22

Apr

Faith.

photo-5

The dictionary defines the word faith as “belief that is not based on proof,” and “confidence or trust in a person or thing.” Faith is unscientific. More often than not, it is identified with religion and a belief in God.

My whole life, I’ve been sort of ambivalent about religion. Both of my parents were Catholics, though my Dad was much more devout than my Mom. Mom bore the unfortunate scars of Catholic school-inflicted trauma. She’d frequently recount tales of nuns that were so terrifying – routinely smacking their students with rulers, preaching of fire and brimstone – that she’d pretend to be sick so she wouldn’t have to go to school. Mom lived in fear of those nuns, and though she eventually returned to the church, that fear created a tension between her and Catholicism that stayed with her throughout her life.

So, between a mother that was skittish about religion, and a father who, while a believer, preferred watching sports on Sundays to going to mass, church attendance throughout my youth was sporadic at best, and mostly reserved for holidays like Christmas and Easter. Though I always felt pretty comfortable in the church, as I got older, my liberal politics – particularly my support for gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose – created a disconnect between my beliefs and the Vatican that I couldn’t reconcile. So I mostly stayed away.

As a liberal, I have a lot of friends who are atheists: a belief that I respect. I think it’s actually quite brave to believe that this life is all there is, and when it’s over, that’s it. But to be completely honest, that idea terrifies me. I find comfort in the idea that our souls carry on beyond the lives of our bodies, and that our spirits are so much more than our physical being. If you’ve ever been with someone you loved when the life passed out of them and seen that they simply weren’t there anymore, you know what I’m talking about.

September 29, 2012 was the date of my Mom’s memorial service. It was an informal waterfront gathering in Allyn, WA, on a parcel of land that’s been in my Mom’s family since the late 1950s. It’s a sort of family compound (my Grandfather, Aunt and Uncle all still live there) that we simply call ‘the beach.’ Despite spending the first fifteen years of my life with a permanent residence in Anchorage, Alaska, I essentially grew up at the beach, as did my Mom, and my Uncle Glenn. It was my Mom’s favorite place in the whole world and the only fitting place to hold her service.

That evening, sitting on the deck of my Grandparents’ house starting out at Case Inlet, I was struck by how beautiful everything was. It was an uncharacteristically warm, clear day for late September in the Pacific Northwest. The sound was flat as glass and reflected the heavens like a mirror. An enormous full moon gleamed bright white, hovering over a big-as-life Mt. Rainier. All was so calm and quiet, you could have heard a pin drop. And as I sat and stared out at the sound, for the first time in the weeklong chaos following my Mom’s death, I felt a sense of peace. I knew that she was here, that she was with me.

The skeptic in me immediately chimes in that I wanted to feel her with me, and that, of course, is true. But I simply can’t explain the power of that moment. It was as though the sea and the sky wrapped me up and held me in a warm blanket, and through the tremendous beauty of my surroundings and the almost trance-like calm that came over me, I could feel my Mom whispering to me, “I’m here. I’m O.K., Sar. I’m home.”

But the most powerful exchange I’ve had with my Mother since she passed on happened last Christmas, and it’s something I’ve told almost no one, and certainly not in as great of detail as I’m about to recount here, because it’s so incredibly personal. I was at the beach, and – as usual – staying in a mobile home on a piece of property adjacent to my Grandparents’ beach cabin. The mobile home and the piece of land used to belong to my parents but was willed to me after their deaths. And while I’m grateful for the inheritance, truth be told, I hate that trailer. My Mom inhabited that thing during the darkest period of her life, and the energy it contains is heavy and oppressive and oh so sad. Some joyful day I will raze it to the ground and build a new home in its place. But, I digress.

The trailer is also – until the perfect summer day meets my Uncle and I finding courage enough to scatter them – the temporary home for my Mother’s ashes. Whenever I stay there, I talk to my Mom. Sometimes, I hold the box of ashes in my arms and hug them.

But on this particular day – last Christmas Eve – I had hit a serious wall. After more than a year of being in survival mode, of moving from one crisis to the next, of working so very hard and keeping myself so very busy as a distraction from the weight of all the emotional baggage I’d been carrying, I finally, finally hit zero. I simply couldn’t pretend to be OK anymore. I’d arrived at a place of overwhelming hopelessness and despair. I knew I needed to change, but I didn’t feel strong enough and I didn’t know where or how to begin.

And so I cradled the box containing my Mom’s ashes and I wept. This emotional actress has cried a lot of tears in her life, but I have never, ever, cried like that. Uncontrollably, unceasingly, just this river of emotion. I didn’t ask, I implored. I begged. “Mom,” I sobbed, “I don’t know what to do. I am so scared. Please help me. Please tell me what to do. Please, Mom.” I have never been more humble. I have never been more afraid. And I have never wanted my Mother more.

I don’t know how the universe works. I don’t know if my Mom heard me that night, or if I was just crying to myself. But I do know that in my darkest moment, I asked for help and then help started to arrive. It wasn’t in the form I wanted. It arrived in a way that wasn’t pleasant; help arrived in the form of an unseen hand that grabbed me by the collar and shook me hard and slapped me across the face and screamed, “wake up!” It was a hand that pushed me through pain in order to make it clear that the only way out was through, that in order to live, a part of me had to die. It was gut-wrenching, but I can see now that it was what I needed.

Four months after that dark, dark Christmas Eve, my healing has been dramatic. I still have a steep mountain to climb, but I am more optimistic, more creative, and less afraid. I am making my choices out of hope now, rather than out of fear. I’m learning to trust myself again.

I don’t know exactly where I come down on the God question. But if faith is a belief in something that can’t be seen, then I have it. And time and time again, over the last two years, when I’ve stepped into something having nothing but faith, that faith has been rewarded. I’ve seen and felt too much not to believe that there’s a force out there that’s bigger than me. A force that’s compassionate, a force that wants me, you, us, to be our highest and best selves. I don’t know if that’s God or the universe or magic or what. All I know is what I’ve felt in the deepest reaches of my soul, and in the darkest moments of my heart. That’s my truth. I don’t need it to be anyone else’s, but it’s mine.  And now I’ve shared it with you.

Until next time, friends.

stub039

12 years ago Short URL 3 Comments

Love/Me/Opinion/Religion

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17

Apr

Trouble.

Noir Lemon Melon

I like to fight. I can’t help it. My Irish father used to delight in telling his kids that our surname Kelly meant ‘troublesome’ in Gaelic. He’d laugh as he said it, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

Dad was a trial lawyer, and by nature, he liked to argue. At family gatherings, my older siblings would often refuse to take the bait, preferring to pursue the path of diplomacy. Not me. I gave as good as I got. Frequent sparring became a central part of Dad’s and my relationship, and he’d pick fights with me on purpose, knowing that more often than not, I’d rise to the occasion.

When Dad was sick and living alone in his home in Olympia, he became even more stubborn and set in his ways. He was maddening, impossible. Everything was a negotiation. We wanted him to be in hospice care, he wanted to die alone at home. We tried to get him a live-in caretaker; he absolutely refused to have a stranger – no matter how qualified or permissive or kind – in his house.

And so it went, the battles. As Dad’s health declined, he labeled me the ‘aggressive’ one. My sisters were much sweeter, nicer, more patient, while I still fought Dad at nearly every turn. And I’m pretty sure he enjoyed it.

One of my last visits to Olympia coincided with an epic football match up between our alma maters: Dad’s beloved Oregon Ducks against my USC Trojans. Dad not only refused to watch the game with me because I wasn’t rooting for his team, he went so far as to banish me to another room, where I watched the game, sequestered away from him where he couldn’t hear me cheer if USC scored a touchdown. While my sister Deirdre shuttled back and forth between the two rooms, Dad and I watched and rooted against each other in our separate corners. At halftime, he abruptly shuffled into the kitchen to make himself a drink, barked ‘exciting game,’ and then retreated back to his den.

It’s no wonder I take sports so seriously. It’s no wonder I’m so competitive. I learned it from my Dad. I learned how to hold my own in fiery, contentious arguments. I learned that fighting with style and eloquence and passion is more effective than fighting fair. And I learned that the person who gets the last word usually wins, and so I always, always try to get the last word. A quality that not everyone finds endearing.

There’s a reason I’m drawn to the film noir genre and co-produce a noir play festival: I love to play bitches. The acting roles I get the most excited about are damaged, edgy, tough, dark and twisted dames who like to break the rules and who will claw and scrape for what they want. I may look like the girl next door, but I’d much rather be Lady Macbeth. After all, it’s a lot more fun to step into someone else’s skin if you’re able to take bolder risks and bigger chances than you’re allowed to in real life, and you’re not bound by the societal expectation to play nice.

There’s a part of me that understands that I have to follow the rules, and there’s a part of me that wants to break stuff, just to watch it shatter. I want to light things on fire and watch them burn. I want to crash the car, to jump off the cliff, to push the limits of what I can get away with.

I like to fight. I like to win. It’s why I’m still here. It’s why I won’t give up. And it’s why, sometimes, I live up to my last name.

Until next time, friends.

12 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

Me

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11

Apr

The price.

For the last several months I’ve been meditating on a big idea. A vast, multi-faceted idea. An idea that can be approached from different sides and attacked from numerous angles. An idea that for me, as an artist and as a creative being, is on par with questions like ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘What’s my higher purpose?’ and ‘Why are we all here?’

I don’t think I can tackle the question weighing on my mind in one post. It’s too big. It will probably become a recurring theme in my work (echoes of it appear in my blog, Broken), or in a series of posts. I’m not sure yet.

But, to begin. What I’ve been puzzling over is this: in order to create great art, is suffering a necessary, and in fact, inevitable, part of the process?

Our history is rife with visionary creators who harbored broken souls. Tennessee Williams, Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath. More recently, Heath Ledger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The talented and tortured musicians who are members of that infamous 27 club: Jimi, Janis, Jim, Kurt, Amy.

There’s no doubt that among the gifted and the sensitive, there’s a proclivity toward addiction and self-destruction. But why? Don’t mistake me; I’m not suggesting that in order to be a great artist (or even a mediocre one), alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, even suicidal tendencies, are a prerequisite. If anything, this toxic and destructive behavior produces inertia that stands in the way of the creative process. But the idea that I keep coming back to is this: as artists, we suffer more than the rest of people. We feel things more exquisitely. In order to be visionary, we must be honest to the point that it’s painful. We must be willing to expose our most private, secret parts, our deepest vulnerabilities, and the darkest parts of our hearts. We must walk into the full range of human emotions open and unguarded.   And for that, we pay a hefty price.

I have a uniquely personal experience with the idea that the act of creation produces suffering, and it’s the reason I’ve been meditating on it at such great length. Over the last year and a half, I’ve lost three of the most important people in my life in dramatic fashion. And I lost not only their physical presence, but also something much deeper and more profound. Through their deaths, I’ve been faced with hard truths about my family that I didn’t want to know. Truths that have shaken and shattered my foundation and left me questioning everything I thought I knew: my childhood, my relationships, my history, and my very identity.

But here’s the gift. When I finally, recently, landed at zero, I became more creative. My writing got better. Ideas started clicking, and synapses started firing in a way they never had before. I found myself suddenly harnessing an authority that I’d never owned before; an authority that I’m not only compelled to share with others, but an authority that I have to share in order to survive. I know this like I know the color of my eyes or the place that I was born.

All human beings suffer. It’s inevitable. We make terrible, tragic mistakes. We experience great pain. We love deeply and we lose profoundly. Most people don’t walk into these emotions willingly. They avoid them because they’re painful, and only experience them as the inevitable by-product of being alive. But as artists, we wade into the most intense human experiences willfully, and with abandon. We welcome the pain, the joy, the agony and the ecstasy. We say bring it on. We want to feel everything. But sometimes we feel too much. Enter booze, drugs, sex, crazy, destructive behavior, in order to numb the pain. And that’s when we get into trouble.

Speaking from personal experience, it’s incredibly difficult to put my heart on the line and my grief on display in such a vulnerable way without becoming a little fucked up and unhealthy about it in the process. The intense feelings I’ve been wading into and moving through have made me feel closer to Tennessee and to Sylvia and to Vincent and to Kurt. I understand them better. My gift and my curse is that the hole in my heart is only filled through sharing my very personal story with the world. And yet to sit in those feelings without letting them swallow me whole is the great challenge that I’m still trying to sort out. The powerful conundrum that we face as artists is that our very lives depend on telling our stories – honestly, openly, nakedly, no holds barred – and yet the act of doing so is so dangerous to our psyches that it threatens our survival. It is the ultimate Catch 22, the tightrope we must all walk.

And so, my fellow poets, beautiful dreamers, dear friends, brave and broken souls, I invite you to join me in meditation on this question: how do we do what we must do, what we were born and put on this earth to do, without allowing it to destroy us?

It’s an open dialogue, if you’d like to have it.

Until next time, friends.

12 years ago Short URL Comments

Los Angeles/Love/Me/Opinion/Well-Being

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04

Apr

Nothing.

Tell me if this has happened to you before: you’re confronted with a problem that you don’t know how to solve, and so, rather than react, you wait.  And while you’re waiting, this problem magically takes care of itself.  It could be an email that you don’t know how to respond to, a request for help from a needy friend that you just don’t have time for, or a work problem that you’re not sure how to tackle.  And sometimes, as with a computer glitch, all you really need to do is turn it off for a while and leave it alone.  It’s the equivalent of shutting down and rebooting your system.

I’m the last person to advocate ignoring a problem in hopes that it will just go away.  I’m a doer.  Anybody who has worked with me on one of the plays or films I’ve produced knows that I’m about 100 miles from lazy.  It is simply not in my DNA to do nothing.

But sometimes in life, it’s important to take a beat.  Sometimes waiting and letting the dust settle is the only thing that can be done.  Sometimes, inaction is the best course of action.

Since I’ve become the girl who writes about very sad things – don’t blame me, blame the cosmic forces at work in shaping my life’s trajectory over the last twenty-four months – allow me relate the power of doing nothing back to another very sad thing.

When my Dad was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic and liver cancer in the spring of 2012, he decided that the best course of action was to do nothing.  The tumors in his liver numbered at least ten – too many to operate successfully – and the pancreatic tumor he had was so rare that the only chemo drug available was brand new to the market, experimental at best, and wouldn’t eradicate the tumor.  In short, there was no cure.  His only treatment option might buy him some time, but it could also make him very sick.  Why add more years to your life, if the life in your years was full of vomiting, pain and misery?

Dad, ever the pragmatist, opted to let his life run its inevitable course.  He figured that at 81, he’d lived a good life and he was going out on his terms.  Plus, any chemo meant that he would have to stop drinking, and there was no way the Irish rascal was giving up his booze, especially not with a looming expiration date.  As Dad’s internist said when his diagnosis came down, ‘If I had your prognosis, Bernie, I’d buy a one-way ticket to a Caribbean island, park myself on the beach with a tropical drink in hand, and lie in the sun until my time was up.’

I thought my Dad’s decision was brave, and it was the one I would have made had I been faced with the same set of circumstances.  My Mom, on the other hand, couldn’t accept it.  I had numerous conversations with her in which I laid out all of the facts on the ground and explained how all reason and logic necessitated that this was the only way to proceed.  And after all, it was Dad’s decision, and we had to respect his wishes.  But no amount of reasoning or logic ever got through to my Mother.  She became obsessed with the idea that this experimental, unproven, non-cure of a drug might work, or that there had to be something else, some unseen solution, something no doctor had ever heard of that just might be a miracle cure.

Accepting that there is nothing that you can do when someone you love is going to die is probably the toughest form of acceptance there is.  There’s a reason why there are five stages of grief and acceptance is the last one.  It is not an easy road to get there.  But as I reflect on the way that my Mom obsessed on Dad’s decision – to the point of making herself literally insane – and how that obsession exacerbated her own addictions and the numerous issues she was already battling, I can’t help but see her behavior as a cautionary tale.

I am my Mother’s daughter.  I am anxious like her and I worry like her and I make endless to-do lists and I lose sleep over the contents of those to-do lists.  I would always, always, rather do something than do nothing.  But, I am trying to learn to be OK with the fact that sometimes there’s nothing to be done.

I can be impulsive and a bit rash (blame the stars, I’m a Sagittarius).  Often, I try too hard and do too much and in doing so, I can turn a situation that’s just fine on its own into a mess.  I am impatient, and frequently just want to get on with it.  But there’s an art to knowing when to act and knowing when to let it be.  When to do something and when to do nothing.  When to take a breath, and relax and let life take care of itself.  And to realize that sometimes, time is the only thing that heals.

Until next time, friends.

12 years ago Short URL 2 Comments

Me/Opinion/Well-Being

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28

Mar

The gift.

A recurring theme in my life these days seems to be the idea that good can come from bad, that great beauty can be born from great adversity, that even the most oppressive rain clouds possess their silver lining, if you’d only look for it.  Several days ago when I was having a particularly tough day, I returned to a poem called Roll the Dice by Charles Bukowski.  It was introduced to me several years ago by my friend Barbara and I’ve leaned on it many times over the years when I’ve needed a lift (If you’d like to read it, it’s pasted below, at the bottom of this blog).  The poem is about dedicating yourself to your passion and being so committed to it that you’re willing to suffer through any hardship in order to make it happen.  A couple lines in particular stand out:  Isolation is the gift.  All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.

Isolation is the gift.  It’s tough to be alone.  It’s more fun to be with other people, to be social.  But it’s also a distraction.  My acting teacher said something in class a few weeks ago and I wrote it down because it really hit home.  Anyone who’s trying to do something wonderful will suffer in loneliness.  He was talking about artists – actors in particular – and the art of creation.  But I think it’s true for most people. As much as we are social beings, we need time on our own.  To do our work.  To figure out who we really are without the opinions of others reflecting back upon us like mirrors.

I have a complicated relationship with my aloneness. I hate it because it makes me feel just that:  lonely.  But I also need it.  There was so much to do after my mother’s death, that I didn’t have time to grieve.  My dad was ill and he was alone.  My grandmother was ill.  Bad things kept happening and crisis management stretched on for months.  And after both my dad and grandmother passed, I threw myself into work, co-producing a play festival and a film, and just keeping so, so busy.

At the time, I think being busy and distracted was what I needed to do.  I had to keep moving in order to get through.  But now – finally – I’ve arrived at the place where in order to get better and to heal, I have to sit with myself and let the feelings land where they land.  No one else can do that for me.  No one can grow for me, or process my emotions for me, or get healthy for me, or make the changes I need to make for me.  That’s my job.  And like it or not, it’s a path I’ve got to walk alone.

It feels paradoxical to say that because throughout all the tough stuff, I’ve been surrounded by wonderful, loving people who’ve buoyed me up, who’ve supported me, and without whom I never would have survived the darkest of the dark.  I don’t want to slight them or diminish their crucial importance in my life.  I’m eternally grateful for every helping hand and kind word.  But now I’ve got to scour the depths of my soul for what’s next and the only one who can do that is yours truly.

We don’t walk into the great unknown willingly because change is uncomfortable and, at times, terrifying.  But life, through circumstance, will drive us to change.  It pushes us to be better when we won’t do it on our own.  It shakes us up when we need to be shaken; it creates obstacles that we must overcome, so that we can surprise ourselves with our resourcefulness and stand in our own strength.  ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ has become such a cliché I almost hate to type it on the page, but clichés are anchored in our vernacular for a reason:  they’re true.

I’ve survived a lot of traumatic life events over the last two years, but I’m starting to see the gift in what has happened to me.  It’s tough to admit that because it almost sounds like I’m grateful for the bad stuff, or that I somehow wanted it to happen.  I’m not, and I didn’t.  But I’m grateful for what it has taught me, for what it is teaching me.  I’m grateful for the ability to look at my life through different, wiser (and yes, sadder) eyes and appreciate how truly beautiful it is, and what a gift I have indeed been given.

Isolation is the gift.  For me, right now, it is.  I’m surrounded by amazing people who love me and whom I love back.  I’m lucky.  But – at least for the time being – I’m on a path that, on a fundamental level, I must walk alone.  To grow.  To explore.  To write and to do my work.  And to just come home.  To me.

Until next time, friends.

Roll the Dice by Charles Bukowski:

If you’re going to try, go all the way.

Otherwise, don’t even start.

This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind.

It could mean not eating for three or four days.

It could mean freezing on a park bench.

It could mean jail.  It could mean derision.  It could mean mockery — isolation.

Isolation is the gift.

All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.

And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds.

And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.

If you’re going to try, go all the way.

There is no other feeling like that.

You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.

You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.

It’s the only good fight there is.

12 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

Me/Opinion/Well-Being

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21

Mar

Bye bye, BlackBerry.

photoI have officially entered the ranks of people living in 2014:  a week ago, I bought my first iPhone.  As much as I love the conveniences that my sparkling new 5s has afforded me, it was not easy for me to part ways with my dinosaur of a smart phone.  Call me sentimental, call me stubborn, call me touch screen averse – all true.  I will admit to being slightly irrational for holding on to it for so long, but damn it, I loved that phone.

I got my BlackBerry Tour just over 4 years ago (4 years!  That phone was indestructible. I am convinced that it could have survived a nuclear holocaust).  Purchased at a Sprint store in Tacoma, Washington, it was a birthday present from my Mom and my first ever smart phone.  My plan came with a generous Boeing discount, because, in the words of the friendly (Yes, friendly!  Because everyone is friendly in the Pacific Northwest) Sprint employee, ‘everyone here knows someone who works for Boeing.’

It may be pretentious and kind of weird to personify a phone, but over the last four plus years that BlackBerry was as reliable as any of my besties.  It traveled with me to London, Paris, Chicago, New Orleans, Phoenix, Amsterdam (to name a few), and all over the Pacific Northwest from Vancouver to Seattle to Olympia to Medford, Oregon with stops in between.  It was a vital tool in coordinating both creative endeavors (co-producing several plays, as well as my first film) and crisis management (planning details of my parents’ memorial services, fighting a bad case of identify theft, troubleshooting an insurance nightmare after a rental car break-in in Chicago).  Through it all, my phone was there, and with it, the ability to send lighting fast emails and text messages on my beloved keypad.

The truth is, I’m still a bit of an analog girl living in a digital world.  I love the smell of books and I’d rather hold one in my hand than read it on a Kindle.  I find sublime happiness in flipping through a glossy magazine.  And I’m convinced I do my best writing pen to paper, rather than fingers to keyboard.

Maybe it’s for these reasons that I resisted upgrading the technology of my phone.  Maybe (definitely) there’s a great deal of sentimental value attached to that pocket computer given who gave it to me and where it came from.  Maybe after all we’ve been through together, BlackBerry, it’s just hard to quit you.

But like all good things, this too had to come to an end.  For years, my phone was the little engine that could.  But when the battery started to go and I had to be plugged into a charger for any conversation lasting longer than 3 minutes, I knew it was time to say goodbye.

So bye bye, BlackBerry.  Bye bye generous Boeing discount, keypad and the beloved ‘ding’ you made whenever I received a text message.  Hello Instagram, super fast internet, convenience, and (gulp) a real cell phone bill.  You may be gone, old friend, but you’ll never, never be forgotten.

Until next time, friends.

12 years ago Short URL Comments

Lifestyle/Love/Me/Technology

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14

Mar

Ghosts.

stub020

Grief experts will tell you that with time, eventually you’ll get to a place where the memory of a lost loved one will make you smile and think of happy times, rather than dwell on the pain of the loss.  How long this takes is, understandably, unique to the situation, and to the person who has suffered the loss.

It has been a year and a half since I lost the most significant person in my life, my Mom, and I’m not there yet.  The passage of time has helped – the nightmares that used to come frequently now occur only once every so often and they’re less wrenching and raw than they used to be, and certain triggers like a photograph or a song or a movie don’t affect me as much as they used to.  But there’s still that ever-present ache that tugs at my insides whenever I think of her.  And I’m never not thinking of her.  I keep myself busy and distracted so that for a time, I can forget.  But, like a shark that has to keep swimming in order to breathe, I have to keep moving, or I will drown.

Unlike other loved ones that I’ve lost, there’s very little peace to be found around my Mom’s death.  She haunts me like a wounded ghost, crying out for my help.  Help that I wasn’t able to give her when she so desperately needed it.  No matter how many people, especially those with intimate knowledge of the situation, tell me that I shouldn’t feel guilty or hold myself responsible for her death, I can’t help but think what if?  She was closer to me than anyone else in the world.  She trusted me; she told me secrets that she never told anyone else, secrets that I, in turn, will never tell.  In many ways, from a very young age, I was often the parent, and she was the child.  She took care of me, but I took care of her too.

caramel apples

But for the last year or so before she died, and in particular, the four months between my Dad’s cancer diagnosis and her death, I didn’t understand her behavior.  It was crazy, it was irrational, and it scared me.  She would send me emails at 3 a.m., rambling on about one nonsensical thing or another, she wouldn’t shower for days, she refused to eat and her body became rail thin, and worst of all, she barely seemed to know who I was.  The most terrifying thing of all was the blank stare, as though she was looking through me, (me, her person) and I didn’t exist.  Then the phone calls came, hysterical.  ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.  I’m worried.  I think you need to talk to a professional.’

I put the resources in her hands but I didn’t make the calls.  I left it up to her, and of course (I can see now), she didn’t and couldn’t do it.  She told me that she had found someone, a psychiatrist, but when I looked up the doctor’s name online and couldn’t find any record of her, Mom said that she was ‘really new,’ to her practice.  I knew she was telling me lies; that she’d made up an imaginary doctor to get me off her back, but what could I do?  What should I have done?

It’s those questions and those relentless what ifs that will drive a person crazy.  I was my Mom’s best friend and she was mine.  She leaned on me so much throughout her life, but when she needed me the most, she pushed me away, and slammed the door in my face.  And even worse, I let her do it.  Was she suffering so much that she didn’t want me to intervene, and she just wanted the pain to be over?  Or did she desperately want my help but was trying to protect me, and she just needed me to push harder and to be tougher and to not take no for an answer?  These are the questions in which my nightmares take root.

me and mom kitchen

Recently, I was in New Orleans to celebrate my sister Marion’s birthday, and we had our palms and tarot cards read by a lady named Miss Irene.  Miss Irene is 86 years old and has been reading cards since she was 16, a total of 70 years.  She looked at some lines on my palm and told me that I’d lost a lot of people that I loved and that they were now my angels watching over me.  Be skeptical if you want to be – I am – but I’m telling you, this lady was no joke.

I wonder:  when will the ghost that’s haunting me become the angel watching over me?  When will the good memories of my Mom – of which there are so, so many – replace all the pain and the guilt and the terrible, relentless what ifs?  We were so very different in so many ways and yet, we were the same.  No matter how much I’m my own person, for the rest of my life, she’s in me.  I am her and she is me.  There isn’t a moment in the last year and a half that she’s been gone where I haven’t wondered, ‘What would Mom do?’ or ‘What would Mom think about this?’  There are times when I’ve done exactly what she would have wanted, to honor her, and times when I’ve deliberately acted out and done something she would have hated, like a rebellious teenager out to assert my independence.  No matter.  She is always, always top of mind.  Being as kind, as compassionate, and as lovely as she was is my greatest aim, and avoiding her pitfalls is my greatest challenge.

For better or for worse, my Mother – the way she lived and the way she died – is the ghost that I am living with.  Pain aside, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be haunted.  At least, as a ghost, I won’t forget her.  She is always, always with me.  She is the thing that pushes me to be better.  She is the thing that threatens to destroy me.  She is the thing that I will never stop chasing, and the reason I will never stop striving.  The source of the ever-present ache is this:  no matter what I do, it’s impossible to make a ghost proud of you.  It’s impossible to make a ghost happy.  I know that.  But I can’t, and I won’t, stop trying.

Until next time, friends.

Mom and Eadie

12 years ago Short URL 9 Comments

Love/Me

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06

Mar

Truth.

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How honest is too honest?  For me, that has been the trickiest part about blogging.  Over the last several months I’ve laid a lot of things bare.  I’ve exposed personal things about my life, my family, and the inner workings of my heart that, at times, have made me uncomfortable because they were so honest.  I’ve been worried about hurting other people, and I’ve been worried about hurting myself.  But I’ve also realized that if I’m not honest, I might as well not write.  If it doesn’t matter to me, if it’s not meaningful, then what the hell is the point?  So I find myself back at square one, telling the truth.  The complete, unabashed and sometimes, ugly, truth.

I’m not a nice person.  That’s the truth.  If you talk to anyone who knows me intimately, they’ll tell you two things:  I have a heart the size of Texas and I’m fiercely and loyally devoted to those I love, and I’m also a complete and total bitch.  It’s true.  Casual acquaintances know me as the ‘nice’ girl.  But those who know me better know that I have another side.  A side that’s unforgiving.  A side that’s not afraid to be vicious if you’re standing in the way of something that matters to me.   A side that’s primal, fiercely protective, and about claws-out survival.

I used to shy away from this part of myself.  I used to deny it.  After all, we’re taught to play nice.  We’re taught to obey the rules.  Especially us girls.  What will people think of me if I let my dark and twisted side out to roam free in the civilized world?

My Mom was nice.  She was the nicest person I ever knew.  She literally did not have a mean bone in her body.  And I adored her.  She was my best friend, and my favorite person on this earth.

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But she was also the unhappiest person I ever knew.  She loved (no, worshipped) my Dad, but he was a difficult man.  A brilliant, often wonderful man, but difficult as hell man to live with.  She probably should have left him.  At times, she wanted to.  She cried to me about it when I was a little girl, making plans about where we’d go, where we’d start our new life.  But she didn’t leave.  She stayed – even though she was unhappy – because she loved him.  My Mom was like that.  Always doing the right thing, no matter what the personal cost.  Maybe it was the Catholic thing.  Maybe she was afraid of rocking the boat.  Maybe she wasn’t brave.  Maybe all of those things.

My Mom died.  And when I say died, what I mean is she imploded in a spectacular fashion.  She did it all, was everything to everyone, until she couldn’t be anymore.  She couldn’t be anything to anyone, least of all herself, and she self-medicated and retreated into a bottle for relief and it killed her.  It was shocking, it was heartbreaking, and it should have been obvious all along that this could have been the only end to her sad story.  My sweet, kind, miserably unhappy mother, too sensitive for this world and who tried to do too much for too many, in the end, had nothing left for herself.

It’s a strange thing to idolize someone, to love them desperately and completely, to be willing to do anything for them, and yet be absolutely determined not to be like them, come hell or high-water.  From a very young age, I knew I didn’t want to be my Mom.  Her choices terrified me.  They felt like a self-imposed prison that flew in the face of everything I dreamed of:  an unconventional life that was adventurous and free and fun, that embraced art and beauty, a life that took risks, that was creative, spontaneous and inspired.

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In the last year and a half, I’ve lost a lot of people that I love.  People who have been been literal giants in my life and crucial to my development as a human being.  Both of my parents.  My only remaining Grandmother.  And a dear friend.  For a long time, all of this death and dying, sadness and loss, left me underwater.  It left me numb.  I didn’t know what to do with myself or where to go.  I felt defeated.  I felt angry.  I felt sad.  And for a long time, I abandoned the one thing I really should have been doing throughout all this, which is to write it all down.  Truthfully.

No more.  I don’t care who doesn’t like it.  I don’t care who doesn’t like me.  I am done, to quote Lanford Wilson, “Telling lies to protect the guilty.”  Telling the truth about my family – with all of their imperfections and frailties – doesn’t mean I don’t love them or miss them or wish that they were still here.  It just means that I want to survive their mistakes.  I want to learn from them.  So that I can be better and stronger and smarter.  And doing that means no more apologizing.  It means embracing the side of myself that’s not so nice.  The side that wants to kick ass.  The side that doesn’t give a damn what you think.  And the side that’s all about telling the truth, no matter how ugly or uncomfortable it can sometimes be.

Until next time, friends.

P.S. – Special thanks to Lemon Melon Photography for the kick-ass photos, and to the incomparable Becca Weber for the hair and makeup magic.

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12 years ago Short URL 2 Comments

Me

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23

Feb

Familiar.

It’s funny the little habits that you get used to.  The everyday comforts that make up your daily routine; things you don’t really notice until they’re gone.  The gym is one of those comforts for me.  I’m a person who never stops going – I’m always working, juggling projects, tackling a to-do list that continually rolls over – and exercise is a crucial tool I use to not only stay healthy and feel good about myself, but also to manage stress and to release the tensions that build up in the course of my busy life.

The other day I found myself working out in an unfamiliar gym.  It was weird.  All of the equipment was different and suddenly I didn’t know which settings to put the machines on or how much weight to lift.  I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what I was doing, all the while trying to look like I knew what I was doing so that some testosterone-fueled meathead didn’t offer to help me.  Ugh.

Wandering around this unfamiliar place, a song I always skip on my iPod (because it’s too damn sad) came on, and suddenly it was a year ago and I was back in Olympia.  After our Dad died, my sister Deirdre and I spent a week camped out in the house he shared with my Mom.  We sorted through old books and music and photos.  We did everything from ordering flowers to placing obituaries in newspapers to picking out gravestones to meeting the lawyer, to booking travel to Medford, Oregon for the memorial, to figuring out how we were going to transport Dad’s ashes to said memorial (that is a story in and of itself), and about a million other little things.  I spent a couple days essentially living in my Mom’s closet, going through piles of clothes and jewelry and beauty products, and her epic collection of Stephanie Johnson bags that I’d given her over the last eight years.

We worked hard and it was sad but it also felt good to work, to do stuff.  We’d collapse each night and wake up with the sun each morning, the to-do list never ending.  We’d talk over coffee first thing in the morning and review the day and write absolutely everything down because our brains were so frazzled with overwhelm from impossibly hard jobs and the utter emotional exhaustion of sorting through a house filled with a lifetime of memories.

After several days of this, I hit a breaking point.  The never-ending freezing February Olympia rain made the thought of running outside unappealing, but I knew I had to exercise or I was going to lose my mind.  So I told Deirdre I was taking a break from the vortex (our term for this weird, disorienting time in our lives and the Olympia house in particular; time disappeared inside the vortex) and getting a guest pass to the local 24 Hour Fitness.

And there I was.  In a gym full of unfamiliar equipment, unfamiliar faces.  My Dad had a membership there and saw a trainer 2-3 times a week until very close to the end of his life.  Dad’s trainer’s name was Dave, an exceptionally wonderful soul who, when he found out that none of Dad’s kids were able to get to Olympia for Thanksgiving, delivered a turkey to his home so that he wouldn’t miss out on his Thanksgiving meal.

I wandered around the gym, wondering what type of exercise Dad could possibly do when he was so sick, wondered at Dave’s patience, wondered if I should ask for him so that I could meet this man who’d been so kind to my father, but also knew if I met him I’d break down instantly and I couldn’t do that because I was barely, barely holding it together.

I wandered around the gym like a zombie, tried and failed at a few machines.  I finally settled on a treadmill because that I knew how to do.  And I ran and ran and ran.  And that song that I always skip came on my iPod, with lyrics about trying your best and not succeeding, about losing something you can’t replace, about learning from mistakes (fuck you, Coldplay) and this time I decided to let it play.  I can only imagine what I must have looked like.  Between the endorphin release of the run, and that stupid song and fighting so hard against the vortex that was sucking me in. Scanning the gym in this unfamiliar place, looking for my missing father (did I somehow think he’d still be there, that I’d find him?), in a town that used to be my home but was so far away from home now.

I don’t know how long I ran.  I was exhausted, I was weeping, I was drenched in sweat, but I couldn’t stop.  I knew that back in the vortex more sad jobs were waiting and I didn’t want any part of them.

There’s a lyric from a new Ingrid Michaelson song that as of late has been running through my head:  I’m a little bit home, but I’m not there yet.  That’s how I felt in the vortex.  That’s how I felt in that 24 Hour Fitness in Olympia.  And that’s how I felt in the unfamiliar gym the other day.  I’m a little bit home, but I’m not there yet.

So I guess I’ll keep running.

Until next time, friends.

12 years ago Short URL 2 Comments

Los Angeles/Love/Me/Opinion

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20

Feb

February.

Oh February, what a month you’re turning out to be.  I’ve experienced overwhelming joy and crushing loss, sometimes in the same day.  I’ve grieved for my family.  I’ve grieved for my childhood.  I’ve grieved for things I’ve lost which can’t be found again.  I’ve grieved for things I’ve lost that were never really mine.

But I’ve also been touched by kindness and compassion, both by virtual strangers and lifelong friends.  I’ve started learning to ask for help – so hard for me to do – and I’ve felt my heart open up.  I’ve felt how much my close friends love me and how willing they are to step into the void left by my family.  I’ve realized that my friends are my family.  I’ve been caught by the striking beauty of a single moment, and have in turn been bowled over by the heartbreaking wonder that is this precious and too-ephemeral life.

When I was at my lowest, I received an unexpected gift:  my first ever network television audition, for Grey’s Anatomy.  The best part of going in to read those three lines today was being able to walk into the room and not need anything from anyone except to simply be who I am, to sit inside myself, free, and say the words on the page aloud.

Thank you, universe.  I am blessed.  I am grateful.  I am listening.

Until next time, friends.

12 years ago Short URL Comments

Love/Me

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