January 16, 2024

That Calendar

I get it. I really do. It was something of a tradition during our time together.

I had never done it before. It was a practice of Shirli’s from the git-go … transferring birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and death dates from the expired calendar onto the next year’s calendar. Every year, every page of every calendar had more names added to the appropriate blocks. The expired calendar was then placed in a file in the file cabinet and the new calendar hung on the wall in plain view.

It seemed only right, at that time, for me to do that after Shirli died. And I did. Painstakingly with a heart full of emotional pain and tears in my eyes. Honestly, it was torture.

We are sixteen days now into the new calendar year of 2024. I have yet to pick up a wall calendar for this new year. For one thing, in all the rearranging and redecorating that I have been doing, I do not have a place on any wall for a wall calendar. Oh, there are places that I could stick one where, in the words of my dear sweet mother now in heaven, it would look as out of place as a turd in a punch bowl. 

Yeah. That is about as out of place as it gets.

There is another thing though.

This other thing is something born during a hard personal process that involved a lot of retrospect and introspect. I am more than comfortable with the conclusion that I came to. Just thinking about it at first really troubled me. It was like I was letting all those people down if I did not take forward with me the tradition of transferring all those names and dates onto a paper calendar that I would look at every day of every month of every year and, taking pen in hand, add new names and dates as these new dates came to bear.

No. I am not continuing this tradition. Not this year. Not any year in the future either.

It’s not that I have no respect for those who have departed before me. There are some very dear ones who have “gone on before”, very dear ones whom I will never forget. I cannot forget them. Their memories live inside of me. From time to time, something stirs one of those memories to life whether I want the memory stirred or not. There are times when I am not particularly prepared to entertain the memory that insists on making its appearance. There are plenty enough of these episodes without indelibly writing on a calendar that I will look at every day of the year then file away and save for what or who knows.

I got to where I would not even look at the calendar on the wall. I knew it was there and would look past it, ignoring it all together.

Why?

Because I would relive, in some measure, the emotional trauma associated with those experiences that are, all too apparently, part of this trip through life as we now know it.

I will not, I cannot, give myself to the brutal bare-knuckle pugilism of a calendar hanging on my wall. I have to have more than that to look forward to in this moving ahead that I am settling into and so enjoying at this point in this huge life-transition in my life.

The past is what it is. There is no going back to change anything in the past.  The past has already been written in the  book of time. There is only a two-pronged question. What am I going to do with my today and all of my potential tomorrows?

 

January 9, 2024

Going Full Circle

I think about things … a lot of things … that are part of the unfolding of this life-altering transition that, though I resented its seeming imposition, and struggled so desperately hard against it, I am now fully involved in embracing it along with the changes that are unfolding as the natural flow of settling into what I can only view as God’s gift in my life for such a time as this.

 A large part of this transitioning fits within the scheme represented by the words … full circle.

I find it rather amazing how, in this transition, I am merely embracing more levels of my true original self. It’s not that I have dreamt up some new version of me as some persona to develop and portray. Far from it. The reality of it is that I am now free to just be me … an older version of the kid that I have always been. 

As that kid becomes more front and center, it’s easy for me to see how so much of the life I lived over the decades, so much of what I have done in my life, both the bad and the good of it, has often been something of a misguided pursuit of trying to find my original self in well-intentioned illusions and people pleasing. I was there all along but I could not see the kid in me anymore.

Oh, those damned thick layers of socially poured concrete that buried me.

I invited some of the layers. Some of the most sinister layers were poured by well-intentioned others along the way who, for some reason or another, felt that they had my (and more importantly “their”) best interest in mind. I tried to fit the constructed molds. I tried to perform according to the expectations of so many others. All the while the layers grew thicker and heavier smothering my original self … the one I was created to be. The spines of those boney horses wore blisters on my narrow sun-deprived ass.

It was out there on the NW Kansas prairie at the turn of the Millennium, that year I lived under a huge cottonwood tree in my vintage camper, that I began laboriously chipping away at the concrete layers that buried me so deeply beneath them. It was there, under that cottonwood tree, that I laid to rest the Martyr Complex that I had so easily justified as the price for serving others as a pastor. I learned some hard lessons about human nature during that season in my life, lessons that none of my preparatory education in that field prepared me for.

It took several years to chisel out from under that life sucking burden of weight. Part of those several include the two years that I lived practically in seclusion in New Jersey. Nobody from my past but my mom and daughter knew where I was at. For all practical purposes, David just disappeared altogether. Honestly, I was happy to be gone too. I was happy to put some people behind me. I refer to the first of those two years as “the year of my bleeding”. I spent that first year emotionally bleeding on every blade of grass on that golf course.

It was there, working on a golf course in New Jersey, that I began exploring and embracing a more contemplative spirituality rather than the Evangelicalism I had known all my life. I also developed an extreme resistance, almost an animosity, toward anyone who tried to press their notions and ideals upon me, especially where hardshell Evangelicalism is concerned. I had fought for and won my freedom and I would not be led away again into captivity with a hook in my jaw.

I can never go back in time physically to live again those early years of my life. I can, however, remember. And, in remembering, re-member, as best as possible, my original true self albeit now being hauled around by this aging vehicle doing its dead level best to defy the effects of aging.

A lot of labor and love have gone into rearranging and redecorating the inside of this little shack beside the track. A certain sense of integrity has been maintained throughout respecting the past and honoring the place that Shirli, my greatest hero, filled while also creating an atmosphere that accurately reflects where I am today in this crazy full circle adventure that is the life of David.

 

 

 

A More Fitting Shrine

January 3, 2024

It does little good attempting to hold onto things and images as reminders from the past. I no longer live there and can only return there through memories. There are many good memories stored in my memory banks. There are also other memories that I prefer not to revisit.

The reality of it does generate a certain sense of sadness. Yes. The sadness still comes and goes but it is short lasting. That is part of the package. That which was once familiar can now only be looked upon as the context of the past. Clinging to the past, to both the calm and blustery contained in it, for me anyway, cannot be allowed to hold my “present” captive in its tenacious life-sucking tentacles.  

An old Chinese proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

This line is pregnant with meaning and validly describes this journey through the hell of grief that I have, rather obviously, emerged from. Ah. The heat of that hell singed my feathers and scorched my skin. In fact, that hole was so deep and hot that I, for months, honestly despaired of life, wanted only to die, and did my best to drink myself to death. Then, after I managed to take a first step to move in some kind of forward direction, there came along several serious tailspins that caused me to nosedive and crash hard. Each of those crashes brought with them their own sets of emotional and physical ramifications.

The past is gone except in memory. 

There is no going back. There is only now. There is only doing now what is necessary to move forward … taking with me all the good in the fond memories of the past while remembering the lessons learned from those memories that I choose to no longer entertain. Both have, after all, been important tutors grooming me so I can keep carrying on in my life.  

I am doing precisely that … carrying on in my life.

Part of the carrying on, now that I am just David rather than the David in Shirli and David, is doing a major makeover on the inside of this little dwelling that I affectionately refer to as the shack beside the track. 

The goal in mind, where this project is concerned, is to create an environment that represents and reflects where I have arrived in this huge life-altering transition. While it has to be “mine”, there is also something of a necessity to keep a healthy balance between the past and the present. A certain integrity has to be maintained. What I am doing is nowhere close to what might be considered a purge. It is, in reality, more of a purification. Shirli’s touch and footprint will always be here. They will always be an indelible imprint on me as well. And rightly so.

There is another angle to this that I cannot help but to think about.

In one of our last conversations, shortly before I began administering the morphine and increased measures of the other medications, Shirli told me in pointed terms that she wanted me to move forward and not sit around in this little house wasting away.

I am finding it very interesting how every change, every letting go of “things” that hold particular sentimental values, every step in creating my own personal environment adds layers of peace and interior freedom to this new life that I am living. 

I think what this little shack is becoming is more of a fitting shrine to Shirli’s memory than anything I attempted to do by amassing shelves and countertops full of “Shirli Memorabilia”. But, at the same time, what I was doing at the time was the best I could possibly do in grappling with such an extremely difficult set of circumstances that had been levied against me. It was part of the process in my grieving the death of one so dear to me.