On Accepting "My Fate"

I’ve been meaning to try to articulate something for sometime, little sweetheart, and I’m probably not going to get it all down in just one go but here’s a start.

It’s about having to - for the best, I guess - accept my fate. Stop struggling. It’s a funny thing to say, isn’t it? Sort of antithetical to our culture of “overcoming adversity” or whatever. It sounds like giving up. Maybe it’s really more about giving over but either way most people don’t like the sound of it at all. It makes them uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable, too, but for a different reason.

I have to be careful where I say it and to whom. A few years ago I posted a word of despair - literally, a single word - on my Facebook page and some people I barely knew called 911 and had me taken away. Entirely against my will. They held me overnight and if I hadn't been seeing a psychologist at the time - indeed, been able to give them her number and tell them I had my regular appointment in two days time - they would have committed me. Up until then I thought things couldn’t possibly become worse. But I was wrong. I could also have my liberty and self-governance taken away.

I have to be careful. The world wants people like us to just go away and if we don’t do that on our own - just shut up and stop harshing their buzz with our grief, with our mourning - they’ll use the authorities and put us away. That’s how frightened people are of the broken. Our bereavement is so scary, ostracizing us isn’t enough - they’ll gladly lock us away. The normal people all have their model for how we should be dealing with things. They like the stories of people who’ve moved on. Especially if they’re famous. Unsurprisingly. This country worships celebrity nearly as much as it does the military.  They like the stories of people - they usually write books - who overcame their grief and married someone else, had kids, traveled the world, posted happy new photos of themselves in exotic locations on Instagram. They point to those people who “got on with their lives” and  tell us we should be more like them. Or they just stop talking to us at all and call it “tough love”.

Everyone needs their rationalizations. I knew that well before I was broken by your tragic passing. We all do. Even me. Even you. But I don’t think we should have the temerity to call it “love” when what we’re doing is making it easier for ourselves, excusing ourselves with distance from the problematic and troubled people we once called friends. We can’t take their heartbroken-ness. We can’t take it on. It’s too disturbing. So, we cut them loose. I get it. I understand. I don’t blame them. Well, not too much. But it helps to accept the absence if somebody doesn’t call their withdrawal an act of love. Everybody needs their rationalizations. I get it. But keep that part to yourself, ya know? Right, little sweetheart? We get it. But do they really have to say it aloud? To us? Maybe they do. It’s all very frightening.

Anyway, I have a different take on it. Giving up, I mean. This was a little bit in that Good Friday address I wrote and gave that I told you about, little sweetheart, although I didn’t come right out and say it. It’s not going to get better. Not in this life. And I have to accept that.

I also have to confess that a part of me for all this time has secretly and sometimes not-so-secretly thought that someone would swoop into my life and save me. Like you did. And so incredibly unselfishly, that they would accept my endless devotion to you, honor that - not make me scatter the ashes of your memory and our love at Burning Man or at the edge of The Dead Sea on some global gallivant to be shared on social media showing how good we all are doing now in moving on and please subscribe to the podcast. That they would hold me but would let me hold you, too. It’s more than just saying there can never be another you, little sweetheart. I know now there can never be anyone but you. I suppose I’ve always known that, but I do get lonely. Of course I do. I miss you. I just have to embrace that. I’m going to be lonely. It’s not going to get better in this life. No one’s swooping in. And that could never be. There can never be anyone but you. I knew that but something inside me still yearned. I have to finally put out that light. And keep yours going forever. Until that day when I may join you. I’m going to be lonely. I’m going to be sad. And this is where it turns…

I spend time sometimes, far too much time, sometimes, on Tumblr. Its images have sometimes given me comfort and I’ve actually gotten to know the work of many of the artists we’ve worked with over the last five albums by discovering them on the site and then establishing communication. But a lot of other memes float by, or “tumble” by, if you will. One of them that I have steadfastly resisted is this one: "Everything is Temporary” .

I don’t want everything to be temporary because I don’t want you to be temporary. I want you to be eternal. And I have faith and believe that you are. But that meme makes me bristle. I don’t want you to be temporary because I don’t want you to be dead. Indeed, I almost never use that word. Even now, I froze up before I actually typed it. My fate, such as it is, isn't the only thing I’ve not been able to accept. Far more potently, I have never been able to accept yours. I won’t say the word. I won’t admit your mortality. Even in the earliest days after, I said aloud more than once that I wouldn’t accept this to be your story. That you are more - ARE, not were - than your tragic passing.

I think to a large degree, that drives my writing, of, for and about you. Not only my testament to you, wonderful you, and our great blessed love. Not only my devotion and my faith that you are eternal, that love is forever, that I will join you. But also that you are not your earthly story - especially your mortality - alone. And certainly that that is not the prism through which we should see your life or remember you, as a girl who died tragically and young. I’ve been at pains to resist that all this time and I suspect I will continue to bristle at the suggestion.

But there’s also something comforting in the “temporal”. I always just read that and reject it because I know and I need to know that you are not temporary. But if I accept that the temporal is temporary - that this great loss is only a separation precisely because you are eternal, because our love is eternal, that I will pass because this state of existence is temporary but that you ARE, we ARE, love IS, then it can be a comfort to accept. Because it won’t be long. It won’t be long until Forever.

Like I say, this is a new idea - not all of it, just the bit about my “fate” (maybe there’s a better word…) and accepting it. I’ll try to think of it some more and tell you. Please be with me today, won’t you, my love? Let me know you are near. Help and guide me to you. With all my love, Summer, all my love…