The Village That Raised Me

My aunt Mary passed away on August 17 this year.   She was my godmother, who I lived with on and off for the first thirty-three years of my life.   She gave birth to my two cousins Eddie and Tim, and also to Erin, who is the same as sister to me.  We knew she was going to pass towards the end, which didn’t make it easier but did allow us to confront the pain and anger of life’s unfairness in a present, expected way, versus the sudden stunned shock that I have seen last for months and months in friends who lose parents unexpectedly.

I have been stomaching the fact that a year ago, before she took a clear turn in health, I moved to California from the MidAtlantic coast that raised me.  Life is funny in its ironies.  The heartbreaking reality of actualizing who I am capable of being in my life–I am a long time teacher of adults, value my friendships and personal relationships as active daily parts of each day, alight in the power of poetry and nature and seek to share these experiences with any and all–has almost seemed to come at the expense of  being so far from the people and life that first rooted me strong in who I am.

Mary and Tim, her husband, were the godparents that my own brother Sean and I always called our Huxtable Parents.  They taught us how to communicate by sitting down with us after our own parents would have raucous, scary fights.  They regularly cuddled us up on the couch to watch movies, took us on bike rides and out for lunch, sat with us for endless hours on the beach our bottoms  in the sand, or on the back porch where the shade fell in shadows and Uncle Tim’s baseball games came  fuzzy over the transistor radio.  What they gave to Sean and I, from before but especially after our parents separated years and years ago, was a sense of steadiness and safety.   They demonstrated a consistent love we could rely on and in doing so showed us how relationships can be loving and real.  Our mom and dad made us strong, our mom with a wisdom that is almost foretelling,  our dad with leadership and social qualities both my brother and I are blessed to have inherited.  From all four we learned the value of family.  They spent decades working among each other and the house that the four shared to see to it that us five kids always knew love and consistency.   My mom and dad, in their imperfections, gave us feet on life’s real ground.  And in their wisdom to allow us the intimacy of Mary and Tim, too gave us faith and trust.  They are best friends though not together today, my mom and dad. They walked side by side Tim and the kids through the days of Mary’s death.  In all of my life, I have never been so proud.

I think what I am doing addressing this here is maybe taking a closer look at how incongruent life and love can be.  That in fact it is the hard parts, the cornered dark and disappointments,  the heartaches, rejections, unfairness, the imperfections, that round out the whole.  Those parts that are easier left untouched when they get so badly bruised.  As much as we try to avoid it, grief is a part of this life on earth.  It is surrendering to it which avows us of the very wisdom it takes to heal.

It’s not about dwelling in the negative, that’s not what I mean to say.  Simply that, the stumbling blocks make us value the road of life we’re on when we finally stand up again, and the process of falling then standing helps us see just how we’ve gotten so strong.

Photo, (c) Lillien Dahl

Cover photo courtesy of Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/moleskineart/4395798148/sizes/z/in/photostream/