« view all posts
The Ministry of Keep Breathing
December 21, 2011
So the truth is it’s not getting better. The intensity and dynamics of this grief are different and better in that I am functioning on a day to day sort of way with inner life pushed to one side in the obvious ways. (No crying stores, at public gatherings or on the street.) For a woman who’s given birth, it’s like a contraction, a big one. Hitting all at once, out of nowhere ~ you’re breathing, perhaps Lamaze breathing ~ you’ve just had a whopper and you’re breathing. It should be a minute or two until the next one but then, Bang and two in a row with no recovery time, nothing to prepare you ~ I go off to the market. I’ll eat lunch. I will watch Brenda Watson on PBS...The Road to Perfect Health. I need to be a supporter of PBS. Somewhere in the back of my mind, Peter should have been taking Probiotics. We both knew Brenda Watson in Florida. I’ve become a PBS supporter. Why didn’t we get on a better health regimen? I go to bed with slight regret. Sleep all night, too. All night. Wake a bit too early, can’t catch my breath...complete panic. It’s the big one, one more push. This is too much, give me drugs. Breathe through it. No, it’s not possible. The policeman says, “Yes, he’s dead.” No, I’m supposed to die first. You’ve made a mistake. “No” he says. It’s now a year later, and again and again with unbearable force, coupled with irrational thoughts and I keep breathing. No birth. That baby is still in there. I’ll just keep breathing. One more cleansing breath. Now I ask myself, is this appropriate? Should anyone out there see it? I’m sorry if anyone thinks not. It’s all I can do. This and breathing. Just breathe. The telephone rings. Yes? Oh, a walk? A walk would be nice. Even though I prefer to walk with a dog, I don’t have one. Cats won’t. I do have 3 strange little creatures and I apologize for all the analogies in this past year, in this last year’s entries. All the sorrow I might have unleashed on you, My Dear Ones. But this is a big one and it lives, and isn’t going away. It seems one hell of a payoff but then I’ve never believed in payoffs. And I keep writing it down because that is how I figure things out. Otherwise thoughts just short-circuit, don’t go anywhere, never resolve. But if were a really good writer, I would resolve everything and then perhaps start my own religion. There must be loads of folks like me...in and out of funk and grief. Any answer might be better than none at all. Maybe between the lines, here and there, is an answer. The obvious one is keep breathing. My Dear Ones, join me in my Ministry of Keep Breathing. Love, Melanie 
Leave Comment:
Too many anglosaxon cultural references in your text, for me to fully understand and taste it. But Camus (Albert) said one day: "We must imagine Sisyphus happy". Even words, we use to write, these too much worn words should be imagined happy. Unworn.
You certainly can be a great writer if you wish. Just begin and work on it. The harder problem is to be able to believe writing is useful.
I meant there were too many localist references in your text, though we all know sorrow is universal. I did not know the cause of your sadness, we are made, limited, to go two by two, stumbling while we look to extend our love from two to at least three and maybe more. And our sorrow is always stronger than the rest of the sorrows of the rest of the world, we are okay alone, but there is always someone who got something we need, Melanie..
I am not certain if the knowledge of being weak gives us more strengph that no knowledge at all: "Ce que j´ai fait aucun animal ne l´aurait fait" said the great Saint Exupery and i do not fully agree with him, if he really said so. "Umbrío por la pena, casi bruno, porque la pena tizna cuando estalla; donde yo no me hallo, no se halla; hombre más apenado que ninguno" said the spanish poet Miguel Hernández, formerly a shepherd, who died in prison during our civil war, emprisonned by those who should have defended him. A mistake is in general followed by another one until no solution is left; just and only sorrow. 
Dear old friend -
How can anyone tell you that it will ever just stop? The ongoing grief is a direct result of the depth of the love that you shared and still feel. It is the missing of the chance to touch - to just talk and connect - yet I know that Peter is with you always - even when you can't reach out for a hug.
The only thing that I can pass on to you - the thing that held me as I went through the loss of my father - then later the loss of my Mother, my brother, my neice and my favorite aunt is this: Please be gentle with yourself. Put no expectations on your feelings - things come up when you least expect them and don't come up at all when you would think that they would show themselves. You can see something that reminds you of him and in that moment be OK - then the wind changes and it is fresh again. It is how it is supposed to be. It gets easier and less frequent - but it never completely goes away - you just make peace with it - love the feeling and the memory and as you said - you breath. Peter stands beside you 24/7 - in ways that you feel all the time. Hang in there old friend - you are so very loved by so many!
Dear Melanie,
No, it probably won't get any better, for some time, anyway. I lost my mother in August 1967, just two years before you electrified that stage on Yazgur's farm. The loss was so permanent that I have felt like an amputee ever since. You have probably heard that amputees often have "phantom limb" syndrome -- they have pains or itches or other feelings on appendages that aren't there anymore. That's how it sometimes is with my mother. She's always there -- sometimes on a little hill in the distance, watching. Sometimes closer, just over my shoulder. I try to imagine what she might say, but it's only a guess. The pain of the loss, the unfairness of it come and go. It's more of a scar now, but sometimes it bleeds a little. I saw Jeordie perform on the 40th anniversary of my mother's death. It was a very emotional evening for me. Jeordie's beautiful green eyes reminded me so much of my mother's. I could barely talk to her. In the weeks before that I watched Steven Spielberg's movie "A.I. (Artificial Intelligence)" in which a couple in the future "adopts" a little android boy who is made to experience real love. At the end of the film in which the boy has long outlived his mother, he is reunited with her for a day by some aliens clone a copy of her from a lock of her hair he had kept. It was so beautifully painful that I wept out loud uncontrollably as the scene progressed. (Just writing about it brings back tears.) I had not cried that much about her in many, many years. Somehow I don't think I have ever completely grieved over the loss. How can you? I don't know. Except that in a strange way, knowing Jeordie has somehow helped me get a little farther along in my grieving process. I don't think she knows that or can completely understand it, but I am grateful to her for it. So, yes, you will feel pains and emptinesses for perhaps a long time. But as is obvious from what many of your many fans have said since, you have a great deal of support from the incredible number of people who love you. And I believe, from the times I have met you and spoken briefly with you, that though it makes you feel lost, you have the strength to find your way through. -- David Campbell Photographer Phoenix, AZ |
|
