expecting the unexpected

At every occasion Ill be ready for a funeral...

Expectations. The more I experience, the easier it becomes for me to see what a huge role expectations play in our lives. They dictate the way we enter any given situation. They are a preemptive determinate of how we will react to whatever comes about. And each new thing we encounter shapes our expectations for the next, a system of tumbling dominoes that becomes our experiences, our memories, and in many ways, who we are.

A long time ago I settled on the fact that the best way to protect yourself is to have no expectations at all. Expect nothing and you will be ready for anything. Hope for nothing and remain blissfully untouched by failure or let down. Even as I write these statements that point to the obvious flaws in this theory, I have a hard time not seeing the merit in a philosophy that would somehow soften the impact of the hurt and disappointment that we will inevitably face.

But as I have been attempting to hash out what such a thing might really look like, I realized something about my own expectations. After losing Quinton, out of sheer emotional necessity, I had to find a way to protect myself from feeling any more pain. I thought that losing expectations was the answer. Yet, I am just coming to realize that my expectations were not gone, they had merely changed. One of my favorite songs says "at every occasion Ill be ready for a funeral". Having experienced a loss worse than anything I could have imagined brought me to a place of expecting the worst in every situation. Somehow expecting the hurt became my protection. Even still, I see the repercussions of those expectations in me now. The dominoes have lead me on a path that makes it hard for me to imagine anything ever working out. I have spent two years expecting the funeral in every occasion.

I heard this said about people that have experienced great loss... "In staring down death every day, we are forced to know that life, every minute, is borrowed time. And each person we let ourselves care about is just one more loss somewhere down the line". I don't want to keep measuring my life in loss. The thought of losing someone else I love is more than I can bare. But, I am also losing a great deal by never moving past my fear of losing someone else. Someone I respect told me that the opposite of fear is not courage, it is love. I want to love. And I want to find a way to love that supersedes expectations, good or bad. A love that carries on despite hurt or disappointment and that overcomes the fear of loss. I suppose that is a rather lofty expectation in and of itself, but I hope, I expect that it is possible. And one day, perhaps not so far off, there may be an occasion that I wont be waiting for the funeral, I will simply join in the celebration.

4... 3... 2... 1... 3/4... 2/3...

Letting go. Its probably the one inevitable task of life that I am worst at. Some would call it my hill to die on. I call it practically impossible.

There is something about the motion of life, the coming and going of people and circumstances that makes letting go so necessary. Yet, when it comes to people in particular, I cannot seem to master the art of letting go. This is, in part, the reason that I tend to shy away from attachment if at all possible. My limited attachments are more or less... for better or worse... permanent. I understand the necessity and feel the strain of intimacies that have run their course. But I just cant seem to relay the message of moving on to my heart... at least not entirely.

Why? I think its a combination of many things. One is the notion that if I keep a piece of someone I care about in my heart, if I hold that part of them with me, they will somehow remain safe. Whether they are in a different state or a different country, their place in me makes me feel as though they cannot be lost. I think another is my own desire to be held onto. Perhaps I havent lived long enough to have any true wisdom about this life, but from what I can make of it, the only thing we have that really matters is each other. If I have made no difference to the people I love, if I myself am easy to let go of, then what have I really done? So maybe I hold onto people in the way I hope they will hold onto me. The way I feel everyone deserves to be held onto.

Its these thoughts and feelings intermingled with the faces of those that have come and gone... some who have walked away, some whose lives have taken them away, and some who are gone forever that make me really terrible at letting go. And Im not sure what to make of that. Maybe as you grow older it grows easier. Maybe it never gets easier... maybe thats ok. For me, thats ok.

maybe you're gonna be the one that saves me

Do you ever feel like your very existence pulls you in two different directions? Right now I long for nothing more than simplicity... the kind of relationships, the kind of love that is peaceful and understood. The problem is, I am not simple. And the fundamental complication wrapped up in who I am makes searching for simplicity exhausting and sometimes painful. But my recent state of unrest has brought to mind certain moments when life and my place in it has been remarkably simple. As I look back at these moments, there is a tie that binds them together, a person that made them possible... Quinton.

Shortly after Quinton died I began to make a list of things that I want to do before I die. I remember in the days after his funeral, trying to make sense of what had happened and realizing that there was no sense to be found. The only thing that I could think to do was to make sure that I didnt waste a day of my own life. It was simple, if Quinton didnt get to live his life, I would live mine to the fullest. I would make all of my dreams come true to take the place of all of his dreams that were lost.

Several months later, I found myself searching for answers again. I was called to stand in front of the man who hit my little brothers and left the scene and say... something. What could I possibly say? But as I sat in my room, hours before the trial, the answer became simple. I stood before Sean Daniels, my family and friends, and asked them to honor Quinton by living their lives the way Quinton would have if he had the chance. Those words were perhaps more for myself than anyone else that was there that day. Quinton was everything that I want to be. He was kind and generous, selfless, full of joy. He made the world better just by being around. He was simply beautiful.

Needless to say, I find myself in a place where the clarity of those moments has once again gotten lost in the complication buried inevitably in who I am. Yet, a friend asked me the other day if I thought it was possible to find simplicity in life as an insimple person. My answer was Yes... wholeheartedly. The reason I know this is that there is a little boy that will not let me forget what is important. And maybe he's gonna be the one that saves me. After a year and a half without him, there is a great deal of pain wrapped up in those words. Finding meaning in his death carries with it the guilt of in some way letting him go. Nevertheless, I am taking all of him that I can and walking forward again.

So what does walking forward look like in this moment? What stands out to me is that simple doesn't necessarily mean easy and it certainly doesn't mean perfect. If Quinton were here, his dreams and his life would have been beautiful but they also would have been messy. He would have failed and lost and his heart would have been broken. That is life. You embrace the good, learn from the bad, and keep moving toward what you know to be true. Perhaps this is the place where complication meets simplicity... in the cold and broken hallelujah.

...hallelujah

Wow, I dont even know where to start this time around. There is a quote that has been in my head for the last couple days. Its from one of my top 5 favorite songs...

"Love is not a victory march. Its a cold and its a broken hallelujah." -Jeff Buckley

In the midst of struggling through wishing certain things were different, that I had done better or been better, I keep coming back to this quote. Love, life... its imperfect. What matters is the people that you share your life with. And that when you truly care for those people, the imperfections, the struggles, the hurts dont matter all that much. They become a part of the beautiful disaster that is love. The cold and broken hallelujah. The true joy that can only be found when it happens despite the harsh reality of how messed up we are. So maybe this hasnt been the most articulate of blogs but it is where I find myself right now. And I cant help but think that the more that I accept that broken hallelujah, the easier it will be to walk through life full of love for the people I care about and content with the state of whatever things may be at the time. No fear... just life. And thats that.

irreconcilable

In the interest of doing something worthwhile, I have recently been forced to ask myself a question that could have very comfortably gone unanswered. How do you come to terms with an irreconcilable loss?

About a year ago, I heard about a place called Judi's House. They help kids work through the grief of a lost loved one. From the minute I heard about it, I couldnt think of something I would rather invest myself in. You see, a year and a half ago, I lost someone I loved very much. His name was Quinton, and he was... beautiful. It was Quinton that brought me to Judi's House. But what I didnt expect is how much of him I would find there.

We spent a weekend training to help kids through their process of grief. To my own surprise, I found that my process of grief has remained painfully stunted. They say the the first task of grief is accepting that the death is real and understanding that it is final. They want us to use the terms bluntly and with authority... dead, death, died. And I had to ask myself, am I there? Do I understand these things? The answer to that questions holds more than I have the strength to sort through. Because I realized, there is a part of me that believes that Quinton is coming back. Dont get me wrong, I know that he is gone. But the finality of that seems impossible to me. When I allow myself to consider fully the gravity of him being gone, it is almost incapacitating. And to think that that will never change... that it will never get better. I dont know how to let that be true. Everything has an end, right? But the end of losing someone is finding them again. So, somewhere deeper than I have been able to reach until now, I have been waiting to find Quinton again. How do I reconcile that part of me with every other part of me that knows that he is gone and feels the weight of it every day? I dont know that I can. Is that ok?

honestly...

I have been thinking about honesty a lot lately. The truth. If you asked any given person what their greatest fear is, they would probably say something like, "Always being alone" or "Failure." But I would argue that for most of us, what we really fear most is the truth. Whether it is the truth about life or the truth about ourselves... there is something about total honesty that makes us completely vulnerable. So much so that a lot of times the person we have the most trouble being honest with is ourselves. We create these pseudo-truths, versions of honesty that protect us from harm. All the while the real truth, the whole truth remains buried under layers of half truths where judgment and hurt cannot reach it.

In the same way, I think we often create a version of ourselves that we choose to believe is true. We learn the characteristics we have that seem acceptable to others or ourselves and become convinced that this is who we are. But behind this version of ourselves, all of our shortcomings and mistakes and ugliness lay hidden. So we split ourselves in two, perpetually sifting through what we include in our truth and what we do not. The problem with this is, when you are only presenting the world with part of yourself, only part of you can be known and loved. I wonder if anyone would feel lonely if they knew that they were fully known and fully loved by another. My guess is no. And yet, there is a very large risk wrapped up in this predicament of total honesty. Opening yourself to the possibility of an all-embracing love leaves you equally open to hurt and shame at its deepest level. At what point does the reward outweigh the risk?

Now if you're thinking "she just talked herself into a philosophical oblivion" (or something along those lines), you are right, and it happens a lot. But I say all that to say... circumstances recently have caused me to question the risks and rewards of honesty. While on a much smaller scale than mentioned above, Im finding the rewards of honesty with myself and the people around me to be pleasantly surprising. And coming from someone who has experienced the hurt of being fully known and not so fully loved or loved at all, Im realizing that may not always be the case. Honesty isnt without hope, and the risk will probably be worth it again.

seasons may change

Someone once said to me, "Life comes in seasons. If the leaves are falling, you know your season is to come."

At any given time we are surrounded by seasons. Things are created and broken and fixed. Seeds are planted, they grow and wither and die. The motion of life from one season to the next cannot be avoided, run from, or ignored. Yet, in this past season of my life I decided that I wasnt going to have it anymore. The thought of another dark and cold season paralyzed me. So, I created a scheme to stop time in its tracks... to freeze my life in a perpetual season of warmth. I made lists and plans and shut out anything that threatened heartache. And still, I find myself in a place where the leaves are falling again and there is NOTHING I can do about it. So I am reminded of a quote from my favorite movie...

You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-You-Are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness." You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you're terrified somebody's going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself. ~ Breakfast at Tiffany's, spoken by Paul Varjak

I ran into myself again... into life again. Its messy and it hurts. And the more you embrace life, the more deeply intertwined you become with its seasons. So the question becomes, how do I face this coming season however dark and cold it may be and be ok with it? I dont know the answer yet.