Departures and disappearances

I'd sworn I would keep it light. Give all (2 0r 3) of you a break. Give myself a break for that matter... but I'm thinking about choice. Specifically, choosing to stay in the world or leave. And how we do either. Whether we're allowed to choose the latter.

On the weekend, I had a long talk with a friend who is experiencing escalating symptoms of serious illness. He's scared - not so much about whether he lives, but about how he lives for whatever time he's got. He wants to decide for himself whether to begin another round of tests and doctors. The options he's been given, if things progress as they've predicated, don't amount to his idea of a satisfactory life.

And today, at 5:00 a.m. I'm up and listening to the news and this piece about a disappearance aired on CBC morning news. On Saturday, A fit, healthy 70 year old woman, who'd been on the job for 18 years, was reported missing from her post at an Athabaska fire lookout tower. Gone from her cabin are pillows, a sheet and a duvet - and her father's watch. The watch is only, CBC reported this morning, of sentimental value.

Police are treating the disappearance as "suspicious," but when I heard the story I immediately thought of the lyrics to David Bowie's, "Space Oddity."

Though I'm past
one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows
which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much
she knows

The radio reporter said "it's so quiet there, you can hear a Raven's wing's beat." And I wondered if so much solitary time in deep woods has the same effect as being in space. I wondered, in fact, if she had simply walked away into the woods. Cut the line to the spaceship.
I know that's crazy.

Perhaps it resulted from the weekend conversation and hearing another story aired during the same five minute news break, launching further speculation about choices. This story concerned a murder/suicide that I have trouble thinking of as either "murder" or "suicide," at least in the sense we usually use the words. A 77 year old man visited his 80 year old wife, who was in her nursing home. They had just been told she was to ill to stay and she was to be transferred to a long-term care facility.

He visits, is friendly with the nurses as usual, loving and affectionate to his wife, as usual. When the nurse leaves, he shoots her and himself. Newspapers are using the word, "violent" to describe the deaths.

I cried when my father finally went to "long-term care." When I first saw the place, I made it to the elevator before I started sobbing, but only barely. It was not a bad "home" as these places go. But it was what it was.

He missed his jeans (too difficult for the nurses to help him dress). He missed having money of his own (it was always stolen). His art supplies were locked in the closet and he had to have permission to paint. He missed dignity and self-sufficiency. The staff were good to him - but there were too few, with too little time. It was a place where people waited to die. And so he did, very shortly, as I knew he would as soon as he went there.

While he was there, I kept remembering that years before, when my grandmother went into a nursing home, after he visited he said to me, "Please. If I ever get that way, shoot me."

I feel great tenderness towards that elderly couple. I don't believe they chose to die violently. I think they were cornered - and it just wasn't worth it anymore. I think they were brave. It was the only way they could decide for themselves without the well-intentioned interference of other people.

As far as Stephanie Stewart goes...I hope that she's safe and at peace...somewhere where it's quiet enough to hear the beat of a bird's wings. Frail as the chances are, I hope she chose.

Forgive me if this seems depressing. I don't find it so. For me it breaks through to the "genuine heart of sadness" Pema Chodron speaks of...and that is a very different thing. It cracks the shell of separateness. That kind of sadness is worthwhile, shared and human - a reminder of how paradoxically fragile and eternal we all are. It softens instead of hardening.

Perhaps I'll have something lighter for you by the long weekend. Meanwhile, I send you my love.

LJ

Leaving August

Turning of the season. Goldenrod and Queen Anne's Lace, the last of the wild roses, blowzy and dark at petal's edge, dying, making way for rose hips like tiny pumpkins. Starlings explode across the sky...avian fireworks.

The coastal sky - low, dense, heavy with cloud and fog so much of the year - is high blue, distant, timeless. My clock-driven, busy self shrugged off, reduced to a humming shadow. The self that's stopped on the bridge at Mac Run, the part who is holding onto the railing, head thrown back, oblivious to the whine and flow of traffic on the road behind, sends herself out to join that miraculous sky. Looks down to watch the river - and to hell with the ever-present rusting, abandoned shopping cart - looks down to watch water streaming over the long green hair of river grass.

Flows with that.
Flows with that.

Virtue, certainty and conscience.

Of all the Hobo signs, this is the one that stopped me in my tracks. Cowards. Will give to get rid of you.

What does the visual mean...the square, jagged at the bottom, sitting behind the unbroken square in front? Is the front shape meant to imply a coverup of the one with a flawed foundation? Obviously, a fake, a fraud is implied. The kindly, giving hand is not what it seems. Not dispensing compassion, but a bribe and an insult. A slap of rejection.

I used to cast around for some nice, smug moral or spiritual floatation device. This is the right thing to do... But paradox took a bite every time, and the deflation was rapid after that. I'd be left treading water in an ocean that kept providing sharks when I was looking for a rescue helicopter to take me to certainty.

Once I was in serious discussion with an astrology client who, I believed, was heading into some deep trouble if she didn't examine her basic paradigms about life and stop running from her own shadows. What, I asked her, is the most important thing in life?

"Kindness," she said.

"And if you knew that someone had to be told a hurtful feeling truth, something that might make them feel bad, and you knew that if you didn't tell them, they would be in a world of trouble...what would be kinder - to tell them, or to spare their feelings." She didn't hesitate.

"I wouldn't tell them because it would hurt their feelings."

Cowards. Will give to get rid of you.

Let she who is without sin cast the first stone. Understand, I have a sack full of stones for myself. Stones for every occasion.

For years, I gave to an NGO - one of those organizations that put children with at least one perfectly good parent up for "adoption." I pledged the money during the famine in Ethiopia. The organization was running a program on a PBS station. I watched those gaunt children, all distended stomachs, stick legs and dead eyes for all of two minutes and I called. Then, I dived for the remote to shut the television off - as if it had suddenly begun to pump hunger, thirst and hopelessness into my living room like radioactive fallout.

Perhaps my small donations bought a school book or helped sink a pump into the ground to provide water for a village, but I hated the guilt I felt reading the letters I got from that beautiful, brown-eyed child. Letters so obviously dictated, so correct, so Christian, that they left me certain the child in the picture had nothing at all to do with them, past being made to sit and print them out laboriously in some rural classroom. Forced gratitude, I thought. Why should the child be made to express gratitude for what was, to me, skipping a restaurant lunch twice a month? For what should have been her right.

I hated the things I later found out about how many NGO's operate. That knowledge of waste and fraud and mismanagement, against the knowledge there was a chance that a village might drink clean water. Mostly, though, I hated the unclean feeling that the money I sent was hush-money for my conscience.

I do believe in many of the traditional virtues...charity, love, kindness... And I think people demonstrate them daily, all over the world. So maybe it isn't paradox that disturbs me, really - but falseness. What masquerades as virtue but hides something else.

Cowards. Will give to get rid of you.

I try to check myself, to ask myself hard questions now - when something needs to be said, when I pull out a dollar for someone on the street, when I claim to love people. What do I want here? What are the conditions I'm putting on this? What am I secretly wanting back?

I've come to think that none of the virtues exist at all without the virtue of self-honesty at their core.

I've come to think that now. We'll see whether the universe wants to send Jaws or the helicopter.

Life on earth and other unstable concepts

I expect it's conjuring trouble to name your blog after a doomed dirigible.

But then, I get up in the morning, guzzle coffee and hustle out into the world - oblivious to the fact that I am situated on a ball of dirt which is hurtling through space at .29 miles per second and has molten lava at its center. Usually, while I'm checking my watch, locking my door, preparing for the day ahead, I am blissfully unaware of my flea-like size and importance, not to mention my mortality.

The mere act of being alive and incarnate is inviting trouble, so let's not be spooked by a little word association.

And if I tell you the quote about the Hindenburg under the title was sent to me by a friend who was describing my personal life and habit of writing about it - that should tell you more than you'd learn from the usual list we use to pigeon hole each other (so that we can immediately stop paying attention.)

You know the list: what-do-you-do, where-do-you-live, favorite musicTVbooksfilms.

Why do we do that? Surely it would be more interesting to know what someone wants carved on their tombstone when they depart this ball of hurtling mud. Or what was the most inappropriate thought they've ever had.

Alright. There's a start. I want Cowgirl of the century. This on the suggestion of the same friend who provided the Hindenburg quote and who has kindly consented to spray-paint graffiti on my grave marker.

As for inappropriate thoughts...

Years ago, I was coming home from work on a beautiful Friday in August. My walk took me through the petting zoo at Riverdale Park, down a steep set of stairs that led to a footpath over the Don Valley Parkway. Although it was a lazy summer afternoon, I was wary because there had recently been a brutal rape in the city - at noon - in a city park. And this particular afternoon, the park was empty of its usual scores of baseball teams, dog walkers and after work athletes.

As I got halfway down the steps, a jogger suddenly appeared - and hauled up to a dead stop at the bottom of the stairs. I stopped short too - then, because he resembled a friend of mine, I relaxed a little.
"Are there animals up there?" he yelled out. What? Oh.
"There's a petting zoo up the path, if you keep going."
"...Because there's none down here," he shouted, like it was the punchline of a joke. He turned around to run back in the direction he'd come from.

Very weird, I thought.

A minute later, when I got to the short path that led to the bridge, he was standing there enthusiastically masturbating. In my direction. And for my entertainment. Did I think, Run! Now!...? No. I stood there, cemented to the ground, thinking...

A simple "you look nice today would've done."