The kind of unity I hope for

Photo by Vinoth Chandar

She is the one who brings it up, cautiously and a little abruptly. “For a long time I’ve been meaning to talk to you about…”

It is a controversial, hot-button issue, rife with capacity to divide us,  make us angry, make us misunderstand. We love each other but we know we will disagree.

“Okay,” I say, “let’s go. Let’s do this.”

We speak earnest and thoughtful and slow. I say my piece. She says hers.

We are both a little disappointed, that we cannot be fully united in this.

We are both a little grateful, that we can have this conversation in love and mutual respect.

*

Later that evening I think how much I admire her and the way she spoke. I think, what if everyone could speak about these things with such grace, such compassion, such genuine love. How would the world be different then.

Perhaps it would be different in Washington. Different in our family. Different on Sunday morning. Different in blogs and twitter feeds and internet rants. Different, even, in Gaza.

It would not be perfect. I would still be angry at the fracking, you would be angry about the children at the border. Someone would still be crying over the Israeli who lost her only son, someone else over the boy on the beach in Gaza, someone else over the sister who was raped, someone else over the light of the unborn child put out.

But if we could talk, perhaps we could share. Weep with those who weep. Perhaps, with our hushed tones, and chances to listen, and sighing rather than raging at the imperfection of our understanding of the world and each other, we could be friends.

The holdup, maybe, is that you are wounded. You cannot hear my piece without hearing the tone of those who have hurt you before. Maybe you are thick-skinned from all the yelling and you cannot soften the body to listen. Maybe you are scared of losing your place at the table, or furious that you’ve never had a place. Maybe we are, all of us, all of these things. Maybe we just need to remember we’re not the only one.

Telling and listening to the real talk is not easy. It requires us to gently cup the pain in the soul, in the body, and bear it to someone else. I don’t know much about pain, except that some people are very brave, to tell and listen openly, holding their pain like a sacred temple.

*

There are many paths that would have been easier. Not being friends, for example. Or being the kind that don’t talk about those things. Or talking louder and more sarcastic and exasperated.

But then if that were the case, I think how much I would be missing, how much less I would be, how empty my inner sanctuary would be—that place where I hold my passion and pain and the soft-intoned stories of all the people who are really, when we get down to it, a lot like me.

Cigarettes and chocolate chips

Three of my four grandparents died in the fall. This year, my first without any of them present, it seems an appropriate time to remember each of them and their gifts to my life. My piece about Papa was posted earlier this week. Today, I remember my Grandmother.

Photo credit

My memories of Grandmother are few. She was generous and fashionable and bought me my favorite dresses. Her Jacksonville drawl I did not much understand. When she visited us in Maryland, she would take frequent smoke breaks; when we visited her, she would watch TV in her den, cigarettes in hand. I came home from fourth grade one afternoon to find that my father was on his way to North Carolina because she had been taken by an acute form of leukemia and was not expected to live out the month. I did not cry then, nor when she died, nor at the funeral. We scattered her ashes in the garden at her church. The photos from that day are gray with strained faces, for her death was early and sudden.

I have learned, in the years since Grandmother died, to celebrate the connections I have to her. She left me some small things: my thick, curly hair and a pearl necklace and the small diamonds that now sit in my engagement ring.

Also, a painting. Grandmother was an artist and recently (after Grandfather died), I got to choose one of her paintings to hang in my apartment. I picked a beautiful oil still-life of cut flowers. The painting is bright with yellow and green and hope and light. Her life was not much these colors. Grandmother battled depression most of her life. Though I have never been clinically depressed, when I hear these stories I feel connected to her. I am certainly more like her than I am like my Grandfather, with his winning charm and his calm, loving approach to every situation. I have been broken and angry and sometimes wondered if I could dig myself out from darkness and apathy.

*

I was thirteen and summer whiled away. Camp and swim team were over and I was home in my room, writing in my journal. And in the August humidity I came upon the meaninglessness of life: how alone we are in our thoughts and desires, how futile the day-to-day can be. I wrote through it, hoping it would go away when school started, when I saw my friends again. But hugs were scarce and the Backstreet Boys could not give the right words to define my thoughts. There was a hurricane and I was at home in the gloomy dark in my room and the rain and the thunder and the tasks of life were gray and heavy on me. Homework, check, piano, check, soccer, cancelled. And no one to explain it to, and no way to explain it.

I was twenty and my head was swirling with images of small huts and banana trees and beautiful brown-skinned children; my head was swirling with the philosophy and science and scholarship that seemed to tear down my faith; my heart swirling with first love and first heartbreak and jealousy and anger and fear of the future. I collapsed into it, and for a year I was lost and alone and tearful, staying in on the weekends and skipping meals and sitting idly in front of the computer.

I was twenty-six and married and in a new place and I felt like I had left everything behind and I was alone on a couch with a subscription to Netflix and bags and bags of chocolate chips.

*

I don’t know the details about Grandmother’s depression, when it began, how bad it got, if it was precipitated by specific experiences. And I don't really compare myself to her. I have been graced to escape the brunt of darkness—for me there has always been sun and laughter. My strand of melancholy has probably just been about average. It gives me a little empathy, and a little extra passion to play deep melodies on the piano and write things raw when I can. 

But since I was nine when she died, that connection is what I have, along with the ring on my finger that reminds me of how Grandfather never stopped loving her, never lost respect for her, even with all she went through, even though he couldn’t understand it.