On Letting Be

Link here to YouTube video of The Beatles, "Let It Be"

Thanks to the Internet, I have some experiences that knock me down from time to time, things that used to drift slowly through postal mail, using headlines or obituaries clipped from papers in towns where significant people live. Sometimes, a person could never know something important about someone who might have been a relative, or a close friend, because the ties would break down and the news would never travel to that corner.

I used to receive letters and clippings from my mother. She would let me know of the death of a classmate or friend, or a teacher, or the engagement of a relative, then we would talk on the phone, and see each other because of the funeral, or the wedding.

My first bereavement experience online was of the man I thought I would marry once upon a time when I was very young. He was the sweetest boy, yet tortured and inwardly bent and broken so that he could only commune in nature, near-silence, walking the hills of his woods. He was an artist, and a musician, and at heart, a hermit. I became infatuated with him when we were in college and he was breaking up with a long-time girlfriend. We passed each other on the sidewalk, noticed each other, and began to ask others who we were.

I pursued him, and he allowed himself to be caught. Yet, when I began to make little departures for adventures (Bolivia, India, seminary, Mississippi ...), he was hurt and afraid. I wanted him to pursue me, but I had to go. I began to learn, I had to let him be.

He became to me like a bird, flightly and beautiful, always there in his Lookout Mountain woods, could be heard but not seen, somehow staying on the other side of the tree as I looked for him. Over time, I left him to his woods and songs; I let him be, and, as I let him be, I let him go and let my own life be. He would call from time to time, not without its exquisite pain in those moments.

I found my true love one day, or she found me; and one day became years and years, through changes and growing, and making a life together. She died in a freakish storm of devastation and crashing world. Brain death. Discontinued life support. Ashes. Shattered, I picked up pieces and kept on going, moving, becoming.

One day, in the midst of fresh grief, I thought I heard the call of that bird of my youth, when I entered a new wood in a new city. I saw a flicker of a feather escaping behind a tree on my new campus. My heart, at the time grieving the loss of my true love, skipped a little. I reached out over the net, to see if he could be found in his familiar wood. What I found silenced his call forever, scattered his feathers on the ground. I found his obituary.

The symmetry is cruel. This elusive bird of the deep woods died the same death as did my own true love. A missed diagnosis. A chest procedure. A botched bleed. An embolus to the brain. Brain death. Discontinued life support. A funeral. Ashes.

Later, in a confrontation of anger and shame, being cast out by my father, I explained, "You see, Dad? Either way, I am a widow. You will know how this feels one day. I hope then you will think of me, and understand."

Within two years, I lost my own true love and the elusive bird of my youth. I am now much older. This horrid symmetry still grips me in my depths, wracks me with tears, and will not let me be.

Over time, to function and to keep going, I have taken anti-depressants. As a result, I do not cry. I also lack high spirits. I stay quite level, but tend toward depression. I take adversity stoically. I have anger, I feel the blues, I feel happy, I have fun. I find deep inward joy in music and art, and working with my hands. I know, in my pathological intellectualizing (according to some) there is a grasping and holding on, a way of living in the past, letting this pain live on -- actually, it evolves, changes, becomes something else as I evolve, change, become someone else all the time, at least that is what I tell myself, and hope is true.

People tell me I have a disconnect between feeling and affective presentation when I tell my stories in settings ritualized and formalized for that purpose, telling and feeling, emoting, affect-ing. They say this as if I have a pathology that could be overcome. I must wonder: If I can I let this be, what do I care if others cannot?

This is my task: let it be.