Christmas Eve and Beliefs

If our family had kept the Christ in Christmas, as the slogan of a few years ago goes, we would have never celebrated it. My parents were atheist/agnostic, and not interested in belief.

However, we had a tree, and lights: white ones on the part of the tree that shone out to the outside world, color lights for inside the house. There was magic there, in the jokes, in the presents, in the lights and in the Handel's Messiah and other classical music. The wine. Herring filets on Ritz Crackers with Mertz's cheese spread. Potato chips with French Onion Dip.

In other words, we had traditions.

Sometimes I think I miss my parents on holidays like this. I do. I miss them. I miss these traditions, though I barely celebrate Christmas anymore. I could bring any of these back, enact these traditions. Fundamentally, though I miss childhood, which I know I can't get back. None of us can.

So what can I take from that to believe in? Carry forward?

Fear of Dying

Bandaged heart graffiti by Beni, Paris 2015

Travel takes me close to death, but not in the way you would think.

When I board a plane to Europe, when I find my seat on the Eurostar, when I climb down the steps of the Metro to ride the No 1 line to La Defense, I am not thinking about death. Not even remotely. When the metro car stops mid-tunnel when it is supposed to be moving, when the train slows down for a moment and the lights go out, when the plane jostles through some rough clouds, maybe I think of death just a bit. Never conscious, always under the surface, some sense of knowing the truth peeks out and makes itself known.

But when I really really think about death is when I am with the people I love. When I look at the face of a friend across the dinner or breakfast table, when I take my wife's hand on the sofa and share a smile, when I tightly bind myself to a heart another in a deep hug, at these moments, often something fleets across my awareness: this may be the last time. We never know.

This is the thing: we never know. If having lost my parents when I was young taught me anything, it taught me this. It did not teach me what to say to others when they have dramatic loss. It did not teach me how to feel or what to do to assuage grief. But it did show me that we really never know.

This is an odd kind of knowledge. Unfortunately, unlike memorizing the conjugations of the verb "to be" in a foreign language, it's not the kind of knowledge that comes back easily. When it arises in my consciousness, as it did this morning in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, I want to bat it away. I want to know what happens next, even if I know that that knowing itself causes me more harm in the end. 

The Americans

My father in Northern Ireland, early 1960's*

Ilana and I began watching the series The Americans yesterday. It's a fantastic show. The acting is subtle and strong, the depictions of spying and undercover life understated and compelling. Ilana told me, after just one episode, that she had had a fantasy that her family was undercover, secret Soviet spies, when she was young. I never knew that, but it makes sense in light of some other fantasies she's shared with me.

Funnily enough, I never had this fantasy, despite the fact that I experienced my mother as a Russophile.

The photo above shows my dad in Northern Ireland. This is the beginning of the era where they drove to Russia together, peeping behind the Iron Curtain in a VW Bug. The story goes that they were taking a co-worker of Dad's back, but of course Mom wanted any reason to head to Russia. She was fluent, with a Master's degree in Russian. I haven't dug deeply enough to see what her personal reaction was to being there (I have letters and whatnot somewhere), but I know she joked that people mistook our father for a young Lenin. The facial hair probably had a lot to do with that.

You can see it even more obviously in this theatrical shot of him from when my parents first met. He was Judge Hawthorne in a production of The Crucible at the time:

My dad as Judge Hawthorne, late 1950's. Pretty Lenin-like, eh?!

What is funny to me is that I grew up in Joseph McCarthy's hometown and burial place - Appleton WI - and my mother was a Russophile. We had Russian books and artefacts all over our house. This was mid-Cold War - 70's, 80's. Not an easy time to be into Russia in midwestern America. My mom was pretty quiet about it - didn't have many close friends in our town anyway. Dad made jokes (and likely actually did both) about pissing on McCarthy's grave and dating one of the Rosenberg's cousins before marrying Mom.

So it wasn't exactly a secret. Then again, there was nothing to hide.

If you are a spy, you cover it all up.
My parents had nothing to hide.

But I didn't grow up in a typical American family. Definitely not average Midwesterners, and certainly not the suburban-like neighbors we had. Mom taught me that New York was the promised land, and even more so, Europe. Travel was to be expected, if not living abroad. They would have raised us in Ireland if there hadn't been "the troubles" at the time. Mom went to a private, very well cultured school in Chicago growing up.

To be a small-town Midwesterner meant things she disdained: well-kept lawns, carpools, gossip and doing your nails. It's hard now to tell what was her own shame in comparing herself or our family to the surrounding community, and what was actual ethic or cultural preference for her. But the ebony bust of Nefertiti on our grand piano and the brass-and-glass Russian tea sets on the side board certainly imply she had other tastes.

Very few objects in The Americans look familiar to me. They don't indulge in Russian culture - the spy KGB couple have to act as if they have no idea what caviar is when they encounter it. And yet, there is something about their lives - trying to get by in the 80's in America as non-Americans - that I get. My parents were Americans by birth, but they didn't act like the other Americans around us. So something feels familiar to me in the way these Americans act. A little bit off. A little bit disjointed.

*I made some revisions to this post after my eldest brother brought some family stories - and definitely some dates! - into better alignment for me.

Let Some Shit Lie.

Day 8 of ‪#‎Quest2015‬ - The prompt of the day from Eric Klein:

How will you face your shadow bag and stop the stink, so you can bring forth what is best within you in 2015? What can you claim right now?

What I can claim is that I do this work all the time, constantly. In fact, dragging around the bag tired me out years ago. What wears at me now is actually the work of scooping it up. I am ready to let some shit lie there and let it stink.

I find I am tired now because I have dug a bit deeper recently than usual, and pulled up some plugs that I knew were keeping my drains from flowing freely. Now that the fluids are rolling out again, I need to lay back and let myself go out with the waters.

My only shadow is what I keep from myself, whether out of survival/protection or in some kind of saving face/flying under detection manoeuvre. For awhile now I have had recurring neck issues, and worked through them with Hakomi therapy and also chiropractor work. These have both been useful, but as some recent deep re-configuring of grief over my mother's death has arisen, I had suspected that my neck and my sadness were deeply entangled.

At a meditation instructor training I found incredible palpable energetic evidence that they are. In situations, repeatedly as we practiced and trained, I tracked as my body tensed and mind became righteous, worried because "the person in charge" (not me) was "not doing their job" and so "someone had to do something" and "the only person who could/would do it was me." In these tiny interactions, the teachers detected my aggressions before I did, mirroring back a struggle I didn't realize I was having. My peers, the other students, mirrored back gratitude that I interrupted unhealthy situations. But my body felt exhausted, like it had been climbing uphill all day.

I had to ask myself, once I saw how clearly I was triggered, then reacting to my sense of lost power with incredibly controlling behavior, what was really going on? The answer was clear as day: I was taken back to a place, the place I visited so frequently when my father died (I was 12) and my mother didn't know how to stay alive - the place, the era, the state of mind of unpredictability, drinking, incredibly hostility at home. It only lasted a few years - and in fact, got better in the last few years of her life - but I was so traumatized that for a long time all I would feel was shock, tension and control whenever a situation seemed at all unstable for me.

Cue now.

So this is the current shadow. They get subtler over time - when I told one person what I was wrestling with, after our group meeting, she screwed up her face and looked at me oddly. What? I hadn't been controlling, she said. But my body told me otherwise. I use "controlling" not to be judgmental but to get to the core of what that energy-draining background program has been trying to do, unconsciously, for over half my life now.

I am ready to pull the plug on this shadow beast, but of course that's not how it works.

Instead I am using this darkest time of the year to rest, and to merge a bit, with long moments of deep breaths, with this inner core pain.

Hello in there, dear shadow.
Let's air you out and maybe you won't stink so much.
Let's go for a walk together, get you out and about.
Let's get you more familiar with life so it doesn't freak you out so much.
We are about to do some flying and I need you to be willing to let some shit lie so we can take off together into the huge sky of 2015.

My Mother, My Brothers.

January 24th, next Friday, will be the 17th anniversary of my mother's death.

I don't formally recognize it every year. It almost always it takes me by surprise if I don't, as if my body knows (and it does) exactly when it the anniversary is, even if my mind has forgotten.

This week, the week of the anniversary, I will go to where our family is buried - mother included - at our family cabin in southern Wisconsin. The brother who owns it has decided to sell it, which is fair. I can't imagine having a second property to keep up, and this one is laden with all kinds of heavy family history, as well as some good memories. It's time to let go.

Loneliness

I have had an epic stretch of fundamental loneliness. I have been home for quite some time - not alone, in fact, in classes, with Dylan, with cats. It does not happen when I am alone - it happens when I am with others. Maybe it is autumn, but I suspect it is other things - other stories. Some of it is my own story - missing my mother, nostalgia and real feeling brought about by various books and movies I've been reading/watching*.

Grief and Letting Go

Grief is a tough one for me.

Or is it?

Having lost my parents when I was pretty young, I am prone to moments - on the treadmill, in bed in the morning or late evening, petting the cats, watching a movie - of missing them.

Or am I?

It's spring. My mother died on January 24. My father on March 15. My mom's birthday would be April 10, and my father's March 25. The spring is annually pockmarked with their absences.

For a long time I identified with my grief. Every time I was sad, it was about my parents. A therapist I had in my late twenties, concerned about my repeated, cyclical depression and anxiety, had me map my emotional responses. Sure enough, at the same time each month, I missed my parents. Missed them because they were dead, missed them because they were often absent even when alive. Missed the idea of having parents. Got angry at them for what they did. Wished they'd done otherwise. Regretted disliking my mother so much when she was alive. Rinse. Repeat.

The therapist said:
While I believe you were traumatized as a child and young adult, I think this cycle is chemical.
I was diagnosed with PMDD - pre menstrual dysphoric disorder. It fit the bill perfectly - a very severe emotional response to the normal hormonal fluctuations of PMS.

Ok. Good. I evened out more. Because I understood the chemical component of my sadness/anxiety, I could also see that perhaps I was holding on to something - my parents'/the idea of my parents/my sadness. I got that a bit. I became more able to let it go, meaning: it was already gone, and I could see it was gone. Came, went. Came again, went again.

However, only recently have I noticed that the acute pain of loss, of hurt and grief, 
returns as well.
Yes, it goes. Yes, it comes again.

On one of numerous road trips for a dharma program that I have recently been on, a sangha friend replied that, when I told her that my parents and grandparents were gone by the time I was 22,
You were all alone.
I balked, though I've been known to say things like this, honestly.
I said, No, I still had, still have, my two older brothers.
But you didn't have any - don't have any - aunts or uncles or anything?
That's true.

I felt the acute sadness behind this story - this story I have told so many times, felt sad about so many times. Yes, I am all alone, I have felt so often. Yes, I was abandoned. And yet, what I was feeling then, it feels like now, were the words. I was feeling the stor(ies)y, not the feelings.

Now, now I am feeling the feelings more. Thanks to meds, meditation and more and more practice recently than in a couple of years, I am sensitized, close to the surface, and aware. Aware when the feelings come, and aware enough to really feel them. Then, to really watch them go.

This is what I talked about in a more abstract way in my recent post on elephant journal.
This is what letting go is - letting them go. Permitting, nay, noticing, accepting that what is gone is already gone.

Each time I acknowledge my feelings and let them go away, see that they are already gone, I am actually letting go of my parents. This is something I haven't been doing in the past. Maybe it was extended denial, or shock. It seemed like acceptance, but as I get closer to some feeling of real acceptance, I can see how far off it was.

There's no problem with that. I am not angry at myself, or shocked, hurt that this is 
"still going on."
No, instead I am grateful, most of the time, that I can keep learning to let go, the only way how:
Now.
Now.
And now again. Experiential. Real. Non-conceptual. In the moment. 

That's the only way to let go.