Two Years Have Gone By and I'm Still Saying It

Photo courtesy of James Butler

Some months ago, my former neighbor came by to do some landlord work on his old house. While we caught up in the driveway, his five-year-old daughter played nearby. Eventually, she came up to me and said:

"Are you sad that Kara's dead?"

And she was smiling.

Not just smiling, but almost giggling.

I smiled back.

In a flash, I saw her father, well over six feet tall, reduced to a heap of ashes in a wooden box. (I have a few such boxes myself.) And I saw her reduced to a pink-cheeked blob of tears and snot at twenty, thirty, forty, who knows how many years old, racked by the sudden changes in the man who raised her.

"Sure, I'm sad," I said.

I left it at that.

But then a short while later, she came back around (after asking me if I buried Kara under the house), and, beaming on her tiptoes, told me she was in kindergarten. And that was when the sadness struck me. Because I'm an assh*le, I could laugh at the child's future grief—but not her indoctrination. She had come to the time in her life when the world told her what to think. Where she got the idea that someone's bereavement was funny remained to be seen, but the fact was that she had entered a social system that will squish her true thoughts and creative impulses. For perhaps a lifetime.

We just tend to get stuck in our social programming.

If that sounds like I'm projecting, just think of artists as unique as James O'Barr, Emily Dickinson, or Kathy Acker. They're rare for a reason. Just think of every time you wanted to create something from the heart or gut, but stopped for fear of ridicule because achieving personal truth at the cost of familiarity and symmetry is apparently just as funny as grieving a loved one.

We're told to think as anyone but ourselves. After enough of this, we forget we're not what we do to keep the lights on or cope with life's challenges. People say, "You never leave high school," but the patterns of socialization at the expense of our true selves start at the fourth or fifth year and maybe even before then. For years I worked at a job where I saw the emotional and physical cost of this every single day. Yet no amount of socialization will ever teach us to outsmart the traumas that come with life.

We can go to our doctors, our personal trainers, our meditation classes, our yoga teachers, our martial arts instructors, our naturopaths, our talk therapists, our physical therapists, our spiritual advisers, our financial advisers, our estate lawyers, and for all the progress and all the insight and all the security that we accumulate, there will always be that swirl of Mystery catching the light and reminding us from time to time—often in emotionally shattering circumstances—that in the end we are just making things up as we go along. And sure, we can say we're aware of all this, and maybe that's true... to the intellect. Of all our inner aspects, our intellects tend to assert themselves the most.

The rest of who we really are—the core of us that wondered about everything and loved the pictures we drew, regardless of perspective and line weight—needs no assertion. We just tend to get lost in our social programming.

Today marks the two-year anniversary of my wife's Sparkling On. Since that day, I think often of how she took many matters under advisement, but chose to experience adversity on her own intuitive and ever evolving terms. Labels, expectations, and specialized assessments did not define her. I'm not idealizing her when I say this. There is nothing ideal about what we went through. It's just that, after two years, I've found that there are those who see Kara as a cautionary tale and those who see her as a model of radical resilience and self-empowerment.

Certainly, one can choose to see her as both. But for myself, I think that turning the ill into a cautionary tale is itself a cautionary tale of medical advancements increasing our suffering from denial of death. In my experience, that is not a healthy place to create from. And whether you like it or not, we were born to create. Just as we were born to die.

Kara's last stained-glass mosaic, "We Are All Stardust," displayed at Arabella Salon

In an earlier post, I said that grief doesn't get easier. What I was trying to convey was that I reject the idea that grief is an experience that should get easier or harder. I would rather stuff my left pocket full of rocks, transfer them to my right pocket, then reverse the process over and over like a Samuel Beckett character, than think about the difficulty level of my grief like a trained therapist who has to keep chart notes of dozens of patients every month.

Am I sad that Kara's dead?

Sure, little girl. I'm sad.

In more ways than one.

As always, thank you for reading. If anything I've said resonates, great. Take it and discard the rest.

That's all I've got for now.

Until next time.

—Charles Austin Muir

Please forgive the icky YouTube title, it's all about clickability these days. If you haven't seen the teaser trailer for Kara's award yet, here you go!