A huge hurt builds inside me. My father died on Christmas Day 1986. It is a familiar, old hurt. This year it is freshly layered with new hurts and loss. Five months ago the my last living brother died. He was the eldest of my siblings. 13 months ago my brother who was closest to me in age died. Two other brothers have passed on, one in 1998, and another in 2005. Mom died in 2007.
I have a husband, and a wonderful daughter who I will see shortly after the New Year when she and her finance return from the great white north to the Old Pueblo to plan a wedding that will happen the day after next Christmas. I have an amazing and talented step-daughter. We spent a fantastic Thanksgiving with her and her husband and their twin five year olds a few weeks ago in the Hudson Valley.
The last two brothers to pass both had dementia so I hadn’t really been able to converse with them for a while. I am not yet 60. My mother lived to be 92. I could live for a long time as the only one who remembers my childhood family holidays. Childhood memories of fall and winter get togethers become cloudy through time. There is no one left to shine sunlight through the clouds on old stories, desserts, family jokes, no one to laugh with about family eccentricities. I can tell the stories to my children and grandchild, and I do, but there is now no one who shares those memories with me.
I know I’m not the only one.
Holidays can be very, very tough. Be kind. Ask people how they are doing. Smile. Give hugs. Take it easy, don’t do more than you want to or can can do. Allow yourself a good cry, don’t cut it short. Then dust yourself off and do something to make someone else happy. Find an activity that brings you cheer. Allow the cheer of others to creep into you. We can learn to have a sadness and to be happy at the same time. Life is bittersweet for those blessed with long lives.
Merry Christmas, or happy whatever you may celebrate!
Tucson Remembers and Cherishes the Departed
The All Souls Procession is just over a week away. My how a year can fly. Seems like just yesterday that I was on a Tram to the Procession End Ceremony at Mercado San Agustin, (where the Procession After-Ceremony is again this year) when I received a text that no one wants to receive.
It was appropriate. I could transition to the idea that my brother had passed on amid other Tucsonans and inhabitants of the this Earth-bound world.
People of my culture, American, once mourned for a year. It takes that long. Sometimes longer. It has taken a year to cycle through all the adjustments I needed to make to my life whole again in a world without my brother. I am not even half way through the mourning period for a second brother who left this world a few months ago in July.
I consider myself fortunate to be able to grieve in a community that radiates acceptance and compassion. Creating legacy is much easier when it can be done openly and truthfully.
Do continue reading on She Knows about how Tucson “gets” and creates legacy.
They Could Not Have Known
Today America remembers attacks on our eastern shores that transpired 9/11/2001. This anniversary in 2015, the 14th anniversary, has many people focusing on children who were born on that day.
On Sept. 11, 2001, 13,238 children were born in the United States, according to the Division of Vital Statistics. Today one of those children, Emily Berta, opened the New York Stock Exchange as an ambassador for the September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance.
https://youtu.be/6WgbSTf_KZM
These children will be impacted by the date of their birth for as long as they live. One never knows what legacy they will leave. Accidents of birth can influence legacy as much as any planned event or deed.
September 11th in Tucson is not quite like the date in other places. A Tucson girl, Christina-Taylor Green, was born that day. Her best known quote is recounted in this Arizona Daily Star piece:
When Christina-Taylor met a little girl her age living in a group home, she told her family: “We are so blessed. We have the best life.”
Christina-Taylor Green was featured in Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11 on page 41 as Christina Taylor from Maryland. Her family then moved from Maryland to Arizona. The 10th Anniversary edition of the book, Faces of Hope 10 Years Later: Babies Born on 9/11, is dedicated to Christina-Taylor, who was murdered in an act of domestic terrorism in which a madman attempted to assassinate United States Congressperson Gabrielle Giffords.
The children of 9/11 will reinvent memorials into hope-filled days of action.
I personally cannot condone the ritual observance of days of tragedy, nor the militarization of remembrances. Legacy is what we make it. As a Tucsonan, as a matriot (feminine of patriot,) as an American, I choose to honor the lives lost, by working to decrease violence in all forms everywhere.
I pray, “Christina-Taylor, sweet Angel of Tucson, help us learn to live in love and peace.” Help us stop war, stop gun violence, stop religious violence. May the violence of the boundary markers of your life, a legacy you did not choose, never be repeated.
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As an aside – No I did not know C-TG. I have a friend who loved her dearly. I knew many of the people injured or killed that January day. No I did not know anyone killed in the Towers or the Pentagon or the flights; I know people who were in the Towers and lived. My step daughter worked in Lower Manhattan then in a building that was evacuated and walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge. When we lived in Arlington, my other daughter went to Junior High with kids who lost a parent when Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
A Legacy of One – Loss of Siblings
You were close. Maybe you could not stand each other. Or perhaps you were indifferent. Sibling relationships are as complex as any relationship in life, or death.
As I write this I am 58 years old. At one time this might have been considered old. I do not feel old. I am not old. Old is always 20 years beyond where you are. Old for me would be when I am older than 75 and also in ill health. 75 need not be old. Old presents as an attitude.
My mother lived to be 92 years of age. I turned 50 a month before she passed. Her younger sister also lived to be 92. I work under the assumption that my body can probably last that long too. Good genes. Probably.
But when my father died at age 71 I was in my late twenties, it was 1986. When I rode back to my mother’s house with the youngest of my four brothers from the hospital shortly after our Dad died, I remember saying to him, “I can’t believe I am going to have to go through this five more times.” My brother looked at me and said, “Oh, I’ve never thought of that. You are right.”
Those five times have happened. April 1998. March 2005. June 2007. November 2014. July 2015.
I am not alone, my husband and daughter are my family now. But I miss my family, the one with which I grew up.
There is no good help source for dealing with the loss of multiple siblings. The only person I ever met who talked about this was my neighbor who lived to be 105. Her baby sister lived to be almost 100. They had each other for almost a century.
I will live the rest of my life without parents or brothers. It could be another 30+ years when I will be the only one of my generation left living. Yes, there are cousins, but I did not know them well, and most of them, too, just like my brothers, were much older than me.
From time to time I will post about sibling loss. Someone should.
Aloneness and Memory
BEING AND BELONGING
I am alone.
I always have been alone.
This aloneness is different.
Ultimately it is the state we all are in all of the time. Consciousness is isolated inside our biological bodies. I have friends who would argue that our core essence can travel beyond our bodies, but for most people, this is not how the world is viewed.
All of my siblings, my four brothers, are dead. My parents are dead. The person I considered a best friend when I was young, and such considerations were more important than anything else in the world, died when she was 21.
I try not to dwell on these facts, but I probably think about this sort of thing more than most people. I try not to bemoan my situation, as I did not lose my family in a single violent event. They are all gone none-the-less.
I am not sure what the word for this state of being is. I have a marriage and a child. Both are in their mid-20s. I am not without family or love. But the family of my birth is gone. Orphan implies that I lost my parents when I was a child. So that is not the right word to describe my state of being and it does not address the lack of siblings. If I speak of the family of my birth it sounds like I was adopted. And I was not adopted. But my natal family is gone.
SYNCRONICITY
There are times I feel as though I am not alone in the universe and that the presence of the universe itself is with me. The feeling comes from where synchronicity bubbles up and nudges at me. Such an event happened last evening.
As I wrote the above words about being alone last evening, I decided to mend some fences and build a stile to access the separate fields of inquiry where my husband and I spend our time. He likes to go to the movies. I saw that a film, Mr Holmes, I thought we would both want to watch, enjoy might be too upbeat a term, was showing at a local Indy cinema, The Loft.
I knew little of the film other than having heard it was quite good, and that I wanted to see Ian McKellan portray a non-wizardly character. It was excellent, thought-producing, and, to me, relevant.
Synchronicity seemed to dance through my brain as I watched the film develop the very interplay of ideas that I had begun writing about earlier in the day: aging and how the process elucidates the existential aloneness which intensifies through time as peers, and those we know, disappear.
CONSTRUCTING MEMORY
The past exists only in memories and when there is no one who shares your memories, how can an event be validated? Holmes, age 93, grappled with senility and the forgetting of the details of the case from decades ago that apparently so shook his belief in his own abilities that he retired from detective work.
Ultimately understanding that facts, while essential to material stories, are nothing without interpretation. The interpretations we choose to share with others often have more significance than any complete inventory of facts.
Two of my own brothers, the two who passed away this past year, both suffered from dementia or senility. I have thought a great deal about what they knew and chose to share or not and literally take to the grave with them. The metaphor of wasps of who attack and live on versus bees that give all for the colony in Mr. Holmes gave me a new frame for contemplating my brothers’ actions and my own.
CONSTRUCTING MEANING
This timeless existential pondering of communication and community coexists with the loneness that is the essential state of being. Self-sacrifice for the good of the community theme entwines the characters through the apiary sub-plot and I cannot help but think of how material concerns, facts, isolated one brother who suffered greatly, and how another brother who was most concerned with love was happy.
Infinite permutations of the Mr. Holmes story exist in life, but I am content to irrationally take comfort from the synchronicity of choosing to see this film as I began to write about losing my last sibling during a visit to the city and region of the midwest in which he lived. Does this logically mean anything? But it has meaning for me.