Word of the Week - 80

 "The Old Red Door" by David Lee Thompson.

Word of the Week:  CLOSURE

Based on its standard usage, especially in tv news stories, I nominate closure for myth status.  The states in which humans are left following death, illness, trauma and loss in its infinite forms do not lend themselves to tidy, invisible restoration.  The frayed ends do not, in my experience, reweave themselves, things torn asunder do not simply reattach.  What remains is not closure but a process of evolution, alchemy really, in which we move from being one thing to another.  We finds what ways we can to grow past the wound.  It will never not leave a scar.  That is not a mistake, that is order.

I believe well-intentioned, giving them the benefit of the doubt, people actually bully others into feeling they are doing it wrong, insisting that by some arbitrary time they should have reached "closure" with anything sad, often horrific.  Unlike the previously mentioned news stories, I do not believe that a jury verdict, a death sentence, or an execution will ever bring to an end the sorrow and suffering resulting from criminal acts.  A sense of revenge is not a substitute for diminished grief.

These musings spring from a post seen a few days ago, suggesting that if we can't have the illusive closure, we can learn to move on.  To me, that is as good as it will get.  Not to be mired in sadness at the same sharp level where we began is progress.  Life alters us, in its high moments and its low.  My familiar theme of living adaptively certainly applies to that which leaves us feeling broken and lost.  Visualizing recovery from physical injury gives us a model of the multiple steps, the duration of healing to get us back on, for instance, our feet.  And when therapy and exercises are completed, we may limp, we may not walk at all, yet we are not where we started.

To the best of my ability, I assume each of us is doing as well as we can, however imperfect that may appear.  How can we possibly know what motivates another, what kind or insidious voices whisper suggestions that might even make sense in the moment?  How can we know until it happens to us which events will take all the starch out of our spines and our spirits?

We will not, we cannot evolve until we learn to be much more forgiving with ourselves and our processes, until we come close to being kind to each other, no matter what.  There will always be differences between us.  We will always appear in the mirror as flawed, forgetting that flawed is human, the only material we have to work with.

I think my greatest disagreement with commonly held beliefs about closure is that it comes from somewhere outside of us, as with criminal proceedings where the jury awards closure to the victim's family.  I think every bit of it is a deeply interior process.  We are the almost unbearably slow train that brings us back to abandoned parts of ourselves.  We must have patience beyond where we once thought patience ended.  Everything is about becoming, to which there is no limit.

Lament

Music takes me places I would likely not reach without it.  As a conveyance toward and through sorrow, it has no equal. 

Here is a link to the New York Times article, "The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning."

For now, it seems the best we can do is grieve beside our sisters and brothers.

Please, let the grieving begin

Not morning jukebox but dream music, as in, I was singing this and sounding just like Linda.  I know I played the grooves flat on HEART LIKE A WHEEL and went on to abuse the cassette.

What story the song wants me to tell isn't clear.  The dream was fading, the music remained vibrant.  Whether they have anything to do with each other or not, I am being enlightened on how little I know of grieving.  Lucky for me, I don't think there is only one right way to do it.  The operative words, though, are Do It.  Where do I begin when the years and the losses have been so numerous?  I feel like the unintentionally dammed creek, logjams, clogs and impediments, fresh water reduced to a trickle and everything downstream parched and gasping.

Grief unacknowledged is trying to live a full life in smaller and smaller boxes.  It is default adapting just to keep from dwindling to no movement at all.  I've tried to reshape it into a problem with an intellectual solution and it will not cooperate.  Unaddressed, it will never leave.  My best guess is to start writing about it.