Obama, The Best

It was amazing for me to view yesterday's historic moment and feel a sense of hope for this country again.

I have lived through a lot of Presidential administrations and have to say that Bush, in my opinion, is truly the worst of all--and I lived through the Reagan years, Nixon, and Bush the First. I have seen a sense of hopelessness creep into people's lives during this administration which is soul-and-life oppressing, and I hope that Obama's administration will create an infusion of hope--for I think he WILL get elected.

Oh, and not to play down the great historical significance of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, but she's not a good choice for McCain to draw in the "angry Hilary supporters," as was said somewhere in the news today. Palin is highly conservative, anti-abortion, anti-same sex marriage, and is not, in my opinion, qualified enough in terms of her political record to be a heartbeat away from the presidency in these horrifically troubled times (McCain is 72 years old and has had four bouts with cancer). So that's my humble opinion on the matter.

And So It Goes

In grief counseling today, I drew a picture of myself and my sister (my counselor uses art sometimes in the sessions)--I drew myself in a purple dress, standing in my garden, my arms outstretched to her as she hovered beside me in a gray bubble. I had talked of feeling very separate from the process of helping to take down her apartment and scatter her ashes; she left these tasks to other people. Yet my counselor pointed out that I drew her as still with me in my daily life.

I dreamed about her the other night, but it wasn't the usual type of visitation dream--I dreamed I was swimming in the pool of my childhood home, but the pool had turned into a wonderful lagoon; I floated on my back and looked at the sky, an incandescent blue on the cusp between day and night, and I saw a gorgeous oval of incredibly brilliant light move slowly across it. I knew that was my sister, and that I was seeing her as she really is now. It was a very comforting dream, and one that has stayed with me.

Well, back to the mundane world and my 1A syllabus. Thanks for stopping by!

While Walking

I love to take my dog Atticus out for a walk on these wonderful, late-summer nights when the moon is coming into fullness. I think about the people asleep in their houses, or staying up late; I look up at the sky with its sparse handful of stars and tonight remembered something my brother-in-law said to me last year, when our family had gathered for a reunion. His sister had died that year, and he said wistfully, while looking with me at the gorgeous night sky, "I wonder if that's where my sister went."

I thought of that tonight as I walked my dog; I looked at Jupiter shining like a small, far-off window full of light and wondered where my own sister went. She has been woven into every thread of my life so far--one of my very first words was "sister"--and now my journey proceeds without her. When something good happened with my writing, I was always so happy to tell her about it, knowing she would share my joy. She was the most unwavering support of my work that anyone could ever want, and so was my friend Maude, who died a year ago. It is hard to proceed without these people in my life. Mr. Strega, who lost both his parents when he was a very young man, reassures me that time does heal even these terrible wounds. But even when they heal, the fact will remain that I have lost my sister, my mother, and an important friend, and I will not see them again until I take my own, final path into the mystery that lies beyond this life.

So what to do with all this grief? Just pick up and keep going, keep writing. She would not want me to just lay my writing down forever, and so I chug along, even when grief is like a stone sitting directly on my heart. What these terrible losses tell me is that time is the greatest gift I could possibly have, and one which, at this point, I dare not squander.

A Patient Journey

It's late and I have just spent a few days grading the final portfolios for my creative writing summer class. I am glad I took on this class--they were a terrific bunch of students and I will greatly miss them. Now I am at work on my 1A syllabus, though I am careful to be taking some form of vacation before I have to go back. I am using a brand-new textbook to me--I like to grow as a teacher and break out of the box every now and again, which means teaching new essays and stories (one of which is "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which I had never read until this summer--it blew me away). My mind was so stunned by shock after my sister's death that I could not comprehend the stories I was teaching. I think things are coming back for me--I can read and make sense of prose again.

I am resting in the fact that I will be at the alma mater for some time to come. I have come to love my job again--it always depends on how my body is doing with pain levels and so forth--but I feel that I have gotten better at managing my time and my anxiety about grading is getting less. I know things will be frenetic again in a few weeks--the campus will go from nicely uncrowded to crowded, the weather will be very hot for awhile, and then the weather will change. And I will be there, teaching away--but my sister will still be gone. For the rest of my life, she will not be there. I am especially sad that she will not see my new little niece, who is to be born in October. I will love her for the both of us.

I realize that, unconsciously, I chose a textbook called Dreams and Inward Journeys for my 1A class which has many essays in it on the great searches for meaning: Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales and myth, an essay by Thomas Lynch, a mortician, on the end of life, four versions of the Cinderella fairy tale, an incredible essay by Rachel Naomi Remen on healing and coming to terms with painful memories. I suppose this teacher will be taking a journey, too. There have been so many goodbyes this year--I look forward to good things happening.

I keep going back to the fact that my sister's death has put a closure on every drama, every plan, every sense of the future that she had. This is what happens! Nothing stays, only the legacy we have left with people--and honestly, the last thing I want is to be a person who is remembered with a legacy of pain and grief hauling along, like an undetachable veil. So I am thinking about what I want to do with my life--do a yoga and meditation retreat, continue to keep teaching only as much as my illness will allow, and above all, to work really hard on getting well. It is very sobering to have a sibling die of the same chronic illness I have. I want to stay on this earth and have a long and healthy life.

Well, that's the news from the woods. Goodnight.

For Her

It is so strange to think my sister will have been dead three weeks as of tomorrow, that her service was last week. I keep thinking she will call up and ask what all the fuss is about..yet I feel close to her, closer even than when she was alive. How strange that is!

I think this is all going to take time. Mr. Strega and I were making pesto today for dinner, and he said that this has been a tumultuous year on so many levels. And yet out of this year, I will grow towards whatever ineffable spiritual and emotional peak I am climbing in this life. The truth is, many people we love will go into the world beyond this one long before we do, and some may go suddenly. All a reminder, I suppose, that life can turn on a dime, in ways both good and terrible.

I would like to share with all of you the opening to my sister's funeral--she loved bluegrass music and traditional American music, so I chose Tony Rice's version of "Shenandoah," which you can see him play on this YouTube video:

Last Things

My sister's memorial service was held last weekend; many people had a share in putting it together, from the actual service to beautiful flower arrangements, and I wrapped the container holding my sister's ashes in a beautiful silk scarf Mr. Strega bought me years ago in Singapore. Her ashes will be scattered in the near future at Point Reyes.

And that is it--how final it is! I do still feel my sister's loving presence, as I believe in an afterlife and that the consciousness and the spirit both live on after death--but I will never see her again. I have not yet dreamed of her, though I dreamed of my mother and some others who have passed on, all reassuring me that Maryanne is okay and happy in the world beyond this one.

It is hard to believe my sister is gone, that her life is over, and that all the plans she had for her life are gone, too,and that her apartment is being packed up and rented to another person. It truly has been a sad and difficult life-changing experience for those left behind, and has caused me to create a lot of questions for my own life. My sister had a full life, despite her illness, and had many things she still wanted to do.

I think that is part of an all-too-human trait of thinking that life is going to happen at some future time, that life is going to somehow arrive with all the things we ever wanted to do placed at our feet. It's a simple fact that we do not have all the time in the world--nobody gets out of this life alive, sadly enough. You have to make your life what you want it to be, simple as that.

For myself, the first thing I am doing is updating my will with a loving heart, really giving thought to what I want done with my personal effects. I also have chosen my executor plus two trusted family members to help with my estate. I have seen from experience that choosing friends as executors whom you've used as an unpaid therapist for your feelings about your family can result in horrible problems once you are gone--and I mean awful, and immensely painful for family and other friends. Think carefully as to what you want done with your property, and my advice is: DON'T make a will when you are angry. It will come back to haunt your loved ones in a way that your restless ghost could never do!!

I am also going to pre-pay my funeral expenses and purchase my burial plot if I can--I have no desire to impose a monetary burden on those left behind. I pray I live a long and healthy life, but I do know that at some point, my life will end and arrangments have to be made. Just to give you an idea of how expensive funerals are, my mother's cost over six thousand dollars--we split the cost between five siblings, but it cost a pretty penny AND she got a special deal because the funeral director knew our family and their business has been serving us since the turn of the last century--it would have been much more otherwise.

Grief is a very strange thing, I've found. I go from shock to sadness, to thinking my sister is still alive somehow and can shed light on everything, to a sense of calm peace that at least her body and spirit are no longer in pain. It is a journey, one I keep starting on with different friends and loved ones.