Grief as waves and tides

I was talking to Mary tonight about grief, noticing how it comes in waves. I suggested there are tides, too, which ebb and flow more slowly than the waves. As time moves forward (away from the central event which sets the waves and tides in motion), both the waves and tides settle down and may in time dissipate altogether. Their original magnitude and duration, and the time it takes them to dissipate, may vary depending on the kind of loss, and depending on the person experiencing the grief, but its wave forms look similar.

She told me she had seen the comparison (waves and tides) about grief before, so I guess others have had this thought.

It's weird to stand outside yourself and watch it happen. You think things like, "I'm a little more normal today. ... Oh, there, it's back again." And it's weird to notice that there are feelings of loss associated with the ebbing of those waves and tides.

It's supposed to get easier as time goes on, and it does. But it feels like that's mostly because you can't keep thinking about it in the same way for so long. It takes too much energy to continually hurt like that, and plus you have so much to distract you from it. Your brain just can't keep it up, so you let go, naturally.

But at the same time, you don't want to let go, and you feel bad for letting go. It’s too much of an admission that the person is really gone. (I don’t want to ever get over losing you.) And that feeling comes with its own waves and tides, which are also observable if you stand outside yourself and watch.

...which leads me back to a recurring thought I'd been having a lot of the time over the past few years.

Existence is weird.

Existence, and within existence, sentience, are in so many ways completely baffling. Sagan, I think, observed that the universe is made of stars, we are made of star stuff, and we are that part of the universe that contemplates itself.

How did star stuff give rise to this? How did the universe grow a navel to gaze at? And why does it feel so good sometimes and hurt so much other times? It’s so weird that this is happening at all, that THIS is what life is like.

When I think about death and suffering being such a big part of it, especially when I think of them in very personal terms, I am beyond baffled. I am overwhelmed. When I think about the opposite, though, all of the life and joy there is in the world, when I hold that in my head and in my heart, I am filled with awe and gratitude.

I don’t know why we must suffer through those darker things and their associated feelings, any more than I know why we are lucky enough to get experience those wonderful things and their feelings. But it seems that they go together, and are in fact intertwined to their very core.

A friend told me years ago that, even though he struggled with clinical depression, in his worst moments of anxiety and fear and hopelessness, he still valued those feelings, and clung to them, because those feelings meant he was alive. They are proof of existence. I know I exist, because I am feeling these feelings right now. These feelings are not all there is to life, but they are among the most interesting and meaningful parts of it, even at their worst.

So I am grateful I am feeling these feelings, whatever they may be, however long they may last, however they may change, because I feel indescribably lucky that I get to exist.

Rocket's Tail

While we were in the Army Band, in 1989, Ralph purchased Kate Bush's new album The Sensual World. It affected me like few albums I've ever heard. So emotional, lyrical, passionate, and occasionally, completely rocking out. This is one of the songs that covers all of that territory. The moment at about 1:30 where the guitar and drums kick in is still one of my favorites in any song ever. 

We listened to it together many times in the Army, and I felt like it had a real emotional hold on me, sometimes making me just bawl. I've never completely understood how something can at once be so heartbreakingly lonely and sad, and yet also somehow triumphant and wonderful.

Now, in retrospect, the song has meaning to me in relation to Ralph's life in a way I never intended or wanted. In our discussions about life and death, and our hopes for life extension, we passionately wanted to figure out how we could become rockets which would never come crashing to the ground. And if we had to come crashing to the ground, we at least wanted there to be someone there to catch us.

Damn.

Rocket's Tail - Kate Bush

RIP, buddy.

Yesterday I got news that my dear friend Ralph Whelan (known as Will Ralph Whelan on Facebook) had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. I am devastated. Those who know me best know that Ralph was many things to me: buddy, confidant, instigator, cheerleader, entertainer, mentor, hero. It is impossible to imagine how different my life would be had I never met him. My friends, my wife, my children, all directly or indirectly due to the changes in my life after meeting and bonding with him while serving together in the Army band, and then hooking up as friends and living together in California after that. No words can possibly say how precious he was to me, how utterly irreplaceable. RIP, buddy. You will be missed.

O Captain! My Captain!

Robin Williams is definitely one of my favorite [what? comedians? actors? artists? he was a bit too multi-talented to put in such a narrow box...] of all time. He was hilarious, of course, gifted beyond measure as an improviser. But it was the way he used his skills to go for the intensely cathartic emotional "awakenings" kind of stories as an actor (Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, and even the movie actually titled Awakenings, to name just a few) that made me love him so much. You could always kind of tell that behind the brilliance there was sadness, and he publicly acknowledged dealing with bipolar disorder. I'm sad this happened, and I'm going to miss him. The world will miss him. We were lucky to have him while we did.

Congrats to Conchita, and thanks from me and my kids.

For several years now, my kids and I have enjoyed watching the Eurovision Song Contest together. We pick favorites, watch certain ones over and over again, and generally have a good time. I like it both because it exposes them to a wide variety of cultures (even if only a little bit), languages, and different accents (whether singing in their native language or in English). And it's always got several big moments, and occasionally wacky stuff.
This year was a bit different, though, because the winner was Conchita Wurst of Austria (aka, "Thomas "Tom" Neuwirth. Neuwirth describes himself as a gay man and uses female pronouns to describe his Wurst character."). Wurst is an unusual celebrity, because though she dresses in drag, she wears a full beard. It's something you can't miss. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conchita_Wurst

I knew my kids would comment and have questions. So once we watched her performance of Rise Like a Phoenix, I took the opportunity to give them the basics of the situation today with the LGBT community, starting with what LGBT stands for, discussing the civil rights movement going on right regarding gay marriage, and even getting into the somewhat complicated details about Transgender variations, including differences of body characteristics, mental characteristic (what you feel like), romantic/emotional characteristics (whom you are attracted to, whom you love), and how you dress. 

All that, to get to the notion of "drag" and "drag queens". I was glad to be able to show them some pictures of some of my friends who exhibit some of these variations away from gender norms, and give them a sense of just how different people can be.

I asked them to imagine what it would be like if when someone said, "Annie likes pink dresses and long hair", or "Tommy likes to play sports and pretend to shoot guns" -- things they never *decided* to like, but just turn out to like because of who they are -- how they would feel if other people heard that and reflexively said "Ew". 

And I told them I thought the LGBT civil rights movement was the modern equivalent of the emancipation of the slaves, and giving women the right to vote. In general, people don't choose to be gay or bi or transgendered any more than their mother and I chose to be heterosexual. We never decided these things. We just are these things.

They took it really well, and were very interested. And for some reason it made them want to give me big hugs. And then we watched Conchita Wurst a second time. Really great song. Overdue educational experience.