Love Never Dies 2016

I could stop writing blog posts right now. I wrote the first post as an outlet to release the frustrations of dealing with my perception of an unfair world. I kept writing because I found I had more to say. I kept writing because I had lost my mother to cancer just a few weeks before my first post. This year that we call two thousand and sixteen ends today. The naming of the years is helpful in navigating our lives, but has no real basis in reality. Marking the trips our planet makes around an insignificant star in an infinite cosmos is an act in futility. In the infinite, you cannot mark time because there is no end and there is no beginning. Saying that I am writing my last blog post would be a guess at this point. I have no idea if I will ever type another sentence or draw another breath. And the cold hard reality and the beautiful possibility is that none of us do.

Soon after I began dating the love of my life, she introduced me to a film from 1971 called Harold and Maude. It’s known as a dark comedy. It was a box office flop and panned by critics. It was seen as distasteful and depressing. But I fell in love with this movie and more deeply in love with the woman who first showed me the film. This movie challenges us to rebel against conformity and to never settle for complacency. It teaches us to embrace life and all of its potential, but also all of its challenges. It assures us that change is what makes life beautiful and that includes death. As the character Maude says, “It's all change. All revolving. Burials and births. The end to the beginning and the beginning to the end.” But change is painful. How can we find beauty in pain? It’s a question that artists, poets, scholars, writers, clerics, and philosophers have attempted to portray an answer to since the beginning of our conscious existence. I certainly do not have an answer. But I understand that we must walk through the deepest and darkest forests to emerge into the vast openness of the horizon that is always waiting for us hanging over the sea filled with brilliant colors and light.

There is a scene in the movie Harold and Maude in which Harold gives Maude a gift as they walk near the sea. She tells him it’s beautiful and then she casts it wildly into the ocean.  Harold looks startled.  Maude says, “So, I’ll always know where it is.” It’s an important moment in the movie. If casting a token of affection into the vastness of the ocean means that it will never be lost, then how can we lose anything? Or anyone? They are always there in the vastness of the heavens. The token that Harold gave Maude now swishes about on the seabed, or hangs upon some coral reef, maybe new life in the form of coral has now sprung forth from it, or maybe it hitched a ride on the back of a sea turtle and traveled to an exotic island where the local natives now see it as a sign from a distant world. But the love expressed by that token remains with Maude. Our loved ones that leave us travel the galaxies, adventure through the infinite, but they remain with us. The true essence of who they were, are, and always will be remain within us in the form of love. 

Love never dies.

So to the year 2016 I say you have been my darkest stretch of forest yet. I know it will grow darker still. But shafts of light have already blasted through the crevices between the boughs and limbs overhead and give me courage and hope to keep moving toward the constant light that is always on the horizon.

The Gift by Guest Blogger Randy

Guest Post by Randy 

From LeGette:

 I am thankful for the gift of this guest post written by my brother Randy.  Every creative effort I have made has been inspired and nourished by him. As children, he taught me to create imaginary worlds where my Teddy Bear played in a hard rock band and lived in a fancy apartment in my desk drawer. A world where the ultra clean cut police from the TV show Adam-12 were replaced with cops more like Dirty Harry. A world where improvisational songs about his roommate's smelly shoes could tell an hour long story.  He taught me that as long as we can be creative, we are never confined to this earth. We can go anywhere and we can be whoever we want. 

Luke 24:5 “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

The Gift

Often in literature and motion pictures, the question is raised, “what if you could have one more day with the departed?” My family received that gift last Christmas.

My mother had been valiantly fighting cancer for almost three years. Although she put up a brave front, in the final few months of the disease, it had clearly taken its toll. The double edged sword of chemotherapy had aged her tremendously. It had slowed her walk, shortened her breath, affected her mood and mental clearness, and revealed to the rest of us what we already knew but did not speak of. Her time remaining was short.

As we approached the holidays, this reality cast a dark cloud over our family and spirit. Joyous festivities of cooking, shopping, wrapping presents were replaced with hospital visits and doctor consultations.

Thanksgiving came and went; my mother was present at the table but had no appetite. She was unusually quiet and withdrawn.

Despite these changes that we all could see, my eldest brother planned a family reunion Christmas gathering at his house. It was scheduled just a few days before Christmas. We weren’t sure if my mother would even feel up to attending. However, invitations were sent and accepted, and our entire extended family, 25 strong and spread out over hundreds of miles, gathered on a Sunday afternoon.

And a glorious afternoon it was. The sky was of a brilliant blue that would have made Van Gogh envious.  On what typically would have been a cold day in our city, instead was a borrowed day from June, with temperatures flirting in the low 80s. And as if time was suspended for this one day, my mother arrived renewed, refreshed, her fashion reputation intact; dressed in her finest holiday attire with matching accessories.

Her smile was as brilliant as the sun, her disposition as light as the breeze that accompanied us as we gathered for an outdoor photograph. She relished holding the great-grandchildren newborns, playing with the toddlers, and engaging in conversations with the older grandchildren, about their lives and future plans.  My Dad never took his adoring eyes off of her, their 6 decade marriage on display as a life and love lesson for all gathered.

For that one day, we did not talk about doctors.

For that one day, we did not talk about hospitals.

For that one day, we did not talk about cancer.

For that one day, we got our mother back.

And on that one day, once again she was the strong, beautiful, radiant, rock of our family.

After exchanging gifts and many hugs, the day ended as quickly as it had begun. And reality returned on the back of the setting sun.

Mom passed away 8 weeks later, her frail body mercifully granted rest.  As long as I live I will never forget that December day. Out mother returned to us that glorious day, a Christmas gift above all others past and present.  

I thank God for that gift.

And I no longer look for the living among the dead.