One Life

Losing someone tends to make us consider our own mortality and that of those we love.  Such thoughts often lead to depressed thoughts and wondering what happens next.  Why are we here?  What are we meant to do?  Is there just one life? 

Some of us have faith that there is something great beyond the here and now, whether in our futures on earth or somewhere beyond.  There are those who believe that this existence is just a stepping stone into some nirvana or even into another life.  Some of us believe that this is it, that this one life is all we get. 

I am a skeptic by nature.  I tend to overanalyze instead of accepting the face value of anything.  Philosophy and science are serious business to someone who wants to know all the answers.  I not only want the answers, I want proof.  I want to know that there is a reason for our existence.  But sometimes the answers are not available.  Not having an answer is difficult for someone like me to take for an answer.  I am going to assume that the reason is somehow within ourselves, and that we are responsible for creating our own answers to the why of our existence. 

The only real conclusion that I have come to so far is that we should live like this is it.  We should all live like this is the only chance we will ever have to do it right. This one life should be spent doing whatever it is that makes us fulfilled and happy. 

Many of us spend our lives as if we are trees firmly rooted in the ground and unable to bend.  While it is comforting to keep things the same and experience the seasons in a way that is expected and serene, sometimes we should branch out a little bit.  After all, we only get so many seasons, and if we never move outside our boundaries, we can only experience what comes to us. 

We should never wait for what happens next.  We should decide exactly what we want and move toward it.  I believe that life is meant to be lived and that we are meant to create our own meaning.    

I need to do what I love, live where I love to be, and surround myself with other people who really want to live. 

If we only get one life, I want to really, truly live it.    

Felt It

Little did I know that when the words were flowing for my last post, Feel It, I was preparing for one of the most painful and sad weeks of my life.  One of my dear friends told me that those words may have been given to me by God in order to ready me for the pain ahead.  I know not whether that is true, or whether the Universe just has a plan, or whether it just happened that way.  In any case, Feel It braced me for the days to come.  That pain I was talking about?  I felt it.  The need to be a rock for someone while later grieving alone?  I felt it.  Wow, did I feel it.  And this is something that I will feel forever. 


Someone I love lost their young child suddenly this week.  The family needed me, and I hope that I was able to be there in every way that they needed me to be, and that I will continue to be there for them in the days, weeks, and years ahead.   


The loss of a child makes no sense in the grand scheme of life.  One day he was there, happy and healthy, and the next he was gone.  The pain of the loss is simply crushing.  There is no way to think about anything beyond the loss.  There is no way to stop feeling it. 


Somehow though, I found the strength to try to do what needed to be done to make things just a little bit easier for the grieving family and their friends.  I can only pray that I did what I was supposed to do.  The need to do something to help was automatic, it is what a friend is meant to do, and the thanks they offered were almost too much to bear.  Hearing someone who is grieving tell me that they appreciate me feels wrong to me.  I felt guilty for taking any second of their attention away from their mourning and away from the family.  Yes, I know that it is illogical, but that is how I felt.      


The strength that got me through this week did not come from me.  It came from having friends and family who offered their love and support when I needed it most. 


The loss of a child I love, I felt it.  My own pained sobbing, I felt it.  The crushing grief, I felt it. 


The love of family, friends, and strangers...I felt it. 

Feel It

Sometimes I feel too much.  When it is other people’s happiness that I feel, it is wonderful.  When it is their pain, it is not.  I tend to be one of those weight-of-the-world-on-her-shoulders kinds of girls, and every now and then things get too heavy to hold on my own.  While I would hate to be a person who does not feel anything at all, there are times when things are too much to handle and I just do not feel like feeling it. 

If I find out a friend is pregnant, I cry with joy for the life they are bringing into the world and the love that they will get to experience as a parent.  When someone shares their pride in their child or the promotion they got at work, I am happy right along with them.  Even their smallest happiness can become my own because I want my friends to be happy.  I genuinely share their joy. 

But when I hear that a friend has lost a loved one, even someone I have never met, I cry for their loss.  I have been lucky enough in my life (knock on wood) to have been to very few funerals, but when I have attended final farewells, I am the one who should be folding up paper to shove in the Wailing Wall a la The Secret Life of Bees.  I cry for the life lost, for those who lost them and, if the person was someone I loved, for the hole that will be left in my life. 

Yet, it goes even beyond that.  If a child is missing, I silently pray for them and their parents.  If an ambulance passes me in traffic, I wish with sad hope that the person it is meant for will make it through.  And, God forbid, if a natural disaster should strike, as I imagine the pain of the lost and the families they have left behind…and I feel it. 

Amazingly, when I worked with people who had truly suffered and they told me their stories, I never cried.  Not once.  Their tears poured like an avalanche and I felt it like a boulder on my chest, but I never cried.  I did not cry because I knew that it was my job to be strong for them, no matter what horrific story they shared.  I was somehow able to do that.  But I did cry privately when I knew that it was the last time I would see them, no matter what hell they had put me through on the job. 

I have held friends and family members in my arms whose bodies shook because of their pain, and I offered comfort and love without adding my own tears.  I have done it.  I can block out and cope with things.  Sometimes I am surprised I can cope with all of the feelings.    

At times, I feel too much.

I would rather feel it all than not feel anything at all. 

Your Thing

As a friend of mine once wrote in a song, “Everybody’s got their thing”.  In the song, the “thing” was a suitcase full of pornography, baby.  While that particular something is not everybody’s thing, all of us do have something.  We have something that we hide from those we love.  We have something that we do not want to talk about. 

Your thing might be a secret that you have kept for years.  It could be something dark and forbidden.  It might even be taboo.  It may be something embarrassing, something of which you are deeply ashamed.  You thought something or did something for which you feel there is no redemption. 

Or maybe you know deep down that you should not feel guilt because of it.  Perhaps there is no reason to feel guilty, because you only feel that shame because someone said that you should.  Maybe it was someone else who brought that shame and guilt upon you.  Maybe it was not your fault that it happened. 

If you never share your secret, it will never go away.  If no one knows your secret, it will always hover like a dark shadow somewhere in your subconscious.  Some trigger will always remain…something that reminds you that it hovers there.  

Maybe your thing is simple and you can handle it on your own.  Or maybe you are not handling it as well as you think you are.  That shadow could be hovering there, unnoticed but heavy, and pushing down on your life in ways you have yet to realize.  It is possible that your secret is too complex and the ramifications of sharing it would be too painful to deal with, perhaps even more painful than keeping it inside. 

Some of us have friends we trust who we could consider revealing the suitcase to, but for some of us, trust is part of the problem.  Maybe the secret itself is the reason that you are alone with no one to trust.  Even the most ashamed of us can take comfort in knowing that there are confidential crisis hotlines and therapists out there waiting to help change secrets into topics of conversation.  We know that we can lighten our burden by sharing...without fear.

After all, fear is why we keep secrets.  Fear is why we hide the suitcase.

Even though it can be scary, showing your thing to someone else will make you feel good. 

Role Play

Recently, while I was walking laps at the park with a friend, I watched a twenty-something guy attempt to kick a football.  He failed miserably.  So I said, “Want me to teach you how to kick that?”  Obviously he thought that the lunatic mother whose children were playing ten feet away must be full of it, but he threw me the ball anyway.  I punted it to his friend, then walked away. 

At the time, I did not realize why I felt the need to kick that ball.  But I psychoanalyze myself just as much as I do everyone else, and now I get it.  Sometimes I play my role, and sometimes I just have to deviate a bit.   

Boys will be boys and girls should be little ladies.  This concept gets me emotionally charged and makes fundamentally exhausted.    

I am not a fan of that particular kind of role playing.

My daughter is one of the best players on her basketball team.  Her coach is very patient and great with the kids, and I appreciate that he is a volunteer.  But he does something that irks the hell out of me.  He calls my daughter, “Beautiful”.  Of course that does not seem like something negative.  But when he says, “Alright, Good Shooter” to one of the boys and a second later says “Nice job, Beautiful” to her, it bothers me.  Maybe I am being ridiculous, but I think that if she is out there kicking the boys’ butts she should be “Good Shooter” like everybody else.  I cringe when, in a game, he tells her teammates to “throw it to the girl”.  I am one of those obnoxious sports moms who yells and cheers for her kids, so when I used her name while she was dribbling down the court, some kid’s father turned to me and said, “I thought her name was ‘The Girl’”.  If I had not been annoyed before, that pretty much sealed the deal.  

Yes, she is in a co-ed league full of boys, but she plays hard and does not even know the concept of special treatment.  Unfortunately, she is quickly learning it by default.  The other girl on her team is not a good player, and the coach frequently picks that poor girl up mid-game so that she can attempt a shot.  Of course, he does not pick up the boys who are not good players.  Girls who struggle in a room full of boys get special attention.  I should know better than to expect anything different, but that does not stop me from being irritated that my daughter is learning this lesson. 

As for me, I have two younger brothers who played football.  When I was little I wanted to play football, too.  My dad was adamant that it was not going to happen.  Not one to take "no" for an answer even then, I had to know why my brothers got to play and I did not.  The answer was, “You’re a girl.  You might hurt yourself.”  So, when I countered with the fact that my brothers could hurt themselves just as easily, I got an explanation that involved the female anatomy.  That was not okay with me, especially since I had yet to develop those particular parts.   

Later on, every time my dad and brothers would play a pick-up game of basketball, I wanted in.  I have no idea how many times I heard, “You can’t play, you’re a girl.”  Sometimes I would get so mad I would cry, further proving my girlness.

Little did they realize that their blocks would provide a wide-open playing field for my own daughter.  She gets to play anything she wants to play. 

Every time she kicks a boy’s butt at something, I smile. 

And every once in a while I kick a football, just to break out of my role.