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Moments in Time

5/14/2016

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​      Here's the thing, when you lose someone you love, you heal over time, but you are never truly whole again.  Everyone heals differently, but I would imagine I am not alone in having those little moments that bring that loved one back to you.  Sometimes, they are light, and you smile at the memory and move on with your day.  Sometimes, they catch your breath and a lump forms in your throat, but you keep your tears at bay.  Sometimes, they rock you to your core and the loss you felt feels fresh and new for some inexplicable reason. 

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     Last night, I took my two youngest kids to see Beauty and the Beast at the high school auditorium.  Most of the night, I reveled at what an amazing job our FPCHS teens were doing.  Gaston captivated the audience with his antics and facial expressions--yes, Jacob, we know you are not really a misogynist, but you entertained us exceptionally well while you played the part.  Belle drew us in with her melodic voice.  Lumiere and Cogsworth along with the rest of the enchanted castle kept adults and children giggling throughout.  I also found myself thinking about the unusual opportunity our students have to work in a professional theater.  Our high school auditorium hosts professional productions on a regular basis.  It is not your typical high school theater.  So our television production students film, our stagecraft students construct and manage lighting and whatever else they do, and our theater students act and student direct in a setting most teens don't have the option of experiencing until later in their educations or careers.
     All was well until one moment in the musical.  Belle and the Beast were sitting down, and the table that had been center stage at one point in the play had been moved to downstage left.  In that moment, that one staging choice swept me back over twenty years.  Because this was a high school production, it is even possible it was the same table, stuck back in the prop room and used in countless productions over the past two decades, but it didn't matter if it was the same table or not.  Only the staging mattered.
     Anthony, my high school sweetheart and father of my first son, sat at a table on the very same stage in a play called Let it Rain.  I worked as a student director on that production.  Anthony played the son of a psychiatrist who was trying to convince God not to flood the Earth a second time.  The psychiatrist had a wife, a son, and a daughter, and during one scene, they sat in that very spot on that very stage.  I couldn't focus on anything else--as if a single spotlight had been trained only on the table and all else in the theater had gone silent, leaving me alone with an empty table and the ghosts of what had once been.
     I didn't cry, although I wanted to.  I didn't run out of the theater, although I wanted to.  Part of me wanted them to move on to the next set change so the table would move to somewhere else.  Part of me wanted them to leave the table there, no matter how ridiculous, so I could hold on to the feeling.  The feeling that Anthony had just been there.  It wasn't twenty plus years ago.  It was a production not that long ago, and if I hurried backstage, I might just catch up with him. (I didn't actually think this, but it is the closest I can get to putting this feeling into words.) None of that is real.  It is an emotion that sneaks up on you and overtakes you.  You want to push it away so you can seem normal and whole, but you also want to embrace it so you can feel just a little bit longer like the one you love is still close by.
     It is difficult for me to explain this to people because there is no term for it.  I am not a widow because we were high school seniors when Anthony died in a plane crash leaving me six months pregnant and alone.  I've used the term soulmates, and I feel this way, but I also have a husband whom I love, and I wonder if it is possible to have more than one soulmate.  I know our relationship was not perfect.  We had our fights--Anthony called them debates.  I even told my best friend I would break up with him if he was getting in the way of our friendship.  But he,too, was my best friend.  Maybe that makes my argument for multiple soulmates.  
     In the end, it comes down to one word.  Love.  Once you love someone, a part of you is with them forever.  When the one you love is gone, you tend to romanticize the past.  It's human nature.  I would pray you never experience a loss like I did, but we all experience loss.  There are only two alternatives which could protect you--you are the one lost or you never love.  I don't wish that on you either; although, when the moment hits, you may feel like either of those options would have been kinder.
     Instead, I share this.  Know that others share the feelings you may have--but they are yours and yours alone.  The loss your heart holds on to is both a burden and a blessing.  It may bring you to your knees from time to time, but it shows you loved, and it is a living memorial to the one you loved.  So, bring on the random staging in life that will carry an echo of the past into your present and the ghost of a lost love brushing past your soul.  Revel in it for a moment to remember the feel of that love.  Then let the next set change take place, and remember to give the loves you have around you a squeeze.

​

    

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Wow!  I haven't written in a while!

9/6/2013

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    I just finished reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  My book club, The Red Heel Society, is reading this for the month of September.  It is an amazing book about a teenage girl's struggle with Cancer and what it means to live a well-lived life when you aren't well and don't have a long life to live.  When we got together for dinner a couple of weeks ago, each girl who had finished reading it raved about the book and declared it a tear inducing masterpiece.  When I purchased the book at Books a Million, the girl at the counter, a book blogger herself, warned me to have a box of tissues at the ready.
    Spoiler alert:  there is a death in the book and I am about to examine that death.  If you intend to read the book and you are not the type of reader who reads the last page of a book first, stop reading this blog post.  Go read The Fault in Our Stars, and then come back to read my blog post.  Or just stop reading.  I don't want to spoil the book for anyone, but I can't explain my state of mind without revealing at least a part of the end of the book.  You've been warned.
***********************************
    When Hazel's boyfriend dies, she has to attend his funeral and read a eulogy.  She has to face her life, however short it might be, without him.  They argued; they didn't always see eye to eye, but at the heart of their story, they were in love.  I get the tears, but I didn't cry them.  I wondered if I had become cold and distant and some thing other than wholly human, some monster merely existing through my time on Earth, no longer able to live the kind of meaningful life the characters in the book might have striven for.
    But I am no monster.  I have lived through Hazel's anguish.  I have loved deeply and lost completely without the solace of a painfully long goodbye.  And I was Hazel's age.  Seventeen.  I didn't have Cancer, but I did have a swelling pregnant belly.  My Augustus was Anthony, and he died quickly and tragically instead of slowly and tragically. 


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I stood in front of a full church and grieved through a eulogy of sorts.  I woke each morning and relished that brief millisecond when I could forget and think the former dreams of my life could still exist, that Anthony could still exist here with me.  I woke in the middle of the night screaming and crying an inconsolable mess of salt and water and tangled sheets that must have terrified my mother. 
    And here I am today.  Seventeen and a half years later.  Life does go on.  I don't wake screaming and crying or thinking I have a life that became only a dream the day Anthony died.  Not to say I didn't have other demons to deal with beyond the initial grief.  I did not have Hazel's death sentence to satiate my love.  I do not know how long I will live, so living a life without another love was something I could not commit myself to do.  Yet, moving on into other relationships has its own sense of guilt, pain, and complications. 
    All of this said, I am relatively balanced in my life now (as much as any writer can be), and I had a choice to make as I read The Fault in Our Stars.  I could dive deeply into the pain and emotion I had experienced, reliving it as extremely as possible in the passages in the book, crying not for Augustus and Hazel but for Anthony and for a younger version of myself.  Or I could examine it in a different light.  I chose the later.  I read through the tragedy, and it brought up thoughts and emotions, but I looked at them, at the experiences of the fictional characters, at my own experiences, in a more analytical light.  Not cold, but through the lens of time and experience.  I shed a few small tears at the end, and I am not fully certain for whom.
    So, reader, if you have made it this far, these are my thoughts.  I am ready to finish the memoir I started back when I first saw those two lines on that little stick.  It has taken me nearly two decades to feel ready, to feel whole again, or whole enough to tackle the raw emotion I lived through.  I have felt this way before, so we will sI must apologize that this will take me away from writing my sequel, although I hope the urge I have to write will carry over to both projects.  To The Red Heel Society, I still intend to have at least a rough draft of Dreams in the Midst in hand for you to read when my turn comes up in February/March.  I may have A Whisper In Time ready for perusal then, too. 
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    Author

    A teacher, a writer, a mother, a wife and a friend.  All people wear what feels like a million different hats at any given time.  In this place, I choose to have freedom.  That doesn't mean I'm not still juggling my hats; it just means I choose which of them I balance on my head as I write.

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