THE GREAT DESPAIR

Many of my friends and colleagues are currently feeling conflicted and overwhelmed. There is just so much awfulness from this administration as they continue to restrict our rights as citizens. This is compounded with this administration’s complacency in genocide and their use of concentration camps here in the US. Trump is now trying to make it illegal for anyone to criticize him, his policies or anyone whose platform is based on preaching racism and homophobia. Many of us are frustrated with the inability of some to distinguish between what is politics and what are basic human rights.

Do you remember the first time you felt comfortable coming out of your box of conformity? We listened to Brene Brown talk about being our authentic selves in a TED talk almost fourteen years ago and for a while we’ve all been doing that. Living authentically. For some of us that meant being open about our sexuality and if you lived in metropolitan places, it wasn’t so dangerous anymore to be a lesbian, to be trans, to be gay…to be different. As women we were finally seeing a reckoning to all the sexual harassment and pestering by men that we’ve been tolerating for years. It almost felt safe to just be a woman walking around the city. For a while, we were carefree and outgrew that box of conformity.

Now this administration is trying to make us all go back into that box and of course, we are all resisting. That is what this feeling is; being shoved back into a box you outgrew. It doesn’t fit and we won’t go back. We refuse to go back to a time when we could not live and love authentically. As women we refuse to go back to a time where our sole value lied in our ability to birth, where our value was little more than livestock. I will not be submissive and I’m far to big for that old box, but I struggle with how to deal with such an overwhelming feeling of being powerless. Except, I am not powerless. WE are not powerless. The very act of continuing to live authentically to our true selves is powerful. It is a protest that says we will not be fear mongered or bullied.

Remember, they’re attempt to demonize the word ‘empathy’ is because they do not understand the concept of empathy, or compassion for that matter. They also have more practice in living authentically. How else can you build a platform around racism and homophobia? They’re authentic selves are teachers of hate, but in a cowardly way because so much of it happens online. So while it might feel like you are doing nothing or nothing you do matters, you are making a difference just by living your life and doing so with compassion and empathy for others. There is someone who sees you and admires you for your bravery. You are teaching compassion and empathy by example. For sure, things are going to get worse. That’s just how it’s going to be for a while, but I believe in our strength and ability to be kind, compassionate humans. And that's what will get them.

Kill them with kindness.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Andrea Gibson, a master of spoken-word poetry who cultivated legions of admirers with intensely personal, often political works exploring gender, love and a personal four-year fight with terminal ovarian cancer, died on Monday in Longmont, Colo. Gibson, who used the pronouns they and them and did not use an honorific, was 49. - Clay Risen, New York Times Obituaries

I know that this is quite the lead in for a gratitude post, quoting an obituary, but Andrea Gibson has been on my mind all week. I do not lean into poetry. In every English class where we were forced to read a poem and then explain the meaning in the poem made me cringe. But I do love a good poetry slam and Andrea Gibson truly was a master of both written and spoken word. Their poems can split open the hardest of hearts and her voice will be greatly missed. The thing that has been most on my mind though is the graceful and most beautiful way they left this planet. In Love Letter from the Afterlife, a poem that Andrea wrote to their wife, they write “Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?” I have been fixated on that line because it says everything that I have been saying for years about Chris’s own death. I was recently tagged in a ‘get-to-know me’ thing on Substack and one of the questions was asking for the last thing I’d read that made me feel seen. I had completely forgotten about this poem. Except I don’t know if ‘seen’ is the right description; maybe the right word to describe how this sentence makes me feel is ‘validated’. Their recognition of how they will never truly be gone is a lesson in death that I want for all of us to study.

The living are here to absorb the souls of our lost loves.

It has taken a lot of time and work to find gratitude in being a vessel for Chris’s soul and knowing that he will always lay claim to a large portion of my heart. It has taken a lot of time and work to release the guilt that comes with that. It has taken a lot of time and work to see this as a gift rather than a curse or a haunting. Because it truly is a gift. From what I have learned about my Chris before he became my Chris, he was not open to love, not even to the idea of it. He was closed off from it, bitter and cranky over the very concept of love. He was very much a Mr. Darcy. I was the one that changed all of that for him. Me. There is something very honorable to being chosen as the collector of the soul at the end. He chose me. But there are also others. Dad. J. I contain bits of them as well.

I’d like to take a moment to address the way Andrea Gibson chose to live while dying. They created a writing space titled “Things that Don’t Suck” where they shared poems and things they loved and beauty. By all means, dying from cancer is far from easy. It is messy and painful and fucking horrible. But They made a choice to live with all of that pain and mess while seeking out and sharing joy and beauty. This is a most beautiful lesson in the art of dying. I have heard so many times that death is hardest on the living. This is true, but I don’t think this saying truly encompasses the complexity of death. You are still alive while you are dying and the knowledge of your demise is an almost impossible thing to comprehend or to make sense of. When Chris and I were handed the pamphlet for hospice care, we were stunned. I sat blinking and looking at our doctor with my head tilted like a curious puppy and I wasn’t even the one dying. Nothing the doctor said made sense to me. Chris had all of that plus the knowledge that his life was over. There are so many choices to make in how one deals with such knowledge. In this world, where it is so easy to see the gross and negative all around, to choose to see the beauty and loveliness a challenge. Choosing to do this while dying is heroic.

But aren’t we all in the process of dying? Isn’t is all just a matter of when? What if we started the practice of seeking out the beauty now?

I have a list of things that do not suck from this week alone, a list of good things that I did or I saw. There were bicycle rides and scooter rides and skate night. There were sacred moments on my yoga mat and cuddles with the sweetest puppy dog. There were many things that did not suck this week and I’m grateful for this.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The other day, I was helping a graduate student set up auto imaging of a slide on a very old microscope. This microscope is the system I have used for years to run batches of slides for one of our labs. It requires me to run a fairly complicated program that works with a slide loading robot and over the years, I have developed a love/hate relationship with this system. When it is working, it is great. When it is not working, there are a million possible reasons why it is not working and I have to troubleshoot all of those reasons to fix the problem. The older the system has gotten the worse these little issues have become. So it is finally time to replace this system with something new. By the time I had given a hard stop to accepting any more slides for batch scanning, the program had become so glitchy that it was randomly not imaging slides. 

The lab I run these slides for had a really hard time with the concept of pausing their imaging experiments while the new system gets installed and we learn how to use the new robot. Finally we agreed they could still use the system until the company moved it, but they would not be able to use the robot and would have to run only one slide at a time. I trained a graduate student to set up the program and run the slides. Of course, he had loads of problems but the company came to move the system. So this week, I was once again going over how to set up the program to run one slide at a time on this old microscope that has basically been decommissioned. Part of setting up the program is entering in a number representing the z plane of your sample. I always think of it as years because the numbers are usually 1771 or like 1884. This time around the number came out to be 1998 and I said “1998! That’s the year I got married and graduated undergrad!” The graduate student I was training said “Whoa…uh…congratulations? I was one.” I did my best to laugh at this and not murder.

Then I thought…wait…he’s just starting! When he was a year old, I was getting married in Vegas and graduating college! Chris and I were just beginning to move into grownup land. We managed to postpone grownup land by going to graduate school, but we were doing the thing. Living the life. In fact, while this person was navigating through childhood, adolescence, and undergrad, I was doing the most grownup stuff of my life. I got a little woozy at the thought of all the life I have lived during this young person’s lifetime. It’s a lot! I’ve seen a lot of things, experienced a lot of things. It’s staggering to think about it. There seems to be swaths of time between milestones and events, yet no time has passed at all and I am confused about how I’ve managed to crame so much living into this amount of time. Michael keeps reminding me that we’re almost fifty. “I’ll be fifty THIS YEAR!” He’ll exclaim. It’s possible he’s more surprised by this than anyone considering he really believed he wouldn’t live this long. He seems to be leaning into being ‘old’. This week, J would have turned forty five and I am sure that if he were still with us, I’d be teasing him about a midlife crisis. He probably would have taken up Cage Fighting as his midlife crisis. This is also the twenty year anniversary of his death. Both of his children are no longer children, but married adults. Yet I do not feel old enough for any of this to be the case. 

I am old enough to have an elderly parent who no longer remembers my married name. 

But again, none of that seems possible because I am a child. If you only knew the number of fart jokes my friend Lauren and I send back and forth to each other in a week. Also, I heard a joke recently that makes me laugh every time I think about it and it is so dumb.

If science were easy, it would be called “your mom”. -unknown

Now doesn’t that make you chuckle?! When I told that joke to a coworker, we laughed so hard that tears leaked out. Because ‘your mom’ jokes, along with ‘dees nutz’ jokes are juvenilely hilarious. So while I have lived a life and grown, so to speak, I am mentally a thirteen year old teenage boy. I sent a text to Michael this week about Sweden being the place to go for moose spotting and I included a link for a place that offers Moose Safaris. I told him if we spotted a moose on the first day, we could then go to that outfitter’s Beaver Safari, wink wink. He did not respond about the Beaver Safari, but I like to imagine he found it just as hilarious as I did.

While, mentally I’ve remained childlike, I am also very aware of the possibility of retirement. CBS Sunday Morning last week was all about retirement. Then I went over to Billy and Dean’s for a game of dominoes and tea where I met two lovely ladies of retirement age and we had an enlightening discussion about my possibilities. My take away from all of that is that I will one day retire so that I can be even more childish and playful. I know exactly what the ‘little old lady’ version of me is going to look like. Spoiler, she looks very much like me now just with more wrinkles and gray hair. I’m lucky because I got my mom’s hair where the gray and blondish brown blend in a way that makes the gray look like it was put there on purpose and you’ll only notice the wrinkles when I come to a stop on my Vespa. I may end up retiring in Italy or Portugal, but I’m thinking about opening an adult only disco skate rink. Something that combines skating and dance music and maybe bingo. 

So to that young grad student who was only a year old in 1998, thank you for the congratulations. Graduating college was a big life milestone that led to so many more. That alone is worth congratulating. But maybe really the congratulations should go towards the quantity of living I’ve managed to do in the twenty seven years since then. It tells me a lot about just how much I can accomplish in a short amount of time. And there is an unknown amount of time left for me to fill up with adventures big and small.

I better get busy.