To Every Thing a Season: Guest Blog

Dear Readers,

I have a treat in store for you today! Instead of reading my rantings, you can read those of Braja from Lost and Found in India.

It all started out like this: I – an innocent bystander – just stumbled across her blog one day. It made me laugh, it made me ponder. I started leaving comments, and before you know it, I was hooked! (Sad, but true.)

Then, last week, somewhere in the middle of a long post, I discovered that she liked to do guest blogs. Not satisfied with her large gaggle of followers and her hundreds of visitors, she was shamelessly looking for even more exposure on other people’s blogs!

Great idea, I thought! Because her blog is a long stream of consciousness in hilarity. Yes – folks! She is shamelessly funny and witty. She can have you rolling around the aisles in laughter.

But not this time. I asked her to write about what she had lost (you know – her marbles, her way) and what she had found in India, and she wrote a piece about … well … death, memories, who we are. She thought it would fit in well with some of my previous posts about the death of my mother-in-law recently.

And do you know what? She’s absolutely right! This may not have you guffawing, but it is a gift: a very personal account of what makes us who we are. Thank you, Braja, for entrusting me with this!

And now – sit back and enjoy, dear readers!

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TO EVERY THING, A SEASON…
A subject that is both delicate and most applicable to all of us, because, as the Bible says, “To every thing there is a season;…a time to be born, and a time to die…”

This is about death. Sorry…

I was eight years old when death knocked on my door, barged into my life, and left its muddy prints throughout every room. When it left, it took my father with it, and the world changed, leaving me with only the memories of a child. Can we trust memories? Does a pale memory, aged over time, give off a light strong enough to leak into the cracked features of stories chiseled into the solid rock of a child’s mind? Or would truth—factual accounts in black and white—actually spoil the preciousness, the essence of memories? Maybe it doesn’t even matter if they’re real. They made us, but would we change if we knew the truth? Maybe we’ve made them our truth, taken the edge off the memories, just as dust motes in a shaft of light filter the harshness, blurring the edges, leaving a memory soft, recognizable—claimable. That’s possibly more like it.

There are cultures in the world that celebrate death. Are we missing something? My childhood memories after the death of my father may sound okay if I related them to you, but there was no one celebrating then. It seems everything about death has to be realized in hindsight. Nothing is apparent at the time; only that things have changed inevitably. Before my father died, my life was interwoven with my brothers, my sisters, my mother: we did things as a family. While death effected differently as individuals, collectively it fractured us. Sometimes learning is like stepping off a cliff: There’s no going back once you know it. That’s how death felt to me when I was eight years old.

Child psychologists tell us the first five years determine what sort of person we become. In that case, I’m the quintessential Aussie: suburban, ordinary, sun-kissed; a smattering of freckles across my nose, zinc cream daubed on like war paint. Beaches and “old” cars and big families. Vegemite sandwiches, blue-check school uniforms and cloth library bags. Church on Sundays, roast lunch, a drive to Gran’s place in the afternoon. Beaches and tents and caravans during the holidays; hot Christmas days, wooden-framed Morris Major station wagons, Army issue everything, sixties furniture because there was nothing else, not because it was ‘retro.’ Barbecues and home-made clothes; Old Spice aftershave and Gossamer hair spray; knitted jumpers with strange patterns, sports on weekends, muddy soccer boots; Tupperware parties, the Men’s Lounge, “shandies” and Navy Cut cigarettes in glass-blown ashtrays. I guess these memories are important, because we’re a product of our youth. We were little and grew into big people; how that happened has a huge effect on who we are, but it’s not everything. If it was, life would be simple. Maybe.

I felt the ramifications of death right into my twenties. That’s what happens when it’s not dealt with, and I definitely hadn’t faced up to the death of my father. No one in our family talked about Dad’s death. It was the unspeakable. That was bound to make for some extraordinary times. Then again, trauma takes ordinary beyond passe. Ordinary memories can’t compare to the electric, mind-slamming, all-consuming reputation of a good trauma.  They limp into insignificance, a blank space. After a while, without realizing it, they evaporate, and then all that’s left is the trauma. With a blink of the eye, the trauma has become the ordinary.

The fallout has to happen somewhere. For me it happened in my teens, but I didn’t feel the effects until my twenties. We all of us, my four brothers and sisters and myself, stumbled into our teenage years in a fog, reeling from the sudden and violent death of our wonderful, happy, kind, loving father. No one ‘dealt’ with us. There was nothing to say, nothing to read, no courses to attend to learn how to cope. It was 1972, and self-help was 20 years away, or might as well have been. We entered a period of our lives that should have been carefree and happy and full of warm memories, a solid building block for future successes, family lives, and careers, hobbling instead with invisible fractures and unbearable burdens.

Both my brothers became Hare Krishnas. That surprised me. I thought Paul, the oldest, was the most intelligent person I knew. How could he join some weirdo cult? But then Neil and his wife, Karen, joined. I still didn’t believe it would happen to me. Although it was 20 years after death first visited me, I would say that death was the reason I turned to religion. In a way, there was nowhere else to turn. When all else fails…

Actually religion is probably the wrong word for it. Calling it that would limit what I can say, and maybe block someone from hearing. Even to me it has ugly, worn out, connotations. Religion is a word, it doesn’t mean anything. I used to drink religiously. Didn’t get me far. So let’s scrub the ‘religion’ bit. Call it what it is. No cheap words. Spirituality; the real thing. The search for the self. The Holy Grail….the hunt for red October (okay, just kidding…)

As we trip through life, sooner or later we have to ask: how am I doing? Will I be happy when I reach the end ask, “How did I do?” I guess it’s an inevitable question if we have any conscience. It’s not fashionable these days to have a conscience though, is it? We’re supposed to experience everything and go through life without “taking on the guilt” for how we affected other people. But I don’t know if that’s really possible. Guilt’s okay, sometimes. It’s like a checking system. It is the conscience. So I don’t think it can be ignored. Like most things, it’s only a problem when it’s in excess.

There are regrets—they’ve camped outside the door of my mind and are peacefully protesting my ignorance of them. They aren’t making too much noise: they seem to have some respect, at least, for the contemplation of death and dying…good for them. Shall I let them in? Maybe I’ll end up regretting addressing my regrets—where does it end? Then again, perhaps that’s meant to be a private meeting, that one…not fit for public consumption. Some things should remain sacred, after all.

There’s a mad woman near where I live. (Actually, there are probably a whole lot of them now that I think of it, but I’ll try not to get sidetracked…) This one in particular, she’s Indian of course, because I live in India. But she covers her face with layers and layers of white face powder. The result isn’t that she looks whiter, but rather like a very strange shade of grayish-brown sludge. Almost a dead body pallor—quite bizarre. I see her every night from my roof, just around sunset. She wanders through the park next to my house on her way to the temple. She makes me smile, this woman. She also makes me think a lot of things. Like, at the end of it all, when we’re facing death—and I would say this applies whether we’re ready for it or not—it doesn’t matter how we see ourselves; or how we want to see ourselves. All that matters is what we are.

The problem is there’s no school or college or university that actually teaches us who we are, what we are. I mean, think about it…all that study, all those years, all those supposedly intelligent people leaving the hallowed halls of education in droves to make their mark on the world—none of them even know who they are. So what if they ‘achieve’ something in this short and mostly bleak life? What does it mean at the end? In the same way that white face powder is not going to make that woman white, so no amount of education or success in this world is going to give any information on who we really are.

And I think it’s good to know that before we die. How we do it is up to each of us individually. Embrace it, it’s not so bad. I can honestly feel that death is positive. We have a habit of making it negative, but it’s not. It’s ok. It happens. And we can embrace it and transcend it and that is an amazing thing.

December 15, 2008 | Categories: Big questions | Tags: childhood, death, father, guest blog, Philosophy, religion, thoughts, who are we? | 8 Comments »