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A matter of life and death

My friend, whom I wrote about in the previous post, re-embraced eternity a week ago. There are no more hospital visits. No more medications. No more tubes and bags. No more delirium. The funeral is over. The words have been said. Now the living just continues. And so it goes.

I will never be able to find her anywhere again. I can go to her house and she will not be there. I will have abundant proof she existed, and yet she does not. That is the mind bending truth of death. The comic truth: death makes people disappear. Thanks for that, Captain Obvious. It may well be the most self-apparent thing you’ve ever read, but yet it is the most difficult thing about death. The most difficult thing to adjust to, to accept, to make sense of. Here one moment. Utterly gone the next.IMG_3851

I happen to believe there is sufficient mystery in life to make an unseen realm possible. You can call it what you will, but I think death is a labour that births us into a new life on another plane. We are midwifed by those who love us and mourn us on this plane and welcomed by those who have already arrived into the other place. It doesn’t matter why I believe that, but I do. Does it comfort me? Sure it does. It’s not that I’m rattled by the alternative view of finality and end. Quite the contrary. I just don’t think it’s true. So I don’t give that possibility much thought to be honest.

My friend was philosophical about her death. She knew it was coming soon and knew it would hit the rest of us hard. She was right on both counts. Death is coming for each of us. We know it cognitively, but we generally push the thought about the when away. One day in the hospital, I asked my friend if she’d be there to greet me when my time came and she said she’d be there with open arms. She added, “It may be sooner than you think.” I was alarmed for a moment, wondering if her nearness to death gave her access to inside information. And it well may have. Then I realized there’s not a damn thing I could do about it anyway. Que sera sera. I’ll stay as long as I’m supposed to…just like everyone else.

One of the best studies of death and the human condition was Alan Ball’s masterpiece Six Feet Under. With the tagline “Everybody Dies,” the show gave us a glimpse each week into the myriad ways people meet their Maker. Sometimes tragically. Sometimes comically. Always finally. In the very last episode, the series wraps up with a montage of how and when each of the main characters dies. It’s powerful and poignant. Everybody dies. Everyone will mourn someone. Everyone will be mourned by someone. When and how are the only questions unanswered. Are they the questions that matter though? How we lived is far more important a question. Did we raise others up while we were here? Did we leave things (including ourselves) just a little better than when we found them. Did we shift even one person’s life for the better?

I can tell you that my friend did all of those things. She was, by all measures, an ordinary person who made an extraordinary impact because she lived a life of compassion, honesty, love, forthrightness and high expectation. She did not choose how or when she died. But she most certainly chose how she lived. And what a life it was. What a wonderful life.

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Rabble Rousing

DSCN3260In the early 90s, I had the great privilege of seeing Andrea Dworkin speak at a conference. Even at the stupid age of 25 (you only know it’s a stupid age when you’re almost twice that), I knew this was a exceptional moment. I was in the presence of one of the great modern feminist minds. Dworkin, for those of you who don’t know, is not for the faint of heart. She was a ‘radical’ (whatever that means), in your face, intelligent, aggressive (whatever that means), take no prisoners challenger of the patriarchal bullshit. She made me uncomfortable. She made a lot of the people in the room uncomfortable…as she simultaneously open our eyes, our minds to the ‘holy fuck’ of the truth she was telling. We don’t get a lot of that in the nice, sanitized world of a TEDtalk or pecha kucha. 

There was a time when Dworkin would have been burned as a heretic, a witch. Modern society does it differently by making rabble rousing women irrelevant. How? Look at Hillary Clinton…perhaps one of the most powerfully intelligent women in the politics today. When her daughter revealed her pregnancy, media questioned whether Hillary Clinton could “balance” being President AND a grandmother. What. The. Fuck. This is how we make women irrelevant. By attaching them to irrelevant discourse: fashion, hair, body size, etc. It’s simple. And effective.

All this to say, I dipped a toe into the world of rabble rousing today…knowingly. I posted something on Facebook and Twitter that I knew would be controversial to some. The post went thus (It was somewhat shorter on Twitter):

Easter: when Jesus emerged from a cave, saw his shadow & predicted 6 more millennia of us being douche bags to animals and each other. No wonder he hasn’t been seen since.

What inspired the post was a news story on how calves are immobilized for their entire lives in order to get the ‘best’ veal. It’s horrific. It’s not this one story, however, that drove me to fury…it’s been story after story after story. From the abuses at Seaworld from deadbeat hicks torturing cats and dogs. From gang rape in India to dead babies stored in garages, we are living in a cesspool of abuse and horror.

I mentioned Dworkin at the top of this post because she came to the podium at that conference and said, “There’s an emergency.” The emergency was that there were so many news stories about the brutalization of women that she could not remember the women’s names. It was so common place, that she was forgetting to be horrified. It was so every day that she was becoming indifferent to the fact that real people were suffering.

The interesting thing about my post is that, on Facebook, the people who were offended were more offended that I’d made a joke about Jesus (a person who, if he existed at all, has not lived for more than two thousand years) than about the current day atrocities to which I referred. Let me re-state that for effect: they’re more concerned their religious sensibilities have been hurt by a smart aleck post and less concerned with real suffering, real abuse and real atrocities that are happening NOW, TODAY, IN OUR COUNTRIES, IN OUR CITIES,  and ON OUR STREETS.

I don’t give a rat’s ass about your religious sensibilities. Wake up!

I don’t want to mislead you. I’m a lazy person who thinks about things more than I act. I’m the Queen of Tut Tut, Oh My and Isn’t that Awful. But even I’m being horrified out of my inertia. This is exactly what Dworkin was trying to do during that keynote. Wake us up. Remind us to be horrified. Remind us to act. Remind us of the choices within our power.

Finally, I’m horrified enough to act. Enough of this shit.

What’s your threshold?