Stillness

There's a lot of noise out there.  And there's a lot of noise in your head.

I grew up in a mostly rural pocket of northeastern Connecticut.  Save for being the home of the state's university, Mansfield was - and is still - a quiet town.  With the UConn skating rink and Student Union arcade room, a drive-in theater, and not much else, I was accustomed to finding ways of passing the hours.  I explored the woods looking for trails, I attempted to go fishing, I enjoyed sledding down pristine white hills.  Though there were many who chose to stay, I, like a lot of kids - many also the children of professional academics - sought to get away just as soon as we could.

Though college only took me to another college cow-town, Amherst, Massachusetts, it was big school in an area with several other colleges within a 20 minute radius.  I met hundreds of new people, joined the crew team and was exposed to a whole different set of experiences.  I fell under the spell of a fraternity, joining their ranks and living in our fetid house for three solid years of college.  There was a buzz and an energy and as a 20 year-old who wanted to be buzzed and energized there was no better place.  With the exception of the time I broke my humerus bone in half and got 10 stitches in my other hand (lumber yard accident, different story) and lived back home for a few weeks recuperation, I flew the coop right after high school.

Moving to a Boston suburb and then into the city after college, I have mostly lived in urban or suburban places ever since.  And as I moved into more compact and complex environments, my own world got more complex.  I had a job now, had to make my own decisions and sometimes suffer the consequences.   In my early twenties, I, like many, made - let's see, to put it politely - questionable decisions.  Many times given the choice between industriousness and indolence I chose the latter.  The party instead of the library, the girl instead of the gym.

A few years later, I advanced in my place of employment.  At first it wasn't really any kind of effort.  I was likable, reasonably intelligent, and mostly kind.  It wasn't long, however, that things got more complex.  If I was still going to be in the company's good favor - and just as importantly if I wanted to boost my pay, I had to take on more responsibility.  More responsibility requires more effort, more training, more curiosity and diligence.  Sure I'd made periodic efforts in my classes.  Sometimes I had to put in maximum effort to get passing grades in particularly difficult courses.  I often employed determination and resolve as an oarsman in college.  In crew I had to learn from my teammates and my coaches how to put forth consistent effort.  And in that sport my failure was my teammates' failure; I felt responsible to them.

Responsibility.  I have no idea how I came to possess any semblance of it.  When I was in high school I worked at the Mansfield Depot Restaurant.  I began as a dishwasher.  I showed up on time, I did my job thoroughly and conscientiously.  If someone called in sick and they called me, I went in.  If they needed someone to work a double, I offered.  Certainly, I was motivated by money.  Though I made less than $4/hr. when I started, those paychecks supplied all my spending money.  I saved up and with some help from my dad, bought my first car (1974 Volvo 164E, with a jerky transmission).  But not far  below money, I didn't want my bosses to think poorly of me.  I felt rewarded by how thankful they were that I was able to work and was a diligent employee.  I should have said "no" more than I did.  I should have spent a little bit of time being still while I could.

When I was in my early 30s, I moved abroad.  It had been a goal of mine; it appeared to be  the next adventure I was craving.  In my several years of city hopping, I lived in London, Amsterdam, Toronto, and Zurich - and that was only where I got my mail.  I was using my work postings to go to Italy or Luxembourg, France, Scandinavia, India, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Poland, and Malta of all places.  Though I travelled more than some, there were others I worked with who hadn't missed a continent and had seemingly alighted in every country on them.  They lived out of their suitcases, had wallets stuffed with reimbursable receipts, and knew every Irish bar in every non-Irish city they'd seen.   I relished the travel, the relative perks, and the opportunity to learn more about myself by seeing myself in different settings.

Year by year, the adventure continued until I moved back to Boston.  It was shortly after 9/11 and our country was a different place than the one that had launched me in the 1990s.  After the 2000 Election, when Bush 'beat' Gore, it was all and more than we might have anticipated.  The country moved right, and became even more partisan.  Bush made extraordinary gaffes, both publicly and politically. But it was funny still.  The Daily Show and Will Ferrell can thank Dubya (and a lot of talent, too) for much of their success today.  But after 9/11 things got pretty serious.  War.  Terrorists, Global Warming, global political unrest, loose nukes!  This was my 30s.

Eventually, traveling began to lose its luster and I had to make different kinds of choices.  I chose between a salary and a lifestyle.  I tried to strike a balance between what I wanted to do and what people wanted me to do.  I'd begun to save for my future.  I took time to consider.  I got my own financial planner.  The more I tried to reconcile what the heck I was doing with my life, I tried to think about what was meaningful to me.  My family.  My friends.  That was about it.  I was traipsing around the globe, but had so much time to myself that I had ample time to reflect.  I reflected on what was worthwhile.  Socializing was valuable, but I grew weary of the repetition.  On many quiet Sunday afternoons, I'd wander foreign city streets.  I was able to meet up with friends, but I also enjoyed the stillness of being alone in a park, by a river, on a trail.

Stillness.  That was the word that my stream of consciousness lingered on.  It's the word that inspired this posting.  I was enjoying a hot shower after a peaceful run.  Both of those things offer stillness, if one permits it to enter you.  Sometimes it's an effort, but other times it is spontaneous.  In the shower, you feel the warm water beat on your skin, cooling and warming at the same time.  You get to give yourself and all over body massage (if you're cleaning all the parts you ought to).  In the shower, behind the closed door, you're away from the TV, the kids, the internet and the iPhone.  Sure you can have a radio, but that would ruin the stillness, the privacy of the moment.  I many wives complain about the length of time their husbands spend in the bathroom doing number two.  It's the stillness.  Whether in the corporate bathroom stall, or the downstairs loo under the stairs, many a man takes respite from all that consumes him outside that door.  Take 10, deep, deep breaths, and you'll feel the stillness seep into you.  Calgon, take me away!

I don't know how many millions the makers of Ambien are raking in, but I do know that they are banking on people's inability to find and possess stillness.  And in that vein, alcohol, recreational drugs, including cigarettes, are mechanisms whereby many find that confounded, illusive stillness.  On the healthier side, many find stillness in yoga, pilates, and various forms of martial arts.  When I lived in New York City for an unemployed time, I had a lot of time to walk the island of Manhattan.  I'd walk 100 blocks at a time, at all hours of the day and night.  For the millions who've done this in any world class city around the globe, you know what it is to be struck by the sheer magnitude of the operation.  All those people, all that transportation, infrastructure, food, trash!  It's 24/7 because it has to be, because it's alive, it breathes.  I am thankful for the time I lived in Manhattan because at that point in my life it taught me that I didn't want to live there. For me, it was too busy.  I literally became tired sometimes after just a short walk outside because I couldn't help but absorb how busy everyone else was.  I needed more stillness.  I am betting there's a lot of Ambien in Manhattan.

In between my second and final European tour of living and that stint in NYC, I disappeared for two months.  Long before Mark Sanford made it a popular alibi, I hiked a few hundred miles of the Appalachian Trail.  Along with a friend who'd often found the stillness he craved in nature, we hoofed it up and down hills and mountains.  We traversed large open fields, scaled rocks, swam in ravines, and spent hour after hour not saying a word.  It was exactly what I needed when I needed it.  Before that hike, I was living in Zurich and planning on moving to Lucerne soon after the summer.  The company package offered wasn't quite what I was expecting and the company was not going to offer more.  We were at an impasse.  It was not the first time I had to make a decision about what was valuable to me, but it was one of those times where you ask yourself what your life means to you - and how valuable you feel to those you work for.  It was a watershed moment for me because it allowed me the opportunity to be true to myself.

I thanked them for the many opportunities I'd been given and gave my notice.  In the process of coming to that decision I spoke with many confidants.  As I'd done many times before and would do many times again, I used those discussions to comb through the complexity of emotions that accompany a major life decision.  As I explained the situation to people in both monetary terms and at what juncture in my life this occured, I began to understand that I'd reached as far as I wanted to go with the company.  I didn't want anyone else's job who was superior.  As I interpreted it then, to me those people were pawns of the company.  If you were talented and completely dedicated to the company, you were 'rewarded' by moving to ten cities in ten years.  Or maybe your whole family would have to move from Boston to China, no matter that it's your daugther's senior year in high school.  I didn't want to be a cog, however highly paid that cog was.

I knew that even though I knew I could earn more money, I also knew that you either have to be very intelligent or very hard working or both - and even if you are you have to catch some luck, too.  Whatever the psychological reasons (and I'm sure they are deep and plentiful), it wasn't enough to make me want to supplant my independence for the sake of the company.  I'd gotten what I perceived was valuable out of the relationship.  I was paid well enough, I got to travel, I had friends all over the world and a global perspective that I continue to carry with me every day.  But the wave had crested and I didn't want to be pulled down into the undertow.

Sadly, many of you - and certainly people you know  - are churning in the undertow and looking to come up for air.  To breathe.  To find stillness.  It happens imperceptibly slowly.  It's easy to see the second hand on a clock move.  If you stare carefully, you can see a minute hand move.  But staring at an hour hand will make you insane.  And yet, time passes.  Before you realize it, you bought a house.  You got married.  Your kids are almost in, what the F!, middle school!  And for too many, you're stuck in a job, town, marriage, relationship, bad habit that you've been in for years.  We find moments of stillness.  For the fortunate among us hard work leads to vacation and that sunrise on the lake from the deck.  A few bottles of wine will stop the mental carousel for an evening.  Otherwise, it's very hard to stop the noise.  Every question leads to another question and another person perhaps to involve, and a cost consideration, and maybe someone's feelings to think about.  With the increase in electronic communication, the immediacy of the times in which we live, presents the need of simply removing yourself from being accessible.  We now have the burden of being concerned that if you don't answer a text message in a 'reasonable' amount of time, you're perceived either as an idiot for not having your apparatus with you or as one intentionally avoiding communication.  And if you are having an affair, it means you are b-u-s-t-e-d.

My path required that I have a crises of personal conscious and leave the job that wasn't filling my soul anymore.  I ditched my laptop and mobile phone and took to the Appalachian Trail.  And while there was stillness and I had many pure and perfectly still moments, I had long, long conversations with myself, too.  What was I going to do when I came out of the woods?  Where was I going to live?  Who was going to be my life partner, the ballast for which I was so obviously yearning?

My romantic arc - rated PG - in brief.  I didn't have a real girlfriend until college.  In high school, I barely kissed a girl outside of whatever spin the bottle game I was fortunate in which to land a seat.  College was different.  In college I wasn't the person everybody already knew.  And girls were different.  They appreciated different things.  For years being funny meant getting laughs.  In college and beyond being funny meant you got to occasionally kiss the girl.  This was new to me and after finally experiencing it for myself it was hard for me to just want to kiss one girl.  So I kissed a few, had some major crushes, picked up girls, and got dumped by girls.  My dad's been married at least as many times as Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president and I used to say - and I think I believed  - that I didn't want to get married before I was ready to stay married.  I met some fantastic women, smart, beautiful, funny, athletic, driven, compassionate, worldly and then there were a few who weren't any of those things.  I was looking for the perfect woman for me and as searchers know the longer it takes the harder it becomes.

It was a void I was looking to fill.  And as much luck as I've ever had led Linda Mary LoPiccolo into my life.  As they say in life and in cliché, all the others were merely prelude to this.  When we finally engaged out in Long Beach, California where we lived in August of 2003, I'd chosen for the first time the kind of permanent commitment that had long eluded me.  It was the first time this selfish Sagittarius elected to be responsible for something other than himself.  It took me longer than it ought to have to realize it, but I fell in love with Linda and thankfully she with me.  I guess I am a slow learner because it's obvious to me now how perfect she is.  Not perfect.  Perfect for me.  But I digress.

There was this moment right after our wedding that I often return to.  After the reception and after stopping at the bar where our rowdy friends and repaired to, Linda and I got in the back of a somewhat tacky limo for our ride from Connecticut to our Boston hotel.  (We departed to Mexico the next morning.  I recommend Hotel Secreto).  It was the first time we were alone in several days.  Those days preceding the wedding are hectic.  There's family coming in, last minute arrangements, weather to watch, and of course, fun to be had.  With the wedding and our all our guests behind us, we could breathe.  We had stillness and the beauty of it, what was magical was that it was shared.  I looked into Linda's eyes and she into mine and in that moment we were perfectly aligned (horizontally, too).  It was a moment of stillness and perfection to which I regularly return.

But like that hour hand on a clock, time passes and it's hard to tell how it did, so quickly.  You think about all that's happened in that span of time, but looking back months get condensed into a nugget of experience.  When Linda and I were going through fertility treatments it went on for more than a year.  And then the whole process of considering and then moving forward with adoption is collapsed into a sentence when really that was probably a year, too. And whether you have your own baby or adopt one, you know what happens after it arrives.  And for those that don't have kids, you can imagine!  Time flies and the 'noise' is as loud as it's ever been.  Not just the noise of the kid, which is real to be sure, but now you've got a spouse, a child or two, or three or seven.  The dogs need to be walked and taken to the vet.  There's the dance recital, your sick parent, the hockey practice, the potential new position, GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN!  That's not what we were prepping for.  As you get older you realize the calamities of youth were but love taps compared to the punches life has in store for you now.

So much noise. A lot of political noise - everyone's pissed off.  They're pissed at their government and they're pissed at the opposition.  They're pissed at big business and they're pissed at corruption.  Sarah Palin's pissed off, Glen Beck's pissed off.  Keith Olberman's pissed off.  John McCain looks pissed off even when he's happy.  If you're at all tuned in, you can't miss the rancor - it's on the radio, the web and on billboards.  I was running around my sister's neighborhood in Texas and many houses had these "No Socialism" placards stuck on their front lawns.  I get freedom of speech, am 100% for it, but just because you can say something doesn't mean you should.  But hey, it's a free country.  I digress again.  And it's easy to do because there are a lot of things in this life that are truly distracting.

Television is pretty noisy too.  Many of these reality shows capitalize on conflict.  If someone's not pissed off, they better be obviously peeved.  How much louder are the commercials than the show?  I know I am not alone in muting them.  Mute.  Silent.  Still.  Breathe.  I used to listen to my iPod (which I still sometimes call a Walkman) a lot when I was running.  In the cities I used it to disappear into the music and into the rhythm of my stride.  I also liked drowning out the sound of my heavy breathing.  It's not attractive.  But as I got fitter and especially when I ran on quieter routes, I left the iPod at home and chose instead to absorb my environment completely.  I smelled the foliage, heard the rippling brook, the chirping birds.  When I lived closer to a pool and swam laps, I found stillness in the repetition.  I find that stillness sometimes when I'm doing dishes or ironing (yes I do both).

As much as I praise stillness, I cannot help now but hear the word still and associate it with stillborn - and that is what Leo what was.  Born still at eight months.  Years after fertility treatments failed and after adoption succeeded we got pregnant.  That event, too, now is reduced to a sentence.  Something years in the making, so much emotional energy invested, so much noise endured, even embraced at times, gets relegated to a sentence.  We got pregnant.  On our own.  Leo brought us tremendous joy while Linda's pregnancy progressed normally and without warning.  It was a warm July day, 4 weeks before the due date when we learned that the baby had died.  This was the kind of stillness I never sought, never truly considered, and the one that also necessitates the stillness I now perpetually crave.  After Leo died, after three long days in the hospital, and after we went to the funeral home to collect his ashes, Linda and I paused as best we could.  Our son Max needed and deserved our attention and he got it.  But we couldn't breathe and we needed to.  We left Max with relatives and went north, to Maine to a cabin retreat belonging to that hiking friend of mine.  Those days nestled in the thick woods, next to that long lake were a gift.  I went for a few jogs.  Linda read.  We swam and we napped.  And there were tears. We had coffee at sunrise with the water lapping on shores. Then we left.

2009 was especially noisy.  The economy tanked, the housing bubble burst, and Obama replaced 8 years of Bush.  I was unemployed and we'd made the decision to walk away from our upside down city condo.  We lost the baby we longed to raise, suddenly, tragically.  And through it all, Linda and I were making choices that compelled us to listen to our values.  I don't want to spend two hours commuting every work day.  I don't think working that hard is worth either commuting or paying through the nose to live closer.  It just makes things noisier.  Let me make sure that readers know that I am speaking only for myself.  Millions choose to commute or feel that what they get for their hard work is worth that equation.  That's fine if it's fine for you.  It wasn't for me and we chose to move to the Quiet Corner - what the northeastern part of the state of Connecticut is affectionately called.  Through all the noise, the message was steadily speaking.  Leo's stillness firmly repositioned stillness to the forefront of my thoughts.  I read some Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle.  I took some wonderfully long and meditative runs in preparation for my first marathon.  I practiced tuning out the noise.  I practiced being present.

Please don't imagine me some Buddhist monk in constant meditation.  I am not.  Despite my green environs and dearth of neighbors, the world too easily penetrates, vibrates, reverberates.  Internet, cable television, radio have made access to noise nearly as abundant here as it was in my former urban life.  But proximity permits me easier entry into stillness.  There's a mile stretch of road that I either drive or run on nearly every day.  It's one of the few straight roads around and there's a canopy of ancient and tall trees that form a cathedral vaulted ceiling of branches.  This time of year the green is so new and lustrous.  Later those leaves will grow richly and deeply green, but now they are translucent; when the sun shines through them the vernal splendor is arresting.

You might imagine me trotting down that shady road, or going to the farmer's market for freshly picked vegetables and those are things I indeed do.  But my mind is still too noisy, too many misplaced thoughts pulling me from the present.  I've read that it's a good first step that I'm aware of these leanings, that to be conscious of my thoughts helps to bring me back to the present.  It's an effort, every waking moment is an effort.  I go through phases of wanting to work on presence and in choosing not to, procrastinating being present for goodness sake!  Recently though, I was in a bookstore and saw a book about Zen Buddhism, Buddhism Is Not What You Think.  I bought it because everything I've ever read - which is not a ton - about Buddhism appeals to me.  I bought it because I knew I would find it helpful to have a new reminder of what it is I am seeking to honor, to value.  It's not something mystical I'm after; it's not even something necessarily spiritual.  What I'm looking for is something practical, a way to be, stasis.  There's a more peaceful mind in me - and in you.

Cloaked Triggers

Linda and I watched In the Valley of Elah the other night. The film follows a father named Hank (played by Tommy Lee Jones) who learns his son is AWOL after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq.  It isn't long before we learn that his son has been murdered and the movie's plot centers on Hank's efforts to learn who perpetrated the crime.  In the course of the action we learn that Hank and his wife also lost their only other child, another son ten years prior in a military helicopter crash.

Watching the film, one can't help but feel tremendous sympathy for Hank and his wife, played by Susan Sarandon.  Two sons, both dead.   Watching a fictionalized portrayal of this kind of parental loss isn't easy.  You likely know parents who struggle with child illness and death.  Sadly, it may be you.  Death  - in whatever form it comes  - is something with which we all must eventually encounter.  But parents who've actually had to endure such tragedies must both cope with the reality of their situation and also figure out a way to live a life amongst those who haven't.  And for those of us who have lost a child, sometimes it's hard to know when those wounds, however long ago inflicted will be reopened.

Toward the end of In the Valley of Elah, when director Paul Haggis lays the sentimentality on pretty thick, feeling sadness rise in me, I glanced over at Linda and saw tears welling in her eyes.  Immediately, I knew that these were not tears for the characters in the movie.  They were tears for Leo.  After eight months of normal pregnancy and for no known cause, Leo was stillborn late last July.

So much has changed since then.  Our son Max is nearly two and half years old.  As parents well know, children of this age develop so rapidly that even a small amount of time can encompass monumental change.  Though a short amount of time may pass, it seems more has owing to the rapid rate of transformation.  Six months ago we lived in a city condo in Massachusetts.  We now live in the quiet country of Connecticut.  And while we've changed much in terms of our surroundings and circumstance when we think about Leo and linger in those thoughts for even a brief moment, all the same feelings come rushing, bull rushing back.  How can it be that Leo's not with us?  How can it be that this has happened to us?  This should not be!  And while Max is more than we could have ever of dreamed, by all rights we should have two sons.  We should have Max and Leo.

Moving to a new town, meeting new people.  They don't know us; they couldn't know our story.  They see us with Max and wonder where he gets his curls from (not from us but from his birth parents).  They ask if we have just the one child.  We answer yes because what else would we say to a new acquaintance?  But we can't say the words without thinking we should have two.  It's not that we want to immediately tell everyone we meet about our dear departed Leo (because, face it, that would just be plain weird), but in not doing so a significant part of our identity remains hidden. By not revealing this fundamental information it paradoxically highlights Leo's absence to us all the more.

Last fall, in Leo's honor, we planted a green mountain sugar maple tree on our family property -  The Farm as we call it.  We dug the hole and sprinkled some of Leo's ashes in amongst the the dirt and roots.  We staked the tree to keep it stable in the stiff breezes that blow across the open expanse.  During the cold and dark days of winter, I'd occasionally inspect Leo's tree to make sure it was fairing well.  In talking to Linda, I discovered that she, too, was doing the same.  Visiting Leo's tree, touching its trunk and caressing its branches is a way of communing with him.

Spring has finally sprung here in Connecticut and with the warmer weather I find myself outside at the Farm quite a bit more.  I have the opportunity to go to Leo's tree more and I do.  It brings me great comfort to see the new growth at the ends of the branches, the buds forming.  Soon the leaves will blossom.  I can't wait.  Yet even as I type this, the notion of the rebirth of Leo's tree fills me with mixd emotions.  I'm grateful for the symbolism embedded in nature's seasonal rebirth.  I am also more frequently aware that this tree which though it brings me so much serenity reminds me of the son that isn't in my arms.

Linda and I have undergone a tremendous amount of healing in the several months since Leo died.  Most hours of most days, you wouldn't, couldn't see the anguish that lies below the surface.  We can often have a normal conversation about Leo and get through it without the rush of emotion that used to be unpreventable.   But there are times when all of it comes at us with no warning.  Sometimes I wake up and feel the pendulant melancholy has returned, a sadness I owe and whose debt has come due.  Other times I feel right as rain, but then a scene in a darned Hollywood movie that, though the circumstances are vastly different, triggers familiar waves of sorrow.  I've never felt and earthquake, but understand that it can feel like the earth is undulating under foot.  This is how the grief sometimes feels.  One moment the ground beneath me is firm and then with little warning, it feels unstable, unpredictable, and I unsteady.

When I saw Linda weeping next to me on the couch and understood who the tears were for I didn't say anything.  I didn't know what to say.  Often there is nothing to say.  For a while we just sat there, adrift in our heartache.  Eventually Linda moved to get up, but I wasn't ready for her to leave the room.  I pulled her back down to the couch and we embraced each other for several minutes in silence.  I was trying to muster my strength to utter the only words that filled my head.  Each time I thought I was ready to speak, I couldn't bring them out.  I wanted to say the words without my voice cracking.  I wanted to say them in one breath.  I know not why, but it was important to me that I deliver them clearly, plainly.  I knew that they were the only words I'd be able to say that night.

"I miss him a lot."

Absence

I am not often given to the highs and lows of outward emotion.  When I am happy you can see it in my eyes.  When I am sad you'll have to look more carefully to find it there, too.  I laugh heartily when amused, but I won't patronize a banal joke with more than a polite smile.  When I am sad, I'm simply quiet and taciturn.  Sometimes I don't realize the sadness that dwells inside of me and am genuinely surprised to feel the emotion.  Without warning it percolates in my chest, rises up through my throat to my mouth and causes my lips quiver ever so slightly.  Only occasionally do I feel tears well in my eyes, but even more rarely do they overflow their banks.

With the recent earthquake in Haiti and all the television coverage of it, I cannot help feeling beaten down with anguish and grief for all those that have lost so much and so many.  It's beyond incomprehensible and at the same time so unambiguous.  It hasn't helped my mood that it's January - the dead of winter .  It has seemed especially gray here the last couple of days.  The trees are bare and the air possesses the kind of damp chill that beckons one to bed, inviting sleep until spring.  And silly as it sounds - and is, the sports teams I root for have greatly faltered of late.  The Patriots were summarily dismissed from the NFL play-offs and the UConn Men's Basketball team has lost three painful games in a row.  It just adds to the malaise.

I know I have much to be grateful for - and I am, but there are times when just feeling happy doesn't scratch my emotional itch.  It's times like these I tend to miss my stillborn son, Leo, most acutely.  Had he lived he'd be about six months old now.  I can't help but wonder what our son Max would make of having a little brother.  How jealous would he be if he had to compete for our attention?  How different would the dynamics in our family be if Leo hadn't....  We had a friend visiting with her daughter this weekend and Max was being so sweet with her, sharing his toys and giving the little girl her bottle of milk when it fell to the floor.  "Here you go," he said in his sweet, lilting voice.  I couldn't help but imagine him with Leo and feel both Leo's presence and absence at the same time.

Most days, most weeks even, I do okay with the loss of Leo.  It is and I cannot change it.  I try to derive lessons from and use the experience to help me live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.  And I do.  Cosmically speaking, I feel that I haven't really lost Leo at all - that he's with me, with us everyday.  But he's not tangible.  The pictures we have of him are the way he'll always look.  We have lost something that we can never replace.  What's often worse is that I don't even know exactly what it is we've lost - just what I imagine it might have been.  I don't and won't know him as a person.  And when I am given to this sadness as I have been in these recent days since the Haiti earthquake, it's that absence that I feel most profoundly. When I see the anguish on the face of a Haitian quake victim, I can't help but deeply empathize.  One moment it's there; the next it's gone.  A void forever gaping.

Yesterday I watched most of a program about the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of elderly singers from the Northampton, Massachusetts area.  The show on PBS documented the chorus as they prepared for a live concert.  Just a week before the show, two chorus members passed away.  But show business is show business and the show went on.  I ached for those singers and the loss I knew they felt.  Just as we've 'gone on' in the wake of our loss, I knew that in spite of their brave faces lay heavy tears in wait.  One of the chorus members, Fred Knittle, was to have sung a duet of Coldplay's "Fix You" with one of the recently deceased chorus members.  Instead he took center stage alone.  The poignancy was more than palpable.

For me, the combination of the immeasurable suffering in Haiti, the bleakness of winter, the collapse of my favorite teams, of seeing Max being so tender with a younger child who wasn't his brother, and the sorrow of these elderly singers losing their fellow chorus members set me up for what I should have seen coming.  As I watched Fred Knittle shuffle his aging body on stage, lower himself into that solitary metal folding chair, and heard the rhythmic 'shhh, shhh, shhh' of his oxygen canister fill the auditorium, I began to feel that rare but familiar tightness in my gut.  I felt the muscles in my face brace for the inevitable and involuntary contortion of sorrow; my eyes welled.  Tears didn't stream down my face and no sounds of woe emanated from my mouth, but then again, I am not given to the highs and lows of emotional displays.

Click here to watch Fred Knittle and the Young@Heart Chorus perform Coldplay's "Fix You."