.” The verb suggests continuity while the noun states finality. This paradox may be the reason I am having such a hard time knowing where/how/when Andy is. Is he? Is there an isness somewhere where Andy is, and if so, where, or, maybe more to the point, when?
But as my therapist/guru has been trying to show me for years, language is not the only paradigm for engaging with the world. As I watch my dog respond to the world spontaneously without the aid of language, I see that my therapist/guru might be right. Even neuroscientists have demonstrated that non-verbal activity, such as meditation, which often includes the act of observing thoughts without engaging them (insofar as that is possible), is not only an alternative way of understanding reality, it actually alters it. That's because meditation can actually create neural pathways where before there were none. Can we think ourselves into a new realities, material or otherwise? Or, rather, non-think ourselves into other worlds, other possibilities?
Tonight, as I was watching a rerun of “The River Runs Through It” on TV – a coming of age story (it doesn’t really matter what about) – it hit me. As we live, our lives unfold in unexpected ways. As we live, there is no end in sight. But when we die, we become a story with a beginning, middle and end. Andy already has. Macleans wrote about him in their last page devoted to interesting people who died. And we talk about him in ways we never did when he was alive, referring to him as a fully realized character with a predetermined story arc. Suddenly, his whole life seems to lead inexorably to building a plane and flying off into the sunset and/or tragically falling out of the sky. I ricochet between the two possibilities, praying for the former and fearing the latter. But it’s also possible both are true. Our lives are both unexpected and the stuff of stories.
I want to believe that Andy died doing what he loved. I want to believe his life ended because he was a highly evolved being who had more expansive horizons to explore which would require him to shed earth-bound things, including his own body. I want to believe our lives have a purpose and meaning because randomness is too hard on my psyche and soul. I want to pull threads together and see coincidences and miracles running through in a life lived that point to a greater purpose or fate or SOMETHING. But mostly, I want Andy to walk through the door and tell us that his death was staged so that he could collect the life insurance money. I want to take him for granted again, to know he’s a phone call away, to hear his voice on the other end asking matter-of-factly and with an open mind, as if anything at all were possible, “yes?”
With love,
Liz
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