Rage and Grief Meditation On The Life And Death Of George Floyd At Age 46

Unusual Summer Clouds During Hot Weather / Broken Person and Broken Guitar / Joni Mitchell's Meditation on the Book of Job / More People Who Are Not Broken

"A mind filled with love can be likened to the sky with a variety of clouds moving through it -- some light and fluffy, others ominous and threatening. No matter the situation, this sky is not affected by the clouds. It is free."
(Sharon Salzberg)

This morning before 8 o'clock I was a few blocks from my home, driving west on my way to SeaMar Community Health Center, a low-income clinic on the north end of town, to turn in paperwork that will have to be filled out by my doctor regarding accommodations that I am requesting in regard to the part-time job that I hope to have soon. The offer letter for the job is problematic. I will not sign it unless I am guaranteed a consistent work schedule and a guarantee that I will not be asked to work on my days off. I have been unemployed on and off since 1998 due to symptoms of PTSD that will be triggered again if my sleep is disrupted by frequent schedule changes that involve working into the evenings and if I am unable to plan anything because of never knowing when I will have a day off or when my work shift will begin or end.

As I waited at the stop light and wondered whether I would be able to get the accommodations I was requesting, I vaguely noticed out of the corner of my eye a nondescript compact person of short stature who was wearing nondescript clothing and a generic knit hat with side flaps with braids hanging down and who was carrying possessions across the cross street to my left. As the light turned green, and I moved forward with the traffic, I was startled to see the person lift an acoustic guitar into the air and smash it hard several times onto the sidewalk, leaving the guitar in pieces. It was like something I might see in a dream. I was shaken, wondering what was going on the mind of that person who was destroying something that was likely dear to that person or someone close to that person. I wasn't sure if the person was a man or a woman. It wasn't Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. It was something else.

I became aware of Joni Mitchell singing from my car's CD player:



On my way home from SeaMar, I had some errands to do in downtown Bellingham, which is on the west side of town. As I drove down Holly Street, I saw someone who appeared to be the same person I had seen earlier and who must have taken the bus into town. He or she was settled on the sidewalk,  not far from the bus station, leaning against the side of a building with his or her possessions. After I dropped off my condo dues at the property management company, I was curious enough to drive back around the block to see if it really was the same person.  Maybe it wasn't the same person, but my gut feeling was that it was. I was still grieving that broken person and the broken guitar. If it was the same person, he or she appeared subdued, nondescript, showing no sign of the anger or grief that prompted destroying an acoustic guitar.















"Take heart and take care of your link with life ..."
(Buffy Sainte-Marie, lyrics from "Look At The Facts")

Listen:

We

We are mourning

Jason Redmond /REUTERS

AN EARLY MORNING MEDITATION ON ANGER AND GRIEF AND FEAR AND GRATITUDE AND LEARNING THAT I DID LOVE MY MOTHER ALL ALONG AND ALWAYS WILL

Thirteen years ago, around 11 o'clock on the morning of December 3, 1994, during Hanukkah and Advent, on the day before my parents' 45th wedding anniversary, my mother died unexpectedly at age 78 of a massive heart attack.

Beginning in 1987, at age 36, when I began my recovery from many years of bulimia and anorexia, I had felt an increasing resentment toward my mother. On the day that my mother died, I woke up feeling an unexpectedly deep and painful anger toward her, which I wrote about at length in my journal that morning. Later in the morning while I was at work, I received a phone call from my youngest sister who told me that our mother had died that morning. I had not experienced before, and have not experienced since, the profound shock I felt in that moment. In my shock, I "saw" a dark heavy cloud, located at the level of my eyes, lifting up and disappearing and revealing clear sky, and I said to my sister, "I don't believe you." Then I said, "She can't hurt me anymore." Then I began to cry. In the following 24 hours, I began to experience the anger and grief that had been building up since I was a tiny child. What was missing was the fear I had always lived with.

One of my earliest memories, at somewhere around 2 years old, is that my mother was angry. I didn't know why she was angry, but I didn't sense that she was angry at me. She was vacuuming the living room in the apartment where we lived. My father was at work. I don't know where my baby sister was. I listened to my mother's angry words and thought, "Anger is stupid. I will NEVER be angry." How a 2 year old could come up with that vow is still a mystery to me, but that was my vow -- a vow I tried to keep, consciously and unconsciously, to the detriment of my physical and mental health, until after my mother died. Now I know that anger is not stupid. It is a challenging and revealing part of being human. I understand now that my mother may well have been experiencing unexpressed grief in the form of expressed anger and rage that blocked her ability to live in peace and love fully.

My mother's first memory was that she was a very young child in a room full of people, that she looked out a window and saw a human body fall from above and said, "Body," and that no one understood what she was trying to say. Soon it was discovered that someone had committed suicide by jumping out a window. After my mother died, my father told me that when my mother was a young woman in her 20s, a young man killed himself after she expressed that she was not interested in a relationship with him.

The last time I saw my mother, in February of the year that she died, she told me that she was tired of being angry. Until she died, I had always had a hard time understanding other people's anger because I had not been able to consciously experience my own anger. After she died, I was shocked to discover the extent of that anger. As a child and until after she died, I don't remember feeling love for my mother. What I often felt in connection her was fear and something else I couldn't identify but now understand was anger and grief.

My mother's mother wasted away and died at home of gallbladder cancer when my mother was 20 years old. My mother told me that she had felt anger toward her mother long before her mother became ill and that she had felt anger towards her mother throughout her mother's illness. When I look at the above photo of my mother and her mother in the year prior to her mother's death, I see the physical and emotional "distance" between them. I suspect that my mother, too, was not able to love her mother until after her mother died. I believe that there was considerable emotional distance between my grandmother and her mother. When I was in my early 30s, always deeply ambivalent about motherhood and never having been pregnant, I made a clear decision not to be a mother and at age 36 underwent a tubal ligation, creating an irrevocable distance between me and the possibility of giving birth to a child.

When my mother was in her late 60s, in the years when she was considering converting to Judaism, she began to study Tai Chi. My favorite photos of my mother are those of her as a child, as a young woman on a horse, and as a 70-year-old woman practicing Tai Chi. On the first photo of her in the series of photos above, her mother had written, "Miss Independence." Maybe "independence" is what I first began to love in my mother after she died, something that made her somewhat distant and confusing as a mother but which now endears her to me, as well as this sonnet she wrote thirty years before she died and in which she expresses both grief and gratitude. It has taken me a long time to learn to begin to understand and love my mother who at age 50, as she began to turn away from organized religion, wrote:

The answers rise and fall like waves. I wait

Then blindly stumble on towards heaven's gate.






















Sometime in the months after my mother died, I was startled to experience a vision of my mother inside heaven's gate, being greeted by her mother whose name was Irene and whose name means "Peace."

Woman Looking Up (1984)

When I did this drawing, I was not feeling confident or strong in any area of my life except as an artist. People frequently expressed astonishment when they saw my drawings, saying things like "you are such a quiet and reserved person, it is surprising that you come up with these bold images." Around the time I did this drawing I read Zora Neale Hurston's book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which ends in the wake of a storm of Hurricane Katrina's magnitude and devastation:

"It was the meanest moment of eternity. A minute before she was just a scared human being fighting for its life. Now she was her sacrificing self with Teacake's head in her lap. She had wanted him to live so much and he was dead. No hour is ever eternity but it has its right to weep. Janie held his head tightly to her breast and wept and thanked him for giving her the chance for loving service. She had to hug him tight, for soon he would be gone. She had to tell him for the last time. Then the grief of darkness descended."