Dear Caminoheads,
Today, I had a conversation with a woman who lost her mother to cancer this past Wednesday. There were other 3 women in this conversation too, and each of them spoke of their losses, sadly 3 of these losses were very recent, their parents or parents in law due to Covid-19, so all of their losses are still too fresh.
I told about them about Phil. And I told Phil in a few opportunities (and I shared this with several of you), how grateful I am to Phil for the opportunity of a good bye. Losing someone with whom we had the opportunity to share time, conversations, create memories, etc. all with the attention and the awareness that there are no do-overs, is a powerful experience. Obviously, none of us know when the last conversation with someone who is fairly healthy will be, yet, we live each conversation as if we would be able to pick it up again tomorrow. At some point, with Phil, it became more obvious that “tomorrow” may not be a possibility, so the exchanges I had with him, even if that meant reading his “news from the ranch”, were loaded with a ton of awareness.
This is a topic I have reflected upon quite a lot along my life, when I realized I do not have memories of my mother (or my life in general as a fact). Certainly, there is a physiological reason for that which is that my hippocampus, the area of the brain that stores memories, was about to mature when she died, in addition to the defense layers created as a result. Likely for this reason, the film “Stepmother” with Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts touched me deeply: Susan Sarandon was decided to make memories for her children to remember her.
Those are the best of the losses. Losses that are prepared, that are treated with care and awareness. Losses that are used as a tool for enlightening, for “incarnating” who we are to the fullest. Losses who are an opportunity for a gain: grain of memories, of forgiveness, or healing…
On the other end of these losses are the worst of the losses, those that are called “ambiguous loss”. Those are the losses when what we lost, has gone lost without any chance to understand a loss would occur and even less, the awareness it really happened. The term seems to have started with the missing in action from the Vietnam war, and overtime moved to any loss where someone leaves to never return, a plane that disappears and is never found (like the Malaysian Airlines), a Tsunami, even the loss to dementia.
In the middle, there are those sudden losses… losses we do not expect, and I would tend to think these are the vast majority we experience, right?
I have experience in the 3 types, and by far, the best was Phil’s loss. Given we will loss others and others will loss us, wouldn’t it be awesome if we leave with having done a great job at creating memories, obtaining and offering forgiveness and healing?
Just a thought loves,
Cris
I’ve flown with Malaysian Airlines after the two tragic flights.One blasted out of the skies by a BUK missile over the Ukraine by parties even now unidentified and the other shortly afterwards vanished completely after an unauthorized course change enroute from Kula Lumpar to Beijing.Some bits of a plane where washed up on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean which they said had come from that plane but I think that now there is doubt about it.Just shows how big our planet is that a whole huge aircraft can vanish without trace.Both of the Malaysian Airlines flights are real mysteries that the authorities of dozens of countries,the UN, the International Court in Den Haag, Interpol,Europol,etc have investigated and never gotten to the bottom of either case.Very strange.Still I survived!I think that I was going to Aukland,New Zealand at the time changing in Kula Lumpar.I was relieved to see on the plane route display that we avoided the Ukraine and went over Turkey instead!
What an experience!!!!
A friend of my Brazilian father stayed in the hotel destroyed by the Tsunami in Thailand, without knowing it was the place. It was interesting to hear him telling this… I realized only then that we always have to return to these places, in a way or another … like you to the airline…!
Beautiful and true. Thank you.
Thanks to you, Michelle!
I have in my mind the conversations we have in the Veranda 2019, sort of like a glimpse of who you are as a human being, and this is why your comments when I write mean a lot to me!
❤️
Cris
Not “Just a thought” but a “profound thought”!
Thank you, Carol! Glad this resonates with others too… it does make the difference in our minds forever, I believe.
Much love!!!
Cris
Once again, Cris, we share in experience and in the neuro-understanding of the trauma mechanisms involved. My grad work was in Learning and Memory (specific to Trauma response and the apt evolutionary adaptation that it is/was) and also in stroke-recovery models – the timing of behavioral treatment modalities that would not accelerate apoptosis but would not be ineffective by inapt delay. It’s all a thing of bigger magic, more wonder and more awe than I ever had before the neuro-mechanisms started to be revealed to me. The spiritual place and space of plasticity, of not-knowing, of curiosity and of awe is the place I know my friend Phil came to dwell in. Though he would not describe it in precisely those terms, he loved the exploration of those qualities and spiritual spaces and the real-life outworking of those insights in the exquisite and often arduous process of intentional ‘self-definition’ – which the Torah teaches is the purpose of life. Who will we be and importantly, who will we be after transformational experiences?This may be a bit In the esoteric, ‘you woulda hada been there’ realm of things, but maybe it will resonate with some of us. Everything leads to wonder, if we choose to expect it. Einstein said one can can live as if nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle. He chose the miracle view. So did my friend Phil as he aimed towards revolutionary self-definition. And we laughed and laughed in the process of exploration. Amazing.
Dearest Cris,
My apologies for being absent for so long from this medium. It’s not that I’m not reading your posts daily, for I surely am, reading and re-reading often. I feel at a “loss” for words after having read your exquisite prose. This offering today, however, had to be responded to. But probably not in the way you might expect.
Again, referring to your daily output for all of the Caminohead Family, I am struck by the “loss” of what my beloved Catholic Church has in NOT fully embracing what you and all womanhood has to offer to all of us. I have found myself putting your daily writing into the context of “homilies”, and marveling at how good they are and how much they would benefit all our Church. I finish each one, maybe for the second time, and exclaim, MAN! Wouldn’t that make a great Sunday Sermon!? Maybe with the combined graces being aimed at the Vatican Synod going on for the next year, this realization may come to fruition.
I do know that I’m assured that our all-knowing God has Blessed you, and is Blessing us with your presence in our lives.
Semper Fi,
PFJ