|
|
|
June 29th, 2009
06:24 am - Developing Identity
Yesterday in an e-mail I identified three people by who their relationships: She is her daughter, He is her husband, etc. This made me think about how we develop a sense of who we are. I wonder how much of the self is developed in relationship. What/how much can develop apart from relating to others. We are born dependent on at least one relationship because we are born totally dependent on the care of another.
And even what we develop in solitude, is it done in the shadow of past conversations? Do we need the mirror of others in order to see ourselves. And yet, there are other senses than sight that don't require reflection in order to know ourselves. What does this mean for developing characters and how they know who they are--how we know who they are?
|
May 24th, 2009
08:24 pm - I'm another straight Christian supporting marriage equality
On Tuesday some of my friends will know if their marriages will be honored in the state of California. I am hoping that the California Supreme court overrules the vote of the public last November which changed our constitution to discriminate against a minority.
It should be enough to say that I am a citizen in favor of marriage equality. This is after all a civil rights issue. However, because faith communities came out so strongly in favor of discriminating against the love of LGBT couples I feel compelled to stand as a member of the straight majority and say to the world that it is because of my faith in God's love for humanity that I support marriage equality. Christianity uses the metaphor of marriage to describe the relationship between God in the person of Jesus and the church. There isn't another relationship that establishes by choice the closeness of joining together in mutual love and commitment and partner-hood to go through life as next-of-kin. This is what marriage is, establishing the legal next-of-kin relationship with the one with whom we choose to blend our lives with the depth of love that creates family. From automatic visits and emergency medical decisions to inheritance, marriage matters. It never struck me as clearly as it did when I signed my husband's death certificate as his next-of-kin. There are countless stories of LGBT people who have been shoved aside (because they could not legally confirm their emotional and spiritual connection) in the favor of next of kin who don't have much or any of an emotional bond with a person. There is nothing in me as a straight Christian that makes this seem right to me. Everything in me says that when two people blend their hearts and lives in partnership, they should have the legal right to be next-of-kin-- not only in a few states, but in every state and under federal law.
Whatever the decision is in the State of California on Tuesday one side or the other of this issue will be hurt and angry. Gender identity and attraction cuts to the quick of our identity. Homophobia has been so embedded in other elements of culture that give us a sense of identity that it is hard to step back away from our heritage of bigotry and admit that it is cultural prejudice that drives the desire to maintain the status quo of discrimination. To stop discriminating means that we will have to redefine ourselves. We will have to let ourselves be resurrected in our love and ideas of love. It seems to me that someone gave us this example a couple thousand years ago. If LGBT people come from families who are not already comfortable with diversity in sexual identity and attraction, there is an internal argument towards accepting the reality of love that doesn't fit the pattern of the majority. For some of us, who don't have those internal feelings to open our eyes, we have to recognize in our friends' love the same essence of our love relationships.
Christianity is a wide and varied religion. I have moved from a Christian tradition that claims to read the Bible 'literally' seeing it as dictated by God to one that looks to the Bible as a collection of writing and stories that were written by authors who struggled with a sense of the divine but were writing as inspired people with the cultural eyes of their times and places and their own personalities. I made this movement with intent. I made it because I read the Bible and found that my 'literal' tradition downplayed and ignored what didn't fit our cultural beliefs and prejudices and lifted up what did support them. I then looked at my cultural beliefs and prejudices and asked 'why?'. When the belief was a prejudice, the answer to 'why?' was always the same: To drop this belief, this prejudice, was to walk outside of my group. I came to see that the literal belief was not about the Bible but was about the dogma of the branch of Christianity which I was taught. To follow my heart, mind, and soul rather than those of the religious leaders in the branch of Christianity to which I was born meant that I had to walk away. For many years I did not know that there was a branch of Christianity that read scripture as I did. I have found myself now, quite at home within Progressive Christianity. I am now a member of the UCC in a branch of Christianity that is about questions and wonder and exploring the love of God the Creator instead of learning to follow the authority of the church. I am in a branch of Christianity that worships the mystery that is God rather than worship church authority. And why am I spending this much time in a post about marriage equality on this? It is simple. There was such a strong push to write discrimination into my states constitution from churches who have defined themselves by calling homophobia holy and righteous by pointing to a few passages in the Bible while they ignore other passages that don't fit their identity. And in reaction to this, there has been a strong anti-religious backlash within groups that support equality. And the brush is too wide. While I understand it because the most recognized voices of Christianity in this country are from the Religious Right, it is still inaccurate and a prejudice. I can see the hurt and pain of threatened identity that leads to anger and expressions of bigotry, but I can't stand with the bigotry. Seeing the pain caused by homophobia was a key element in my questioning the beliefs I was taught. I questioned those beliefs slowly and carefully and ended up walking away from them and from relationships that required holding them. But I also found a branch of Christianity that supports love and justice. And the anti-religious brush paints me too. And more importantly, it makes it harder for others within conservative churches to walk the path that I walked. It reinforces the US vs. THEM messages that are heard in pulpits and around dinner tables. It makes it harder to risk change.
Whatever the ruling is on Tuesday I suspect it will be followed by more of what we saw after the election with religious groups and LGBT groups angry with each other. And I sit here as a person of faith hoping for marriage equality so that all couples have the same freedom to establish that special next-of-kin relationship of loving life partners that is marriage. I am a Christian, but I am not a member of the Christian community that is threatened by love. And I support marriage equality because it is in my heart to support love. But my heart was shaped as it was by the stories of Christianity which themselves undercut an unquestioning belief in the church which gave them to me. I hope that in another generation this discrimination and bigotry seems like a silly thing of the past.
|
May 3rd, 2009
07:58 pm
For the first time in I don't know how many months, I clicked on my friends page and read a few posts. It's good to be feeling like knowing what is happening in others' lives. It feels like thawing.
|
April 27th, 2009
09:45 pm
In My Fair Lady there is a line Henry Higgins sings -- I've grown accustomed to her face. I've become accustomed to not seeing Bob. I've grown accustomed to being alone. I don't know how long I will be in this cleaning up and figuring out where I'm going phase. It is interesting to be able to do some of the type of reflection that people often do later in life at this point of life. I have time to think about what I would do the same or differently with my life and actually do it.
Obviously this last year was filled with the pain of loss, but I suspect it has been easier for me than it would have been had we had twice as much time together. And it has always been in the back of my mind that while I was going to be in Bob's life to the end of it, he was never going to be in mine until the end -- unless the end had been tragic.
And so what does tomorrow hold for me? And how do I get there? I suppose by living today. And even while I move into the rest of me life, Bob is a part of me and I will bring him with me in the way that those we have lost always live in us.
|
March 14th, 2009
06:35 pm - The first year
First: Hi, Joan!
I approached grieving during the first year without Bob as I do anything that I know is important while it is happening--slow and steady. I have now been through an entire year of firsts. The first ______ alone. I could not figure out why I kept forgetting the car registration. Finally after the anniversary of Bob's death, I realized it had been the last chore he had done. It was the last one to absorb from his annual to do list into mine. This first year I concentrated on not running from the reality of death and building an enlarged circle of friends. I've learned to let go and I've learned to embrace.
In the first year I was often in a fog. And when I was present in the moment, each moment was like an unstrung pearl. While we grieve those who have been so much a part of our everyday lives and identity what we are doing is reorganizing our sense of who we are. Moving our loved one from the present to the past. It takes a lot of energy and I didn't have enough left to string the pearls of moments into a connected whole. I took some time in the last couple of weeks to start stringing this past year together.
I've let go, now I need to start looking towards what I will build my self into. The 'letting go' of grief is not like shoving to the side, it is integrating into a different layer, a different meaning. Bob is and will always be a part of me. But he isn't my 'now'. While in that fog of grief, my now grew very messy. Now I have a lot of work to do to start sorting out the disorganized mess I woke from that first year to find myself in the midst of. I could turn the computer around and take a picture, but I'm not going to.
|
February 9th, 2009
06:29 am - The center of grief's labyrinth
I reached the center of grief's labyrinth last week. And what I found there was that my fear of death has disappeared. I'm resting there for awhile before I journey back out.
|
January 18th, 2009
09:20 pm - I'm a circle
I haven't posted for a long time because it all seemed more of the same--grief. The holidays were hard, but Ive worked hard at making new friends this year and I didn't feel alone. Life continues and in many ways is good.
Somehow, through the holidays, a new year beginning, and another birthday something has happened within me. I don't feel like an ellipse missing one of the foci anymore; I feel like a circle. My emotions are still up and down, but I feel centered. It has been a long journey to this feeling.
I'm not sure what will happen in the next month as I approach the one year anniversary, but for today life is okay. And this week we get to see a man live out Martin Luther King Jr. Dream. Even when there is so much trouble in life, hope is a guiding light.
For someone with NO musical talent, music really speaks to me and helps me find my way in life. My song right now is David Sylvian's 'Laugher and Forgetting'.
Running like a horse between the trees
The ground beneath my feet
Gives me something to hold on to
With the reins around my heart
Guided by hands that spread life before my very eyes
Well every hope falls down on it’s knees in time
But I’m no longer lost
Every day, every second, every hour inside
Love’s my only guide
Are these the years for laughter and forgetting?
|
November 8th, 2008
07:17 am - Moments of heaven
Have you ever had one of those moments that feels as if it is what heaven must be? One of those moments that stays with you forever? At the time you realize it is amazing and special but you don't realize how often the memory will come back and sustain you by putting you in touch with heaven. There was one spring day when I was in elementary school that was like that. I could have been anywhere from second to fifth grade, I don't remember. I was walking downtown in my small Wyoming hometown. The snow was melting and running down the gutter like a little stream. The sun was warm but the breeze was crisp since it had blown past the mountain snow before it reached me. The sky was clear blue like it never is where I live now and I was eating Easter candy. Some type of sweet-tart egg. It was one of those moments of being overwhelmed by beauty coming through all five senses that I felt connected to the creator of it all. When I think of God or heaven, that memory is the one that comes back to me. I woke up this morning with that memory, I'm not sure why.
|
October 24th, 2008
09:49 pm
I have known all along that I would have a life after Bob. Being female and twenty years younger, the odds were very slim that I would die first. But there is a huge difference in knowing that I will have to build this life after Bob. I could take the direct object route and let it happen to me. But I don't think that either Bob or God would be happy with me if I chose to be the direct object rather than the subject of my life.
I have not yet figured out the what or how of it, but I know that I have to do life with intent. Anything less would be wasting the gift of life that I have been given.
|
October 11th, 2008
07:26 am - Having to do things you are not ready to do
I am so not ready to have moved. I'm not ready to leave the past behind and nothing has made me feel that as clearly as moving. I have to move into the future and I know that the future will hold good things, but I'm just not ready.
I love a piece of dialog from the movie 'Saved'.
Mother: When God closes a door he opens a window.
Daughter: Yeah, so he has something to push you out off.
I'm not sure I have the exact line, but that is the idea. I feel pushed out of a window and I am flapping as hard as I can hoping that I can fly before I hit the ground.
|
October 10th, 2008
04:48 am - moving
I moved this week. The apartment complex I'm in is renovating the apartments and expect to be done within this year so I could not renew the lease. I moved to another one in the same building. I need to sort through and get rid of stuff. I don't know where it all fit.
I haven't done this much physical activity in three days in a long time and I am stiff and have unbelievable muscle aches. I can't believe the things I knew I had to do but kept forgetting. Like doing a change of address from with the post office.
Also, I mistyped my e-mail password and need to call the tech number to fix it. My account isn't the primary one and I don't remember what the primary one was.
|
September 4th, 2008
08:56 pm
I spent last Sunday and Monday doing things to take the fear out of some of the associations I had from last year. I replayed the path of events of Aug. 31 - Sept. 1 2007--sans heart attack.
I went to the Barnes and Nobel that we went to last year. I had the coffee drink that I haven't had since that day. Then I went to the hospital and spent some time in the ICU waiting room and chapel. I cried and then came home. They have new furniture in the waiting room. I guess time really has passed.
On Monday I went to a restaurant I haven't been to since Bob died. I actually enjoyed sitting there thinking about conversations we had over meals. And I didn't cry, which totally surprised me. Then I went to a movie at the theater where we went to our last movie. I didn't stay for the whole movie, but that's another "haven't done since" thing checked off my list.
In the weeks after the hospital Bob made me promise to continue living and loving life and people when he died. I think that has helped me give myself the permission to continue. It even let's me give myself the permission to FEEL alive now and then and pursue interests that I didn't while focused on Bob's health, but I miss having him here with me. There are so many things I want to tell him and so many jokes that go unsaid because only he would understand (or at least appreciate) them. And the things he did that made me mad while he was here, make me mad when I think about them. And the things that made me feel warm and loved bring back those feelings when I think about them. That is what grief looks like at six months--getting through the ups and downs of one day -- and then another day -- and then another day -- and so on.
|
August 31st, 2008
05:41 am - Sometimes a year is a YEAR!
One year ago today Bob and I spent the afternoon at Barnes and Nobel because it was really hot and their AC is so much better than ours. And he couldn't handle the heat in the condition he was in. That night he had a heart attack and ended up in ICU.
Six months ago tonight I kissed Bob good night for the last time. He passed away in his sleep.
Through all of this, I am learning to live in the moment. I can't think beyond 'now'.
|
August 17th, 2008
06:33 pm - I believe in the sanctity of marriage and, therefore, marriage equality
Earlier this year same sex marriage became legal in California. Those who want to limit marriage to heterosexuals have place a measure on the ballot for this November's election to limit marriage. I will be voting NO on Prop 8. I was not raised to support homosexual marriage. I was raised to see homosexuality as one of the greatest sins-although I a was also raised to see all sin as being equal in meriting damnation. (Don't try to figure it out, it will give you a headache.)
So why don't I believe what I was taught? The simple answer is that my faith journey changed my mind.
As I read the Bible for myself, I found many things in it that we have set aside and many things we gloss over. Have you noticed how many things you could be stoned for according to the Bible? Or how many wives all the big name characters had? And what was up with Abraham telling powerful people that Sarah was his sister and lending her out to them to have safe passage through their land? In the whole text, homosexuality seemed to be about as important as gluttony, if even that important. Have you seen how many of our Christian Leaders are habitual gluttons? Saying this as an overweight person myself, they are living a perpetual lifestyle of 'sin'. But is anyone trying to make them legal second class citizens because of it? I'm not seeing it.
I first noticed these things while attending a conservative Christian college and taking my required Bible classes. I was at that age of deciding who I would be as an adult. I have always been introspective, so I weighed what I was reading in Bible stories against my own life/thoughts/feelings and what I saw in others around me. I also did this with what I was learning in other classes (science, psychology, sociology, literature) that dealt with what made people who they are. I paid attention to my reactions to what I learned and saw and decided that in the area of love relationships we all fall somewhere on three continuums.
We are all somewhere on the continuum of feeling male to female.
We are all somewhere on the continuum of feeling sexual desire for males or females.
We are all somewhere on the continuum of our emotional and sexual intimacy being very closely tied together or being sexually intimate without being emotionally intimate.
I think I was able to look carefully at this because my own personal leanings were 'acceptable' with my society's values. But the lack of social judgment of my own feelings also gave me the freedom to think 'What if my natural leanings were different?'
And then I fell in love with someone 22 years older than I was. In our 15 plus years together I learned to love more. I learned to accept being loved more. We learned more about forgiveness. He read Harry Potter. I watched baseball. We learned to be more fully human. This is what intimate committed love relationships are about and what is sacred about them. But I also learned what it was like to slowly stop holding hands in public because of the glares when people disapproved of our age difference. I learned to be aware of where we were and who was around and how they might react to us before I put my hand on his thigh when I sat next to him in an audience. And when we went to the emergency room, I learned to expect to have to correct people's assumption that I was his daughter and tell them I was his wife. But what I don't know, is not having the legal standing of being a spouse. When Bob died I was his next of kin. No one kept me away from him in the hospital because I wasn't 'family'. I was able to make all the decisions about what to do when he died; I did not have to defer to someone who didn't know him anywhere near as well as I did. And THAT is what my NO vote on Prop 8 will be about this November. It is about all people who share the same love that Bob and I had for each other having the legal right to be next of kin. If you are in California, I urge you to join me in helping keep marriage legal for all couples. And if you are in other states, please think about the issue of marriage equality and how people who love each other are treated in your communities.
|
August 11th, 2008
07:09 am
I had a thought that I liked very much and was going to post. But it was as I first was starting the coffee. Since then I fed the cats, and now the thought is gone. This is grief. I'm beginning to think that I am just going to be along for the ride in life for the next couple of years.
Grief is the small print of falling in love. At some point it comes calling, unless you so protect yourself from the pain that you never let yourself connect to another person. And, on this roller coaster that seems to be all drops (I've never felt the thrill of roller coaster drops, I don't like the feeling of falling.) with a few horizontal breaks, it is easy to forget that climb of love with periodic drops of arguments and disappointments which seemed major at the time but were small compared to the drop of grief. Grief is what brings one down from the heights of love and back around to the level of the self alone pulling back into the station where the ride started, back at the beginning, not the same, but changed by the experience. At the amusement park I will choose the merry-go-round over the roller coaster, but in life I will choose the roller coaster.
I just wish I could remember the thought that I lost. I'm seeing a grief counselor talked to her about the forgetting aspect of grief. She said it is likely to last a couple of years. Sigh. . .
|
July 2nd, 2008
03:32 am
I am running from my feelings. This doesn't work. I had some work I needed to crank out and spent the weekend with people instead of alone so I didn't do my grief work (sitting and feeling the grief, journaling, etc.) either last week during the week or over the weekend. So I've been periodically leaking tears. I've also been a little manic as I try to distance myself from crying. I went up to Anaheim to see friends at the ALA convention. As I was walking the floor looking for the person I had gone up to see, I found someone else that I had gone to Vermont College with signing, so I stopped and chatted. For a moment I was transported back several years. Then when she asked how life was, I said, "Good, oh yeah, except my husband died." In the time of that sentence I had to transport my mind from years ago when he was alive to the present when he is gone.
It's been four months. In the bereavement group I've been going to, the grief counselor said that for the really big losses in our lives it takes a year or two. This is the small print that you don't read when you fall in love. I think the thing to do is only fall in love with someone who is 95% more likely to outlive you. Then you get to escape it. The problem is that when you love someone you would rather go through it than have them feel this. So, all I can do is keep doing life while always feeling an undercurrent of death that the people I interact with aren't feeling. What I really want to do is find a nice soft nest in a cool dark place and curl up in the fetal position and sleep and sleep and sleep.
|
June 22nd, 2008
07:02 pm - Depression
I feel like I'm living on two levels. I am so incredibly sad and lonely on the level I am grieving and I am more normal on the other level-not back to my normal self, but closer. I can handle each thing right in front of me, but I can't connect them or keep them in mind if they are not right in front of me. I feel like I am going through each day stringing beads on a needle only to find out at the end that the needle had no thread and I have a pile of disconnected beads.
And now that I am beginning again to be aware of the world around me, I miss Bob even more than when his being gone was the only thing I was aware of. For over fifteen years he was always there to be my memory for me. I no longer have a private historian to help me remember dates in my own life or to check historical facts and context. Now I have to look things up if I want to know. I didn't realize that there was so much I never incorporated into my own mind because I had him as auxiliary memory. My not bothering to remember that was the main thing about me that annoyed him. Now it is annoying me.
I spent much of last weekend watching MSNBC as people grieved Tim Russert. It was comforting to see others paused by death in the way I have felt while the rest of the world continued. Bob was a news junkie and I have often thought about what a shame it was he didn't get to see the whole election. I hope somewhere Tim Russert and Bob and other news junkies who have passed are getting to watch it.
This whole grief thing is so hard. I wish I could just sit and stare, but life still requires living and moving and thinking and earning a living. The earning a living makes Sunday evening especially hard because I never can imagine getting up and making it through a week. Once I'm up on Monday it isn't as bad, but on Sunday night I have no idea where I will find the energy.
Now that my layers are coming back, I suspect life will simultaneously get better and worse for quite some time.
|
June 3rd, 2008
08:31 am
I thought I would be doing better three months out, but this is actually harder. I am trying to function normally and get things done, but I still can't concentrate. Now I have more aches and cry more. Then I was numb and unaware that I was staring into space. Now I'm aware of it and feel like I should be doing what needs to get done but still I stare in shock. Numb shock is more comfortable than painful aware shock. I suppose it is improvement even if it feels like the opposite.
|
May 31st, 2008
10:18 pm - Why I (a straight Christian) support same-sex marriage
Bob and I were married 16 years ago today. He died three months ago tonight.
I've been thinking a lot about what marriage means. Marriage is one of two ways that non-birth familial relationships are created (other being the parent-child relationship of adoption). Marriage is the legal partnership of two people who have chosen to blend their lives together into one. It creates the closest recognized next-of-kin relationship. I was taught in a Christian church that God hated homosexuality. Then, in college, I read the stories that were used as proof, and didn't see it. (Rev. Mel White, has written a pamphlet about what the Bible says and doesn't say about homosexuality, if you would like to explore the issue.) I don't understand why American Christianity at the turn of the 21st century holds firmly to homophobia when we have let go of so many other biases that scripture can be used to support. In the last three months one of the things I have found most comforting has been witnessing those small moments of couple tenderness. Leaning into one another. A hand brushing a knee in welcome when the other person sits down. Leaning over and lightly kissing a temple. These moments have been between heterosexual and homosexual couples. I can not see a difference between heterosexual and homosexual love. (I see a difference between couples who are equal partners in love and couples who are together in a dance of power, the first is healthy, the second not. BTW, most of the couples I know in that unhealthy dance of power are straight.) Knowing what it means in one's life to be married, and knowing how much less complicated it was that I was Bob's next-of-kin in dealing with his death, I am delighted with the California Supreme court's ruling this month. And this fall, if there is a ballot initiative to change the California constitution to support bigotry, I will stand against it and fight those who would use my religion to deny marriage to people who have created the same life partnership that Bob and I had.
|
May 20th, 2008
05:29 am - I'm not usually impulsive . . .
But, with grief brain, I don't have a choice. I don't retain thoughts right now for more than an instant. And remembering what I need to take care of has never been a strong skill for me. When Bob died, the memory of him saying (many many many times) that I would burn down the house without him to remind me that something was on the stove caused a certain level of panic. Of course if it is 'something' on the stove, I will know I have forgotten it by the smell. But boiling water? I went a bought a tea pot that whistles. And yes, it has startled me because I forgot I was boiling water. If someone asks me to do something, I try to do it right away so that I don't forget. Usually I think things through and debate them with myself. But now, I don't know that I will retain the thought long enough to think it through, so I am impulsive. In sometimes it is frustrating, but other times? I kind of like it.
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
laurakemp's journal