“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.” ~ James Baldwin
Back story…
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Tag Archives: resilience
Versatile Blogger
A heart felt “Thank You” to Jen at Step On a Crack…, for nominating the GrowthLines blog for The Versatile Blogger Award. I began blogging as a way to think out loud with a larger community, outside the therapy room. To think about the growth that comes from our experiences. To recognize the incredible resilience of humans. To highlight the hope to be found even in our darkest moments.
In the process of writing my thoughts, I have encountered an amazing fabric of fellow travelers who push me to listen more closely, think more clearly, and to see the raw beauty in each of us. Fellow bloggers have expressed that beauty with humor and wit. With warmth and encouragement. With agony and longing. With confusion and uncertainty. With candor and honesty.
Thank you, Jen, for your continued presence in the blogging world. Thank you for your willingness to give us a window into the complexity of your relationship with your mother, and your grief over her living, and her dying. You invite and inspire all of us to engage in honest conversation about our own lives.
According to the requirements of the award I must:
• Nominate 15 other bloggers
• Inform my nominees
• Share 7 random facts about myself
• Thank those who nominated me
• Add a picture of the award to this post
Congratulations Versatile Bloggers!
I am honored to nominate the following blogs for the Versatile Blogger Award:
http://www.thursdaymorningmeditations.wordpress.com – Emerson J. Winchester invites me to think with her every Thursday morning through her writing. Her meditations push us to think as a springboard to action, as in her recent post , Pop Music Failure (or, A Step in the Wrong Direction).
http://www.creatingyourbeyond.com – Check out this blog on “survivors creating a life beyond Loss and Trauma”. I found Brenda’s post on self-forgiveness to be insightful.
http://www.findinglifeinadeath.wordpress.com – a rich and poetic blog about the simultaneous dance we do with life and death, loss and change. The final post of 2011 was especially thought provoking.
http://www.thereinventedlass.wordpress.com – join a fellow blogger at a crossroads with the chance and challenge to reinvent her life. One view of the crossroads can be found in the Weekly roundup post.
http://www.ptsdawayout.com – a wonderful “voice of experience” resource for people living with complex PTSD. “Show up empty and experience everything joyfully.”
http://www.fewerforgreater.wordpress.com – Consider fewer possessions for a greater quality of life. I was intrigued by the most recent post, Pick four people.
http://www.workthedream.wordpress.com – I was delighted to discover this blog about daring to dream your life, and then working the dream. I was even more delighted to discover that the dream is being worked out in the shadow of one of my favorite places on this earth, The Spanish Twin Peaks near LaVeta, CO. The indigenous tribes of the area called them Wahatoya, the “breasts of the world”.
http://www.grandfathersky.wordpress.com – Written by “a poet and a dreamer”, asking “Why Life?” Beautiful photographs and thought provoking posts, such as Walking Between Worlds.
http://www.cocorum.wordpress.com – She’s a seventeen year old thinking beyond her years, and writing her thoughts. Listen to her in “What’s the point of kindness?”
http://www.katiedodson.wordpress.com – following the musings at the People Always Leave blog, and read Hanging By A Moment
http://www.belleofthecarnival.com – Join the “head clown” at the Cameron family Carnival as she looks at being family yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Hear her honor her own father’s spirit in A Skier’s Dream
http://www.nidhisays.wordpress.com – Thank you for poetry and prose. Make sure you read “To a special man…”
http://www.ariannasrandomthoughts.com – Arianna invites us to join her in a discussion of resilience, motivation, and personal development. She sometimes uses sports as a metaphor for our discoveries about life, as in Press On! What Rowing Taught Me About Resilience
http://www.anissastein.wordpress.com – an interesting blog about “living the life less traveled”, which includes among other topics, “Mistakes introverts make”.
http://ashleycherie.wordpress.com – Another young, talented artist who is letting the blogging community join her as she “paints” her thoughts with words. I appreciate her candid thinking in Recap: 2011.
Congratulations again to my Versatile Blogger nominees!
Now for the seven random facts about me:
- I have lived long enough that after years of wearing glasses and contacts, I now have 20/20 vision to see anything within 18 inches of the end of my nose. Since I love to read, write, and “google”, all of which fall within the 18 inch range, I’m ecstatic. Anything past the magical 18 inches is a blur, including the glasses I took off in my moment of “clarity”. On more than one occasion I’ve had to put in contacts in order to find where I left my glasses.
- I too am a “one-sneezer”, and sometimes pretty loud. I am occasionally embarrassed when a sneeze refuses to be stifled. On the heels of nearly every sneeze I have a memory moment of my grandad. Our sneezing behaviors are identical, which means my sneezes are often followed by a smile.
- I grew up watching my Dad work on cars, literally a “shade tree mechanic”. Later, with the luxury of a garage, he taught me how to maintain and repair my first car, a 66 Mustang. I spent years worth of happy moments in that garage getting my hands dirty and my heart filled. Some of my hardest moments were being there alone, packing up the remains of my shade tree mechanic dad, when dementia made it necessary for him to move to a nursing home. Sometimes I go to my own garage and hold his socket wrench in my hand for old time’s sake.
- When I was old enough to know better, I left my grandad’s horse grazing in the yard while I went to get a drink of water. In less than five minutes, Old Red had caught the saddle horn on the clothesline wire, and was racing around the yard in a panic dragging one of my grandmother’s new iron clothesline poles behind him. The other pole was bent to the ground. I had to wait for grandad to come home so I could look into his clear, blue eyes, and explain what had happened. I had to live knowing I had destroyed something my grandma had waited for, for years. Red and I both survived the experience, him with a small cut over one eye and me with a better understanding of responsibility, and that it takes less than five minutes for things to “go to hell in a handbasket”. My grandparents kept on loving and investing in me in spite of my mistakes…, priceless.
- I like hiking with a camera and a sketch pad.
- I’ve been to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival every year since Hurricane Katrina. If I could rewind my life, I would shake the limitations of a “no dancing” religious code, and learn to do the Zydeco. The next best thing is to be at the Fais Do Do stage watching a mass of people dancing zydeco to live music.
- I love Vivian Higginbotham’s seafood gumbo, and am so glad she gave me her recipe and taught me how to make it before she died.
Dominoes falling
In 1975, Bob Speca appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He had lined up 5000 dominoes onstage in varying patterns, including a section that spelled out Johnny’s name. On the count of three, Johnny reached out with a single finger and pushed the first domino over. One after the other they fell until none were left standing. All because that single first one had been bumped. Five thousand dominoes falling forever, in a matter of seconds. It was fascinating to watch them fall, precisely, regularly, each leading to the next one’s fall, with no chance of stopping what had been started.
I think about those falling dominoes a lot. To me they are a picture of loss and the grief that follows. Those dominoes remind me that our losses rarely happen one at a time. There’s the loss we recognize, the first domino falling, bumping into the next and the next until we are buried beneath more loss than we believed could come to one person at one time.
Bob Speca’s dominoes weren’t in separate, straight rows. There were intersections where dominoes fell in several directions at once, fanning out like the spokes of a wheel or weaving back and forth in a braid. I could anticipate the direction and outcome of some of the falls, but was caught off guard by others.
Such is loss and the grief that follows. Our losses rarely belong to us alone. They intersect, weaving our lives and our grief together. We may take comfort in the fact that someone besides us is feeling the weight of this loss. We may be angry that others call this loss their own, when we feel sure it is completely ours. We do our best to prepare for the losses we see coming. We feel helpless and sometimes conquered by those we couldn’t anticipate.
We could say that this is the end of the story. That in 1975, all of Bob Speca’s dominoes fell. That our lives are defined and dictated by loss after loss. That that’s all there is. But we would miss the fact that for the last 36 years Bob Speca has been standing dominoes up, creating larger and more intricate patterns even though he knows they will fall.
Such is loss and the power of our own resilience. To stand up again and again. To risk stepping back into life. To seek connection. To open ourselves to relationship. To do all this, knowing that loss will come again.
“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears. For tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.” ~ Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Learn more about Bob Speca at Ocean City lifeguard is toppling records one domino at a time.
After a harsh winter…
No holiday should be a time of sorrow, a place acquainted with grief. Certainly not Thanksgiving. There is nothing in the name that suggests loss. It’s a time to gather with family and friends. A time to “give thanks”. Who wants to give thanks for loss or difficulty? Nevertheless, we are faced with the reality that Thanksgiving is experienced in a context that includes hardship and tragedy.
I’ve thought a lot about the marriage of gratitude and grief during this Thanksgiving holiday. Maybe it was writing the series of posts about loss. Maybe it was spending time with three generations of family. Maybe it was attending the funeral of a friend two days after Thanksgiving.
I decided to revisit how this holiday came to be, so I googled “Thanksgiving”. A sentence caught my eye.
“The first American Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, to commemorate the harvest reaped by the Plymouth Colony after a harsh winter.”
On that first holiday they gave thanks for the bounty of the harvest, “after a harsh winter.” Their celebration was based on having survived a season of hard work, tragedy, and loss. They gave thanks for the gift of plenty. They gave thanks for the discovery of their own strength and resilience through difficulty.
President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanks in October, 1863. A day of giving thanks, in the midst of the Civil War. What was there to be thankful for in a time of such internal turmoil? How could we be grateful in the face of so much destruction and death? Perhaps Lincoln hoped that a day of Thanksgiving might remind us of our connection rather than all that divided us. That our strength and resilience might unite us once more.
It seems that Thanksgiving has always been about gratitude in the midst of loss. Gratitude for the gift of time, of health, of relationship. John Claypool came to understand gratitude “after a harsh winter,” when his ten year old daughter died of leukemia. In the midst of his grief he realized that he had never been promised a span of time with her. That each year had been a gift. He began to move from anger that he had been robbed of a lifetime with her, to thanksgiving for every unpromised moment shared over those ten years. Claypool discovered the gift of his own resilience. Grounded in the strength that comes from adversity, he made his way beyond his own winter of grief to a place of healing gratitude.
What if our clearest moments of resilience and strength are mined from the landscape of our disappointments and tragedies? What if the key to discovering these gifts is our willingness to fall into the abyss of our grief. Psychology Today, Psych Basics, notes that,
“Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes. Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make someone resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Even after a misfortune, blessed with such an outlook, resilient people are able to change course and soldier on.”
What does it mean to “soldier on”? I don’t think it means being an untouchable stoic who never falters, never sheds a tear. I think to “soldier on” may mean that we continue to rise in all our faltering, tearful, uncertain, grieving humanness. Continuing to rise again, and again, until we find a new balance.
J.R. Martinez began to “change course and soldier on” a long time before he won Dancing With the Stars. After his win, he received a note from US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta that read:
“Your strength and spirit captivated the nation, and your victory sends a strong message about the strength and resilience of our wounded warriors.”
In reality, we are all wounded warriors, struggling to soldier on after our own harsh winter, to a place of thanksgiving. I hope as you sat with loved ones at your Thanksgiving table, you received the gift of strength and resilience that comes after surviving a harsh winter with grief and gratitude.
Papa’s Stocking
I attended a Hospice Memorial service just before Thanksgiving several years ago. The room was filled with families and friends who had experienced the death of someone they loved during the past year. It was a time of remembering. And a time to focus on the journey of living through grief.
Loss is one of the few experiences besides our birth that is universal. We would be hard pressed to find a single person in a crowd, who has not had some personal contact with grief. How is it then that grief can feel so solitary? Perhaps that mixture of solitary and universal is why talking about our grief brings both pain and relief. But talking about loss and the grief that follows is important if we are to weave both joy and sorrow into our own rich fabric.
I don’t remember the name of the speaker at that Hospice service, but I remember the personal story he told about finding joy in the midst of grief. After his wife’s mother passed away, his father in law came to live in their home. He quickly became an integral part of their daily lives. And then last year, in the fall, Papa had died. The man, his wife, and two daughters were left with the empty spaces that Papa had once filled. As Christmas drew near, the depth of their loss was magnified. Christmas traditions that had been a source of joy, were now a reminder of Papa’s absence. This was especially true when it was time to hang their Christmas stockings. There was Papa’s stocking, empty. Just like his chair at the table. Just like the hole left in their hearts.
They began to talk about the pain of Papa’s absence, and the dilemma of how to have Christmas without him. A new tradition, a ritual of healing, was born out of that conversation. Papa’s stocking would be hung in its place on the mantel, with 
slips of paper near by. In the days leading up to Christmas morning, family members wrote their thoughts, memories, feelings about Papa and dropped them in his stocking. On Christmas morning after presents had been opened, and their own stockings emptied, they read the notes from Papa’s stocking. There were tears, and laughter, and connection with each other and with Papa on that Christmas morning.
I don’t know if they hung Papa’s stocking beyond that first year he was gone. But I do know their Christmas story is a wonderful example of partnering with grief to create a moment of celebration that will last a lifetime. They had discovered that although Papa was gone, he was not lost to them. Sometimes healing comes not from avoiding the painful moment, but from stepping into it to create a new meaning.
I wish it was not yours to do…
A child’s death at any age leaves a gaping hole. Before birth or after. When your child is young or old. Their death separates you from all that is living. A painful gap between the world that was taken from you, and the flat, grey world in which you find yourself. We see your pain, but we don’t know what to do with it. It is palpable. We want to acknowledge your loss, and maybe even apologize for the relief we feel every time we look at our own child, knowing that our heart is still whole, while yours is not. So we walk with you, not because we know exactly how you feel, but because we don’t want you to be alone. We find a way, however awkward, to say we’re sorry that this is now your job…
How You Rise Each Day
I wish
It were not
Yours to do.
But it is
Your pain,
And you have wrestled it
To the ground,
Rising again
And again
Until you found its heart
And forced it to join you
In celebration of him,
Your son,
John Michael.
It is a mystery to me
How you rise each day
To be reminded
That you are,
And he is not.
Perhaps because you were
His beginning,
And witness to his brief present,
Now you must become his future.
Walking where he cannot,
Breathing life into each
Precious dream
Until his footprints surround us
With all he would have been
Had he not gone so soon.
I wish
It was not
Yours to do.
But it is your grief,
And you have donned its
Black cloak of mourning
With courage,
Determined to dance again
In celebration of him,
Your son,
John Michael.
And dance you will.
Slowly,
At times halting,
Then with confidence
And joy,
Filling the world again
With color,
Vibrant,
Youthful
As you dance not your dance,
But his,
Your son,
John Michael.
© Paulann Condray Canty, 2011
“Death comes to our dances, and if we dance at all, it must be in her forbidding presence. But the wondrous conclusion is that we who must die, must dance, and that both are our destiny, and neither dying nor dancing is missing from the whole of life.” —-Calvin Miller
Thank you, Skip and Marsha, for living your journey of turning mourning into dancing before us. You give us hope that having come through the dark night, we too can return to the dance. Thank you for not hiding your pain from us. Thank you for letting us join you in celebrating your son’s life.
In Memory of
John Michael Gore
July 27, 1984 – October 11, 2009
Connection
Saturday was an incredibly full day. It began with breakfast at one of our “regular” places. I ordered what I “usually” order. Later that morning I sat in a church sanctuary, celebrating the life of a longtime friend who finished her race in this life and crossed over into eternity. There was wonderful “catch up” conversation with a friend over a lunch that extended into the afternoon. Then the spontaneous decision to drive to another town to catch the play “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, and finally back home to crash on the couch with a dog who thinks I hung the moon.
As I snuggled with the dog I replayed the day. Not just the time spent, but the emotions felt. I thought about the gift of connection. In the course of my day I had experienced…
- the connection and comfort of routine. Those things we do over and over, day in and day out, that ground us in the familiar.
- the connection of remembering and celebrating one who enriched and changed us in this life on her way to the next.
- the connection of friendship, of shared space and conversation that warms like an old flannel shirt.
- the connection of laughter as I joined a community of strangers to watch a play.
- the connection of a pet who loves me without judgement or hesitation.
Resting there on the couch I felt profoundly thankful for the connections of the day. I was glad to be reminded of the connections across the years and the ways they had challenged and sustained me. I hoped to step into the week ahead more mindful of the space we share and our impact, for good or bad, on each other.
And then Tuesday came. April 19. The sixteenth anniversary of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Tuesday came and reminded me of the powerful connection of shared experience. If you were living in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995, you probably remember where you were and what you were doing at 9:02 when the Murrah Federal Building was bombed. Shared experience invites us to rise above what separates us. On April 19, 1995, an act intended to destroy led us to common ground and gave us a reason to connect. We connected then to rescue, to grieve, to grow, and eventually to celebrate our resilience.
Celebrate connection! The small and the large of it. The quiet and the loud of it. The joy, and even the pain of it. Most of all celebrate the timing of it and choose to connect now, with family and friends, with occasional acquaintances, with total strangers. Connect with those like you, and not, with God’s creatures, and with yourself. Look for the “tie that binds” and just connect.
More than you’ll ever know.
Trivia is intriguing. Trivia couched in a story becomes less trivial and more about “fleshing out” a person or situation. I knew Brian May played lead guitar for Queen. I didn’t know he also held a PhD in astrophysics. I discovered that piece of trivia listening to the story of how in 2007, a Dutch school teacher discovered “a great, green blob floating in space”. She knew very little about astronomy but while looking on Brian May’s website, followed a link to Galaxy Zoo photos, where she made the discovery.
What interests me about this bit of trivia has nothing to do with astronomy and very little to do with Brian May. It has to with drawing conclusions based on partial information, making assumptions. The moment I learned that Brian May has a PhD in astrophysics I realized “again” how often I assume that all I know about a person is all there is to know. I thought of how easy it is to forget that people have a history of experiences and stories that precedes my stepping into their lives, and how that view may limit my definition of who they are.
Marie Hughes was one of the sweetest people I have ever known. She seemed almost too nice to be real. I knew Marie had been married for a long time to Luther, a gentle, pleasant man in spite of having been a POW during the Vietnam war. Over time I
think I began to assume that only someone incredibly innocent could be that sweet, a 20th century Pollyanna. If Marie had reached her senior years with innocence intact, then I had to conclude she hadn’t felt the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. I think I began to see Marie as sweet, and diminished.
I was facilitating a women’s book discussion group which Marie attended regularly. One night the discussion focused on how we live in spite of difficult life experiences and loss. That night I learned how much I didn’t know about Marie Hughes as she told us about her first husband, a railroad worker who was killed on the job, leaving her a young, widowed bride. She described her devastation and grief, how empty and lost she felt, how she didn’t think she could go on. She told us how her father’s strength helped her and what a godsend it had been when she met Luther and they began to build a life together. I was stunned. Marie was still one the sweetest people I had ever known, but she was no longer untested, and she would never be diminished to me again.
Tracy Kidder wrote about life in a nursing home in his novel, Old Friends. It is a wonderful, insightful story of strangers becoming community, of people near the end of life whose history and stories seem present in fragments if at all. Kidder borrows a line from a Frost poem as he wonders, “What to make of a diminished thing…” After the revelation about Marie, I began to look at the people around me wondering how many of them I had diminished simply because I didn’t know more of their story. How many had I discounted without intending to, due to my tunnel vision about who they were, what they had accomplished, and what they had to contribute. I became more aware of the risk of living out of my own perception without acknowledging the inherent limitations.
I could suggest that we focus on gathering every tidbit of information we can about those we encounter. Although there are occasions when we should be open to a fuller life story, it isn’t practical to think we can literally know everything about someone before we assess who they will be to us or who will be to them. What I am suggesting is that we work to be fully aware that there will always be more to the story than we will ever know. That our respective stories will be a part of our exchange even when we don’t know they’re there. And knowing that, we will add an extra measure of grace to our giving and our taking.
I think Plato said it well…
“Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Turning the day RED
Today, December 1st, is World AIDS Day. For years the symbol of a single red ribbon has called us to care, and to act. In 1996, I completed my master’s thesis on the impact of individuals disclosing to their family that they were HIV positive. During my research I interviewed people diagnosed with HIV or AIDS and in various stages of their journey with a terminal illness. My time spent hearing their stories was life changing.
I discovered individuals living with courage in the face of a disease that isolated and ostracized. I discovered many families rising up with compassion and integrity to surround their loved one with their presence. In spite of the stigma, the known and the unknown, the agony of watching their child, sibling, parent, spouse, friend waste away before their eyes. . .they stayed, and they loved.
I discovered the power of numbers to tell us, “Somebody should do something.”. I discovered the power of names and faces that told me, “I must do something.”.
A lot has changed in the 15 years since I heard those stories. Too many have died. Medicine has helped the battle be more chronic and less terminal. We’ve gotten smarter and better at prevention.
What hasn’t changed?
- We are still at risk of letting stigma and ignorance blind us to the names and faces of the individuals and families living with AIDS.
- We are still at risk of believing HIV/AIDS is not our problem.
- We are still at risk of robbing ourselves of the gift of courageous stories in exchange for our compassion and action.
We all know someone who has been affected by HIV/AIDS. . .even if we don’t know who they are. My hope is this is the day we choose to be the eyes and ears of compassion in all our encounters, to those whose wounds are obvious, and to those whose wounds we can’t see. After all, we are all walking wounded.
Why Blog?
People blog for a lot of different reasons. They blog to make us laugh, cry, heal, listen, and change. They blog to question, to rant, and maybe even to annoy. I am blogging to think. Actually, I’m blogging to think out loud. Something happens when we speak our thoughts or put them on paper. In that moment we have the opportunity to hear ourselves more clearly, maybe even differently, and to know ourselves better. Thinking out loud also creates the possibility of thinking out loud together. As we respond to each other’s observations, stories, hopes, and concerns, we weave a rich cloth of human connection that has the power to extend our reach and to enrich our souls.
Now for my thoughts, and perhaps a conversation about resilience, relationship, and hope.