Look at the news. We have failed economically. Economic recovery is not possible, or desirable. I just watched a film that I wish everyone would see. The Economics of Happiness. I don’t preach anymore, haven’t since resigning from the ministery 17 years ago, but I really want to encourage you to go to www.theeoncomincsofhappiness.org, buy this film, and show it to friends. It is a simple, honest, brilliant statement of the affect globalization has produced, creating poverty, depression, and decline in every nation. Think globally, as they say, but act locally. Buy locally. And support local efforts. We’re giving it all away to corporations that have lost touch. Every thing that we buy affects our health and our situation. The decisions we make all day long create the world. We must wake up.
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Economics of Happiness
August 11, 2011University of the Streets
August 8, 2011I had a cultural education this weekend in Queens, New York, wild and wonderful. Moving in the jazz world of my jazz musician nephew, Tom Zlabinger, who teaches music at York College in Queens leaves me vibrating with a thousand stories I wish I could tell. 7 years ago Tom started the York College Summer Jazz Program, a free 5-week intensive that teaches music to high school aged kids from all 5 boroughs of New York. They spend their summers studying music theory, history and performance, receive private lessons on their instruments, and then give concerts in various venues.
In an upstairs, old historical jazz club in the East Village, I got to see kids from every background come together to play jazz music in a jazz band. If I counted correctly there were 6 trumpets, 7 trombones, 8 sax players, drums, bass, bass guitar, piano, and occasionally some bongos. The night was so hot you started sweating the moment you entered the un-airconditioned room. It was filled to the brim, knee to knee, shoulder to shoulder, everyone sweating in what began to feel like an exotic spa experience. There were pictures all over the walls of historical musical events that had taken place in that large room. A sense of music history entered my bones; people had been shaped by their experience in this room for decades. As soon as these kids started blowing their horns, enlivening their instruments, losing themselves in the power of what they were doing, the pain of the heat and sweat turned into a kind of ecstatic physical immersion into what was happening. The whole room was in the trance of it.
The drummer beat the skins of those drums all night and never once stopped smiling. The pianist went into an obviously altered space, eyes closed, head rolling, body swirling while his hands flew up and down the board. Every color of skin and eyes glowed in this group of women and men playing their instruments shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee.
Unforgettable to me was a dialogue that emerged between a baritone sax and an alto sax player. The baritone was played by a young woman named Rachel, so sassy and spirited my heart went into “Whhooaa” and respect mode immediately. The tenor sax was played by a young man named Aiden, an unflappable young fellow who could match her without question. So there they were, delivering notes to each other with attitude and style, back and forth for a long stretch – and I swear I never wanted the moment to end. I could watch this forever. No scripture ever contained so much information or that many messages of interest, beauty and power.
A couple of days later the band played again at the Louis Armstrong home and museum in Queens. I got a tour of the house where Louis and Lucille lived for nearly 40 years from Tom’s wife, Lesley, who is an archivist for the Louis Armstrong museum (as well as a soprano vocalist and accomplished music teacher herself). The deep root of this style of music, jazz, vibrates in this place where one of its most loved founders lived and died. Landmarks are landmarks for a reason. They enter your bone marrow and tell you stories you can’t learn in any other way or in any other place. It happens automatically because you are there.
I said, and meant, that I have a thousand stories to tell, but will conclude with just two more thoughts. Tom mentioned in both of these concerts his concern that the Grammys have eliminated 31 categories of music this year. He called it the “deforestation” of the diversity of music. One of the categories, Latin Jazz, he particularly mourned, and honored it by including an early piece of composition in that style by Duke Ellington. He said he wanted to continue playing the many styles of music to “hold their feet to the fire.” I want to join him in being an appreciator and supporter for such diversity in music.
And a last anecdote came from a parent named Fred. He talked about how Tom loves these kids, gives his life energy to them, and, rare in Fred’s experience, offers students the opportunity to not just play notes on a page but express their full instinctual and creative selves through the music. His eyes became red and shed tears as he said to me, “He will NEVER be alone. These kids adore him.” One of Tom’s students said as much to me after the first concert.
A role model for me, this nephew, Tom Zlabinger. What joy.
Spirit and Form
August 3, 2011Long years ago I had a dream that will always stay with me. I saw two feet walking, when one hit the ground I heard the word “Spirit”, the next hit the ground and I heard the word “Form.” Spirit, form, spirit, form, spirit, form. The feet kept walking. The dream seemed to be instructing me in some basics of the mystery of this system we live in. Spirit comes into form, goes back to spirit. Form holds spirit, then lets it go. Nothing stays, but the motion is consistent and reliable. It keeps walking.
In my new Tae Kwon Do practice I am learning the lovely dance that this ancient art does with this. I can’t speak the language, it is Korean, but there is a word they use for “soul call” or “soul cry.” When you hear that loud “Yeeaaahhhh” – (however it comes out) as a person is practicing, this is allowing soul to make its sound. It feels so good to do it! The forms present soul in position, the soul cries release it, the release invites the next form. As I practice I am now reminded of my long remembered dream — spirit, form, spirit, form, spirit, form.
This is the dance we are always doing. But what I am thinking now is that we are often missing the sound part of the ritual. Releasing sound all day long is regularly practiced in indigenous cultures, in a variety of ways for different reasons. We moderns have gotta get that back. Learn when to YELL, yell on behalf of soul, not AT anyone or anything. Spontaneously cry out like the hawk. Squawk. Sing. Holler. Yodel. Release sound however you feel it coming on. If spirit stays in form too long without intentional and dynamic release it will come out whining, bitching, nagging, criticizing, moaning. Give it some permission and some joy and some juice. Howl! Feel GOOD with it.
Animals don’t take this ritual lightly. Neither should we.
Clusterf**k: me, you, the economy and the planet
July 31, 2011I had a dream not too long ago in which I was witnessing a huge, gorgeous spiral galaxy, the stars twinkling like diamonds against a velvety dark sky. On one of the arms of the galaxy however I noticed a huge mass, like a glut of stars all tangled up together so that the energy could not flow. It was a galactic mess. When I woke up, the word “clusterfuck” occurred to me. I do not know where that word comes from, but I know I’ve heard it before, probably in reference to traffic inLos Angeles.
Of course, with my Jungian training, I took the dream personally; it was to me a picture of my psyche – lovely, natural, part of the starry cosmos, but LOOK what I have going on over here – a tangled mass of psychic material that energy cannot flow through.
A week or so after having this dream, a similar one occurred. I was walking through a crowded town that seemed like the whole world, almost like an M.C. Escher drawing with layers and dimensions winding out of each other. My dream was not abstract like his drawings though, the scenes were more realistic. I wandered into an area that was literally covered with shit and diapers, too many babies had been born there, too many mothers starving and unable to handle the chaos. I was knee deep in it and could only try to slog my way out of the enormous area teeming with stink and sickness. I saw someone on the edge starting to clean up and struggled with a sense of hopelessness. Can this mess be resolved? This guy seems to think so. The place reminded me of Kibera, the slum outside Nairobi in Kenya where I worked a year ago. But Kibera seems clean compared to this terrain.
Again looking at the dream as a personal message I saw it as an earthier way to view the galactic mess. Shadow work is daunting. I can see a cluster of internal things it begins to refer to, debilitating results of the tangle and illness that results. A sense of hopelessness is a temptation. It takes effort to hang on to glimmers of hope.
Then last night I read an article in the recent More magazine about a toxic mess the size of a small continent floating in the Pacific ocean made completely of plastic and trash. A deep sea diver named Mary Crowley apparently discovered it. She relates the story of the beauty and wonders that made her fall in love with diving, then tells of the horror of what she found – plastic pieces, plastic bags, beach chairs, miles upon miles of junk clustered together. The description she tells will make you weep and feel sick. There seems to be a vortex in this location that draws the trash dumped into our oceans and water systems to itself. Hundreds of thousands of living creatures have eaten the bits of plastic and died from it. Many of the fish who eat it are eaten by larger fish, who are eaten by other fish, who end up on our dinner tables.
As I read I couldn’t help but think of the clusterfuck in my dreams. I have taken the dream images personally, and they are personal, but they are also visions of bigger things going on. In the holographic model of the universe, each cell reflects everything that is in the whole. In this, everything that is in the universe is also in me, and everything in me is also in the universe.
The article tells of the controversy and antagonism that is coming Mary Crowley’s way because of what she discovered and because she is determined that there is something to do about it. It seems llike she now is a vortex for a lot of toxic psychological and political material. Yet she is driven by a sense of hope that the mess can be cleared.
An analogy comparing depth psychology to deep sea diving has occurred to me many times over the years for a variety of reasons. Now I see it again. I love to slip into the waters of psyche and see what resides there, beauties not visible on “land” or in daylight consciousness. But along with the investigation come encounters with deep shadowy material. There is horrifying stuff in there along with the wonders. Many people and religions want to rise above, transcend, move out of the vibration of shadow material. Such efforts easily turn into dangerous repression and phobic denial rather than mastery, which causes the mass to simply build in power and toxicity. Author Thomas Berry writes that what we need now is not transcendence, but “inscendence.” We need to know how to go in or we will never be familiar with the problems. But there are a lot of taboos around this.
Experience tells me that working with shadow will never be successful until we clear judgment from our hearts and minds. It is a terrible waste of time to judge and moralize about the problem in the ocean rather than simply get busy finding ways to resolve and prevent it. Similarly if I judge myself about the matter in my own mess, that will tend to dispirit and suck energy from what is required to simply deal with the issues. I need to be as clean and dispassionate as a surgeon as I go into the problem areas. Judgment increases the mess, obfuscates, complicates and delays every effort.
The poet Rilke writes, “Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants our love.” I believe this. I find when I think anything through to its core, there lies a reason for compassion. Nobody who bought a beach chair or a bottle of water meant to poison the planet; our collective ignorance and shortsightedness wasn’t apparent at first, then it rapidly got out of control and went beyond us. So it is with my own internal mess. One thing led to another. Compassion is a natural result of comprehension, of seeing clearly. But it takes getting through the revulsions, the taboos, instincts to condemn or to cast into otherness. Compassion is fierce and takes more courage than any other stance. Compassion is fearless.
You don’t have to look very far to see the massive clusterfucks we have created collectively. The economy seems to be our number one reflection of it at the moment.
I know that awakening compassion will move us to a place of vision. Only from there will we be able to see, heal and resolve. No matter what problem we are facing, the demon is, in the end, something helpless that wants our love.
I Don’t Want to Go to Rehab, I say No, No, No
July 26, 2011I’m thinking about our young musical talent recently lost, Amy Winehouse, her tragic end mysteriously at the same age as greats such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and others. The words of her song keep going through my head. Is there a prescience to them?
Are we in denial that everybody needs to go to rehab? It seems like most of the world is addicted to consumerism, waste, medication, war, self-destructive habits and ways of thinking. But none of us want to go to rehab. We say no, no, no.
Where is, what is the massive rehab for us going to be? We’re killing ourselves collectively. Toxic air, toxic water, toxic food, toxic soil. Medicating ourselves with stuff and distraction.
The tragedy of Amy Winehouse may be a mirror for all of us.
Youth and Healing the Planet
July 24, 2011For the last several days thoughts keep occurring to me about Youth, youth itself, as a vital power. More and more the direction culture is heading is to bring children into the world and immediately start their training for adulthood, as if youth is worth little more than providing time for such training. The intention to prepare babies to receive a strong education and a means for entering our social, political and economic structures begins practically before conception. Children know that, their own focus begins to go in that direction, sometimes largely bypassing the immense wisdom and glory of who they are, exactly as they are, in those childhood moments. Surviving in the set up and pleasing adults gets most of the attention.
I know I quote Buckminster Fuller often, as it seems there is something he said on nearly every subject that illuminates it for me. He often mentioned the error in education that a child like himself, with a mind full of creative thoughts and ideas, was constantly told to “shut up and listen. It doesn’t matter what you think, listen to what I am telling you.” It makes me hurt every time I think about it.
I studied and teach the Dialogue method developed by physicist David Bohm. I have mostly been able to utilize this training only with adults, though I was thrilled to teach it in a college classroom for some years. Continually, however, I imagine how wonderful it would be if I could get 2nd graders talking together in intentional dialogue, learning to listen to each other thoughtfully, finding voice for their own perceptions and ideas, feeling respected and heard by each other as well as their teachers. Often any of us never tell a thought or impression until there is a context, an opening to find words for it. When it is spoken, that is true creation. As Bohm puts it something that was in the implicate order moves into the explicate order and that changes everything, even our physics.
I was a hippie child of the 60’s and 70’s during the years that I got to hang out with Bucky Fuller since he was a friend of my father’s. Bucky’s posture at that time regarding that puzzling and rebellious generation was “Let them talk! Listen to them! All of your corporate and political ideals are tragically oppressing and ruining our world. These kids don’t want to follow you there!” It took a lot of heat off those in our generation who were around him, and allowed us to listen to ourselves and each other differently. The words I just attributed to Bucky were my iteration of his message, but here are some of his own words from It Came to Pass-Not to Stay:
The top-gun, self-serving power structure
Also claims outright ownership
Of the lives of all those born
Within their sovereignly claimed
Geographical bounds
And can forfeit their citizens’ lives
In their official warfaring,
Which of psychological necessity
Is always waged in terms
Of moral rectitude
While overtly protecting and fostering their special self-interests.
To keep the conquered
Controllably disintegrated
And fearfully dependent
“They” also foster perpetuation or increase
Of religious, ethnic, linguistic,
And skin-color differentiations
As obvious conditioned-reflex exploitabilities.
Special-interest sovereignity will always
Attempt to monopolize and control
All strategic information (intelligence),
Thus to keep the divided specializing world
Innocently controlled by its propaganda
And dependent exclusively upon its dictum.
Youth has discovered all this
And is countering with comprehensivity and synergy.
Youth will win overwhelmingly
For truth
Is eternally regenerative
In youth.
Youth’s love
Embracingly integrates
Successfully frustrates
And holds together,
Often unwittingly,
All that hate, fear and selfishness
Attempt to disintegrate.
Thank you Bucky. What a mind, what a man, what a heart.
Watching C-Span the other night, proceedings in the British Parliament showed their government all stirred up over the Rupert Murdoch scandal. I looked at the room full of characters trying to sort the problem out and noticed that they mostly look to be in their 50’s and over, possibly there are a few in their 40’s.
And then I see news clips about the kids who are the new billionaires because of social media break-throughs they have designed, genius ideas that hook the world up differently. I find it captivating the that corporate guys are saying to the 25-year-olds “We’ll give you 6 billion dollars for this,” and the kids are saying “Nope, it’s not for sale.”
What if Parliament, government, corporations, every organization had a think-tank that only the really young could be involved in? Rather than wait for those minds to come up through the system so that by the time they are 40 their spirits are crushed, they are dumbed down, bummed out, burned out and medicated – what if we intentionally tap the resource of our youth? It guarantees unmatched energy, enthusiasm, creativity and raw power. Why is this resource not more involved?
I am turning into an elder, now 60, and increasingly notice how irrelevant elders become in our culture, partly because everything is moving so fast. Our brains got formed before all of these challenges. There are certain things that only an elder with life experience can teach you. And there are other things that only the youth, born into the changing world, can teach us. We have to work together. Maybe mid-life crises wouldn’t be so extreme if more of the responsibility were spread out across the generations.
Surely there is a way to figure this out. Let’s ask a young person.
Solitude
July 18, 2011After living like a hermit for nearly 7 years, now having a room in town and an increasingly busy life because of it, I am finding the thirst for solitude to be an issue. Previously I did not thirst, I was nearly drowning in it. A new balance demands to be struck.
Looking into a couple of books recently for different reasons, I rediscovered long-time favorite passages on Solitude that hit me between the eyes as I found them, their impact notifying me of a need to reorient. Protecting solitude is a little valued concern in this busy, twittery, facebooky, achievement driven, masculine value oriented culture. I had almost forgotten.
Robert Johnson’s genius little book The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden discusses the difference between masculine and feminine responses to addressing the wrongs of life. The masculine aspect of the psyche (in men and in women) goes out on his white steed, sword in hand, to protect and conquer through heroic action. The feminine aspect, on the other hand, goes into the forest and drops down into her own nature knowing instinctively that all healing comes from within. He writes: “Solitude is the feminine equivalent of masculine heroic action.”
My masculine side, even when I am on the mountain, can maintain a heroic stance of outward focus, tirelessly working to achieve whatever my perceived goals are – developing business, maintaining the property, trying to grow “it”, whatever “it” is so that I can survive and thrive in the world, much to the detriment of my feminine nature. Spinning wheels in this way while alone is not the same as solitude. Solitude is about focus upon and permission for deep interiority. About stopping. Stillness. Listening. Attention. Intention.
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke speaks emphatically and eloquently of the necessity for solitude. Holding to it, he says, is difficult work – we would rather any distraction, no matter how banal or cheap, than stay with the challenges of solitude. He advises the young poet to drop his attention to the humdrum, paltry, status-oriented vocations that enslave him and to “only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in you your innermost being is worthy of your whole love.” Cherishing solitude “is itself work, and status, and vocation.”
My body arrests me at times and demands that I attend to solitude, but I learn more every year how to be in content and happy occupation with it. Holding to it, even in the face of screaming demands from my own torturous, though well-intended, masculine side, is, as Rilke stated, difficult work. It is a vocation. Muscle for it has to be trained and developed.
Which thought brings me to a moment in which to share sheer, unapologetic maternal pride. This will seem like an aside, but I will bring it back to the theme of this writing.
My daughter, Arlene Ward, came in 4th in the nation in her category for weightlifting in the National Championships held in Council Bluffs Iowa held two days ago. Her drive, joy, will, purpose and integrity in developing such extraordinary balance and strength inspire me beyond my capacity to declare. She is a Teacher to me, in the highest sense of the word, because of who she is. If you knew her you would know whereof I speak. This woman… the carefully developed power of her body is the tiniest glimpse of the internal forces of will and beauty that drive her.
In my solitude I hope to allow for her influence to help me develop muscle I need for what I do. The value of drawing on figures that truly inspire us as we go into the well of our own being can never be underestimated. These mirrors help us to see and identify ourselves. Of the many great persons that inspire me and move me to want become all that I can be, my two offspring, Josi and Arlene Ward, are at the top of the list. This is because of who they are.
What a nice metaphor for the value of what come out of one’s deep inner being. The womb of the Self for both male and female is a gestation and birthing place for all manner of surprises and miracles that inevitably, by nature, will be delivered to the world.
Rites of Passage, Death and Mystery
July 14, 2011Rituals are symbolic acts, gestures that create a relationship between individuals or communities with the larger reality. There are daily rituals, which indigenous cultures describe as maintenance rituals, and radical rituals which address larger questions and transitions in life.
Then there are Rites of Passage. These are rituals that take one from one stage of life to another and are irrevocable. Birth is an irrevocable rite of passage. You can’t put a baby back in the womb. Penetration in sexual intercourse is irrevocable; once experienced the person has moved beyond virginity. Motherhood is irrevocable. A child delivered, living or dead, turns that woman into a Mother. Death is irrevocable, a rite of passage not only for the soul who transitions but for all who have loved that soul. We are never the same after experiencing death.
Since the recent passing of my Mother, the mystery that death has represented for humans since the beginning of time is highlighted for me not so much “death is a natural part of life” as they say, but as death being a mystery. I have experienced significant personal deaths before – including that of my first boyfriend, my father, my dog – but this one inches me closer, not to understanding death but to appreciation for mystery.
Mystery surrounds us. Every time a tiny seed becomes a plant, sweet love-making becomes a baby, a cut on the body heals – though science tries to describe it, mystery is never eliminated. Somehow the Western mind, with its addiction to reason, rationality, explanations, control and answers – along with an alarming capacity for numbing denial – robs us too often of the experience of simply reveling in mystery with a sense of wonder, allowing ourselves not to know a thing and be comfortable fools in that.
A Rite of Passage is like a tunnel, a birth canal. Whoosh, you enter another world, one you have never known before. Or, better said, by labor you enter that other world. The Rite generally, in Earth reality so far, involves pain; not that there is anything wrong with pain, but more with our acceptance of or relationship to it. The passage, and the pain, are doorways to a new reality.
Part of this mystery for me personally so far, is the life-review aspect of death. They say that in dying one’s life flashes before their eyes. I think that must be true not just for the one dying, but for those who love the one dying. For a slide-show at the Wake we found ourselves pouring through family albums that have been collecting dust for decades. Clearing out the house, family clothes, portraits, letters and treasures have to be reviewed for their meaning, present value, and where they should go next.
When I went through an extended initiation with a Nigerian shaman he wanted me not just to discover who I am now and where I want to go, but where I came from, who were my ancestors, what are their deep stories. Apparently there is no successful birth to the next life without a sense of continuity with the one left behind.
This look back for me, at the moment, is more mysterious than the look forward into the world beyond. Ahhhh. I can barely say what mystery it holds. That “other” world feels so much less mysterious to me than this.
Indigenous people infallibly teach that we need the dead, we must be in relationship to the dead. Our ancestors carry those keys for us. And the dead need us.
Mom, what can I do for you now? And now that we are birthed through this passage, how can we help each other in the new world? Let us enter together this mystery.
And She Came to Pass, but Not to Stay
July 7, 2011The title of a book by Buckminster Fuller has been running through my head constantly regarding the recent passing of my Mother. His book is And It Came to Pass, but Not to Stay. The words haunt me. Everything is passing. This we know conceptually, but I have just experienced the first days of life without my Mother residing here in this incarnated realm. Her love, her presence has always been there.
She passed. Passed. The meaning eludes me just now. What does that mean, passed? I don’t want any answer just yet; I need to consider.
My Mother really, really, really loved her kids and grandkids. As my daughter Josi said at her Wake service, her love was fierce, protective. Where does all of that love go when she passes? Where did Coco’s dynamic love go? When a relationship ends, where does the love that was held within it go? Do all of these merge with the cosmic love, or is there still a particularity to those loves outside of subjective memory? Cosmic love is good, but my Mother’s love was very particular.
In Mother’s last months all she wanted to talk about was her love. We’d tell her things in our lives and she was interested, but her attention would simply gravitate to expressing how much she loved us. And when we expressed ours in return she genuinely let it in. This was very satisfying. She knew she was loved, and we have always known that we were loved.
She commented to my other daughter Arlene in one of their last conversations that she might like to learn to play rugby. Mom was 89. Arlene told this story at the Wake too, appreciating her Grandmother’s fearlessness. The priceless stories went on and on, and will continue on and on.
I was home alone one night just after she passed and heard myself singing the song from the musical Oliver, “Where is Love?” I sang it over and over; such a sweet song I have always remembered the lyrics to. Singing it made me feel better. My heart is scanning, looking for the new evidences of my Mother’s love emerging from where she is now, and for new evidences of all of the loves in my life that came to Pass but not to Stay.
Those evidences will be my true North. I will direct myself by them.
A Good Death
June 25, 2011My Mother, Kathryn Whitlow, has courageously struggled with frail health for the last 6 years. During her many close calls all I could think to ask in prayer for her was that she have the gift of a good death. The idea that she might be alone, or frightened, or in an ambulance, or in great pain, confused, being fussed with by strangers or any such scenario while she made her crossing was too hard to imagine. Please, God, just let her have a good death. During rituals and prayer times, this was a constant wish.
The wish was granted today. Mama had a massive stroke last Monday. I left North Carolina the same day, my sister left Vienna, Austria, my daughter Josi and nephew Michael left New York; we all arrived at Mom’s home in Dubuque, Iowa. We got her home from the hospital on Thursday. She was in her own bed, unable to communicate except a little bit through the eyes and a tiny bit through a squeeze in the hand, but we knew she knew we were all there. We read to her, listened to music, told stories, stayed with her, laughed, cried, told her how much we love her and how much she has inspired us with her strong character our whole lives. All day yesterday she didn’t open her eyes, she seemed to have retreated a little further from us while she labored to birth herself to the next place.
Today the hospice nurse was with us as my daughter Josi was about to leave for the airport to fly to California for her cousin’s wedding. Josi was sad to leave prematurely, but we all told her Grandma would want her to represent us at the wedding. Minutes before she was to leave the nurse said, “You all should gather around her now.” She noticed a subtle change. My two sisters and I held our faces right above Mother’s face, my nephew and daughter had their faces right over her heart, a constellation of 5 faces right above her. Mom suddenly opened her eyes and looked slowly and carefully at each one of us, back and forth and around, the look of eternity in her eyes. We all told her how much we love her, that we will take care of each other, and think of her every single day. Mama closed her eyes and calmly took her last breath. We all felt that she chose this moment as she didn’t want Josi to have to miss it.
When my Father crossed over 23 years ago, his best friend Fran O’Connor walked in the hospital room that very moment. He knelt by Dad’s bed and prayed. When Mom crossed today, Fran’s son Jock, who has taken care of Mom lovingly for years, walked into the house. He knelt and prayed with us. Full circle. Too miraculous and amazing, all of it, for words.
Native American’s say that one of the best prayers you can say for a loved one is that they have a good death. I now believe a good death is one of life’s finest gifts. Mother’s death leaves us missing a grand lady, but astounded by how it all happened, more grateful than we can possibly say.
I was writing a bare bones obituary, thinking we can look at it more carefully and fill it in together later. The last line I threw in just for fun for the family was “Kathryn will be remembered as an ornery little thing with a heart of gold who inspired love and devoted admiration in everyone she met.” To my surprise they all like it and want to keep it in.
Kathryn Whitlow was a force of nature, a feisty lady who spoke her mind with frankness, without editing, apology or regret. Honest to the bone. As tender-hearted as any human I have ever known. Witty, fun, full of generosity and joy. In our last conversation, the day before her stroke I asked her how she was feeling, which I knew wasn’t too good. She said “I have nothing to complain about, only things to be grateful for.” That was her philosophy. She will remain as large in death as she was in life, a model of strength and goodness. I have been the luckiest daughter. I am unspeakably grateful.
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