I know some of you don't know this, but it's about ren-faire season. My friend Amethyst came into my life about this time of year. I met her when she was running a workshop at the Southern California faires in, gees, I guess 1998? People kept telling me she was bossy, and cruel, and all sorts of stuff. But when I met her she was pretty funny, and we got along great. In fact we pretty much bonded from the moment we met.
If you saw her you'd be taken aback first by the fact she had the largest most amazingly beautiful brown eyes you'd ever seen, except there were flecks of purple in them. Seriously. Her real name aside, everyone called her Amethyst because of those eyes. It suited her. Her hair was very long, and wavy, and she was built like an Italian vixen. Kind of tiny, but curvy, and very much unapologetic for it. No skinny bones on her. And her daughter, just a tiny version, except a bit more of the anglo side, carrying more of her father's genes. She was just a powerful presence, and as small as she was, she could be heard from one side of a lake to another.
Cruelty is NOT one of the qualities I ever saw in her. In fact she was the sweetest, kindest people I ever knew. She'd give you anything she ever had, and in fact, she even let me live with her, when my boyfriend and I were waiting for our apartment to be ready, after the landlord "forgot" to tell us they were still painting when we moved our entire life from Orange County, (southern Cal), to Northern Cal during a job change. He forgot to tell us a few other things, and we were there for a full five weeks. So she was very generous. I watched her help hundreds of people.
She worked as a PTA mom. She took care of everyone's personal problems at the ren-faires If anyone had issues with the big honchos there, (there were always issues), she was the first one the stand up to them. That's probably why she had a reputation of being bossy. She never took crap from anyone, and she never backed down from a just cause. She really was a strong, super, wonderful, empowered woman.
And she was as flawed as we all are. We were both dealing with depression, and shared war stories about antidepressants. I was in that boyfriend situation that I really did NOT want to be in, and she was always there for me. She got it. She saw that he was taking advantage of me, and just put out that I was the one letting him. In 2000, I helped plan her wedding to the guy she was with for the 9 years before. He is still one of my best friends. (Like a kid brother, and it's uncanny how much he looks like a younger version of my dad.) She came out to Vegas with 80 or so people and we all had a great time, celebrating, enjoying, and one of the guests actually won enough money, on the way to the men's room, that he paid for the dinner. (And that was pretty pricey, let me tell you.)
Four months later, she had a bit of a stomach flu, about this time of year. I had already stopped doing ren faires, as it was too hard on my joints, and my disease had been getting progressively worse. (I'm in a wheelchair a lot.) She went on antibiotics, felt a bit better, and went on with Faire. A few weeks later she started feeling badly again. Her husband wasn't sure she should go back and do the Northern faire, but she went to the workshops anyway. During workshops, she felt badly, and started getting a fever. She went back to the hospital, and just about two weeks later, she was put in intensive care.
I would call. She would talk and say she was fine. In fact the last time I called her, and the last time I talked to her, I asked her if I should fly back to California, (as I was in Vegas, now for the last four years), and help her daughter and Elliot, (hubby), and she said, she had so many people hanging around them that she thought they'd be crowded. But it was great talking. So we chatted about hospital food, and the idiot doctors. They weren't sure what was going on, but her blood kept clotting, and there were signs of this going back to when she was in workshops, back when she thought it was the flu. But no one caught it then. And still no one was sure exactly what IT was. To this day, no one has yet said. And then, it was another week, and I hadn't heard from anyone. I called and the nurse said she was sleeping. I called a few days later, and her mother said she was in a coma. A coma??? A what?? No one told me? Then that night Elliot called me. He said she was out of the coma, and that her hands were turning black.
He was a mess. They called him from the faire, after all was okay, and there new treatments, she was talking to him, then she went into a coma. A few hours later, she was talking to him again. The doctor said she was experiencing a brain clot in her head and they had surgery. She was fine after that. They thought she was going to be great, and the doctor said he could go ahead and take some time off to go to the faire if he wanted, because she was talking and everything looked great. Then two hours later, she went into the coma again. They called him back to the hospital. (She was in Stanford, the Faire was in Gilroy or somesuch), so he took his motorcycle, and doesn't even remember driving there.
He called me and told me they had to have a family meeting the next day, and decide if she needed to be taken off of life support, and he needed me to tell him if he was making the right decision. She was already blinded from the stroke, they'd have to remove her hands, and feet from the necrotic tissue caused by the blood clots, and there was a chance that most of her organs were already dying from the clots as well. The life support was keeping her alive, but there was still no cure for what was killing her, and there wasn't any solution for these clots. She would keep having strokes, and keep having organ failures.
Her mother, father and siblings, whom she was very close to were going to be there in the afternoon, and it was already 1am. I knew that they were going to make the right decision, and I told Elliot that he needed to just sit by Amethyst and talk to her a bit. Don't worry about decisions right then, just take some time to be with her, and talk to her. He already knew the right answer, and thinking about it right then wasn't what he needed to do.
So the next day at about 3, Elliot called to let me know she died. He wasn't going to be the same, and he really hasn't been. She made him be alive for the time they were together, and it seems like that he still feels like he is in the crematorium instead of in his present day. He's a terrific, wonderful, giving human, and a great, warm kind man. I still see a lot of who he was when he was with her, and he still feels like love means painful loss. It's a hard road when you're stuck on that bus stop. And he's a hotty, that all the girls LOVE, so he does still flirt. I just hope the right one kicks that bus stop sign away, and reminds him that there are things to see past the loss. Or, maybe he just needs to be the bus driver for a bit.
But, the point is, this time of year, when the purple blossoms come out, and the ren faires start popping up on the calendars. I always think of Am.
Deity
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McQ added
Oh, man. Thanks, deity. She really touched your life in such a positive way. I'm glad you had her as a friend. Her death seems so random and senseless.
I'm glad you create a memory through the faire season though. It's a very nice way to keep her alive in you.
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starrlyly said
I'm so sorry for the loss of such a wonderful person. Thank you for sharing her story with us.
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deity
Thanks for being here to share her!
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Steven S wrote
Hi Deity,
In your post, you wrote, "I still see a lot of who he was when he was with her, and he still feels like love means painful loss." Do you elaborate on this thought in your book? Reading the words reminded me of a recurring thought I have about loss and loyalty, and how, at times, it feels almost disloyal to let time smooth the edges of pain. - Steven
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deity answered
I do, but again, the forum is available so people can discuss feelings...and if this touches a nerve with you, I'll talk about it further here. There are times when time isn't the big band-aid and dose of neosporin we want it to be. Some of us are very good at storing memories that are so true to ourselves, and so true to our lives, that they almost become recurring daily movies in our day to day existence, including scent, and even sound. For instance, you may get a whiff of a crayon and relive an entire day you spent in grade school. They remain part of our day to day because there was a purpose so deeply ingrained in that particular event, or feeling that we either needed to avoid until we were strong enough to handle it for a later date..(shock, repression, or even avoidance), or we become numb to feelings and simply turn off emotional response because of inconvenience. Soldiers are taught this in boot camp, and emergency workers, medical professionals, and even psychologists are taught to distance themselves because emotional attachment during crises causes mistakes, or worse.
When you were writing about the women who died earlier, you were talking about a time that happened when you were younger. You were also in a different state of mind, when youth and vibrancy were taken for granted...and there would always be a "someday" time. You even talked about going back to find some sort of answers, somewhere. Some SomeDay. Someday you were going to be able to be close to either one of the women, or both, as friends, or more. Some how you were touched by something they said or did and Someday you were going to have the chance to tell her or them. There was an unfinished moment there. Unfinished moments are stolen time, and stolen time is a cruel notion in grief that often gets overlooked by counselors, friends and family. Why?
Why do we forget to grieve stolen time? The SHOULD HAVEs are important. I SHOULD have been someone that was around one Friday night to talk to at 3am, about a dumb movie, and had that memory to share with that one person before she went away. I SHOULD HAVE been able to taste that pie that my husband's mother made but I never met her. We SHOULD HAVE been able to play with a child who made it to her third birthday, but a drunk driver stole that from us. She Should Have been able to celebrate a fifth anniversary before her husband left her for another person ten years ago, while she was alone at a restaurant wondering where he was.
Time does cruel tricks. It sometimes doesn't move forward at all in our minds. In fact, sometimes our minds play the game of stopped watch, and holds all memories in one location, like a photo album, left opened on a coffee table, and all it takes is a simple mental lean to one side or the other to be right back at those pages. We're looking at those mental images as if we're back in the exact location we were when we took those pictures. For some it's a trap that keeps them from moving forward in their lives because they fear what would happen if they added new pages. They fear that the people who were there would be lost to them forever.
For others, the opposite is true. They look at those images and they fill their lives with people who are almost visual and psychological doubles of the people who fill that same photo album. Neither case is healthier, or wrong. Both have positive and negative purposes.
For instance, if I was to replace the page in my mind that held memories of my foster mother with women who were kind, giving, well-educated, and who spoke in a soft, gentle, midwestern tone, I'd have constant positive reminders of people who reminded me of my foster mother. However, if I were to replace the mental images of my ex-husband with other people in my life who were as abusive, as cruel, it would be a cycle of self-defeating behavior.
But, we do need to grieve the SHOULD have's, the COULD have's, and the MIGHT have's.... if not just for a moment, just to validate that yes, we did care about the future we may have had. When we think of the future, we think in terms of HOPE.
Hope is a misunderstood word for Atheists and Secularists, humanists and the like. Far too often it is aligned with prayer, and it is the farthest ideal from that! To hope means to understand that there is a possibility. Any skeptic understands possible and probable are two entirely different concepts. POSSIBLE means things COULD happen if the circumstances allow, whereas, PROBABLE means things WILL happen given the proper set of circumstances. Hope relies on dreams, and imagination. All good scientific minds thrive on imagination.
When we grieve the should have's we are grieving the hope we have lost. There is no shame in this. In fact, it opens up the idea that there is more to hope for in our lives. We have the capacity to care enough for another person, or for ourselves. That's a lot of emotion. That's a lot of a empathy. That's the most humanity we can have. What a powerful state of being! That is a very rational idea when things around us seem completely irrational- and that is the basis of our human-ness- the idea that we can care for any one or anything at all is astounding.
I'll stop there, because I think I've left you, and probably a lot of other people a lot to take in for tonight. But let me know if that helps at all.
deity
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Steven S said
Deity,
Thank you for your thoughtful and very interesting response.
I think my grief encompasses the spectrum covered here. Many, many times throughout the day, I think "T would have loved that," "this was T's favorite kind," "tonight's sunset reminds me of...I wish she were here." It's almost a continuous internal monologue.
The volume of my thoughts of T has little to do with context, only the particular is affected--it's going to be something we did together that jolts me, something we didn't do and she would have liked or loved to do, or any of the endless experiences or situations between or beyond. Grocery store or holiday--place or place in time does factor, but only regarding specifics and not how often T comes to mind.
It's fascinating to me how people think that removing articles that evoke memories of a loved one will help us to "get on with life," as though having lived most of an adult life (in my case) in their presence isn't enough to jog a memory repeatedly and constantly. I guess the fascination arises from trying to decipher a thought process that thinks "if we take that photo down, he won't think of T." The idea that it isn't considered that every time I look at that place on the wall I wouldn't think "I wish that photo of T was still there" is baffling. It is possible, I guess that for some "out of sight, out of mind" isn't just a cliche, but reflects the reality of their thinking, but I suspect that 'solutions' of this type more often indicate powerlessness to effect a solution to the pain of someone they would like to help rather than their real thoughts.
Steve
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deity wrote
Interesting way of putting that. I have a pin that I wear fairly often that is of a jester. It was made in a memory of Amethyst, and I also wear a small amethyst ring every so often when I'm in "Amethyst" moods. There are days that I wish she could be around, and even in my wedding, her husband, who stood in as one of my "bribesmaids", sprinkled ashes at the location, because not a year before the pair of them wed in the same chapel. I look at the picture of the four of us.. the bribesmaids, me, and those ashes on the ground... and get into Amethyst mode. She died years ago, and yet, there are days when I swear I could still hear her laugh in a crowd, but that's only wishful thinking. I'll find myself talking to my self, and responding as if she was the one who was going to answer... knowing full well that will never happen.
When people who have affected you make up part of who you have become, it's natural to want to feel them around you. . It's okay to have a photo, or a similar reminder. There are some people who get a little overboard, and go for the Elvis-shrine-look. I worry a bit for those whom I counsel when I see that happening because it's not a matter of "letting go" of the person who has died, but it's a matter of not allowing the present to exist anymore. Their lives become so involved with the idolatry of the past that there is no concept of the present any more. I've seen this happen with parents of young children who have died, or of parents who have lost people in the war... or in accidents or by murder, where there is no control of the events, (act of war, man, and nature are certainly covered in the book). Obsession of the last moments becomes so entrancing that the person who is grieving forgets to be part of the world around her anymore. In effect, she is as lost as the person who has died.
To coax that person back into the present, it helps to incorporate the mission of the dead into the mission of the live. What does that mean? Well.. if the person was involved in writing.. maybe get a small book published of her words. Or if she was a child... have a park named in her honor. Find something that person loved, and use that love into the present. This is a wonderful way to push the present back into the reality of the person grieving, without taking away the person who is lost from him or her...and still honors the dead.
There are some other ideas that incorporate honoring the memory without denying the grief. Victorian age mourners would even wear hair jewelry!
deity
