Planting Seeds: Stories We Tell
One moment we are not sure if Schrödinger’s Cat is alive or dead in that box ...then the next moment the answer becomes clear.
Most mornings I get up early. I get some time sculpting and creating in my studio or writing while Michael sleeps.
When Michael wakes up, I go back into the bedroom. Mornings are difficult. It takes him quite a while to “reanimate”, as he calls it.
I lay down in bed with him. We hold hands and talk about this that. He scratches my itchy back. It is a simple thing he can do for me to thank me for what I do for him, he says. I have been surprised that he hasn’t been itchy because that is a common symptom of the rising toxins caused by a failing kidney. I joke that I have chosen to “carry that burden” for him so that his symptom load will be lighter.
Sometimes I talk about his life and how much he done. Sometimes he has forgotten how much he managed to do in his life. Even though his life was hampered by the Cushings Disease, he fought to accomplish what he could do. Does he think that he got everything done that he wanted to do? Nope. But desires are endless. There will always be “one more thing” to do or to see. The key is to “consider satisfaction” as the old Zen Masters have said. He has considered satisfaction and he is satisfied.
Sometimes we talk about some harder things from our life. But mostly that kind of talk was done years ago. We used the last ten years to heal up some of those hurts, as much as we could. Fortunately, we did that because now he just doesn’t have the energy for that kind of soul healing.
I listen closely to some advice he has for me but mostly he is leaving me as a strong and competent person so not much to be said.
As he likes to say, “I am a good Boy Scout and I like to leave the campsite better than how I found it”. He does try to do that for relationships and people, to best of his abilities. He learned that from a comedian he heard a few years back. Sometimes he failed but the effort was generally made.
We both are comfortable with the life we lived together. We both agree that the rough years were such a deep lesson in becoming better people. The learning never stops but now our life is one of acceptance of what life is presenting to us right this very moment.
Sometimes we talk about politics, which has always been a passion/obsession with him. We joke that when he is near the end and all he can do is hear things, I will have to put on MSNBC instead traditional “soothing music”.
Sometimes we talk about the things he has learned in his life. I try to absorb so much of what he says. Sometimes I stop to write some notes. He understands why I do that.
This blog is something he wanted me to do. Even though the words are mine, his life informs each word and so many of the sentences I write are his ideas intertwined with mine, like an ivy vine winding up an old brick building.
Years ago, I became a professional story teller. I told stories about the out of doors to schools, nature centers, pre schools etc.
For a time, both Michael and I told stories as a part of a Fur Trade history story telling group called Prairie Smoke. He was known as Michel Almont, a fur trade voyageur and the “finest voyageur in All of the North Country” and I was his Métis wife Louise Almont. We told stories of our life together, in the roles of these fictional historic characters.
What people didn’t know, was that though I had a business storytelling, it was Michael who taught me to become a better storyteller. He created so many of the stories told.
Sometimes people would come up and tell us that they remembered hearing a particular story years ago but ours was the better version. He would just laugh and laugh because the original story he had created had such an old and iconic feel, that people thought they had heard it years before.
Stories have always been important to him. Even, as a child, he loved hearing the stories his Great Uncle Carl told.
This week, in the midst of our many conversations, his back started to itch. He has also told me that he is now getting cramps, not just the ones he used to get in his calves as an athlete. He has told me, also, of the cramps that grip his upper legs and his side and belly when he rolls over. This, too, is a symptom of the progression of his End Stage Kidney Failure.
This week, as we were eating dinner, he started to fall asleep at the table. He went to bed at 7:30. This has now happened twice. Sleeping has become even more. He is getting occasional nausea; last night was the first sudden nausea again in some weeks.
Last Friday, I called our oldest daughter Amanda. She had been planning on seeing Michael in March. I suggested she come now. So we made arrangements for me to fly to Salt Lake City to take her place with our grandchildren and for her to fly to Minnesota to be with her Dad. One of the things she wanted from him was to hear him tell some of the family stories. One of our traditions was him telling his memories of the births (and one adoption) of our daughters and our grandchildren.
This time she plans to record them.
It happened so fast.
One day, we were not so sure dying was that near; the next day we were sure of it.
His life right now is one of losing things and he knows in the end, he will even lose his very breath. But the stories, in an oral tradition way, can continue on.
Over the years, he has taken the time to tell these stories to me. So, I tell his stories now because his energy is waning and he frequently doesn’t have enough breath to tell them himself.
I have lived his life story with him too. I will carry his tradition, as he has taught me.
It has been a wild ride. I think perhaps it is like the rides his Great Uncle Carl used to take as the shot gun for a Wells Fargo Stage coach.
His story, though wild, has been one of a life lived well and thoroughly.
From Bertrand Russell:
“The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.”
A post from Scurrilous Monk- Fudo Michael Koppang
SATURDAY, MAY 02, 2009
It is in times like these we stop to contemplate the great matter of life and death. Everything that is born also dies. As we say in my tradition right there in birth is death. When life is created, that life's eventual end is also created, when a relationship with another person is begun, its end is also created. All of us hope that between the beginning and the end there will a full life to fulfill the promise of the potentials that arise with each new thing.
The old masters of Buddhism sometimes ask the Koan (puzzle) what was your face before your parents were born? In the eastern cultures “face” does not mean just your eyes nose and mouth, it means the essence of who you are, including concepts of honor, bravery, honesty, attitude, and all the sorts of traits that go into making up what we think of as a person. Inherent in this question is the idea that who you are is beginning to be shaped before your parents are born. In our time and place we even say we want to know about our ancestry to get to know how we came to be who and where we are. It is not a great leap to move from “what was your face before your parents were born?” to what of your life carries on after our life here on earth comes to an end? A more modern way of saying this is that people live on in the legacy they leave. Those forces that started to shape our world and ourselves that began before our parents were born continue on after our grandchildren create our great grandchildren. The things that really matter about our lives, what we do in this world, have seeds that exist before our birth and flowers that bloom long after our death.
When I was reading the nice words Maj wrote about her mother Marian loving and tending flowers, it took me back to memories of my mother and her love of flowers and how she passed on that love to me, patiently teaching me about the smell of the clover, and the brown pollen one can get all over themselves from tiger lilies. We worked in the garden growing flowers and vegetables that never seemed to be allowed to grow to their full potential before children's hands picked them. Part of Saturday morning before I sat down to write this I spent teaching my Grandchildren about violets and tulips and dandelions. I am sure when my mother shared with me her love of flowers and nature, she was not thinking about the fact that years after her death, that love would be passed on to yet another generation, and that part of her that was this love would live on to brighten the lives of descendants she would not live to know. To this day I cannot see a clover without recalling my mother laying on the grass looking for another of the four leaf clovers she used to find so frequently in the lawn, and that eluded me in many hours of childhood searching of that same patch of lawn. Perhaps not all of my mother is to be found in a patch of clover, but you will never convince me that part of her is is not there as surely as part of her looks back at me in my grandchild's eyes.
I read once in some place or another.(like Marian I am a voracious reader) that there is in each of us an atom that was once in ever other human being that ever lived. This idea stuck in my head as I was at the time learning to see that not as much as I thought separated me from every other person. It sort of helped me to be more generous in my thoughts when I realized that part of what had been me was in every person I met, and would meet. Maybe at a time like this, it would help to begin to look for the atom of what was Marian in each person we meet.
The reality of my Mother was not all flowers and love however, and sometimes some parts of her legacy were not as pleasant for me to deal with. There was the part that was easily hurt, and quick to remember each slight. The part that would often recall for any who would listen each thing anyone else had ever done wrong. This is a part of my mother's legacy I do not wish to pass, and bless her heart, my mother would not wish to have passed on. Part of my life's work is to work with this legacy and heal the broken parts, and spread the parts that are whole and healing. I sort of feel I am healing my mother as I heal myself.
It occurs to me that in this way my mother is still growing and changing as each of us who were touched by her life grow and change. I am quite sure the same is true of Marian as well.
As I grow older and I begin to understand the answer to what my face was before my parents were born I find the more important question becomes “What will be your face after your great grandchildren die?”
Just like we have no control over the circumstances of our Grandparent's birth we really have no control over what happens after we leave this life. What we can control is what we do in this life. All of us are planting seeds whether we know it or not. Seeds that will flower sometimes long after we are gone. The truth is all we can do is plant the best we can, and hope that seeds grow on fertile ground.
Comments
Post a Comment