Ashram of Yes

Last week, my beautiful guru told me that one does not have to go to a remote retreat in order to achieve the ashram experience. “Your daily life can be your ashram – your telephone calls, your interactions at the video store, your meetings with coworkers, paying your bills, all of it, everything you do. What defines the ashram is the intention and practice of awareness, even in the middle of chaos.”

She’s right. Nevertheless, starting June 14 and ending June 28, I am officially “on ashram” for two weeks, which will involve radio silence on all my communication channels, except for work. I am not leaving the city. And I will be able to get your e-mails, but I won’t be responding unless it’s an emergency.

Why am I doing this? To recover my “yes.”

Some years ago, I came to a screeching halt at a picture of Susan Sarandon (in a magazine) in which she’s standing in front of an open fridge door, popping something yummy into her mouth. The caption read, “I like people who say yes to food. People who say yes to food tend to say yes to living.”

That really struck me at the time because I was not eating. I was not eating because I thought my food lust was responsible for my thigh size. So, I decided to take control. My version of control, unfortunately, involved applying the opposite of yes to practically everything, not just food.

Previously, when on binge tear, I told myself the irresistible nature of the crap I was scarfing was fully responsible for my loss of control. But the truth is, the crap was delicious only in the way shopping therapy is delicious: the highs (in the moment) are at crack-happy levels, but the crashes (in the next moment) are at equal-and-opposite crack-despair lows. The joy is not lasting, and the price you pay in health, spirit and karma depletion is astronomical.

Some people have trouble saying no. They can’t seem to put up boundaries, take space or speak their truth. I’ve been some of those people. But when I read Susan’s affirmation, I realized that “no” was now the only thing I was allowing to cross my lips. I was having trouble opening to yes. Yes to my health, yes to my body, yes to my views (especially if they conflicted with someone else’s), yes to my time. Instead, I was “hanrgy” all the time. I had successfully starved my hips into siren sweetness, but I wore the mask of Medusa.

I know a couple who embody Yes. And that’s what I love most about them. They see a yes even when there’s a No standing there, legs akimbo, arms folded over chest like a town marshal refusing them entrance to No Town.

This couple is not afraid of Marshal No or the barren, hostile town of No. They walk right up to Marshal No and say, “what seems to be the problem here, Pardner?” Marshal No may get all blustery at first, protecting the town’s territory, but my friends keep firing off questions that hit MN where it hurts: in the belief system, dismantling it one ill-conceived belief at a time . . .

. . .until MN finally breaks down and admits the problem just seems to have been there forever, without MN knowing how it got there, or why it’s still there, or why the townsfolk keep defending it so, lo these long, dry, dusty years. My friends let out a thoughtful, "hmmmmm," then brush past MN, who is now on knees, head in hands, while their arms sweep over the landscape and their voices describe promising alternatives for the town, engineering a vision of such beauty that MN perks up and -- what's this! -- begins to see potential! possibilities! and then -- what's this! -- starts developing a new vision that transforms MN into someone more yes-er-y.

I have not only been Marshal No, but I have embodied the very town of No. And let me tell you, No was devoid of attractions. (Never mind that my mouth was always full of grit.) One day I finally decided to elect myself the Mayor of Maybe in the hopes of turning the town around through sheer force of acting as if. As if my dreams could come true. Soon, the craziest of ideas grew plump and shiny on the greenest of sky-scraping trees.

As Marsha Beck says, it never starts with the right conditions – "if I lose weight, I’ll be loved; if my parents only made me do my homework, I’d have a career," etc. and so on. It starts with the right thoughts – I’m good enough, smart enough, and goshdarnit, people like me! – which then change the external conditions because the new internal conditions feel good enough to motivate you to make changes.

I know I often sound like a cheerleader drunk on self-help books. Probably because I am. But let me be clear: I’m not dissing the dark side. No way! Dark is delicious. Dark is the bitter sweet that makes life worth living. But Dark and No are not the same animal. No is all glittery surface on a skin of dull pancake make-up on a supermodel. While Dark is the deep and rich smell of freshly ground organic, fair-trade, dark-roast espresso that keeps you awake at night jittery with a mind full of a million ideas (not all good). Yes loves Dark. Yes loves it all. Yes loves life’s full spectrum of the good, the bad and the ugly.

In her book, “Steering by Starlight,” Martha Beck writes, “Neurologists like to say that ‘what fires together, wires together’.” In other words, every time you indulge your favourite obsessive thoughts, you are essentially firing obsessive-thought neurons along pathways in your brain that create literal grooves in your nervous system. Over time you will have pressed your very own EP of sadness, fear, rage, jealousy and etc. Beck says we are not born with negative thoughts and feelings, but life bombards us with experiences that create these feelings, adding this very amazing fact, “Human infants have only two natural fears: the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling. Every other fear is learned. But the harder our lives, especially in childhood, the more deeply and unconsciously negative reaction-clusters are etched into our brains and bodies.”

The great news is, all this can be rewired. Beck says you can achieve reverse wiring by holding different thoughts, but only if you do so DELIBERATELY, CONSCIOUSLY, until you've smoothed over the old grooves and created new ones -- I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and goshdarnit, people like me! Beck says the results are not just astonishing, but “empirically testable.”

“Scientist have found that Tibetan lamas who do something called ‘loving-kindness meditation’ have thicker-than-average neuron development in parts of the brain associated with happiness. Meditation has also been shown to lessen heart disease, high blood pressure, infectious illness, and many other indicators of both health and aging.”

Meditation will be one of the things I do while on ashram, both at home and once a week at a meditation centre. When I was at grad school and ready to throw myself into a patch of cow manure (goddamn, that city stank in the summer!), I joined a meditation group instead, which not only saved my life, but also gave me lasting friendships with amazing women.

So, what has got me running scared and seeking refuge in a self-styled ashram? A few things. One being so much static in my head that my heart can’t tune into a clear channel. And if I can't tune in to me, I certainly can't tune in to anyone else.

And because when I saw this sign, I wanted to cry.

Recently, I have been noticing that, in conversations with other people, instead of supporting my political, ethical and personal truths, I have been suppressing what is fundamental to me, betraying myself to the point of pain.

The price I pay for not standing by my values and not questioning ideas that have had a profound impact on people's lives -- the extreme result being violence, marginalization and poverty, and the less extreme being erosion of self-esteem (what a terrible spectrum) -- is high indeed.

Whenever I trade myself in to diminish difference with someone else (folks who I don't even think want me to! That's the crazy part!), I inevitably create a discord in my world so complex in its uncomposition that even the most experimental jazz composer would clap her hands over her ears.

Also, it's utterly disrespectful to others when I am not totally honest about how I feel. Not to mention patronizing, because it assumes the other person is not capable of absorbing and analyzing information and entering into a productive dialogue. Or even an engaging, life-changing dialogue in which both parties feel heard, respected and transformed! I want to get my engagement back.

That's just one example of how lost I feel right now, and how my lostness is shutting me down. My beautiful guru has been trying to give me this mantra for years, "truth at all costs." When I say it, I usually find my agency again. But I've fallen out of practice.

I want to find the Liz who feels like a bombshell when she sports hairy armpits (with compassion for those who find it unattractive), and who stands up LOUDLY for all social-justice issues, and who considers "view opponents" as friends-in-the-making, because, as my brilliant new boss said to me, "if you can't change the unexamined biases of the people closest to you, then how can you hope to change the world?"

How I long to change the world, but not with my usual bull-in-a-china-shop approach. Not with anger at the mainstream for perpetuating injustice and clinging blindly to their blind spots. I want to become the change I wish to see, to act with love and from love, with the patience and compassion others have shown me when I have said and done ignorant things. I want an open heart for hearing about my own unexamined mindsets.

My usual fear-based, conflict-averse MO is to give up on important conversations because I'd rather go quiet than be disliked. But no more. NO MORE. I really want to learn how to speak up, even when I'm scared of rejection, to keep trying to open up conversation, lovingly, gently and respectfully. Which means I can't be afraid of resistance. That's just part of the territory. Otherwise there'd be nothing to change.

Which, of course, might have you asking why I'm choosing to disconnect for two weeks instead of engaging more -- especially since I framed my ashram as bringing awareness to my every day life. It's a fair question. My answer is simply, I am retreating to recharge. Back to the head-noise thing. There's too much of it, and since I can't leave the city to drop out inside a temple on a mountain, or drop my work commitments, I am going to carve out silence right here at home by carving out some time alone.

Because I love you, I'm asking you all to kindly bear with my absesnce, which will be short, but necessary. And please rest assured this so not about you. It’s about me. I will not only be seeking my truth at all costs, but I'll be working on my book again, which I have let drop -- another reason for going on ashram. And, believe me, you will all benefit in the end because I will be a clearer person with less Pig-Pen dust whipping up around the both of us every time I open my mouth.

Just think of me as being in Berlin, the ashram of my soul.

Fan of Being a Fan

How many of you have had this conversation?

Someone asks you about something you did and you say something like, “check it out, it’s on my Facebook page,” and they go, “I hate Facebook! It’s such a time sucker! I think everyone who uses Facebook is idle or bored or immature!”

And you think, WTF????

I wish it had happened about two decades ago, but it happened a year ago when I turned 40 -- I no longer fear what others think. I love Facebook. I LOVE FACEBOOK. I also love all kinds of other things that don’t make it onto the cutting-edge of the cultural analysis-o-metre. Case in point: Oprah. Not a fan of the show, but most definitely a fan of the mag. Taking a page from Playboy fans, I read "O" for the articles. Yes, it’s filled with advertising for stuff I don’t need, and exhortations to women to fit into even more microscopic clothing sizes, and I’m not a fan of either of those things. But the articles are kick-ass. Especially the ones Martha Beck writes (former Mormon and Harvard Business School prof, now a lesbian life coach with a sense of humour so sharp it could slice Harvard Business School in two faster than you can say Gordon Matta Clark).



I am sure I don’t use Facebook the way the kids do. I’m not a kid. So, I’m not a fan of everything. Nor do I take the kagillions of tests to find out what rock star’s pet rock I’m most like. But if other people enjoy doing that, dammit, who am I to spoil their fun? I say, knock yourself out. Because the truth is, I laughed till I cried when my friend told me that her friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter "friended" my friend, and that this girl’s zeal for becoming a fan of things now takes up the lion’s share of real estate on my friend’s newsfeed page. The girl becomes a fan of something new everyday. Here’s a sampling:

Fan of hot showers, cookie dough, staying up late, I need a vacation, hoodies, sarcasm, hair straighteners. Hates mosquitoes, loves sleep, summer nights, Steve Carell, ipods, Dairy Queen, the beach, Cadbury mini eggs, shopping, and sleeping in class. Fan of making a "don't like" button on Facebook. Petitioning to allow short shorts/mini skits in school dress codes.

When I was thirteen, I yakked on my era-appropriate social-media tool all day long and was a fan of many people and things – Cheap Trick, salty peanuts, swimming after school, Richard Irvine (boy from Australia who arrived in grade 6), discos (there was no drinking age in Manila so we were at bars and discos at age thirteen), Singapore slings, Grease, pool parties, my best friends: Sara and Helena, the Euro boys who played soccer in the park, chicken and pork adobo, mangos, mangostines, bell bottoms, sleeping in, scary movies, imagining my first kiss . . . I just didn’t have a way to publish my passions, so they went from my mouth to Sara and Helena’s ears.

Today I got an e-mail from an FB friend who, among other things, told me that her new guy likes it when she’s on top. Now this woman is my age, more or less, newly divorced, and living the life of Rieley: dating whom she pleases and pledging herself to no one until she bloody well feels like it, if she ever feels like it. She’s an outspoken feminist who walks through the world like she not only owns it but owns everyone else’s world as well. I LOVE HER. So you can imagine how surprised I was to hear her make a distinction between the new guy and what I can only guess were the old guys who didn’t like it when she was on top. I can’t for one feminist second imagine she would have put up with that. My internal response: WTF? My written response: “any man who does not like it when you’re on top is suspect. Period.” That seemed to strike a chord in her. She immediately posted my response to her blog, which I immediately visited and discovered, to my great joy, that my friend is still the owner of the world. How do I know? Just look at her tags!

bullshit, caring, climax, disappointment, energy, friendship, hedging, love, patriarchy, personal care, player, reflection, relationships, relaxation, revelations, two girlfriends.

I especially love “hedging.” Everyone has had the experience of someone else hedging their bets about them. The tag is the opposite of inscrutable. It’s like having your own experience compressed into an atomic word that then explodes with self-exposure all over your bunker of failed romances.

Anyway, this rabbit-warren chase through all our social media spaces started with our connection on Facebook. This topper of a gal lives in my city but I have not seen her since Janauary. Thanks to Facebook, I get to experience her anyway, as well as all my other friends in this city, peeps whose delicious babies and spectacular holidays and cozy family reunions I can participate in without having to be there in the flesh, or waiting for weeks or months to get a long update letter in the mail. It's not a real-time event replacement. It's a supplement that adds richness to my day when I can't be there. What I find especially magical about Facebook is the way it levels the field with regards to geography and time zones, enabling me to stay connected with those who live around the globe, as if everyone, near and far, were all living on my doorstep.

So, when people say to me, “I hate it when someone from my past friends me. I don’t even know that person anymore,” I think “so, don’t accept the friendship. Period.” That’s the beauty of FB. You get to decide who is in or out, and even how in or out. But why throw out the friends with whom you do want to share pictures and jokes and status updates just to avoid the few with whom you don’t?


This is such old news I feel like I’m touting the virtues of television. But if people are still bitching about FB, I guess it’s not as old as all that. What I have never understood is if you think Facebook (or anything else) is a waste of time, then just don’t do it. No one is holding a gun to your head.


My mother used to say this really smart thing when I was kid, stomping my feet and having a full-blown hate on for something like peas or beans. She'd say, "stop hating so much."

I was doing absolutely nothing the other day when I was suddenly struck with the thought of how freaking weird it is that I’m am this mass of blood and guts and bones and I have this strange free-floating consciousness that chatters all day long, and that there are others like me walking around, and yet we all obsess over things like boys and clothes and status and whether or not we should be participating in social-media activities when it’s an unmitigated miracle that we exist, never mind that we think, or that we build crazy edifices we call buildings, and that we turn poisonous, bitter beans into a drink called coffee and then teach ourselves to enjoy drinking it! I mean, shit, what is more miraculous and unfathomable than us and all our manifestations? In those moments, I want to jump out of bed and eat a tray of brownies. But I’m worried about getting fat.


The point is, enjoy your life. Your way. And if you really want to ratchet up the joy factor, become a fan of something. It adds passion to your world. It gives you something to live for. Of course it’s pointless. Everything is pointless, which means everything is up for grabs, depending on which lens you wish to view life through. Mine is a chocolate lens with a popcorn chaser bathed in the LCD light of my FB profile page where I get to read about all of you!

Mmmmm, socks ...

Every so often it happens. I write a post that causes someone pain, and I find myself learning a lesson I thought I’d learned already. Apparently I have more learning to do. All I can say for myself this time is that at least I swung into immediate action, apologized profusely to the hurt party while simultaneously pulling down the offending post (which one can do nowadays thanks to the IntermaWeb), after which I allowed myself a few hours of sitting in a shame spiral.


Anais Nin once wrote:

I write as I breathe, naturally, flowingly, spontaneously, out of an overflow, not as a substitute for life. I am more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one. I am more interesting than what I write.


If her biopic -- Henry and June -- is any indication, Nin definitely lived an interesting life. Although I think my life could be called interesting, too, I am not personally interested in becoming a work of art, whatever that means. But it’s the line about being more interested in living than writing that resonates with me. Yup. Real life trumps writing every time. Which means that the people I love trump the characters I create every time, which means I will never (consciously) sacrifice my flesh-and-blood peeps to the writing gods.

Thank the gods the long weekend wasn’t all about my stupid mistakes. It started off with a great visit from a dear friend who came from out of town and met me outside Manic Coffee wearing the most amazing pair of socks.


My first thought was, Manic will not do. Her socks required a more specific backdrop. So I took them (and her) to Ideal Coffee in Kensington market, where we sipped molten soy lattes (at my behest) on Ideal’s patio. And it was.

As we settled into a conversation about her PhD anxieties (which I’ll get to in a minute), a self-assured pug rooting around at my feet and making pig noises decided to hop on my lap and make himself at home. Between the eye-popping socks and the perfectest pug, I wondered how things could possibly get better.


As the three of us enjoyed the sunshine, while two of us got high on caffeine and one of us fell in love, I put on my listening face as my friend recounted her dissertation struggles: how she wants to approach her thesis like an art project, but how she is afraid to express her authentic voice in an academic context. I won’t go into detail because this story is best read on the faces of anyone who has ever attempted a PhD. It’s a tale of horror so scary no one has enough hands to cover their eyes and ears. I’ve often thought academia should get out of the business of enlightenment and into the business of torture instead. Water boarding has nothing on the unique self-esteem-eroding methods of the academy.


The long and short of it is that she was feeling overwhelmed by her inner critic, but all I could really focus on were her mindblowing socks. She is always wearing fabulous socks. When she was done talking, I waited a beat, took a deep breath so as to formulate a thoughtful response, and finally managed to ask what I think a trenchant and, frankly, super pertinent question: “Where did you get those socks????”

She told me she got them in Ottawa. They were hand made by a certain designer, etc. And then she told me that she was wearing them inside out because she likes the way the seams look. Fascinating. So here’s a woman who fears expressing her authentic voice in the context of the academy but who has no qualms taking someone’s one-of-a-kind sock design and flouting the way they are supposed to be worn, making them even more original!!!!!

Why can she do it in one context and not another? In a word: context. Martha Beck, one of my favourite humans I’ve never met, describes this contextual blind spot as something we can’t see when we are inside our own culture. There are many French theorists who say the same thing in high tones and with expensive words, but Martha Beck brings it home with a story about a guy who suffers outrageous guilt when he sneaks into his girlfriend’s tooth filing ceremony (in Bali), a ritual he’s not supposed to see. As cultural outsiders, his guilt might seem ridiculous to us (unless you are Balinese). But try telling your out-of-work friend that going to Berlin in the spring time is far more life affirming than a job hunt when her mother sees it as an act of utter irresponsibility (you're killing me!), and you’ll see a person suffer inside a whole other contextual blind spot in which they actually believe their choices might precipitate their mother's death. Yes, it’s a cliché, but it also happens to be a lived truth, at least at the level of a lived fear.


One of my favourite cartoons shows a couple in bed, each with a smile on their respective faces and their own thought bubble, one thinking, “mmmmm sex …” the other thinking “mmmmmmm socks …” I have no idea how this relates to my friend’s sexy socks and dissertation dilemma, but I have definitely had that experience of lying in bed on a winter’s night thoroughly enjoying the feeling of my warm toes inside my woolen socks. But I digress . . .


The day after her visit, I sent my friend pics I took of her sumptuously socked calves and she sent me an e-mail telling me she had posted the pics on her fridge “as a reminder.”

“A reminder of what?” I wrote back.

“Definintely to wear great socks. Probably to also pick up another pair the next time I am in Ottawa. And also to risk being myself. All three decent ideas.”

More than decent. Blogable!

Best Funeral Ever

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?