While my sister-friend, Anne, who lives in New Mexico, was walking home from the park yesterday, she sent me this photo and she wrote, “… My ocean view. Horizon makes me feel itâs the ocean.”
Anne’s mom was my Godmother, one of the most loving influences in my life. Our families knew each other long before I was born.
Now, for sure, the horizon in the photo DOES resemble a realistic ocean scene even though the shot was taken âdeepâ in the desert. It is so typical of Anneâs character to find possibility in the impossibility. Needless to say, she’s a positive person, and every season in her life, she stirs up a fresh batch of homemade lemonade that tastes like sunshine. It is the perfect antidote to winter blues and helps lift most emotional downward spirals.
Of course, there’s a prerequisite, though, to making lemonade out of lemons â you need a desire first. Then you act on the motivation, and thatâs where faith comes in to help carry out the goal.
No matter what difficulties Anne encountered in life, she always kept her eyes on the horizon to help level her out and not sway too far from walking an even course. In fact, whenever I found myself in Anneâs company, we rarely stared at a new batch of lemons. Instead, we rolled up our sleeves, sliced and squeezed the pulp. In the end, no matter how hot and barren our lives may have felt, we clinked our glasses before we experienced a refreshing taste of lemonade. The sensation invigorated our spirits and gave us the strength to carry forward. Today, whenever, I need a lift, I reach for her treasured lemonade recipe.
âYes, Anne.â I wrote her back after she shared her photo, âI see your ocean view horizon, and itâs beautiful, full of life and wonder. Cheers to a future of endless possibilities!”
… Maybe Iâll visit Anne and âthe ocean in New Mexicoâ firsthand. We can walk together from the park while we finish the last drops of lemonade from our insulated tumblers, and search for angel figures and heart shapes in the clouds that can be seen, even when the weather is bad, by those who know how to look.â
Last Saturday, November 19, marked the International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day. Each year, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention honors the day by helping to organize large and small events at different venues around the world. The events connect people who are survivors of suicide loss with mental health professionals, and provide a safe, empowering, empathetic and educational space that supports and exemplifies the value of storytelling and shared experiences.
This year, two-hundred and seventy-one events took place at different sites not only in the United States, but also in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Nepal, Russia, Scotland, Taiwan and South Africa.
The International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day is held on the Saturday before Thanksgiving each year, which, if you think about it, can be viewed as an oxymoron. How can this day, centered around grieving parents, spouses, children and those affected by suicide, be in such close proximity to a holiday that celebrates blessings? What sort of “blessings” can there conceivably be when it involves heartbreaking, unexplained losses, and deaths associated with widespread societal stigmas that oftentimes are hidden below the underbelly of silence and shame?
If we examine Thanksgiving Day itself, one definition of it is âan annual national holiday in the United States and Canada celebrating the harvest and other blessings of the past year. Americans generally believe that their Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people.â
Conversely, since 1970, the United American Indians of New England have organized the National Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving Day. “To us, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning, because we remember the millions of our ancestors who were murdered by uninvited European colonists, such as the Pilgrims. Today, we and many Indigenous people around the country say, ‘No Thanks, No Giving.'”
After experiencing our own personal tragedy nine days before Thanksgiving Day of 2019, our personal day of mourning helped me stand, as never before, in solidarity with my indigenous brothers and sisters. “Solidarity” is commonly defined as “unity or agreement of feeling or action.” Ever since our family’s post-tragedy during that “first” Thanksgiving in 2019, each year afterward, I not only acknowledge a feeling of sadness, but I consciously act differently. I make it a point NOT to stuff myself and over-indulge on food, drink or merriment. By nightfall, I direct my eyes at the endless blanket of stars in the night. To me, each star represents those people around the world who have or, at that very minute are, through circumstances beyond their control, forced to leave the comfort of their homes and homelands. In addition, I think about those, now and through history, unjustly serving time in brick and mortar prisons and those trapped in minds of mental illness.
So, anyway, last weekend, five days before this year’s Thanksgiving Day, I feared that attending a suicide loss survivors conference at the Noroton PresbyterianChurch could plummet me to the depths of despair.
Coincidentally, the previous week, I watched an incredible movie, Mission: JOY, âa film that shares the humor and wisdom of two of the world’s most beloved icons, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.â
The movie kicked off a four-day summit based on Joy. The theme on day two was âThe Inseparability of Joy and Sorrow.â In a segment entitled, âInciting Joy: A Poetâs Perspective with Ross Gay,” Mr. Gay elucidates a number of definitions pertaining to joy. Most apropos for this blog post, he explains that joy “emanates from the tethers between us when we hold each other through our sorrows.”
He continues saying that the definition not only pertains to the concept of grief associated with death, but with other losses as well. The common thread, he says is that âWeâre all heartbroken, all of us, and all of us are in the process of dying, as is everything we love.â
Between the conference I attended and, now, heading into Thanksgiving week, I’ve felt a sense of interconnectedness that Mr. Gay refers to, and Iâve realized how our stories of our shared humanity can land us in a place of belonging, a place, symbolically, that is home. This helping of âcomfort food,” BTW, is the complete opposite of my typical âThere’s no place for me to go” frame of mind.
The Dalai Lama, in fact, in the movie, mentions a Tibetan saying, âWherever you receive love, thatâs your home.â
I will tell you the moment I felt I was “home” at the survivors conference: when I sat in a circle of about fifteen people at the church that donated their facility for the event. It was the moment Michelle Peters, area director of the Connecticut American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, welcomed the group, her throat constricting as she tried to suppress the tears in her eyes.
It was apparent that the sorrow was not only her own. It signaled Ubuntu in its purest form. Ubuntu means âI am, because you are.â It is derived from an ancient African word meaning âhumanity to othersâ and describes connectedness, compassion and oneness.
(Again, quite coincidentally, the theme on the last day of the four-day summit based on Joy was âInterconnection & Ubuntu.â)
In other words, although Michelle did not know us, nor our stories, there were no strangers in the room. She knew our hearts and the depth of our sorrow.
I am because you are.
From the onset of the conference, Michelle set a âThanksgivingâ table in the affluent town of Darien, CT, and we sat and spent the bulk of our time sharing tears and sorrow, anger, disgust, rage, stories, more tears and sorrow and more stories and even laughter, all connected to the heart of the soul, the heart of Ubuntu, where our genders, skin color, ages, backgrounds, political affiliations, IQ’s and all the labels were set on fire, ablaze in solidarity. We held each other in our sorrows, and in the process, joy and thanksgiving filled the day.
“Marshall Matters,” January 18, 1993 to November 19, 2019
My wish for each and every single one of you in my blogging community is that you find a renewed purpose, a fearless sense of thanksgiving to enable you to embrace the sorrow in your personal brokenness, and keep the faith that your brokenness will not break you, but allow the light and spirit of Ubuntu to shine through the cracks.
Renew! Refresh! Restart! in the morning … afternoon … evening … RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND. Faith is fluid, bursts forth like a river flowing, able to calm, cool and collect the most explosive moments and transform them into fresh beginnings. Whatever you have faith in, call upon it NOW!
My dear friend, Bob, has been a practicing Buddhist for most of his life. He is now in his 70s. Iâve known Bob for nearly 38 years, and he is one of the influential âzen menâ in my life. We met up last week, and we exchanged our usual dialogue.
âHow are you, Bob?â
âGREAT!â
âHowâs everything going, Bob?â
âGREAT!â
His enthusiasm nearly knocks me over each and every time. Itâs as if his every living breath is channeled into his exclamation, and it never fails to wake me up in my own life. Bob is like my buzzing alarm clock awakening me to my stagnant state, to my captivity in my own headâs prison built on fear, falsehoods and frailties that feed me at the given moment.
It never fails. Bob signals me to realize that Iâve been stuck in my head. Iâve missed the day gone by, including the entire car ride that brought me to visit with Bob in the first place. Iâve missed the trees outside. The front door I just swung opened, and the fluorescent lights in dim room. The minute I notice the rosy patches of Bobâs cheeks that glow and resemble the human heart, I almost feel as if Iâve exhaled for the first time in a long time.
At the end of our zen-centric conversation when I am about ready to leave, we always say, âI love you,â and embrace gently, as we have for 38 years.
I move toward the door. The hardwood taps under the rubber soles of my ankle boots. As I swing open the door, my hand feels the glossy coat on the freshly painted wood that is flecked with grains of lint in its texture, reminding me of the imperfection in perfection. My insights give me the faith to keep up the journey as I recall the miniscule part I play in the “GREAT!” scheme of life, because I have escaped my tiny mind long enough to inspect the vast universe directly under my nose.
WTF? (Where's the faith?) 