Spoiler alert: Everyone leaves

In the span of the last year or so, losses are my new reality. I have said goodbye to my father, grandmother, ex-spouse, children (part-time), a job unsuited to me. After a busy weekend of bartending, church, even fitting in a much-needed therapeutic hike, the journey down to La Crosse on Sunday for yet another goodbye felt regular, routine almost. Another family member, equal in the losses, our family’s 15-year-old daschund, Molly Mae would depart this realm Monday. An unnecessary reiteration that everything and everyone is temporary.

Author Katharine Weber wrote, “Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.”

Some losses feel cataclysmic, as I know so many people have felt in the last week. And any loss deserves grief. My oldest doesn’t say “I love you” to me anymore, 12 years of perceived friendships gone, no more new advice from my dad, no more recipes learned hands-on with grandma. And now, no unconditional love from those canine brown eyes.

And my response has varied, definitely making it up as I go. As it happens, there is no manual. So it has meant really ugly cries, by myself, in front of complete strangers, on the phone, in the car, in the middle of church. But anything lost leaves a  space for learning, growing, forgiving. So it has also meant pounding the pavement and the keyboard and learning to love myself again, maybe for the first time.

New friendships, new careers doing everything I love, new ideas, growth. Understanding that nothing really belongs to us, not things nor people, not our work, not relationships, yet loving anyway, striving anyway, beginning again.

As I held my mom, again wracked with grief, I turned away from my own losses and focused on her’s—mom, husband and favorite fur child now gone,  all within a year. I tried to bear her sorrow’s weight, to feel her pain over my own, and she told me how proud she was of me. I am in awe of the strength rising from the brokenness in her, and reminded again that we only rise up by lifting others.

On Monday, a small text from my brother to our remaining family simply requested that everyone just stop dying for a little while, like a decade. Not too much to ask, right?

Human Tragedy – Reflections on the Orlando Massacre

We have to identify this as a tragedy at the very human level for all sides. Those were my friends, brothers, daughters, and lovers in that club. They were yours, they were my neighbor’s, they were my daughter’s. Part of me was unconscious in that California alley, under that desk in Connecticut, Colorado, California, Virginia, etc., inside that movie theater, inside that gas chamber, starving in that POW camp, jumping from that Twin Tower, fleeing that street in Syria, suffering in that nursing home. And yet I was also pulling that trigger, torturing soldiers, gassing Jews, raping that girl, flying that plane, just because I am human. The labels become targets of hate and separation. It should be that we are born to love and that should always endure, always triumph, always equalize. But hate begets hate begets hate. And “love is love is love is love is love.” Judging, dividing and defining by our differences is exactly how we have bred superior and inferior identifications of ourselves, allowing hate to seep into the cracks and divide us further.

We hate the rapist who hated the woman. We hate the shooter who hated the gays. We hate the mentally ill who hated the child in himself. We hate the cop killers who hate the abuse of power. We hate the white supremacists who hate people of color. And I don’t have a solution other than choosing love for all of them, because really what we hate is THE HATE. I can’t love the victims more than the one who took those victim’s lives, even though we do, I do. It seems impossible not to. And it’s harder still not to attach that love to only the label, to the target, to the platform, to quickly conjoin it with billions of others to make it known and grand and more powerful than hate, but also compartmentalizing it to victimized.

I wrote a Facebook post after the Connecticut mass shooting somewhat naively and without much credibility other than that if we could see one another as a life created from love, from the biggest and purest entity of love, hate cannot survive. And I implored myself and anyone listening to start to “see” each other, really see, and just as this article suggests, it starts with one. All we can control is ourselves, and by using love unconditionally and without borders is the only way to multiply it exponentially. And it is so very difficult. The only way I know how is to do it small, over and over and over again. Really looking at my own biases and filters and starting to tear them down one by one, and then looking at them again, and tearing them down again. Maybe it’s loving the ones in our own lives that are the most difficult to love first. Then it gets easier to from there.

Again, I don’t know. It’s not linear.

I imagine that in all the interactions the conductors of hate we now call by name, Hitler, Bin Laden, etc. had, I believe that very few were likely derived from pure love. And that is only an observation from my own interactions. How often do I look at strangers with as much love as I have for my child, the only pure love I can think of? Never. I am no better than a mass murderer. Why? Because if I’m not choosing to look at them with love, there is space for hate. And until our very beautiful and vast differences can be celebrated not just in one club or one church or one class or one race or one sex, I will keep trying to choose love, no matter what. And I will fail, but I hope to fail and learn and then be better able to choose love, again and again and again.

And we stood

Remnants of sugar and costumes litter my path, a glittered pair of shoes, the tell-tale orange wrapper of the best candy bars that couldn’t wait until returning home. I run to displace the pain of these current events. Anywhere else but this heaviness in my chest.

As I cover the miles, there is a picture seared into my mind–a little boy in costume, surrounded by heroes in uniform, searching every one of their faces for that familiar smile that wasn’t there. An entire team of superheroes behind him, behind us all.

I run past blue ribbons and blazing blue lights, screaming our unity, our community. We lost a part of our freedom that night, but together, rapidly we are gaining it back. Fighting to stand up, hold each other up once again as we do in small-town America. I think of our neighbors in Iowa, hurting and crying and dusting off their knees to stand too.

Legs and arms reaching across states and time zones holding their brothers and sisters in blue. And if they are the blue, then we are the red and white and stars of freedom to do better, be better for ourselves, be better for his children and our children. To hold them up.

United we support those called to raw bravery and deep loyalty to complete strangers, because at the very base of it, they represent the purest definition of love that I can find. To lay down a life, for the faceless you and me.
So we will continue to mourn today with the same integrity and honor. And as we help to say farewell, remember that we are the remaining voice of freedom. Wave those flags high, keep the blue blazing in our hearts, because he, like too many others and their families, have ultimately purchased our responsibility to keep that freedom and love alive for all. RIP Deputy Dan Glaze Jr. Our hearts are with you today.

Things I will never tell you.

How my breath stopped for a second when I saw your beautiful face light up my phone tonight.

How I battle within myself every day to fight to love YOU (and not need you) and not just my feelings for you, because I really do want your utmost bliss in this life, however that comes for you.

How I restrain myself (and fail) from looking at your recent activity on social media and interpreting your place in time-now no longer relative to myself, though I know it never was relative to me, which was the beauty of us, incredible space and freedom, but nonetheless feeling like you saw depths of me no one else has.

How proud I am of the work I am doing and want YOU to see it.

How I need to thank you for helping me to fall in love with myself again and want to be better to myself, because I deserve it.

How much in the moment I was during our time together, and because of that, my memories are vivid and sharp in my heart and so very difficult to let go.

How I used my body with other bodies while you are away, to feel wanted.

How you silently taking my hand for that very brief moment when I told you my dad died minutes into our first date touched me deeper than any words ever have, and words and I go way back.

How I am writing this to put my heart on something tangible so I don’t have to feel it so hot in my chest, always burning. But it is futile anyway.

How I think about the things we never got to do and the likelihood that we never will and the void that brings to my future self and unsurety and fear of what will come in its place.

How you have set the bar higher for me than I thought I deserved, not because you’re perfect, but because the things I’d have liked from you and did not get, are things I will not settle for the next time. And the things I did get, that I never knew I needed,  I will not compromise for anything less than going forward, so thank you.

How much joy and love I have for this life and the people in it. Because of the experience of you, I embrace instead of resist which has led to a few declarations of love to me gone unrequited. People want to be connected at the deepest levels and I tend to listen well and make people feel warm. And I’m getting better at making them feel loved even when I have to say “you are not him”. And you, my love, may not even be him.

How I associate you with all things warm –coffee, sunshine, tea, socks, water, fire, stocking hats, yellows and reds and always sunsets.

How I watched you in our time together–your tiny moments of insecurity and your quiet confidence that never made me feel less than.

How I memorized the lines of gray in your hair and fell in love with each one. I watched you war between embracing them and sheer resistance, joking about something so precious as growing gray due to worrying about me.

How I have never hated you or disliked you. How even now I feel pure joy at your name and understand that association will never fade even in our different life paths. We were always too practical to let our dreams get too carried away, but the dream was ecstasy when I did let down the logic for just a bit (and still do!) and let my heart paint what hope looked like in 2 years, 8 years, 15, 40 with you.

Just exactly how much time and space and energy I’ve given to you without you ever knowing.

Even though you may see this, there are some parts of my crazy that you’ll never see because they make me way too vulnerable, too raw, and possibly insane. Even those will not make this list. You have to show up for those.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I fell in love with your hands sometime before I knew that they have magic.

That when I see you in a photo that you post, I can’t stop thinking about who took the photo. Because that means something, who you’re choosing to spend time with.

How I dream of how we can make this forever and what that looks like. Small little blonde curly-haired children. (Yup, there’s the crazy.)

How you haunt me, day and night, and I can’t help wondering what depths I didn’t get to see, where I couldn’t reach in our short time. What was even real and what was not.

How I worry about how you are, really? Who you are really. What parts are truth and what was just for “fun” or worse, show.

How I stalk your music choices which I believe allows me to look into your soul for just a few minutes, and it crushes me or lifts me higher, depending on which man I think I’m seeing, but you’ve already changed so much, or maybe not at all. And that scares me more.

How one first bite of ice cream told me you loved me, well before you did.

How even now I know I’m not ready for you, or you for me. And the saddest part, that I may never be. We may never be.

How much I’m battling the fine line between retaining my self-respect and preserving the relationship with subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle,  fruitless efforts to communicate;  placing unfair expectations on when I’d like you to reach out to me, for me, and the devastating disappointment that brings, every. single. time. Keeping score even when I know I shouldn’t, trying to keep in mind that love in its purest form exists no matter what. And recognizing that I don’t know if that’s what this is.

But also recognizing that typical conventions of someone wanting to be in your life look like them making an effort to communicate and actually be in your life and not just one-sided initiation.

How this last revelation about how people make space and time for the ones they truly love means that this is likely not that, love. And how much that hurts even when I tried so hard not to let you in. Because inevitably I did, wholly and full of hope once again.

How I, moving forward, will continue to be fully engaged in the hope of love. I will continue to love deep and fast if I deem it to be true, and if that’s too scary for you, then I do not want your fear.

How I’ve refined my greatest fantasy – like Romeo and Juliet without the tragedy (or maybe with?), standing on my porch screaming out, in front of the whole world,no matter the time or distance that has passed,one very real and raw declaration of love.