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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.
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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. . .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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May 3rd, 2008
05:32 am - What I have learned from love and death so far
It has been two months since Bob died. I have been thinking about what it means to be a partnered soul, and what it means when one of those souls moves into eternity.
I did not know until I felt spiritual exhaustion that there is a part of the soul deeper than the psyche. I have been physically, emotionally, and psychologically exhausted before, but never to the core of my soul.
This is the image that has taken shape in my mind over the last two months. The soul is the very core of the self. It is the center of a circle (a closed plane curve every point of which is equidistant from a fixed point within the curve*). It is something we are born with that is constant regardless of where or when we were born. Our sense of self is developed in the context of life experience and relating to others. It is what I have thought of as one's identity. And it is the area of the circle. It includes the psyche, with the unconscious closest in to the center (soul) and the conscious farthest out. When we fall in love and decide to journey through life with a partner, the two circles merge into an ellipse (a closed plane curve generated by a point moving in such a way that the sums of its distances from two fixed points is a constant*). The two fixed points are the foci of the ellipse. They are the two individual souls that become partnered. The souls remain distinct, but the sense of self merges into an identity of being part of a couple. I think this thinking of the two as one is true both for each member of the couple and for other people. If you watch couples in a social event, you see that they are aware of each other even if they are in different parts of the room. They look around periodically and see where the other one is. Even if you know only one of the people in a couple, there is the awareness of the union with the other. We've even created the symbol of a ring on the ring finger of the left hand which is a silent witness to the soul that is the other foci of the ellipse of a couple. When one partner dies, the other is left alone to mourn. Mourning is the process of the sense of self returning to a circle. But the circle is not what it was before the partnership. The circle now contains much of what was in the ellipse. It contains the growth and memories of the shared life journey. Some of what was the specific to the other one disappears with them, but much of it stays and rearranges into the circle of the individual self. I have no idea how long this takes. My sense of self is still at the stage of a very wobbling undefined blob shape. What I like about my geometry of individual and partnered souls is that the very core of the self, the soul, remains distinct while the sense of self, the psyche, changes. This is what captures my experience of who I was before Bob, with Bob, and after Bob. It is an image that allows me a sense of continuity and wholeness of my soul while at the same time it allows me a sense of flux and chaos of my psyche and identity. Thank you all for being there for me the last two months.
*from: www.merriam-webster.com/
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April 26th, 2008
08:18 am
Losing your soul mate is like going from being one of two foci of an ellipse to being the center of a circle. It is an exhausting transition.
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April 21st, 2008
08:38 pm - sad
Tonight I am sad--nonpoetically sad. Even smores didn't touch this sadness, so for tonight I will be sad. On every layer. Sad. Just. Sad.
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April 20th, 2008
04:08 pm - What happens when you alphebatize books by author
I'm not paying any attention to type of book, so if one author writes various types of books they are all together. For instance, Anne Lamott's books on writing, essays, and novels are all together. This has also means that odd categories of books are next to each other. So far my favorite is that Herodotus's THE HISTORIES is sandwiched between Henke's JULIUS, THE BABY OF THE WORLD and Heyward's THE COUNTRY BUNNY AND THE LITTLE GOLD SHOES. If I find something that breaks up this trio, it will have to go into the donation pile.
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08:48 am - A shout out to Carrie Jones
I finally read Carrie's book, Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend. I was waiting until I found it on a store shelf. Silly, huh. I wanted to give business to whatever bookstore carried it. I think it was a Borders. The Barnes and Nobles I've been to didn't. Of course B&N and Borders are all part of one company, but whatever.
What I found was that this book helped me with grief. I've have various layers of complete-heart-broken-can't-do-anything-but-cry and the-sun-is-shining-and-I-want-to-laugh-and-twirl moments in the last seven weeks. And time feels so slow. Each week feels like a month. I think something happened last week, but it was yesterday. I found this feeling in Tips, also. But mostly, it helped give me the assurance that I can be stuck and sad and continue and be happy all at the same time. Thanks, Carrie!
Current Music: birds singing outside the window
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April 19th, 2008
06:58 pm - How do you arrange your books?
I have spent the last three hours dusting and alphabetizing books. I am in the C's. I am ruining Bob's nice sorting and aesthetics. I am doing this because I almost bought a book and then thought that Bob must have already had a copy. Yep, I found it. I know most of mine, but not his. I was always lazy and just asked for info instead of looking it up. Now I have to find it. And, yes, if I had enough spices, they would be alphabetized. They really don't look as nice anymore. The lines are all jagged. But I can find things and not by duplicates or even triplicates.
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April 16th, 2008
06:10 am - imprints
I gained weight during the nearly 16 years of our marriage. Although the ring is no longer on my finger, its imprint remains. Although Bob is no longer here and I no longer have that most intimate friend and partner to talk to, cry with, and laugh with at the end of the day, his imprint is on my heart, mind, and soul. The imprint of love remains after death.
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April 14th, 2008
10:27 am - I took my ring off this morning
The emptiness of my finger is a more accurate reflection of my heart now. Not that my heart is empty, but that I am alone in that most intimate of partnerships. The ring symbolizes partnership, that there is someone walking through life's journey with you. Maybe that person is off doing their stuff during the day, but at the end of the day you come together as a couple. I don't have that partner in my life that the ring symbolizes. The ring felt like a lie in the face of the snow drifts on my heart. And oddly, after removing the ring, I felt Bob's presence as I had not since waking to find he had died. I think he is finding a new place in my heart which is helping the new growth of spring to happen. And later in the day, this realization will probably trigger a snow flurry.
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April 13th, 2008
05:28 pm - How are you doing?
Right now, when people (other than complete strangers who don't know about my husband's death) ask me this, I know it is not just a polite greeting. And yet, I'm hard pressed for an answer. I've been answering by saying a standard 'okay'. And this is true, but there is a much clearer truth.
How am I?
In one word--muddy. I am like that season of winter beginning its change into spring. There are cold iced over snowdrifts hanging around in the shadows. In sunny spots of my soul there are tiny bits of green breaking through to the surface. This is new ground for me, so I can't say what the plants are. I will have to wait and watch them grow until they are recognizable. And I wonder where one finds a good botanist of the soul who can recognize these plants from the leaves before the buds appear, or do I just have to wait for the bloom before I know? And in any moment, even with this promise of spring, I know that one of winter's late blizzards can take me by surprise. Cold winds will surround me and these tiny hints of life will be buried under the snow of sadness and despair. But it is a wet spring snow, no longer the icy dry crystals of winter. The sun comes out and melts this snow quickly. I long for spring to push out winter, but it isn't strong enough for that yet. So, currently, I am in one word--muddy.
btw-- I wish I were an Eskimo because I know I used the word 'snow' too often and wish I had the variety of words to describe different types of snow that Eskimo's have.
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April 11th, 2008
08:20 am - My mind is doing something new
I've never experienced this, but my mind is thinking clearly in very short spurts . . . and then blank. Totally BLANK!!! So I am hoping that the short spurts are long enough to get the needed done. Also, I some words are missing. Either the word or how to approach spelling it. Well, maybe the spellining part is normal for me. I was just talking to a friend that I talk to every day, and went blank on her name. It is very odd. I trust it won't last. But it is something I want to remember for a character some day.
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April 7th, 2008
10:17 pm - Grief is a daily learning experience
One of my co-workers and friends nearly died during childbirth two years ago. She had been in a coma since then and passed away over the weekend. I posted pictures of the blanket I knit for her before she left for maternity leave.
I finally cried profusely around other people this morning. Then I came home from work and slept. Tomorrow would have been Bob's 63 birthday. Audrey was only 30 when she went into the coma. Life is never long enough and so much is left undone. And I can't fix it. I can't make it better. And I hate this helplessness against time and death. The world lost so much with these to people. Tonight was the first time that I stepped back from my own grief far enough to realize what others lost in his death. Just as I can see how much we all lost in the loss of Audrey, even though our loss is not as acute as that of her husband and daughter. We all touch so many people each day. I wish I could give everyone everything I would like to with my life, but I feel so inadequate. And I know that when I die, I too will leave my life unfinished. I do hope I have at least 40 more years to chip away at life. But it will never be enough. And I can't fix the fact of death, I can't undo it. I can only put one foot in front of the other, often not even knowing where I am going, and hope that it is enough.
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March 31st, 2008
07:21 pm - AIDS Walk
I'm joining the AIDS Walk in May. If you would like to sponsor me, please click here.
Thank you,
Laura
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06:02 pm - Carrie Jones!
I don't have the words to say how much I admire Carrie Jones.
Information about her candidacy for Maine state legislator
Author website
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laurakemp's journal