Death/ An Act of Love

Hi All…

Again, not dead. I have been writing a lot, but just not posting here.  However, I thought it might be a good time to share a story with you that makes me feel, at once, free for telling it, and incredibly vulnerable.  So, here goes…

 

My mother did not technically commit suicide, but she did decide when it was time for her to die. In the span of ten years, she had lost both of her parents, her husband, and her son. And then she lost control of herself, as alcoholism and depression consumed her life. It became undeniably clear that it was the beginning of the end for my mother when she stopped eating and started taking on massive quantities of fluid in her mid-section. Ironically, my stomach was growing too at the time because I was about six months pregnant with my first child. Our synchronized, expanding bellies indicated that I was losing my mom on the brink of becoming one myself.

When her liver finally gave out, and her body started shutting down, the doctors pumped her full of medications to prolong her life. Due to the extreme cirrhosis, her mental clarity became punctuated by moments of confusion during which she would organize whatever items lay in front of her in varying, illogical patterns. She would also routinely mistake certain objects for others. Once we found her trying to light a cigarette with the remote control.

The last time I spoke to my mother I had just popped into the hospital for a short visit. This is when I learned that without consulting anyone in her family, my mother had instructed the doctor to cease all the medication that was keeping her body functioning. She wanted them to focus solely on comfort and pain management until she faded away.

For most of this visit she babbled incoherently. But as I was preparing to leave, she took my hand in hers, and placed her other hand on my growing stomach. She looked at me with an odd clarity in her eyes and she said, “I love you, and I love this little girl”.

I was almost nine months pregnant when my mother finally passed away. Why she chose to stop her medications and die that close to my due date is beyond me. Initially I believed it was because she was selfish. The same selfishness that allowed her to consume copious amounts of alcohol until her insides corroded inspired her to pass away at the moment I needed her most. Could she not have suffered through another few months of life to welcome her granddaughter into the world?

But with some time, and some perspective, I have chosen to believe that she actually did it for me, and for my daughter. I believe that she didn’t want to interrupt the timid and precious emerging bond of mother and newborn with her own tragic and fading existence.

And the truth is, I was relieved that I did not have to share the birth of my child with the impending death of my drug addled, physically dependent and mentally unsound mother. I think that somehow mom knew that stopping her medication, when I was nine months pregnant, was the best gift she could have given me. I believe that for my mother, dying was a final act of love.

I choose this perspective, not for her, but for my own sake. It is important to honor the dead by remembering the best about them, But it is equally, if not more important, to honor our continued existences on this planet by choosing to view our experiences with death, and life, as rich, meaningful and ultimately good.

And is this not true of most every circumstance we face in our lives? In The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, the protagonist is robbed of most all his belonging and finds himself in a foreign land, penniless and alone. Faced with the harsh reality of his circumstances, he decides that he has the power to determine his own truth. He realizes that, “he [has] to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief and as an adventurer in quest of his treasure”.   In choosing the latter, the hero strengthens his will and dedicates himself to the continued pursuit of his lifelong dream.

My circumstances with regard to my mother’s death are not so different. I can choose to think of myself as a daughter who was brushed aside and abandoned in favor of addiction and release from suffering. But I can also decide to think of myself as a daughter for whom great sacrifices in love, life and death were made. I choose the latter.

Disentangling Love From Fear

In conjunction with A Course in Miracles, I am reading Marianne Williamson’s book A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles. Here she considers the claim in ACIM that “The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite”. From this, Williamson gleans that “only love is real” and that fear is, essentially, a hallucination (Williamson).

I read this bit just before falling asleep last night. Then, around 3:45am I woke up and checked my email to find a breaking news update about the 2-year-old boy missing in Orlando after he was attacked by an alligator. These circumstances are absolutely heart-wrenching, and my thoughts and prayers are with the family of this little boy.

I am not sure if this reaction is common amongst parents, but any time I hear of tragedy involving a small child, my thoughts immediately turn to my own 2-year-old daughter. From my experience, the love we have for our children is often accompanied by fear- fear of injury, sickness or loss. I think this stems from our biological instinct to protect them at all costs, which results in a kind of attachment unparalleled by any other relationship.

So last night, as I lay in bed feeling an intense love and fierce sense of protectiveness for my own child, I thought back to Williamson’s point. Was I able to feel pure love for my daughter in that moment without the element of worry? Or are the two emotions somehow opposite sides of the very same coin? How can we disentangle fear from love when the two seem so inextricably linked?

John Nash, the Nobel-Prize winning mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia, believed that he was receiving messages from alien life forms recruiting him to help save the world. Upon visiting Nash in the mental hospital, Harvard professor George Mackey asked him how he could possibly devote himself to the reason and logic involved with mathematics while also entertaining such hallucinations. Nash responds, “because…the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously” (Nasar, A Beautiful Mind).

Does it not often feel the same way with regard to love and fear? If fear is the alien hallucination and love is mathematics, it seems we are often faced with Nash’s very same predicament. Both fear and love seem to originate from the same source. They both seem natural. If Williamson’s reading of ACIM is correct, then we are all just, well, mental patients who cannot clearly differentiate between the two. One is madness and the other is sanity. But it seems so sane to worry about the health and safety of own children by virtue of our incredible, infinite all encompassing love for them!

This one throws me for a loop every time I try to deal with it, because, in some ways, I want to feel the fear. To worry about my child feels sort of instinctive and fulfilling. It makes me feel like a mother and a protector. In fact, I could even go so far as to say it enhances my love. So what gives, here? Is this something to combat or accept? Or, (the option that seems more likely to me) am I meant to reorient the way I perceive fear in a way that makes it less burdensome and more beautiful somehow?

The Tokyo Trip

This second manifestation story feels a bit closer to my heart than that of the typewriter. In 2011, two weeks before the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, I moved to Tokyo to teach English for a year. Brand new to the country and the culture, and all alone in the most massive city in the world, I felt both deeply connected to, and also strangely alienated from the events that unfolded. I knew it was a big deal that the trains stopped running, that the lights went out in Shibuya to save power, and that businesses closed their doors for a few days. But I didn’t really know. At least, not fully, and I probably never will.

My mother begged me to come home, and many of the newly arrived teachers in my cohort did go home, but I already felt too close to my job and my new city to leave. So I stayed, and what ensued was a year of beautiful connections with coworkers, students and other expats, all in the context of tragedy and recovery.

I still have tons of friends in Tokyo, who, like me, are now married and having babies. This is a stark contrast with the days we used to stay out all night singing karaoke and taking advantage of nomihodai (all-you-can-drink).

Last year I felt a strong pull toward Tokyo-I really wanted to reconnect with the city and my friends. But I had an infant child and was planning to pack up my family and all my belongings to move away for graduate school in the fall. It did not feel like the appropriate time to spend exorbitant amounts of money on plane tickets to Japan. So I decided to consult with The Universe, as I had already had a success manifesting my typewriters.

The very next day someone introduced me to the “Explore” feature on the Kayak app where you can put in your departure airport, budget and general dates and, voila! The app tells you where in the world you can go that meets your criteria. There I found tickets to Japan for an astonishingly low price ($600 round trip) during the exact duration of my Thanksgiving break in the fall. My husband and I purchased them right away-It felt right.

An hour later we’d recruited my mother-in-law to come with us and help take care of our daughter-she was to be just over one year old at the time. We got back on Kayak to buy the tickets, and they were $1600 a piece. Nearly three times the original price. Within an hour.

I can’t help but think the $600 listing must have been a mistake on the part of the airline. Either that, or I’d accessed the tickets at the exact right time. In any event, it was rather fortuitous.

We were able to find my mother-in-law a reasonably priced fare, but she would not be on our flight. This was distressing to us because the idea of flying for 15 hours with a one year old sounded like a special version of hell. We felt we could definitely use the backup. But I decided to be cool about it and just visualize the flight going well.

The day we departed we discovered that the airline had moved my mother-in-law onto our very same flight. We did not even have to ask them. Her original flight was not canceled; they had just moved her for no discernible reason. They also booked us in the bulkhead row with no one else around us. Our daughter could play on the floor a bit and sleep in the little bassinet they provide for babies in that row. The flight went beautifully, and we arrived in Tokyo ready to reconnect and explore.

I hold Tokyo and the people there very close to my heart. The city is at once chaotic and convenient, exhausting and energizing, colossal and impeccably detailed. And spending time with my friends as we all venture into new and exciting stages of life fortified me for the journey forward and renewed my sense of connectedness to the world around me.

Orange Is The New Pink

If you have been reading my blog you will recall that I am currently conducting the second energy experiment from Pam Grout’s E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality. For this experiment I had intended to see at least one pink car in 24 hours. Well, that 24 hours is up and I have to say, I did not, in fact, see any pink cars.

However, there is one tiny detail that I should mention. It is a potentially significant snafu with the inter-workings of this experiment: I have not left my house in two days. Ok, I know I probably sound like one of those bizarre shut-in types, but I have a genuine excuse for not having removed my pajamas. I work from home, it’s been raining, and, well, I’m lazy. So how is the universe meant to deliver pink cars to a woman who refuses to leave the confines of her home? Unless Barbie crashes into my living room, I don’t technically see how this can be accomplished.

But do not fret. I still have some data to report from this experiment. Last night I was sitting on the couch reading while my husband and my daughter played with her toys on the floor. After a time, I heard my husband ask, “What color is the car?”

My ears perked up. “Here it is!” I thought. “I’ll betcha that car is pink!”

But alas, the little toy car is not pink. It is orange. C’mon universe! It seems you missed a perfectly good opportunity, there. What’s the big idea?

After this incident I began to view that stupid orange car as the foil of my experiment. And what is worse, I saw it everywhere. It was under the table. Then it was in the kitchen. It was even in the bathroom for a bit. It just kept showing up in my reality. But as I repeatedly, and begrudgingly, stepped over the little orange car, I began to notice something. In certain lights, the little car actually looked pink!

Right about now you might be thinking that this post is pretty lame. For one, all I have to report is some story regarding a little orange car that on occasion, when you squint, in certain lights, looks pink. But isn’t that kind of the point that Grout is making with this experiment? So maybe the universe did not deliver an undeniably pink car. But what it did deliver is infinitely more useful: evidence that, to a certain extent, we can choose how we want to see the world.

For me, this insight is key. I can go on believing that the universe failed me, and that the whole law of attraction thing is all bunk. Or I can choose to believe that everything is exactly how it should be, and find value in my experiences, even when they do not pan out in the way I would have chosen. I am not suggesting that I fully buy the whole premise behind the law of attraction theory. However, I cannot deny that these experiments have helped me expand my worldview.

Incidentally, right before I sat down to write this post, just as the 24-hour period was drawing to a close, I looked down to see my daughter shoving a small toy fireman in her shoe. “What is he doing?” I asked.

“He’s driving in a shoe car!” she replied.

Guess what color the shoe was…

(Side note: Please feel free to leave any thoughts, questions or insights in my comments section. I would love to hear from you!)

Pineapples, Carrots and the Nature of Reality

This morning my two-year-old daughter was playing with a beautiful felt picnic set that her grandmother bought for her from IKEA. Included in the set were many food items that Americans might think strange: sausages, a whole fish, eggplant and a pineapple. It is not that Americans aren’t familiar with these items, but that they just do not belong in a typical American picnic basket. Where are the sandwiches? Chips? Good old American red apples? And, how is one supposed to hack into a whole pineapple on a picnic? I have trouble elegantly cutting pineapple with the full use of my kitchen facilities and can’t imagine trying to do it in nature.

Anyway, my daughter picked up the pineapple and I asked her what she was holding. “A carrot”, she replied.

“Are you sure that’s not a pineapple?” I asked her.

“No. It’s a carrot,” she said and proceeded to feed it to her stuffed bunny rabbit.

This is one of those parenting moments where I have to decide if it is important to foist my commonly held worldview onto my child, or if I should go on allowing her to view reality in her own way. I decide that for my daughter the pineapple is a damn carrot, and she shall continue to view it as such if she wants to. For one, IKEA has not labeled the object “pineapple”, so who knows? Maybe it was intended to be a carrot, but it just happens to look like a pineapple.

But, more importantly, I am sensitive to how vulnerable we all are to the messages about reality that the world sends to us on a continuous basis. See, even if I do not work to convince my daughter that the carrot is actually a pineapple, the world will take care of it for me eventually. In this same way, the world has already implanted in her mind that bunny rabbits regularly subsist on a steady diet of carrots. Even without intentionally shaping their worldviews, children will still learn to see reality in a somewhat standardized manner.

Now this is not all bad. We need these commonly held beliefs in order to interact with one another in a meaningful way. Yet it is important to acknowledge that the names we give to things, and the categories into which we place them are artificial. We made them up in order to facilitate our inherent sociable tendencies.

Pam Grout gets at this notion with the second energy experiment in her book E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality. This experiment is meant to show that the reality we experience is shaped by what we expect to find. For example, my daughter expected to find a carrot because, presumably, her bunny rabbit needed a snack. For her, there were no pineapples to be seen. Yet, perhaps if she needed a pineapple for some reason, the carrot would magically take pineapple form. My daughter has not yet learned that an object must adhere to ontological certainty, and so she is allowed to alter her perception at will. As Grout writes, this shows that “by changing what you look for, you can radically change what shows up in your world”.

In order to conduct this second experiment Grout instructs her reader to spend the first 24 hours looking for sunset beige cars, and the second 24 hours looking for butterflies. If we intend to see sunset beige cars, the universe will reveal a bevy of sunset beige cars. If we convince ourselves that there are butterflies abound, we’ll be swatting those suckers away from our faces in no time.

As a dutiful reader, I make my intention to see cars, but not sunset beige cars. That’s too easy! Instead I am off to look for pink cars. I’ll let you know what happens…