a week of losses

Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead. Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good. W. H. Auden

This has been a week of losses. On Tuesday I learned that a colleague at work passed away following heart surgery, and also that a couple I was good friends with many years ago, when they first met, are splitting up. Wednesday a man hanged himself from a tree behind the playground at Liam's school, at the entrance to our neighborhood. And today, Friday, I learned that a friend is retiring from Winterthur--I'll miss seeing her face and hearing her stories. I also found out that my parents had to put their cat, Sam I Am, to sleep this morning because no one could figure out why he was so sick.

I feel I haven't been handling all of this very well. It has rattled me more than I expected. I think the suicide got me thinking of the fragility of souls. I've always loved how, many years ago, people used to refer to individuals as "souls," as in "this town was inhabited by 246 souls." As I travel through my days, I sometimes try to imagine the people I pass as souls--souls driving their cars, buying their groceries, and bringing brand-new souls into the world. It strips away all the incidentals. So when I heard that a soul in my very own quiet neighborhood--on a sunny hillside, in a tree with new spring leaves--had been in such a state of despair so as to end his own existence, I felt tremendous grief in my own soul. I don't know his situation, his personality, or his lovable or detestable traits. But if I think of this person simply as a soul I can't help but wish my own soul could have metaphysically been with him and held him and kept him safe through that dark night on the sunny hill, until some sort of help arrived. I suppose that's what some people imagine God to be--the eternal mother-figure of unconditional love. Is it bad that I secretly wish I could be God? I know real people and real problems and my own very real inadequate human-ness make this wish impossible, but I secretly wish I could mother the world. Probably because, since I myself am just a soul, I know how badly I could use those imagined, eternally reliable warm arms around me sometimes.

All that said, I am fortunate that most of my weeks include more gains than losses. I heard a line in a movie once that caught my attention, "We have reached the part of our lives where life stops giving and starts taking away." I am thankful that I am not yet there, and that this week is the anomaly rather than the norm. But it has been sad and difficult nonetheless, and I feel weight and emptiness together in my heart.

But of course there have been occasional moments of pure joy and delight in the ridiculousness of life this week too. One day when I was leaving work, a garden tram was dropping off a load of visitors at the main doors. As I approached the doors, swimming upstream against the disembarking tram passengers, my eyes were drawn to a great swath of undulating pale yellow fabric. It was the babydoll dress of a tremendously obese woman with oddly thin, purplish bare legs. Yards and yards of lemony knit cotton sprinkled with tiny white polka dots, waving like the American flag as she heaved her weight from foot to foot. I'd never seen anything quite like it and was mesmerized like a kid at the circus until, with great force of will, I recovered my manners and mentally noted that I hoped she had a nice visit and could stay standing without incident for the whole 45 minute tour. Immediately behind the tremendous lemon dress was a dwarf in jeans. And immediately behind him was a hunched octogenarian woman with thin scarlet-dyed hair, sideshow makeup, and a shiny violet smock. It made my day.

Can my desire to be a person driven by compassion really survive my love and appreciation for a carnival?