Life Is What's Happening

Sometimes life just jerks you around and no matter what you have planned you have to go wherever it takes you.

In early May, 2009, as always, my attention had turned toward my cottage in England. Emails were flying back and forth between the house-minder and me: Can we fix the table on the terrace that lost a leg at the end of last summer? Do I need a fresh canister of gas for the grill? Just try to fill a prescription for three months through AARP. You can’t believe the layers of illogical hoops you have to jump through.

I was poised at the first of those hoops when suddenly, George, the husband of fifty-five years of my oldest friend, Peg, died at their home in North Carolina. Peg wanted me to come after the funeral and stay with her. 

Peg and I became friends at 22, living in a small Ohio town, having our three babies at roughly the same times. Together we pushed prams along the sidewalks, organized school car pools, shared back yard suppers. We drove to Cleveland to take Tai Chi with Al Chuang (Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain) and Gestalt workshops with Esalen’s Will Shutz. We became consecutive Junior League of Toledo presidents, and after that, we formed a business in which we designed and led leadership- training workshops for both women and men. We had fun.

When I broke my ankle in the jungle of Costa Rica, Peg was the friend who refused to allow the guide to abandon me in the hotel for three days—no flights home were immediately available. “We will take her with us,” Peg told him. “We will take care of her.” And she did.

Thoughts of England were put on hold; I headed for North Carolina.

Peg’s grief was raw and wrenching, her loss a kind of amputation. We held each other and cried. We walked when we could, when it wasn’t raining which it too often was. I urged her up hills and along paths, more walking than she thought she could do. We cooked food that she hadn’t much interest in. We talked about the past, about George. We closed George’s bank account; we reconciled the checkbooks. George always did all the financial tasks and Peg’s grief had demolished her ability to concentrate.

I knew that that she would always feel the loss of George, but that her grief would eventually become an ache rather than the way it was now, sharp as a knife. I assured her that she would not always be, as she put it, a “deranged person.” I haven’t lost a husband of many years, but there was a time in my life when loss had slammed me into the fetal position so I knew something of what she was going through.

Shattered by Peg’s grief and my own---any grief brings up all grief--- and stunned once again by the fragility of human existence, I arrived home exhausted. For three days I was non-functional.

On the fourth day a concert was scheduled at Trinity Episcopal Church. I had planned to go, that is, before my trip to North Carolina, but the evening of the concert was rainy and cold and, given my mood, the couch in front of the television set looked a far better place for me to be. What if I burst into tears during the concert? I vacillated back and forth but in the end my love of music triumphed and I went.

The Knights Chamber Orchestra played Beethoven’s Symphony #7 and from the opening bars I was transported. I’ve heard lots of Beethoven played but never before with such juicy aliveness. The musicians were passionately involved in the music they were creating. Some were even smiling and, suddenly, I was smiling with them. The chorus and soloists, who followed, sang so beautifully that I felt my body relax and my heart surrender. Music: a glorious healing gift.

Life refuses to wrap up in the tidy way that essays usually do. Derailed from my excitement about England, called to attend Peg’s grief, brought to a bereaved stand-still of my own, then lifted and freed by the music: it’s all just that rollercoaster of life happening isn’t it? Life happening in and around and through us. Exciting, painful, uplifting. No matter what, dive right in. It’s worth it to live every moment with your whole heart.

***

 Because these days my mind is wrapped around the Healing Into Aging series that I am leading, for a few weeks I am resurrecting past newspaper columns I hope you will enjoy.