January 10, 2009
Saturday

Love is a temple,
Love the higher law.
One life, sisters, brothers,
We’ve got to carry each other,
Carry each other. . . .
              — Paul David Hewson (Bono), b. 1960
                   Irish singer-songwriter

“So,” he said, his voice fading and cracking some as I walked around outside trying to find a strong signal. The sun was filtering through the trees and casting short shadows on the ground, but it was colder than it looked. “Seems like things are going great for you.” We had not spoken since before Thanksgiving, and all I’d said so far was “hello,” but he’d made an assumption, probably based on reading here and there (or everywhere) in my Holidailies pieces, that I was in an extended period of sunny and warm inner weather.

I make choices about what I write here. One of my most discerning readers once described my blog work as “a blend of stream of consciousness and planned essay,” and that, I think, characterizes it perfectly. When I went online nearly ten years ago I contrasted this material with that in my private paper stream-of-consciousness notebook by saying that “what I write here is a public journal, with an immediate and largely anonymous audience. That doesn’t mean it isn’t authentic. Just shaped.”

Although I sometimes report periods of personal depression and sadness, I try in this work to write about things that amuse me or inspire me or trigger my exasperation with or even my outright anger toward some public institution or policy that hurts already burdened people or makes things more difficult for them. The truth is, I am (by self-diagnosis anyway) what has been described as a highly sensitive person. The term has been in use in psychology circles only since 1996, and some authorities dispute its validity. It might be just a positive way of saying, “She’s really moody.”

I carry a lot inside me. The voices in my head are never silent. There is a constant stream of memories and connections, each experience, each utterance, each encounter with another triggering an association, which itself triggers an association. I feel like the people in Verizon commercials, trailed by a multitude. Most of this inner chatter gives me energy and joy, but from time to time streams of sad memories or gloomy thoughts become so intense that they threaten to overwhelm me.

As it happened, yesterday was a high energy day. The somewhat difficult conversation gave way to a productive afternoon in which I read three manuscripts for workshop next week and addressed some questions about my process that the workshop leader has posed.

Today, the wind and the light changed. It was overcast, there was a blizzard predicted, and I had a sad office to perform.

I learned on Thursday that a former student, 33 years old, died on Monday. I remembered him with some fondness. He’d passed through my classroom at the peak of the ten best years of my career, when I was at the top of my game and experienced almost every day at school as part of an intense creative wind that kept pushing me forward. I thought briefly of going to the funeral, but had not made a decision.

And then I heard from another student from those days. Her grief over this death is deep and howling. She lives at a very great distance and is unable to do more than write to the family in whose company she spent so many hours. I resolved then to attend the service and to carry her with me in spirit.

Every single step today was a decision. I felt anxiety about my ability to prepare effectively for the conference next week, and worry that I’d missed the date for returning my deposit for the residency in Georgia (there’s no due date on the letter but they sent it a month ago and it got lost in the pile of “things to address after Christmas”). I made a nutritious breakfast according to Weight Watchers’ guidelines for using filling foods and felt sad at how meager and unsatisfying it seemed, how I was left feeling a hunger that I knew another helping of shredded wheat with banana and yogurt would not assuage.

The church was filled with people, and probably three quarters of them were people the deceased had known in Philadelphia, a hundred miles away. He lived there a long time, maybe the whole fifteen years since he left our school. An adopted child, he had problems at birth that dogged him always, resulting in behavioral characteristics that made conducting his own life a challenge for him and posed many obstacles for people who came into relationship with him. And yet friend after friend rose to recall his zest for life, his sense of humor, his genuine capacity to care for others, including the infant son he leaves, his efforts to make the people in his world better or happier for having known him.

I stopped at the supermarket on my way home. The snow had begun in earnest, fat flakes that covered my coat and my bulky scarf with a lacy white layer in the time it took me to walk from my car into the store. Inside, once again, every step was a decision to keep going. I thought about my recently-departed student. If he, with all his challenges, could continue to meet life with determination and to give joy to those who knew him, could not I, less burdened, do the same?

Crossing the parking lot again I took a deep breath and looked up. The snow had stopped and the sky was clearing, if only a little. I had promised to carry a young friend with me in spirit this day, and I had fulfilled that. I would be sending her a note to tell her what I had seen and what I had heard. And I would thank her for her presence in my life, she and all the others. Because we carry each other.

We carry each other.

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say hi?
To comment or to be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the bracketed parts with @ and a period)