All those faces and hearts, come to acknowledge Eula W’s death. Her children: F, Mitch, Suzannah, Wendy, Murielle, Vonnie, Nate, Mandy, Josh. Her grandchildren: Jason, Marvin, Ashton, Jake, Bret, Randolph, Stanley, Eddie, Alla. The children’s spouses: Vitauts, Jay, Don, Herb, Josh, Fannie, Carmen.
The memorial turned out to be what I think such an event should be: a time and a space for folks to talk and feel regarding someone who has died. I’d say this particular event had more talking than feeling. Many got up front to share their recollections, myself included. It was touching to hear how each person’s words simultaneously portrayed some aspects of Eula, but also painted a picture of the speaker themselves.
I surprised myself, when I got up to speak and, as I related the Mendocino story, found myself reduced (expanded?) to tearful silence. Eula’s vocal acceptance and acknowledgement of me as her son is a gift that I have always valued. Yesterday I realized that I’ve not acknowledged to myself just how profoundly it has touched me.
Later. I'm siting at Café Flore, here since 1973, the decal on the window sez.
F & I just lunched. We both had spinach salad with salmon steak and turkey sausage; prosecco; a German-style torta de chocolate; and coffee. The cortado F ordered for me looks for all the world just like his latte…
All morning it has felt like I could burst into tears at the drop of the proverbial hat. Yesterday’s events, in all their emotional intensity, have churned up a frappe of emotions inside of me. Feelings of all sizes and shapes are swirling around, most of a certain intensity.
The memorial and the dinner afterwards were replete with stories of Pain, Loss, and Abandonment, manifested both in words and in people’s eyes. I was constantly being touched by such expressions I perceived in various members of the White clan. At the same time stories and histories of my own came to remembrance, reverberating inside of me.
(As I write at a table that faces Market Street, I can watch the various vintage streetcars pass by. The post WWII model that seems to have plodded the streets of SF back then is eye-catching, with its two-tone pattern of bright blue and lemon yellow. Is this where F developed such a fondness for this color combination?)
Eula is Dead. Just like the old gray goose. Gone. This particular story is done. I’m not sad that her crummy last, post-bypass chapter is finished. It was misery for her. It’s a relief that it is over. The sadness that leapt forward in me yesterday has to do with a grief about how difficult it winds up being for all of us to create the lives that we actually want. Eula, a lass of such spunk and promise, wound up with a life of many great pains. A life that, from my vantage point, saw much of her promise go unfulfilled.
Perceiving her life story in such a light, I, of course, feel terrified that my own brief passage upon this stage may turn out similarly. The ongoing struggle to muster the gumption to pursue my own dreams…
One aspect of her persona that I can learn much from is her talent at speaking her mind. She was not afraid of others’ opinions, she didn’t avoid tussles. While she may not have been skilled in her outspokenness, she didn’t shy away from differences of opinion. She certainly was not driven by a need for confluence and congruence at all cost. I shall practice being with disharmony while holding my ground.
Josh W. talked at the service about how his experience of Eula was not one that speaks fondly of Golden Memories. From all accounts I’ve heard, Eula did not like Josh. She did not treat him lovingly. This is a sad truth. It seems that Josh is so wrapped up in this story that he doesn’t see the current story of loving and accepting sibs.
Ashton, sweet and tortured Ashton, is experiencing a tremendous loss with the death of his grandmother. “She never judged me. She expressed her opinions about what I did, but she never judged me.” There is so much Deep Hurt and Anger flowing in him. So tough is he and such a survivor, so unskilled at expressing or even feeling his tender emotions. (Hm, not dissimilar to Eula…) I see in him much of myself when I was younger.
Jake, too, is so amazingly sweet and so deeply hurt. He has cultivated humor as a way to interface his wounds with the world. The pain is always so visible to me in his eyes. The appalling truth of how his father brutalized him.
Such beautiful, beautiful souls. So brutally treated. Such ugly and false stories told about who they are. Of course, my heart breaks so deeply for these two young men because of my own experience of familial brutality, of having horribly distorting and debilitating stories told about me in the family circle.
It is so infernally tricky to work around the damage caused by Brutal and Hateful stories. These stories cannot be untold. They exist, as does their corrosive impact upon the souls they’ve been directed at. The task is to re-write the impact they have upon us. To incorporate the truth that such stores were, indeed, told and to realize that they are not about us, but about the tellers of such tales.
If the Horrid Tales told about us are not true, are the Beautiful Tales any truer? I suppose the essence is that we become tellers of our own tales, so that we are not dependent on others to create the tale of who we are. To not take in Toxic Tales, to enjoy Glowing Tales. But to not be dependent on their external telling. Of course, to always choose the company of those who tell Beautiful Tales.
Israel, Palestine and the Hezbollah in Lebanon are currently telling a horrid story of Violence. Each rejects the tale the others spin about them, but the fashion in which they are doing it has them each becoming what their enemies accuse them of.
How to more completely embody the Tale that I wish to tell? To free myself of the strangulating influences of early-on told stores. Their impact is all too real, just like the wounding of my left shoulder. The pain is undeniably real. My decision can be to work with and through the pain to achieve a greater range of motion. I can entertain the Pain in order to develop a relationship with it that does not constrict me.