When I left work around midnight it was a windless eighty-two degrees, a rare thing in San Francisco. Nights like tonight entices one to want to take a long walk or go sit on a park bench while listening to the sounds of the City as it slows down readying itself for sleep. In my birth town most summer nights were like this. I remember laying in bed listening to the window fan in the basement, its belt flapping again the fly wheel as it pulled air through the open window above my bed. I remember the sounds of the old Walker foundry pounding out steel with a methodical clunk some miles away. The nights were so still that sounds would carry for miles. Within that quiet of a balmy night there was a centeredness. A place of unique quiet, much like what I felt as I stepped outside after work. This felt sense of quiet is not the absence of something but the wholeness of nothing.
In the weeks after Larry's death I felt the cacophony of my grief, a place where there is little quiet. Rage was common place, so was my pleading, so was my crying. Losing someone we cherish is like that. Of us in perpetual movement as our grief overwhelms us. I lost count how many times my closest friends held my space while I grieved. Grieving during the End Times as I laughing refer to this pandemic wasn't easy. When my friends wanted to hug me we couldn't. For the most part we couldn't even be in the same room together. Grieving in the Zoom generation. Humor is a good emotion to have when all else looks bleak.
I recently said to a few friends that this year feels a lot like 1968. That year was as tumultuous as this one seems to have been. There were assassinations, rioting, demonstrations, political upheaval, curfews, all seemingly co-existing with no end in sight. There was a point then when we all had to let go and accept the reality in which we found ourselves. To accept our powerlessness. I suppose we all had to find a way in which to do that just as I have had to learn that recently; relearn it really. For the most part I am powerless over most things in my life. Not that my logical mind wants to accept that fact. My logical mind, like my child trauma, wants to convince me that I am all powerful, all knowing, that in essence I am godlike. To survive four years of untenable things being done to my body, things that started with the insane and ended with the unimaginable, one becomes convinced that to survive that one can effectively survive anything and more then likely control most all things. Survival does that to the psyche. It's raison d'etre begets the reality it has already manifested. I had to laugh when I finally read the results of my physiological testing from 2009. I went to be tested because I was having difficulty in doing the mundane motor skill tasks of everyday life. What came out was a lengthy single spaced seven or so page document prepared by a battery of clinicians, all of whom were so rattled by my childhood trauma that had been revealed that they could not place me within any of their known categories, not that I was made privy to any of it. It was years later when I finally got a copy of it and that was well after I had recovered memories detailing what they had saw. It took me three weeks to get through reading it and then all I had left was the act of letting go.
Letting go. It isn't a bad thing as much as it is a necessary one. We let go of all sorts of things during our lifetime. Of favorite childhood toys, friends we made in elementary school, clothes that no longer fit or that have gone out of style. We let go of our school years when we graduate, of our childhood homes when we move on. We let go of our grandparents when they die, of our friends who are taken prematurely from us. Of our parents when the time comes. Of our beloved animal companions. None of which is easy. Loss and death are messy and painful experiences but we are tasked with the necessity of living that truth until it is no longer our truth. Acceptance is such a powerful act. To accept ones emotions when one desperately want to escape them is an act of sheer courage. Courageous acts done from a place of courage.
I was having a deep conversation with one of my oldest friends recently. We talked about the need to let go when the time is right. Nothing like hearing the guidance of my Higher Power through a trusted friend. I do seem to be moving closer to saying goodbye to Larry. The guidance has been showing up lately in the most mundane of places. That's how guidance from my HP happens in my life; sometimes it is undeniably clear, most often though it is just found quietly within a larger unrelated entity. Letting go does not mean that I will forget about Larry or stop talking to him, or lose all that he was in my life. The act of saying goodbye is simply me changing in relation to the immediacy of my grief leaving the wider space it once occupied to which will alway be a part of me, my tangible memories of my precious baby boy Larry. In the last six years I have had to say goodbye to many beloved people in my life; my mom, my dad, my rescue boy Crook, a number of beloved extended family members, and two close friends. Change is inevitable. As Plato said; "All is flux, nothing stays still."
Letting go, it's not a bad thing as much as it is a necessary one.
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