One Crowded Hour

There's a sensual quality to Indian Summer in San Francisco.  It is lovely and warm, rarely humid.  The air is sweet yet musty but not quite salty to the taste.  The ever present fog, with its accompanying sea breeze, is conspicuously absence.  It has been replaced with a stillness that envelopes us.  During these dog days of early October we fling our windows open with wild abandon.  There are celebratory explosions of bare limbs, limbs that had been, just twenty four hours prior, wrapped within layer upon layer of fabric, fabric that had protected them from the abrasive cold and salty air that regularly flows in from the Pacific.  We breathe deeper during Indian Summer.  Sigh really as we willingly succumb to its inherent beauty while sitting within the inevitability of its finite end.  I feel our ability to be fully present for these fleeting moments comes from the deep and abiding knowledge that at any moment life as we know it could come crashing down upon us in a cacophony of crumbing bricks and broken glass.  This lends itself to us having a somewhat irreverent attitude towards life.  Maybe, some might even say, cavalier. 

From this place I have come to understand that we San Franciscans are an eccentric bunch.  We are joyful at times, curmudgeonly at others.  We are willingly tolerant of human peculiarities while reveling in the Otherness of those around us, and indeed of ourselves.  We venerate tradition especially San Francisco tradition.  We hold in special esteem those few amongst us who are lucky enough to have been born here.  They are the story tellers, the holders of the past, the ones who are connected to this soil in a unique way.  The rest of us, interlopers as I call myself, the nonnative lot, we are exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to build a life here.  To be a part of this urban isle.  This grand experiment that was once know as the Paris of the West.  Most importantly though we all deeply know that we are integrally rooted to that  mythological Phoenix, the immortal bird that rises from its own ashes to recreate its life.  Many of us have risen from the ashes of our former lives, the ones we inhabited before coming to San Francisco.  In that we embody the past of this great City as much as the present.  We walk the same streets that were teeming with life before that fateful morning of Eighteen April Nineteen hundred and Six.  We carry their hopes and fears, their dreams of a fulfilling and joyful life.  With each breath we take we are living our crowded hour of glorious life just as they were.  The Call by Thomas Mordaunt says it all: 

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the life,

Throughout the sensual world proclaim,

One Crowded hour of glorious life

is worth an age without a name."

 

Faith

For most of my adult life I have heard tell of a book written by my paternal grandfather's sister Hazel.  It was a book in which she describes her interactions with forces beyond our world.  By her definition and by wider repute she was known as a Christian mystic.  Even in my childhood I had heard whispered bits of stories about her experiences, incidences in which she would commune with ghosts or God.  Where she would in one day learn to play the piano with the proficiency that could only have been attainable after a lifetimes worth of arduous practice.  As I forged ahead with my exploration cousins of mine confirmed the book's existence and in some cases had told me that they had actually read parts of it.  My cousin Trudy who passed unexpectedly this past week was one who had read it when she was a teenager.  Speaking to Trudy about it only heightened its mythology within my mind and more recently the role that Faith had played in my great aunt Hazel's life. 

Merriam Webster defines Faith as an allegiance to, or fidelity with something.  A belief in a traditional religious doctrine ; a trust in or loyalty to something.  A sincerity in ones promises.  Putting aside the raison d'etre of Merriam Webster's mission, their definitions belies Faith's relationship with mysticism, that misty intersection of otherworldliness that can be neither seen nor touched with the solidity of the ground beneath our feet.  In a recent blog I seem to remember saying that I had received a copy of my great aunt Hazel's book. and in the intervening months I have read some of it.  It is fascinating in many ways and it has fed my need to explore it more deeply and by extension my relationship to Faith.

During my childhood religion played a fundamental role in our household.  To put it bluntly religion was the bedrock of our lives.  It wasn't until my wholesale rejection of and subsequent renewal with a protestant church of different and more accepting viewpoint that I began to understand why religion was so important to my parents, and in particular to my mom.  In a complicated way my mom believed that her religious tenets were the garments in which she could wrap herself in to find comfort, meaning, and protection.  In reality that was not the case.  My mom's childhood demons haunted her every day of her life, and by extension ours.  In a recent conversation with a paternal cousin I described my mom as being difficult.  In many ways that is a gross understatement.  My mom was a complicated, controlling, reactionary, frightened, and often frighteningly violent twelve year old child living in an adult body.  Her professed religious beliefs were not a comfort but a weapon that she would use to bludgeon those around her into submission.  I remember her always saying It's not what I say but what God says.  I came to understand during my renewal that my mom conflated her missing self esteem and self worth with that of the omnipotence of her God.  In the intervening years before recovery and early into my recovery I began to understand that in many ways I was also like my mom.  I was often complicated and controlling, at times reactionary sometimes to the point of excess.  I conflated my lack of self esteem and self worth not wrapped within religious tenets but within a sense of academic knowledge.  I began to understand why I was like my mom about three years into recovery when I started to  re-experience parts of my childhood trauma, memories that I had buried deep within me out of reach of my conscious mind.  To look into my past with a keen eye is to understand how I inhabit the present.  There's a saying in recovery that in essence says look back without staring.  Some people have interpreted that to mean live in the present with little regard to ones past.  I interpret it to mean that the more I understand how my past informs my present the more my body will transform from living in past to living in the present.  Equally important is to  understand that I am the sum total of my experiences to date on this earth.  That I can not erase my past, I can only continually build a new relationship to those things from my past that challenge me in the presence.  It is about acceptance.

How I came to be where I find myself today was more about the randomness of life than of me making thoughtful decisions based on prayer and guidance.  That has changed in the twenty one years I've been in recovery.  I am more thoughtful, less reactive, less controlling, and by extension, less complicated.  In everything I try to act from a place of intention seeking guidance through prayer.  I continue to work to deepen my acceptance of my past and the PTSD that comes with it.  I have found more clarity about my relationship to grief.  I can also say with a great deal of introspection that my spiritual practice has, over these last many years, expanded exponentially beyond my renewed protestant beliefs.  In hindsight I suppose that was inevitable.  That I find myself here, finding a different way to inhabit my spirituality by questioning the very foundations of it.  That is why reading my great aunt Hazel's book is so apropos.  She was not afraid to open up to all the possibilities, to embrace her mysticism.  She followed it where ever it led her.  Great aunt Hazel was not afraid to explore the world well beyond what the five senses had to offer.  It seems too that I am now being led through her prose and poetry toward more mystical experiences of my spirituality.  Maybe that is the role Faith is to play in my life.  For me to let go.  To follow where I am being led with a childlike sense of awe and wonder.  To allow myself to be led by Faith.  

Today

 "We can not erase our pasts however hard we try.  Instead we must carry them with us into the future.  We must carry them with us and look forward with hope.  We must look forward because to look back is to waste precious time.  Someone recently said to me we should live as we have never lived and we must, all of us, take heed and live as we have never lived for we are all mortal.  We are all fragile, and we all live under the shadow of death."

These are not my words but ones said by the vicar at the end of the first episode of Grantchester, a favorite British show of mine.  The reason they were said is not important.  What is important is that this paragraph is prophetic for me right now although I do take issue where the vicar says looking back is a waste of precious time.  I find it quite powerful to look back.  I believe to know ones past is to know oneself.  For most of my life before recovery and for a good number of years into it I blindly moved forth without the benefit of hindsight.  A bull in a china shop comes to mind albeit with some bits of grace and decorum mixed in.  I wasn't the bull because of outright malice, it was for the most part because I was unaware of my childhood trauma and the effects it had on my adult life.  To understand one's past is to know how that past informs ones present.  

I am not a very forward looking person right know although I have, for some time, been seeking guidance from my Higher Power about what my future is meant to be.  To say that my life has changed in the last three years is a gross understatement.  Three years ago my only concern was preparing for retirement.  I did not know that both Larry and Guido would pass from this earth as my father, mother, Crook, and Sylvia had before them.  I didn't know that I would be leaving work prematurely and that the first year of my retirement would be taken up by settling Guido's estate.  I thought my days would be filled with puttering in the garden, hanging out with Larry in his declining years, traveling back to Italy with Guido, and spending time with my chosen and blood family's who I dearly love.  I thought my days would be like that song sung by Marlene Dietrich entitled Lazy Afternoon.  I knew I wouldn't be spending those hazy lazy afternoons making love as she sings about.  I thought my life would be me relaxing into my post work life while the beetle bugs are zooming and the tulip trees are blooming, and the meadow cows are sleeping......  but I was wrong.  It has been about grieving the loss of the last of my animal companions and the loss of someone who also meant the world to me.  Guido and Larry loved me unconditionally as I loved them, just as I had all who I lost.  As Guido's estate finally moves towards its inevitable end my life has begun to take on more of that lazy hazy afternoon feeling but hanging over it all is one question; what is my life meant to be in my post work years?

I love San Francisco.  I love the fact of it.  The essence of it.  The power it has to warp ones consciousness.  It lures you in with its seductive raison d'etre even on its most challenging of days.  I love my apartment just as I have since I first set eyes on it.  I love how my apartment has evolved over time, how it has evolved since retiring.  I love my garden.  I love the play of light and shadow as the afternoon sun moves west.  I love how the leaves of the trees shimmer in the wind.  I love how the perennial border blooms throughout the spring, summer. and fall.  I love how the birds flit from one branch to another as they teach their young to fly.  My garden is everything I ever dreamed it could be and more.  I love that I have everything I need within a ten block radius of where I live.  That if I chose to I would never have to leave my neighborhood.  I have the quintessential urban life.  A cherished existence that most people only dream of.   I also understand just how tenuous this life is.  Heraclitus said "all is flux, nothing stays still.  Nothing endures but change."  The paradox for me right now is that I want to relax into this life I have so graciously been given while at the same time I seek to escape it.  It is as much about my fear of being vulnerable while at rest as it is about my fear of change.  To relax into my post work life here in San Francisco is patently unsettling to me.  To consider moving away is incomprehensible.  

I have always struggled with how I came to live in San Francisco.  It wasn't by my choice.  It always seemed to be because someone else said this where I should be, like I was riding someone else's coattails.  It may explain why I have never felt a soul connection to San Francisco, that inherent felt sense of homecoming when your foot touches the earth.  I have felt this in other places so it's not from a lack of understanding.  It has been present when walking the streets of New York City, London, Budapest, and Vienna.  In those cities I seem to be able to exhale in a way I could only do here when cuddling with Larry on the floor.  I'm happy to say that somewhat recently there has been a shift in this because of some guidance I received.  Basically it said, I didn't choose San Francisco, it chose me.  This has brought me some peace as guidance generally does, even if at times the answer is not within the realm of possibilities that I saw in front of me.  I was meant to come to San Francisco, to build a life here, but for how long?  Is there another place that is waiting upon my arrival just as San Francisco did for first twenty-one years of my life?  I have no idea.  What I do know is that, as always, the next right step for me is to continue to seek guidance from a power greater than myself until the answer is revealed.  In the mean time I raise my glass to the City by the Bay.  

Life on Life's Terms

I haven't been writing much lately and I miss that.  I miss it because the act of writing does for me what I can rarely do for myself.  It gets me out of my head and down into my body.  There is a quiet center in that down space, a spiritual place that is devoid of my anxiety and fears.   I feel that is why I am so strongly drawn to gardening, besides the genetics of it.  Gardening also gets me down into my body to that quiet center.  It has something to do with feeling the dirt between my fingers and aroma of the sweet loamy soil wafting up.  Cleaning the house while it is quiet does the same for me as does taking a passeggiata in my neighborhood in the late afternoon sun and people watching in the various parks near my home.  Taking a drive out in the country is also a favorite of mine.  My parents use take drives out into the country all the time when I was a kid.  They called it "taking a ride".  There was never a reason for it that I could tell.  It always just seemed like a spontaneous act where they would say, lets go, and we would all pile into the car.  They never had a destination in mind that I could tell.  They just headed away from the house in a blind act of faith.  In my adult years I started taking rides and like my parents, I would let the powers that be randomly lead me towards wherever I was meant to go.  Often times I would find myself driving some back country road somewhere as I enjoyed the unfolding scenery or climbing a steep winding two lane road only to find the expansive Pacific Ocean open out in front of me when I reached the crest.  The last time I went for a ride was about three years ago when Subie Deux was in the shop.   I had rented a canvas topped Fiat 500 for the duration; the little Italian I called it.  After picking the car up from a rental place around the corner I got the urge.  I thought, what better way to spend my day then to open the canvas top and head out for parts unknown.  Soon I found myself heading north across the Golden Gate Bridge, the great towers casting their momentary shadows across me as I drove.  Hours later I was on a back country road in West Sonoma County heading who knows where.  Somewhere along the way I found a perfect place to pull over for a nap.  After turning the engine off and reclining the seat I found myself being lolled into a peaceful place guided by the utter quiet around me, a quiet that was, from time to time, interrupted by some bird song or the occasional warm breeze that rustled the gnarled branches of an old oak tree above.    

Unfortunately I spend a lot of time in my head.  I can't fault the fact of it.  It's raison d'etre is designed to protect me.  It knows it as much as I do that being fully in touch with my physical body brings with it significant emotional challenges.  In the early years of my recovery my anxiety perpetually begot more anxiety feeding on itself like a virus until I thought I would go crazy.  It wasn't until some years later that I learned the value of cultivating quietude.  This is why I value writing and gardening so much among other things.  It transcends that anxiety breaking through to a quiet grounded center that is my safe place.  I learned during those intervening that most of my anxiety originated in the trauma stories of my childhood, tales that had lain unformed for many decades.  I seemed to had always known that something(s) were amiss but they lacked both definition and clarity.  To me they always seemed to be just a bunch of jostled consonants and vowels, ones that I kept nudging into.  It's like those buzzing mosquitos circling above you in a darkened bedroom on a hot summer night.  You know they're there but when you turn on the light.......  The majority of these stories began to coalesce in my late Forties bringing with them the aforementioned anxiety.  Thankfully, much of my recovery has coexisted side by side with my core group of close loving friends, confidants, and beloved animal companions.  Their support and love has been essential to me.  It was because of this that I was able to learn an important lesson, especially lately.  It is the concept of living life on life's terms.  I have to say this wasn't easy and lately it has gotten even more convoluted.  Lately I have come to define this current phase of my recovery as me being in a non sexual polyamorous relationship with various parts of myself and my history, all of which are filled with loads of unconditional love, great joy, even greater sadness, and unending grief just to name a few.  What did Churchill call the Russians?   "A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."  That is what this time in my life feels like.  No wonder I have always had a strong affinity towards Russia, an affinity that has recently led me to buying my first icon, one I will soon be hanging in my hallway.  

Life on life's term.  This seemingly simple four word sentence is deceptively complex to me.  It means that I must sit in acceptance even though I often find myself railing against the very situation I know I can not change.  And afterwards when all is calm again I know I still have to face the inevitable fact of what I was trying to avoid in the first place; accepting the reality of my existence.  This is not to say that anger is a wasted emotion.  It is not.  It can be a powerful motivator if it is not twinned with the act of causing harm.  No emotion is wasted in my opinion.  To have a rich full emotional life is a gift from the gods.  They say in the rooms, feeling the full maturation of our emotions without being slaves to them.  There is so much more to this grouping of words too.  It is at once a powerful statement of awareness and acceptance and yet one of utter spiritual humility in the face of our emotional life.  

We humans are an interesting bunch, a fact that has been amply highlighted in the past five years. We have seen the worse of the worse, the best of the best, and everything in between; and yet we are still here, still breathing, still walking the loamy earth beneath our feet.  The Greeks had a good eye for the vastness of our emotion lives.  Their pantheon of gods were based lovingly, or not, on the richness of our human condition.  In Greek mythology the Greek god of fire was married to the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.  Aphrodite was purported to have been born in the froth of the sea when Uranus' genitals were tossed in, genitals that had been cut off by his son, Cronos ; and yet equally it is said that Aphrodite was born from the coupling of Zeus, the Greek god of sky and thunder and his mate Dione, the female side of Zeus.  

Life on life's terms.  It been a tough road, these last four years.  Besides the normal challenges of my recovery I have been faced with a number of health issues, some of which have not yet been resolved and one of which will never be resolved.  I have also lost many that I held deep in my heart.  Beloved cousins and friends; my oldest friend Kathy who I met when I moved to Colorado in 1976; my friend Bebe who I had met in the early 1980's; the last of my animal companions, my beloved cat Larry in May of 2020; and six months ago, Guido, my closest and dearest confidant of forty-two years.  I also retired last September ending my some fifty plus year relationship with the working world.  What I face now is an unknown future, one without the intimate connection of those people who brought me joy, love, and stability.  This is not to say that I haven't a friend left in the world.  I have been deeply blessed over the course of my life and I still have many very close friends and family whom I love dearly and who are at the center of my life. 

Earlier this evening before I started writing this blog I was reminiscing about the time I spontaneously hitchhiked half way across the country during the fall of '76.  I was living in Colorado Springs at the time in a flat I had rented earlier that summer.  I had been partied hard the night before and had slept well into my alarm the next day.  When I finally woke up I realized I was quite late for work.  I remember being utterly frustrated about everything and that I dearly wanted nothing more than to take a break for it all.  I remember grabbing the phone to call Kathy not knowing why until I heard myself asking her if she would come pick up my golden retriever puppy Alexander Bryant and my car because I was going to hitchhike to San Francisco.  When she arrived at my place she tried talking me out of it but I refused to backdown.  After she left I packed my backpack, grabbed the only money I had, three dollars and change, and headed down the few blocks to the Interstate on ramp.  That first night I stayed with my cousin Crystal and her husband in Denver.  Throughout the evening and well into the night they both convinced me not to go west so I decided to go east instead.  For the next week I had the best time.  I never knew who was going to pick me up, or where they would take me.  I never knew when my next meal would come.  I got rides from a father and his teenage son who put me up for the night in Wyoming.  I stayed with a geologist who had picked me up east of Cheyenne.  I got a ride with a trucker, stayed with my friend Chuck in Omaha for three days spending most of my time with an elderly woman I had met on the streets, a woman who had just gotten out of the hospital and was hell bent on having a three day bender.  I got rides from a gang of musicians who had just been released from jail, a randy monk, a gregarious guy in a pickup truck across Iowa, and an insurance salesman who took me into south eastern Wisconsin.  For the entire week I was in no communication with anyone other those who I was spending my time with.  Not once during that week did I feel in danger.  Not once did I question my decision to leave.  It was all about just living from moment to moment without knowing what my future held for me.    

Life on life's terms.  It's not a bad thing.  It's rather liberating to tell the truth because as I walk my current path I know that it is the same act of faith that I had tapped into while hitchhiking.  I know I will be taken care of by a power greater than myself just like I was then.  And I know that I will be shown what the next right step is for me and that all will be revealed when it is meant to be revealed.  And I know I will arrive at my next destination when I am suppose to arrive.  In the meantime all I need to do is take one step at a time, then another, then another.

.....as ghosts are said to do.

Today was one of those days in the City.  The air was thick and warm to the touch, the sun brilliantly shining, the sky that particular soft blue foretelling spring's imminent arrival.  It was one of those days in which I would have rather languished laying about on the great expanse of lawn that covers the western side of Lafayette Park.  I use to spend a great deal of time up there in my youth; well in my twenties and thirties.  It was a meeting place for all kinds of people, some of which I knew from my neighborhood, others were friends of mine.  Sometimes we would plan an afternoon up there or on other days we would run into each other then spend the afternoon propped up on one arm talking about the nonsensical things young people talk about.  I so enjoyed those halcyon days relaxing into conversation for hours on end.  I also enjoyed those spontaneous moments of just running into someone on the off chance in the neighborhood.  I use to say to Tyler, "I'm running up to the corner store.  Be back in a few minutes" only to amble back in about an hour later to his furious questioning of where have you been?  I would turn to him and say "oh I ran into this friend or that and we ended up talking."  His fury would always drain away because it would most often be one or more of our friends who he would then ask "oh how are they doing?" and I would tell him of their latest exploits even though we had just seen them a few days before.  Life moved so quickly then. 

While cleaning the bedroom last week I picked up a picture of Tyler and I.  It was taken during those same days by my paternal cousin Bonnie who had been visiting the City for a week.  We had met somewhere in Hayes Valley prior to having breakfast nearby and she snapped a picture of us standing against some leafy wall or another.  I held the picture closely while examining our faces.  We were so young then.  So full of life and promise as it seemed to be even though by then Tyler and I had been together for more than a dozen years.  

During those same years in the second half of my sophomore year at University I took a photo class.  My penultimate project was to create a series of photos depicting an event.  I knew what I was going to do and set about getting the props and asking my good friend Ralph to be my subject.  When I was ready we both headed up one afternoon to Lafayette Park, to that same expanse of green lawn.  I took seven photos of Ralph that day, photos that depicted him having an encounter with his former self from a previous life.  The series was of him walking down a pathway, then unwittingly walking though his former self, of them both turning to look back with some faint awareness of what had just happened, then recognition by both, of them both forcing another connection, then of his former self lowering itself into Ralph's body as he sat on the lawn, the last photo being of them as one looking straight into the lens.  Even then at that young age I somehow knew that time and space could be breached, that there was an Other or Others existing beside our own space time continuum.  That this life was not the only one out there.

As I have said before I have been struggling during this post Larry period of my life for a number of reasons.  One such reason is that Larry was the last connection I had to Tyler, to our life together, and by extension to those halcyon days of our youth.  I remember the gut wrenching grief I felt that first year after Tyler and I split after twenty five years of being together.  I felt that I had lost my very soul.  In addition to this seemingly unending grief  I was also dealing with the beginnings of my recovery from my childhood trauma which had begun resurfacing one month after we had split.  Of course this is as they say all water under the bridge except for one very important fact that I am now becoming aware of.   To put it  succinctly, I have not been a dead man walking since Larry's death as I had thought but since my childhood trauma began.  More importantly, what I had defined as the felt sense of being alive during Larry's lifetime and before was not real but an illusion.  This awareness came to fruition in drips and drabs over the last few weeks as guidance often does in my life.  A word here, a phrase there, all seemingly meaningless; until they are not.  The promises say, slowly and haltingly and sometimes in great bursts....  This guidance coalesced slowly and haltingly until it became a contiguous whole this past Saturday afternoon.  The fuller version of the awareness is this:  that during those times when I perceived myself to be alive it was only that via osmosis with another living being with whom I permanently shared my intimate space at home.  And that when these shared intimacies ceased I was not only grieving their loss but equally grieving the lost of my childhood self.  I have believed with all my heart that all things began and ended with Larry, that he was my life support system.  That I could not do this thing called life without him.  I have begun to take in that my felt sense of being alive with him was this aforementioned illusion, just as it seemingly had been with Crook, and Sylvia; and when Tyler and I were together, and when I was with my two partners before him.  No one ever says that guidance is not sobering.  

There is a scene at the end of the fifth episode of Brideshead Revisited that mirrors my current awareness.  It is when Charles Ryder is leaving Brideshead for the last time.

"But as I drove away I felt that I was leaving a part of myself behind.  And to ever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it and search for it hopelessly as ghosts are said to do.  I shall never go back I said to myself.  A door had shut.  The low door in the wall I had sought and found at Oxford.  Open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.  I had come to the surface into the light of common day after a long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.  I have left behind illusion I said to myself.  Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions with the aid of my five senses.  I have since learned that there is no such world.  But then as the car turned out of sight of the house I thought it took no finding.  That it laid all about me at the end of the avenue."

I have left a part of myself behind with each loss I have experienced and in their aftermath I always find myself searching to somehow find a way back so I can reclaim that sense of aliveness I had felt.  Now that I know it was all an illusion....  

One of the main threads of my grief journalling since Larry's passing is the sense that I am forever destined to search for what I will never be able to attain; arriving home.  That I will forever be roaming this earth searching for I will never find within my post childhood trauma life.  Maybe the answer can be found in who I was prior to it.  I am in no way saying that I wish to erase what was done to me.  That I know I can not do.  I just wish to become more aware of what this guidance means for me.  I've been asking myself where do I go from here?  Can something real be found beyond this illusion?  Am I to look towards those parts of my existence that are an organic  representative of who I am?   Do those things actually exist by virtue of themselves or are they too just an illusion?  As I sit here writing I do not know the answer to any of these questions.  I only know that going forward I will do what I always try to do in my life and that is pray for guidance on what is the next right step for me.

The loss of one's Tribe

 I am innately a tribal person.  I suspect this has as much to do with human nature as it does with anything else.  I believe that it is quite natural for people to gravitate towards being part of a tribe.  We become a part of a tribe at birth, one rooted in our immediate family connections.  That in time it expands to include out maternal and paternal family's, friends in our neighborhoods, school chums, until such a time comes that we move into adulthood and venture out on our own.   Looking back I had strong connections to my wider family during my childhood as I did with my neighborhood friends.  Church was another tribal connection as was school and later into adulthood my work life, intimate partners, and long term relationships.  Tyler and I created our own primary tribe that included furry kids. Vester was his childhood animal companion that came to live with us when his mom moved out of state.  Some years after Vester had passed we adopted our own furry's, Larry and Sylvia.  When Tylers and my relationship ended my primary tribe became my kids until Larry passed some seven months ago.  This is where I seem to be struggling so deeply in this post Larry existence.  I no longer have a primary tribe.

In a more expansive way I have been reflecting on how tribal connections seem to be at the root of our political life, that many within our society seem to be saying that they feel that they have lost their tribe and their hope for a better future.  Or at the very least one that they knew from childhood.   I am grateful for growing up in the Midwest as it has given me the ability to look at politics from different viewpoints.  I can understand when one says that they fear for their future and that of their children.   My father grew up destitute because his father had died in 1929 when he was four.  I have pictures of him as a child literally clothed in rags.  After grandpa died and especially during the Depression my dad's older siblings were the primary breadwinners for the family.  More often than not when they had gotten married they brought their spouses to live with grandma or left only to come back with children in tow.  That changed when the war came.  Everyone who could work had a paying job.  Despite graduating from high school my dad struggled with writing as he had dyslexia.   He would have never been able to attend college.  However, after coming back from the war my dad had the ability to forge a work life that gave us a solid middle class existence, one that provided a roof over our heads, clean clothes on our backs, and a place to call home ; not withstanding the childhood trauma I experienced.   They were good at creating the logistics of home.  What my father and so many others attained post war has't been available for the average high school graduate for a number of decades.  Long gone are the days when a good union job with health care and a pension were attainable.  They have been replaced with the modern amalgamation of what is now being called the "Gig" economy.  Something that very nearly resembles what existed post WWI.  Dad's pension and post work retiree healthcare were the only things that kept my mom and dad from being destitute.  I get it when people say they are scared.  And I understand how such fear and vulnerability can be manipulated by demagogues.  We have seen it many times in our history.  The Huey Long's and Father Coughlin's of the world playing on the fears and vulnerabilities of others.  I see it happening all over the world today.  Those in power playing on those very fears and vulnerabilities while promising a return to greatness.  That old saying during the 1928 presidential campaign when things were rapidly heading downward just prior to the Great Depression.  Hoover promising "a chicken for every pot.  Wages, dividends, progress, and prosperity;  Vote for Hoover. " One only has to look at the news coming out of Europe and Asia to see how prevalent that myth still is.  Turkey, China, India, Russia, Hungary just to name a few are all in the grips of demagogues promising things that they can not possibly provide.  But yet they seems to sustain their power by hook or by crook.

I get it when I hear someone saying that they feel lost.  Most days I feel like I'm a ghost stealthily moving about a place full of memories, a place that is devoid of both life and breath.  Larry was that for me.  He brought both life and breath into our home just as Crook did and Larry's sister before.  That is what I seem to struggle with the most: what is this post Larry life that I find myself navigating. 

I was telling my sponsor last week that much of my work in recovery has been about coming to an accommodation with my childhood trauma.  I explained that the fact of my trauma changed how my body functioned, how my neural pathways work.  I said it was akin to losing one's limb.  You navigate the fact of it while attempting to create a quality life.  Historically, loss within all of its facets seemed to be the emotion that I am always trying to find an accommodation with and that is still fact.  I know Larry will never be coming back.  I know I can never recreate what I had with him, or  Crook, or with Larry's sister Sylvia before Crook.  I am also keenly aware that I felt for the most part content when Larry was alive.  The fact of him being with me, that we shared a life together.  That all things began and ended with him.  We were our primary tribe, the one that fed and sustained us both.  

The loss of one's tribe.  There is a deep sense of powerlessness there.  Of helplessness too.  Facts that most times seems too overwhelming for me to surmount.  Yet hope does exist there.  I see evidence of it everyday.  Extraordinary stories of people who have not only survived tragedy but have gone on to thrive.  I see hope in our impending change of political administration not that I am naive enough to think that all things will magically come right.  They will not.  My sponsor said something last week when we saw each other that reinforced the message fo hope; sometimes things have to die in order for others to live.  I would never presume to say that he meant Larry had to die in order for me to live.  What I heard was that change is inevitable.  That all living beings have a natural beginning and end and that I am subject to the same.  I heard that what one feels may be unsurmountable is also subject to change.  That not only can one survive what is thought to be insurmountable, one can thrive within that accommodation.  

I have no idea what my post Larry life will be  Or what continued accommodation I will be making to both my childhood trauma and my loss.  I only know that I am on a journey, a journey where I am seeking clarity from guidance while attempting to live an authentic emotional life.

Letting Go

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.

A Day Without Art

I can scarcely believe that today is the one month anniversary of Larry's passing.  Later on I will be taking down the purple fabric that I had draped across all of my art work the day Larry died.  The act of draping my art has been a mourning ritual that I have engaged in for nearly thirty years.  The origins of it are not familial but one that was started by the gay artist group Visual AIDS in Nineteen Eighty-Nine.  I had many gay friends who were artists at that time.  I met most of them during my college days, others I met in the neighborhood.  The Day Without Art project was created as a mourning ritual to honor those artists who had passed from AIDS.  Soon after it was expanded to also honor those artists who were living with the virus.  I began covering my art in honor of my artist friends who died.  As time went on it morphed into a way for me to honor those of my immediate family who had passed from this earth.  Sitting here as I write I can hardly believe that today is the day when I be uncovering my art.  I am thankful that the deep and grievous weeping has for the most part stopped.  The pain has not.  If anything it has deepened the further away from Larry I am.  When his dementia diagnosis came in some months ago I knew my time with him would be finite and I did wonder what my life would be like without him.  I thought about what it would be like not seeing his nesting spot on the bed, his fort in the living room, him not curled up sleeping on the perch in the closet.  What it would be like not to cuddle with him on the floor.  I guess in some ways I was naive about the relative nature of my post Larry life.  Maybe it was because I thought I had more time with him, that I could ease into my grief the way I did with Crook before he died.  Maybe it was because I didn't want to let myself go to "that" place again.  The one where I always go when someone I love more than life itself dies.  Sitting here as I write I'm also not surprised that I have been reluctant to work on my trilogy for some of the same reasons.  Jack has just lost his partner Patrick and is reeling within his grief at the sudden and tragic nature of his lover's death.  Last year I did try writing his truth but I found that I had just glazed over the surface.  I think it amounted to all of about three paragraphs.  Down deep though I knew that at the time I would one day return and walk beside him as we both navigated the depths of his grief, the depths of which I already find myself in.  What do they say about storytelling, write about what you know?
Two years ago I asked a writer friend of mine to do a manuscript read for me.  He had extensive training in the field encompassing both teaching and writing and I valued his input.  He was one of a few that I had asked for guidance.  After he had finished his critique we met for coffee at a cafe in the lower Haight.  The first thing he said when he walked in was, "I can't help but call you Jack.".   I suppose there's a lot of Jack in me and vice versa.  This is why I have been reluctant to bear witness to his grief.  I know that what is his pain will be mine and mine, his.
Writing can be cathartic; however, in the past few days I have been struggling with how one shares his innermost grief, the grief that only he and God bear witness to?  That was one of the beautiful parts of my life with Larry.  He bore witness to the laughter, the joy, the contentment, and the pain.  He was there for the deep sadness, the grievous weeping after Silvia, my dad, and Crook died; he was there for it all.  All the while being present in his body in the way only animal companions can be.  There's something to be said about the unvarnished ability to be free of ones baggage, to be in that perpetual state of grace that animal companions can be when their lives have been untouched by personal trauma.
Lately, I have again been questioning everything about my life.  How did I come to be where I find myself.  Why has life happened in the way it did.  Why seemingly insignificant decisions can grow into life shattering moments later on.  How the effects of trauma talking to trauma can make my life so unmanageable, information that I have readily shared with a few of my sponsees.  Many years ago I had made a conscious decision not to share the totality of my trauma history with many of my close friends. Only a chosen few know.  I made that decision knowing that my history is not for the faint of heart.  My childhood trauma was deeply insane at the best of times, and at it's worst, unimaginable.  To carry that reality in my conscious memory has been challenging.  Carrying it along with my grief......   I'll be frank in this moment about something that only my sponsor knows.  During the first week after Larry's death I thought about suicide.  I guess I'm much like my mother in that way.  After my eldest sibling Muriel passed away at five years old my mother ingested rat poison.  When that did not work she fled across several state lines to her oldest sister in Topeka refusing to come back.  After three weeks of pleading my father had to drive many hundreds of miles to get her and drag her back because she still had my one and half year old brother to care for.  My sponsor calls my thoughts of suicide trauma talking to trauma.  Nothing like having my own words reflected back.  I suppose in reality it is trauma talking to trauma.  The trauma of my multiple layers of deep grief speaking to and with the deep shame of my childhood history.  A lethal combination if there ever was one.  I told him laughingly but also seriously that at least I'm not drinking, drugging, or fucking my way out of myself.  Not that I haven't thought about it.  I have.  Thankfully the diversion from my grief has taken a decidedly more productive avenue of late as I have been doing the repair work around the house that needs to be done.  A much better way of coping wouldn't you say?
I have come to understand that grieving can be such a treacherous journey for me.  And I do my best to bear witness to the authenticity of my journey while taking ownership of it and the emotions that it entails but it can be such a convoluted mess at times.  I guess that is what grief is at its core.  Messy, convoluted, weepy, and full of unexpected emotional sink holes. 

Dead Man Walking

It is surreal, this path I am walking.  I feel as if I have slipped down the rabbit hole into an alternate reality, a reality where all the colors are so vibrant they seem to be lit from within by flames, flames that simultaneously both consume in death while facilitating rebirth.  Juxtaposition in this realm are many dilapidated stone houses, miles from each other, each of which is covered by ancient weathered vines that have over a millennia adhered themselves to the rotting structures.  Most of their windows are broken and as the winds move through the tattered cloth coverings billow into spider web covered interiors filled with the discarded belongings of people who have disappeared during another age.  As I navigate the convoluted paths of this reality, the ones that snake from one house to another through forests that are thick and overgrown I know what my task will be.  When I arrive I am to search for my truth, for Home, knowing full well that I will find neither.  And as I leave the realization once again becomes clear, that no matter how hard I search I will never find my way back home.  With each step I take towards the next house I can feel the increasing weight of it all as it sets itself upon my shoulders like a stone yoke.  This is the nature of my grief.  Millennia old, aged by time and circumstance, multiplied by death upon death as the vines of which have become one, entangled within my soul.  I thought, maybe in truth, more likely within denial, that I was building a new relationship to my grief.  Nothing like the death of one's child to clear the senses.
I have said that I have walked this earth before.  Many times as far as I can tell.  New York City was one, Budapest another, London, Moscow, maybe Vienna.   I tested this once in the mid Nineties when I met my friend Diane in New York City.  It was my second trip there and we had just finished a wonderful meal on the Lower East Side.  As we walked out of the restaurant I said, "Let me show you where our subway stop is."  I had told Diane about my history so she readily agreed as she had grown up in New York City and knew it well.  As we walked snaking our way northwest I went directly to the subway stop some seven blocks away, the one that would take us back up to the Upper West Side where our hotel room was located.  I had felt the same sense of deja vu when I was in London and Budapest.  When I went back to New York City just after my father died three years ago I had that same feeling again.  I had been sick while I was there and was grateful for a night out.  I walked a few blocks over to a cinema to watch a movie with Judy Dench.  On the way back to my hotel I knew that I had walked that street many many times before.  Closely on its heels came the familiar refrain, that I will be forever destined to wander this earth without ever being able to go back from once I came.  I wept when I got back to my room, as much as for losing my father as it was for the pervasive feeling of Other that has dogged me for the whole of my life.  I suppose I am much like my paternal grandfather's sister Hazel.  Hers was much like the life I have had.  She communicated with the dead as I have.  She had experiences that could not be explained; except by her.  Once, she had had a "Visitor" who came to her when her first husband was at work one day.  The visitor taught her how to play the piano, the one that had sat in the parlor collecting dust for years. When her husband came home there she sat playing like she had been a accomplished pianist for the whole of her life.  Dumbfounded, he asked for an explanation and she told him what had happened.  He was so unsettled that soon after he filed for divorce.
My dad came to me many times after he had died, sometimes talking with me, others not.  Our last conversation was him asking me how it felt to not have parents.  I was taken aback by this question at first but then I understood.   My dad knew who I was but had lost the ability to speak to me from the perspective of being my father.  My mom visited me after her death but in a nefarious way.  She, like my paternal aunt Jeanette, turned on the high capacity burner on my stove but without the flame.  Crook came to me too, albeit briefly.  I only caught sight of him once as he made his way over to our favorite spot by the south face living room windows.  That was where we would lay on the floor cuddling as I sang good morning to him.  Larry has been around too. Just after I got home the day he died I had laid down in bed not knowing what else to do.  When I rolled onto my back I felt him jump up, one of his front paws landing on my leg.  Since then I have seen him a number of times.  When he came in from the bedroom I got down onto the floor as I always did greeting him.  When he passed by I felt him brush up against my right forearm.  I saw him going into the bathroom too.  I followed him in turning the bathtub spout on for him to drink from only to begin weeping as I sat on the edge of the tub. 
When I said that all things originated from Larry, that he ordered every facet of our existence together, I never realized how deeply ingrained that was.  Everything around me has his imprint on it and not just the obvious things that I recently alluded to in my previous blog.  Every cupboard, every closet, the cabinet under the bathroom sink; they are all his.  How I partially close the shower curtain, how I stack the prerinsed dishes in the drainer, when and in what order I wash the dishes at the end of the day; they are all his.  How I hang my clothes in both closets, how every closet is organized, where I store my gardening shoes, it even extends to how I shop for fruit and veg.  They are all his. 
I always knew where he was in the house. Whenever I left, came in, or moved about, I instinctively made visual contact and if I did not readily see him I would search for him finding him asleep on the perch in the bedroom closet, or curled up under the bed, or baking in the sauna.  He was my touchstone of unconditional love and seeing him brought me eminence comfort and joy.  Often I would walk over, lean in, and gently kiss him.  In response he would curl his head under, or stretch his legs, his whole body quivering, while settling back into a deep sleep.  Now however, when I turn to look for him he's not here.  When I stop at the door craning my neck back to say I love you as I'm leaving for work I realize he is no longer here.  When I open a closet door, or a drawer, or a cupboard he is there but not here.  As I move about my world all of these actions have become ticking emotional time bombs that can in an instant take me right back down onto my knees.  And as I descend to the floor, my head bowed, my arms wrapped tightly around my chest, tears streaming down my face I utter what have become familiar words in the wake of his death, "I can't do this without you."
I am a dead man walking, my Raison D'etre having been taken from me.  I've noticed that at times I have agonal breathing, that labored way in which a person breaths just before death.  I do not always realize I'm doing it but when I do I accept that that is where I happened to be in the moment.  Just as when my chest closes down because of my contracting muscles are tightening around my lungs, or when I feel the blood draining from my head, or I feel my body being drawn once again into the fetal position, I accept that is where I happen to be, that this is my insurmountable grief speaking its truth.

The Loss of Oneself

Morning are typically hard for me  I find it takes me some time to get my wits about me, to get both eyes open at the same time.  Today is no exception.  As I sit here propped up in bed, my back resting against Larry's pillow I am faced with the reality of what my life will be like now that Larry is gone.  Larry and I had rituals in the morning.  We had rituals about many things.  How we woke up, how we said good morning, how we navigated our day together.  How we ended them.  Bedtime was of particular importance.  Me spooning with him on the floor, then him moving onto the sofa curling up, waiting.  Of me saying "time for bed" as I turned the lights out.  Of me picking him up and carrying him into the bedroom.  And once we were settled in bed, of me saying "lights out".  He had many things he did afterwards too.  Climbing under the covers for a while, then going to eat, followed by climbing onto the bedding box to stare out at the garden, eventually coming back to bed with me.  Even within his dementia he remembered.  Looking around I can see all of his favorite spots, the nest at the end of the bed, the perch in the closet that looked out on the garden.  That was his sister Sylvia's spot before it was his.  What I called the Sauna, the triangular space behind one of the bedroom doors that backed up against the wall where the heat pipe was behind, next to the radiator for the bedroom.  Larry had a particular fondness for the feel of cotton sheets.  He loved to sleep next to me on or against the pillow.  I suppose remembering is my way of diverting my attention from the obvious on this first morning without my boy;  how one navigates the pain of losing ones child.  Of how one defines oneself in the face of intense loss and with the prospect of becoming "Other".   In the old days it seemed defining ourselves was more straightforward.  People chose their marriage or profession as their title.  Mr. and Mrs. X, Doctor and Mrs. Y.   In Italy doctors are afforded the title Il Docttore when being addressed, both in and out of work.  People do it out of respect and to honor their accomplishments.  We have done the same for priests, college professors, and lawyers just naming a few.  Times have changed though.  These days we seemed to have come to the understand that the search for our authenticity is how we define ourselves, especially in the midst of loss.  Or it seems to be that to me within the microcosms of my life as I know it.  Even within the realms of gender we have come to understand that the traditional monikers of male and female no longer apply for some.  That gender fluidity is just that, the vast area that exists between the polar opposites of male and female.
Sitting here in bed, I wonder what my life will now be, how I will define myself as I face the abyss that exists in front of me. 
How does one take in the vastness of losing their existence as one knows it, of losing the sun that both fed and sustained.  Larry was quite literally the center of my life of which all else revolved. He was the core to which all else was ordered.  I may be sounding melodramatic, but I'm not.  There is a very real history to all of this.  It was Larry and his sister Sylvia who fed and sustained me through the darkest days of my early recovery nearly seventeen years ago.  Days during which I thought at any moment I would quite literally die.  It was the touch of their bodies against mine, the sound of their purr, the life I saw in their eyes that provided for me the only link to sanity and the real world I had.  When Sylvia died suddenly eleven years ago it became Larry and I; me trying to support him in his incomprehensible pain of losing the world as he had always known since birth and me of losing her and the understanding of what "Us" had been.  Before her death Sylvia had been the center of our existence.  She was core by which all else was ordered.  Her indomitable spirit, her ability to love and be loved so unconditionally was what had fed and sustained us all; and by the grace of the Universe Larry somehow survived the loss of that and his sister, as I of mine and her.  In the intervening years I adopted Crook and we forged a new definition of "Us" as Larry came out of his shell taking on Sylvia's indomitable spirit and ability to love so freely and completely.  Then three years ago we lost Crook and the unique unfailing love that he had brought into our family.  That is what I am again facing as I sit here, the loss of that indomitable spirit that only an animal companion can bring, that unconditional love.  The loss of my beloved Larry and by extension Crook.   I am also reliving the loss of Sylvia and the loss of the meaning of "Us" as I always do within the confines how my PTSD has changed my physical and emotional body's processes.
I blogged incessantly in the month after Sylvia's death.  Each entry titled only by the date and time in which it had been written.  Those blogs are a chronicle of the immediacy of my grief of that time.  It is still extraordinarily painful for me to read them.  It took me many years before I could comprehend the fullness of that loss.  And now I find myself back from once I came, sitting in the immediacy of my incomprehensible grief just trusting that my next breath will come when it is meant to.  I can't imagine a life without Larry.  What the loss of his loving spirit and by extension of our rituals will mean for me.
His death came as a surprise much like Sylvia's had.  She had been seemingly happy, content with playing and chasing Larry around the house only to be dead eight hours later of heart failure.  For Larry, he had had some ongoing dental issues since January, an abbess then, a small lesion now. one that was to be addressed by surgery yesterday morning.  Nothing seemingly bad or out of the ordinary.  Then the mid morning call came that he had suspected bone cancer, that a small part of his jaw had already been eaten away.  That left little choice in which way to go forward.  Before Crook died I had had a week with him to spend grieving his oncoming death.  With Larry.....
I can't say that I will blog incessantly during the next month as I navigate Larry's loss.  Blogging, like journaling, doesn't hold the same value it once had in my life.  Before, both were written words, a way for me to navigate and understand what was happening in the immediacy of my emotional and physical life during a time when without them I seemed lost.  Now.....   I suppose that is because I seem to have a better grasp of my internal processes or maybe I am just doing what I naturally do in the face of intense emotion; I isolate.  Either way my path will be what it will be as I am reluctantly forced to navigate towards a new definition of self without my precious baby boy.

Life's Rich Tapestry

Back in the day when things in my life were going awry I would jokingly say to myself as I shook my head, life's rich tapestry of bullshit.  It was a way for me to cope I suppose.  Laugh it off, lessen the importance.  Deal with the powerlessness.  I had heard about that word before recovery.  Mostly during my college days in reference to those who were struggling to become free; but I didn't understand it; at least not in its fuller implications as I do now.
This evening I watched Falsetto's from Lincoln Center,  It was one of those programs that our local public channel trots out for our viewing pleasure during pledge month; and as always it was interrupted, several times I might add.  (Thank the Goddess for the fast forward on my DVR!) 
I hadn't ever seen Falsetto's in its entirety.  In the past I tended to shy away from watching these types of performances as it hit that touchstone of loss I have deep within me.  Loss is still very real for me.  It has been something I have been struggling with for a long time, that feeling of being in a perpetual state of loss, the one that I can never seem to get out from under it.  My sponsor and I have been working on this issue for a while now and things have been shifting.  Watching Falsetto's though hit a nerve for me.  It brought it all back as if it was happening in real time; losing two former partners, countless friends.  Such senseless loss.  I have sometimes wondered if I process loss within the same neural pathways that I experience my PTSD.  They live on in my memory, my friends, as if they were here sitting next to me as I write.  As I was fast forwarding through the pledge breaks I glanced into the bedroom where on my dresser sits the ashes of both of my animal companions, Larry's sister Sylvia and my rescue boy, Crook.  I found myself crying about that and yearning to pick up my Iphone where I have videos of Crook stored.
They were trying to find truth in Falsetto's.  The truth of ones sexual orientation, of love, of friendship, and of what was taking his lover.  Finding truth is a painstakingly difficult process.  I can attest to that after eighteen years in recovery.  And that was what I am trying to always do; to find truth within my powerlessness.  The truth of why I am who I am.  Why I find myself where I happen to be.  Why I react the way I do.  I have always wanted to know the truth about losing my friends, former partners, all of whom I loved.  What was that thing that was taking them from me at such an astonishing rate?  Living a full and active life one day and dead the next.  My friend Stephen died quickly.  One day he was his partner Neil's caregiver, feeding him, bathing him, while he laid dying, three weeks later...  Mind numbing, even now.
I cried so many times during Falsetto's; in part because I remember what it was like to feel free in love.  To know that you could love and make love with purpose and truth.  Also in part because I knew what was coming, that silent unknown killer; and then when it did, because loss is still so real to me.  No one has ever offered to sit with me explaining why.  I still wonder what was the point of all that senseless death. 
Life's rich tapestry.....
What I have come to realize in a deeper way this evening is that life's rich tapestry is not only a cliche.  I have a tapestry, one that has been woven of each moment of my lives and that when another moment passes, a new thread is added.  Mine is made up of many many threads, some as delicate a fine gold, some of rich cotton, others of wool, and many of things I can not yet identify.  And that is the point, that I may not know ever know what each thread represents.  It is enough that my tapestry exists in and of itself.  I do know a great many of those threads.  They are my friends and loved ones, both living and dead.  There are those experiences that I hold within me, both life affirming and challenging.  My tapestry is an integral part of me, both known and unknown.  It is me.  I know too that at any time I can run my fingertips over the delicate unique designs and touch the one that is Steven's life, and the one that is Bryan's, and Patrick's.  That this one here, the beautifully stitched flower is Gram, and that sky blue one there is Dad; and the bright red cardinal, Mom.  And I know that there will be times when I am taken to the tapestry when I am unwilling.  Powerlessness is a part of my tapestry too, but not a major part any longer.  It has become just another part of a bigger whole.  The one that is all that I have been, Am and will Be.  My journey is that I accept what is.  That I embrace those threads of loss and longing and be thankful that they are an integral part of my life's tapestry.  Life happens on life's terms as they say in meetings.  We can rail against it or accept it.  It is the only life we have, until the next one comes along that this.

Aimless Discontent

I've been in recovery for seventeen and a half years and I can say that it is like nothing I ever imaged.  Looking back I'm not sure I ever thought about what it would look like in the first place.  In the early days of therapy and then being in the rooms I just did what I was told.  I showed up each week, occupied my seat, whether that was on my therapists couch or elsewhere.  It wasn't until well into it that things started to change, and not for the better.  No one tells you during those first months that physical and/or emotional sobriety strips away the protective coatings that one has adapted to survive.  Mine where honed when I was a young child; expertly so.  Simply put, during my childhood it was develop the skills or die.  The insanity was that real.  There's a saying in the rooms, one peels away the layers like an onion working towards finding the core, those hidden things that drive us into creating our own adult insanity.  My insanity predisposed me to drink, to muck into other peoples lives, sex addiction, and having an obsession with myself.  There were a lot of layers, still are.  Within my experience of recovery there has never been an end point, just a continual journey towards health and light.  I suspect I will be on this road until I take my last breath and beyond into my next life and the one after that as I laughingly like to say.  My baggage is that potent.
When I was nearing the end of my time in therapy in 2015 I started experiencing feelings of aimless discontent.  I said that to my therapist one day, that I didn't see what good was coming of me occupying my seat each week.  He looked upon that as a good thing.  I did not.  Aimless discontent can be an uncomfortable place to be.  One looks around for inspiration or just for having a purpose to move from one day to the next and finds none.  I didn't realize at the time that in actuality aimless discontent is, as my therapist had said, a good thing.  Within it there is peace.  For too many years I lived with anxiety driven angst that colored every moment of my existence.  That is no longer the case.  Within the discontent there is clarity.  Within it there is love.  Love of oneself; and respect, particularly for the demons that once drove me to near insanity.  I told a friend recently that before recovery and for some time after I was the guy clinging, sometimes just by my fingertips, to the roof rack of an out of control bus careening on and off road.  At any given moment I did not know whether I was going to be thrown or not.  It was that bizarre.  Only I didn't even know the bus existed.  It was, simply put , my everyday reality, one borne out of my childhood experiences and the skill sets that I had honed in order to survive.
You hear in the rooms that we use the steps to re-parent ourselves.  This is true in my case.  I have done this and continue to because in many ways the adults that were charged with my care as a child were children themselves, only ones in adult sized bodies.  This is not to say that all things were insane.  They were not.  We had the essentials, a well kept home, clean clothes, good food.  We had some moral guidance albeit borne out of a fundamentalist background.  The window dressings were all there, the substance was not.  Those things like meaningful expressions of love, emotional support, a sense of real safety, the kind that allows children to explore the world knowing that the adults in the rooms have their back.  That they can take risks, step outside the box, because they have been instilled with an sense of self and genuine authenticity.  It takes real skill to provide a home where these qualities exists, where the child can explore the wonders of the world around them and still feel safe.  This is what the core of my recovery has become as I peel away the layers; providing for my inner children what they never had when we were all young.
Being a man of a certain age also drives my aimless discontent.  I am looking at retiring and what my life will look like.  Work has never been my calling.  I enjoy it.  It can be challenging though, and frustrating, wildly so at times; but for me, work has always been just a means to an end, the vehicle to which I use to fund my real life.  Gardening has always been my calling.  More recently writing too.
I am looking forward to not having the constraints of time spent at work.  There are so many things I would love to do with my friends that I can not due to my work schedule.  Equally though, I would be perfectly content with puttering in the garden each day then relaxing in the evening with a cup of tea and a good book.   Or continuing the process of finishing my novel, well a trilogy as it now exists.  I am an Old Soul, An Old Soul in the City, and Within the Sunrise have been creating themselves within me for ten years and I'm looking forward to the day when they become fully themselves. There are other novels waiting to be written, The Gripman's Daughter and another about Harriet Beecher Stowe's son Freddie who disappeared after coming to San Francisco to escape his battle scarred demons borne of his Civil War experiences.  Retirement is an exciting prospect.
A friend asked me recently if I was happy.  I said no.  I told him I have many joyous moments but I am not happy.  I am content though.  Maybe the aimless discontent is, as I said earlier. me living with the absence of the drama and angst that drove me like a bullwhip for so much of my life.  Maybe aimless discontent is me existing with some degree of a sense of self and authenticity borne of love, peace, and of clarity.  Maybe I will name it Aimless Content instead, a Content that is the result of feeling relatively free of ones demons.  Whatever this is, it is my reality at the moment and I'm grateful for it and for the breath it provides.

Endings and Beginnings

It's Midnight and I can hear the fireworks going off.  Lars, surprisingly, is sleeping in the blue chair to my right, the one that sits by the south facing windows, his head and shoulder resting comfortably against the sage green throw pillow.  I'm sitting on the sofa with my laptop resting on my thighs.  When I look at Larry he is surrounded by an aura of such serenity and peace that it takes my breath away.  Such innocence and vulnerability.
Larry is a leaner, always has been.  I have a picture of him sleeping with his brother and sister when he was a kitten, maybe two months old.  His brother, mostly white with just a touch of gray at his forehead, is stretched out length ways on their parents sofa.  Sylvia is curled up in the corner, her feet and nose nestled into the back of her brothers hind legs.  Lars is curled up at the other end, his face tucked under his brother's chin, his arms and feet stretched along his brothers face, his right shoulder resting against his brothers chest.  Larry is the same way with me.  He has to be leaning on me if he can.  Whenever we snuggle he rests against some part of me; sleeping against my ankle, my thigh, or nestled in the the crook of my left arm, his arms stretched across my chest.  Whenever we lay on the floor together he leans his shoulder against my forearm resting his chin on the back of my hand.  The intimacies of moments much like now as I sit here looking at him.
I had such moments with Crook.  And with Sylvia before him.  I cherished those moments as much as I these now.  They are what feed my soul.  I cherish those shared intimacies I have with my friends and family too.  The quiet lunches and dinners.  The raucous parties of Lotteria or Poker with my friends dogs, Coco and Maggie May, running around and through our legs chasing each other and barking as they play with such wild abandon.   I cherish the Opera and the Symphony, phone calls with friends over my morning coffee, and the ones I use to have with my Dad.  Of me leaning on them, resting my spirit, being held or holding them as we engage.  I had that with my Dad, of me leaning on him or him on me, sharing our fears and joys or just aimlessly chatting about nothing for an hour.  I miss my Three PM calls with my Dad.  Even now I still have my eye on the dashboard clock whenever I am running errands, timing them so  I would get home before Three.  Then I remember Dad is gone just as my morning cuddles by the south facing window are with Crook.  Of us resting in the sun on those summer days, falling asleep albeit briefly.  Endings can be so brutal when we lose someone so quickly.  I was in shock for days, weeks, after losing Sylvia.  During her last morning she was chasing her brother around the living room only to be dead seven hours later, wrapped in a towel, laying on the examination table in that cold lifeless room.  So it seems with my Dad.  Living a vibrant and full life one day, gone three weeks later.
This year has been one of many endings; losing Dad and Crook only months apart, the changes to my health which ended the relative settledness of my physical landscape; of completing the fourth revision of my novel I Am an Old Soul, a deeply personal project of nine years.  In many ways I suppose I have been naive about some things.  I thought that if I continued to manage Crook's diabetes, something that I was told I was doing well, he would be with me until he was Twenty.  I thought during my calls to my Dad that he would always just be there with me, his timeless energy living on.  When I shared with him in April the changing landscape of my health he said, "you're not planning on leaving me are you?"  Neither of us could have known that it would be he that was to leave, in just four short months.  Being naive I guess is not an altogether bad thing.  Naivete can have its merits as well as its downside.  One brings with it a relative serenity of being rooted in the present while the other neither warns us nor prepares us for what is to come.  New Years Eve seems to bring us endings, the ending of another calendar year, the deaths of friends and love ones, of celebrating what has been while singing Auld Lang Syne, exchanging hugs at the stroke of Midnight.  We had a New Years Eve ritual in our house when I was young.  Dad always went to De Rango's in West Racine for pizza just before Midnight.  Then about two minutes til he would arrive home with two steaming thin crust pizzas, one cheese, one cheese and sausage, a style that I have yet to experience anywhere else.   While he was gone Mom would set out the root beers in iced glasses and my brother and I would get exited about the prospect of having pizza so late.  Then at the stroke of midnight Dad would flip open the lids and we would dig in.
The evening after my Dad passed I was waiting outside De Rango's to meet my maternal aunt and cousins for dinner, sitting on this large rock in the parking lot.  I was talking to my friend Paul, describing where I was and the memories that it held for me.  Riding my bike up to Nelson's Five and Dime down the street from De Rango's, entering through the back to sit at the counter of the fountain while I watched them ladle out that deep green opaque syrup out of a large ceramic lime for my Green River soda.  Memories of when they closed off the street in front for a evening of square dancing called by my Uncle Dan as he stood on a raised wooden stage in the center of the intersection.  Of the North Shore railroad, its station just down the street,  of us watching the daily runs stopping as they moved between Milwaukee and Chicago.  Of my friends and I going to De Rangos for pizza after school.  He said it sounded a lot like Mayberry, that infamous city from the Andy Griffith Show and in many ways I suppose it was; however, in many ways it also wasn't.  Whichever, that life I was remembering in that moment is also long gone.
This New Years also signifies new beginnings for me; the last full year I plan to be working, celebrating my Sixty-Second birthday; I still gasp at the thought of being that old.  The handing over of my novel to an editor, the new life that Larry and I will be creating as we continue to let go of all the structures that defined our lives while Crook was with us.  It will be another year of feeling into the powerlessness around my health issues and what that may or may not bring for me.  This new year also brings with it the beginnings of my second novel, The Gripman's Daughter, a story of little Anna Thoresen and her life here on this property prior to, during, and just after the great quake of Nineteen-O-Six.  She has been waiting for such a long time, revealing bits and pieces of her life to me as I finished the fourth revision of I Am an Old Soul.  I am excited for her, that she is finally finding her voice, and I am excited by the act of writing, an act that is nothing less than profound for me.  To get completely out of the way, letting the characters tell their stories, to be the passive typist as they reveal their intimate joys and struggles.   To be so present as to cede my body to them, trusting them with what is so precious to me.  Writing is such an extraordinarily freeing experience, much like gardening.  To lose myself in the soil, breathing in the sweet damp aroma of loam as I move my fingers through it.
December Thirty-First brings with it the duality of me mourning the losses of this year while looking forward in celebration towards what is coming just around the corner, this duality of spirit, of one foot in the here and and now and one firmly planted just across the new year.  Dare I mention what good this new year could bring for our collective lives too; the possible end of our current flirtations with the dark side, politically speaking; the inherent power of the MeToo movement and the profound cultural changes that I hope it will bring; a reawakening of our responsibilities toward the downtrodden and vulnerable; all of this embedded into the celebratory fireworks, cheers, and hugs we have just exchanged at Midnight.  Here's to an emboldened shift this new year towards what feeds our love, joy, and happiness and away from what triggers our fears, bias, and prejudices.  Happy New Years!!

Death and the Act of Grieving

Grief is defined by Webster's as deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.  It is a rather matter of fact statement, dry and to the point, with no hint of what to expect in reality.  Over the years I have bore witness to the act of grieving.  A mother standing on the beach in my birth town, wailing, her arms flailing towards God, pleading with him to save her son as his twelve year old lifeless body was being brought out of the waters of Lake Michigan.  I was not much older than her son at the time.  I stood helpless at the grave of a friend who had lost his life in a horrific car accident after leaving our flat, his twin sister weeping, on her knees, clawing at the casket as it was being lowered into the earth.  I carried my maternal grandfather's casket with five others as a young man praying that I would not trip and fall.  I sat on the edge of my maternal grandmothers bed as she laid dying.  I sat at the bedside of a dear friend as he literally and slowly drown from AIDS related lung ailment until the doctor sedated him so he wouldn't suffer anymore.  And after he took his last labored breath there was a silence in the room that defied reality.  I have lost count of all the funerals and memorial services I have been to since the Nineteen Eighties and before.  When I lost my first two partners to AIDS I was stunned more than anything.  Even though we were no longer together I still wept bitterly.  When I unexpectedly lost my animal companion Sylvia nine years ago I was the one on my knees weeping and wailing, crying out, not my baby girl.  And so it was this time with Crook.  I wept for days before his vet assisted passing knowing that I was about to lose him.  No one ever prepares you for someones death.  No one explains to you what it will feel like when you lose someone so close, when you can't catch your breath, when your body feels as if someone sucker punched you in the gut so many times that your internal organs are little more that mush.  No one prepares you for the act of grieving.  I wasn't prepared for Crook's death.  Nor my father's for that matter.  Both came out of nowhere.  Dad's, three weeks to the day he entered the hospital with pain in his gut.  Crook, albeit his pancreatitis had gone into the chronic stage during the summer and I did have "that" conversation with his vet; however, I had expected him to last for a quite a while longer.  I didn't expect to come home from my father's memorial service to immediately start working on stabilizing Crook's emotional life, one that unbeknownst to me had taken a huge hit while I was gone.  It was the coming and going so many times that triggered it, his family of origin stuff, those things that most rescue animal companions bring to the table.
Grieving has never been a healthy act of self care for me.  Make no mistake, it has gotten better over the years but it is still not as healthy as I would like.  Grieving has always been a messy and difficult process fraught with my demons speaking their truths, saying things like you're a horrible father, you should have known better, you are the reasons they are suffering, you were the cause of their death.  That was particularly acute with Sylvia and I still believe nine years on that I have some culpability.  It has taken many years though for that to wane, to see past my demons and more to what was fact at the time.  That is why this time with Crook was so intensely hard for me even though I had made so much progress.  This was essentially the first time I had to make the decision to end a life; something I wish upon no one.  To know when is the right time.  How does one know when it is the right time?  Animal companions lack the one thing that us two legged person's have; a voice.  We can say when we are in pain.  We can describe the issue at hand, ask for guidance, listen to advice from professionals.  Crook was not able to speak his truth.  Cats by nature are resilient beings and very adept at hiding their distress; however I knew Crook's body well and I generally knew when he was in pain, at times a lot of pain; but when is it that the line is crossed, the one that they can no longer return over.
In the days since his death I have come to realize just how ordered our daily lives had become around his diabetes, how everything was planned around the timing of his shots, how they occurred, and where in our home they happened.  How the before and after rituals came to be, how foods were introduced and discarded, supplements shifted.  Looking back I have begun to see now that they just started of their own accord, in the moment, as we all struggled to deal with the immediacy of his new diagnosis in December of 2012.  How, out of the chaos, came the rituals that defined our days and nights up to and including the morning of Crook's death.
Lars and I are lost, literally and figuratively.  The structures that were so ingrained into our existence are gone, never to return.  Gone too are almost all of the rituals that Crook brought with him from his family of origin, the ones that he had held dear with his former family; coming under the covers to sleep against the inside of my left leg as my right leg was bent up to create a tent in which he would crawl into.  Of us laying in the sun as I sung to him.  Him meeting me at the door when I cam home from work, of me carrying him around with me as I put my things away.  Him talking during the night.  I swore when I first adopted him from the rescue shelter he was able to speak a few words.  He would say or I thought he would say after eating his dinner, I Love You.  These rituals are only a few of what we had together.  He came to us with so many, all of which he lovingly taught us over the years.  Without them, we are trying to find our way forward, trying to reinvent our daily lives, trying to recapture many of the rituals Lars and I had before Crook came to us.  They were never lost.  They had just palled in comparison to what Crook brought to the table.
Crook had his rituals with Lars too, ones that were unique to them.  Most were endearing to watch, wonderful really, but others not so much.  Crook was traumatized by his time at Animal Care and Control.  He had lost his family of origin who he had been with for the first ten years of his life, a family that he absolutely adored.  He had lost his bonded mate of ten years when Shadow was euthanized a month into their stay at ACC.  After their surrender to ACC and especially after Shadow's death Crook transformed from being a loving, vulnerable, and open human to being untouchable.  Losing Shadow was the last straw it seemed.  As I was attempting to adopt him Crook savagely attacked a worker and was also slated for euthanasia.  Thankfully, they gave him to a rescue group who then contacted me to finalize his adoption.  And when I got him he was still untouchable.  However, it only took three weeks for him to start becoming his loving self again albeit as I said before with deep memories of his trauma, trauma that did complicate our lives from time to time, especially as he became more ill.  Still, we are lost without his loving personality, his open and vulnerable eyes.  I know that a few of his rituals will live on with us, the ones that Lars has made his own over the six years Crook was with us.  And in time the pain of his loss will lessen.  However, what I have also learned from death and the act of grieving over my lifetime is that each loss I experience becomes a part of who I am, as embedded into my DNA as the color of my eyes or the amount of hair on my head, or in my case, the lack of it.  Whether I was ever prepared for it or not, grief and loss have become my intimate friends, ones that bring both pain and pleasant memories and it will be both that I will rely on to help me find my and Lars way to whatever new life we are meant to have.

Rituals of Life

I found myself reaching for my journal after I came home from swimming this evening.  Writing is such a integral part of my life.  I have a novel that is ready for the editors.  I have two more in the wings, the characters patiently waiting for their day in the sun.  I have a number of short stories in various forms, all waiting for me too.  I haven't though written in my journal since the Ghostship fire last December.  I'm not sure why.  I'm not even sure I need to question why;  the act of writing is organic for me, happening in its own way and on it own time.  I have learned over the years that it is never subject to the ticking of a clock or the changing of the seasons.  It just exists, fully and authentically, in the way I wish I could exist.
Before I started writing in my journal this evening I reread that Ghostship entry.  It was all about loss, of me grieving the lives of those who died so tragically that cold December evening in Oakland.  Those mostly young lives never to be lived into their natural ends; their lives stopped in a brief second of time, swallowed up by the intense smoke and flame; the very things that we interpret as symbols of cleansing and of rebirth, of the Phoenix rising.   Dad's death seems to have brought me back to this place of deep grieving again, of me questioning my life's purpose, of whether I'm happy or just contented to show up each day for the rituals of my life.
As I have said many times before I have a very complicated relationship to loss, one that was created when I was a small child, then reformed again and again through the loss during the height of the AIDS Pandemic, from the loss of partners, of friends, and later of family, both chosen and blood.  I also have said that no one should be forced to have such an intimate relationship with death at such an early age.  We were in our twenties, thirties, and some older.  Most of us were new and fresh to the world, intent on claiming our rightful place as queer men and women, as transgendered, standing together against a hostile world that was intent on slamming the closet door closed again.  We, as those who came before us, created rituals that connected and grounded us to each other.  We created community with our rituals,  ones that sustained and fed us in our youth.  Through these rituals we celebrated life, and love.  We celebrated anniversaries, both personal and collective.  Of uprisings, and street battles, and protests; of weddings, of our love, for each other, of the birth of our children and in some cases, their deaths.  Rituals were and continue to be at the core of our personal and collective lives.  They are tied intrinsically to our identities, they inform how we view the world around us and how the world views us.  We have ethnic rituals, ones that bind us to each other, we have religious and spiritual ones that are marked by their calendars.  We have rituals marking the personal, the collective, ones that mark the passing of the seasons, ones that are millennia old and deeply connected to the core of who we are.  So why is it when I claim my seat again at the table of grief I begin to question the very core of my being?  Of whether I am happy or not?  Of whether my lifetime of rituals that I have established that bind me to myself and the world around me are still valid?  The key seems to be in that Ghostship entry and my deep seated feelings of Otherness.
Those young men and women at Ghostship were living their Otherness, creating rituals with their art and music.  They found joy in embracing it, they found community, and love however much their celebrations and their rituals were looked upon as less then, as an affront to society.  They refused to conform to the "accepted" definitions of wider society and were chastised for it; however, they did it and with an eagerness and zeal that most could only wish for.
I seem to not want to embrace my Otherness; still; even when it is mirrored so beautifully in the lives of those who died that night and in the lives of my many of my friends.   It is a frightening place for me.  It reminds me too much of my childhood, of those years of fear and degradation.  I jettisoned so much of myself during those years.  I suspect but I am not sure that my Otherness is about those jettisoned pieces of myself that still orbit just beyond my consciousness, the ones I still struggle to reincorporate; or better said, the ones that I till the soil for, preparing for their return when they are ready.  So much of my spiritual life is about that preparation, no wonder I am so deeply connected to the act of gardening; besides the genetic predisposition that is.  I do know that my authenticity is to be found in my Otherness, that I will find great joy there.  I just fear that Otherness and joy that it will bring.  It creates that well oiled dynamic of waiting for the other shoe to drop; don't be too joyous, that part of me likes to say, because it will be all taken away from you in an instant.  Better to be content than joyful.  It's that fight or flight thing within me; as always.
I was speaking to a close friend of mine last night and I realized that I still hold onto that understanding that my authenticity is a goal that I am working towards instead of a state of being in the now, one that is perpetually organic.   I suspect if I sit quietly for long enough I will find that I am already deeply grounded into my Otherness and that my life reflects that fact.  And that I am joyous more often that not.  How does that old saying go; I am already at where I think I am going.