The greatest gift one can give is that of truly devoted listening.  I find that to be true in all facets of my life, but especially so with the very young and the very old.

Tim and I recently visited his 102 year old grandmother in her nursing home in Des Moines.  We spent the first twenty minutes trying to engage her in group conversation that I am sure was gibberish.  She doesn't remember anyone from her current life because in her mind she is a twelve year old girl walking her horse, Bonnie, to her piano lessons in the grand old year of 1920.  As the family spoke, she grew more and more agitated and those around her grew more and more desperate for her to remember.  One memory.  One mention of Steve or Patty or Tim or Char or a singular name that would indicate she was truly with us, that she truly understood who we are and the year in which she's living.  It's a gift every family in every crappy Lifetime movie is given, that one last moment with a loved one in which they bust out every person's name with a vivid flash of life and everyone hugs and then the person dies but all are vindicated by the return of Memory.  Good old Memory.  The thing which ties us to this life, to this person, to who we perceive ourselves and our families to be.

When in actuality, we are much more than memory.  Memory is just a thing, a recollection of things which have happened.  At our essence, I imagine memory does not factor in a single bit.  Except, of course, that it can shape our ability to be courageous or fearful based on previous success or failure.  But when it is gone, we still exist.  We do not cease to be, I don't believe, simply because the context of history has disappeared.

So after a half hour of feeling fearful of overstepping boundaries, I sat next to Cleyla and we had quite a raucous conversation.  Out of pearly, glaucoma-ridden eyes she and I planned a party in which she would wear red and I would wear blue and we would bring a picnic basket.  Tim, we decided, could attend if he continued to be good, but the others would all be joyfully welcomed.  We had already finished the ham and Mom was finishing up the potatoes and we thought the best place might be down by the river, next to the old scraggly oak that tipped at such a precarious angle we were certain one day it would wash downstream.  In moments of worry, Cleyla would wonder if we were chatting too long, if she had missed dinner.  When I assured her Mom would certainly save her some, we continued planning, talking about the Christmas gifts we would buy the ghosts of a past only she recalled.

And so I found sitting in that room that as memory evades us, we do not cease to be at all.  We can still be storytellers and feel the joy of Christmas and the sweetness of fudge on our lips.  We can smile and laugh and be joyous, even if most of who we perceived ourselves to be has disappeared.  Although the lack of memory is a painful, debilitating fact to those who loved her most and knew her when she still "had her mind," I found our interaction to be meaningful and love-filled.  I found parts of myself in her and, deep in the secret recesses of my heart, wished we could throw that party together.  We told a good story, one so compelling I am certain we nearly dreamed it into existence.

The greatest gift we can give, indeed, is love.  Love not tied to the dreadful weight of memory.  Love not obstructed by our own wish for someone to be different than who they are.  Love fully entangled with a deep commitment to listen deeply and, especially, with the heart.

Accidental Babies

I love the song "Accidental Babies" more than is probably healthy.  It's an atrocious song, right?  Filled with regret and wish and the acknowledgment that life moves on, that we move on, and that some things can never be the same even if they seemed so desperately right in the moment.  Love between two people doesn't seem to follow rules.  Life happens and gets terribly in the way.  One is immature.  Or one feels a desperate yearning for something that turns out to be a shallow, misunderstood desire. Or one finds another love only to realize the first was, indeed, the superior.  Is this, then, a part of the path we walk?  Unfulfilled, unrealized, almost somethings between friends or strangers or roommates or old loves?

"Does he drive you wild, or just mildly free?'

How many people, do you think, end up with someone who drives them wild?  How many people are lucky enough to do forever with someone who makes them feel so alive?

Is it healthy, even, to maintain that pace?

I had a teacher in high school who maintained that the most boring man you meet, the one who absolutely drives you to tears with his unexcitability is the one you should marry.  She insisted, in fact, that he would be the stable father/husband figure about which every woman dreams.  No wild, passionate break up notes followed shortly by desperate reconciliations.  No letters of poetry insisting life without the other is equivalent to a death.  Nothing exotic or crazy or world altering.  Just a constant, stable love.  A dinner on the table, a consistent income, and a father who would desperately love children.

What do I do with the almost-had moments of my life?  Do I put them on the shelf and dust them off from time to time and reminisce about what those days were like or do I, in a moment of absolute insanity, pursue them?  Do I write an illicit letter in the dark, secretly relaying feelings I thought I had put to bed?  Or do I forget them?  Forget them forever.  Bury them deeply. Pursue my automaton lifestyle in which I do not think too deeply or too long upon anything that troubles me, upon the imaginings that sneak up when I am close to sleep, or in the moment I make eye contact, across the room, with someone who used to mean so desperately much to me.

I like this song, I think, because none of us is without regret.  Because life would not be without opportunities missed.  The point, I suppose, is to think about those moments in which you felt so god damned alive and to relish them for existing, while whole heartedly appreciating precisely where you are and precisely what you have.  I'm not talking about putting blinders on and trudging on if life is awful.  But in the case that you have found another who drives you wild (and not mildly free) and is bold enough to take you on, then I suppose you should relish that person.  And, perhaps, have accidental babies with him.

Maybe the real lesson here is simply to have Accidental Babies.  Does that seem like a good plan?

I wish there was a way to remember, every single day, that we are all connected and that we are only as good as the sum of all our parts.  The hospital where I am a student serves a lot of at risk patients.  We scan numerous people with chronic, awful illnesses that are often behaviorally contracted.  Lots of Hepatitis C, lots of AIDS, and lots of Cirrhosis.  And it is so easy when I am in a room with a patient who has contracted AIDS to blame them.  To go to that place in my mind where only derelict, irresponsible people get themselves sick.  Disease is like that; it's easy to make someone who is ill not like you because it means maybe (just maybe) you're less likely to get the disease.  If only idiots get AIDS, then somehow white folk like us are safe.

But as I go through an exam (and our exams are LONG) and I begin talking to the patient, I find we have much more in common than not.  I find we may agree on politics or a favorite food or simply in relishing these last days before winter hits.  The things that unite us are so much more gargantuan than the things that separate us.

And then, inevitably, I find myself thinking about what it would be like to grow up in the really rough parts of Denver as a young, black female.  Having worked in Denver Public Schools, I know that the education is about as thorough and quality as a safety check point in a small, off-the-map airport.  I know that a lot of my students didn't have a parent at home because they were working two jobs just to pay rent.  And I know a lot of my students were lonely.  So terribly, desperately alone.

And if you do the addition on that equation, you find a really lost, scared human.  And it is no wonder, really, that they may find themselves in bed with someone they shouldn't or sticking a needle full of something in an arm.  It's no wonder that when kids like I was sit at the kitchen table with their parents, working on their homework, another fraction of the population is searching for any place and any person to call home.

And so I remind myself, again and again, that we are all so much alike.  If only we could listen long enough to appreciate just how much we should love one another.  And we should, truly.  It's not some cheesy, stereotypical line.  It is the truth.  What we owe one another, every single other living thing in this universe, is the love, compassion, and respect of acknowledging them in whatever place they may find themselves.

Let's be clear that life is hard.  Life is so, so, so impossibly demoralizing.  It is full of loss and sadness and sometimes a desperate loneliness that seems like it will never dissipate.  But life, above all, is beautiful.  It is two lovers sitting on a park bench, holding hands in the moonlight.  It is the irreversible love of a parent for their child.  It is the ridiculous connection we're capable of with the natural environment.  This world, this very one that seems so drearily long and difficult and exhausting, is truly a place of enchantment.

It is all the richer for each and every patient I see, in whatever state they arrive.  It is richer, even, as a result of all the angry, lost souls.  And it is all the richer, especially (my dearest), for containing you.

You, my friend, are beautiful.  I owe my life to you.  And to all the oh so very lost souls in the world who make my longest days that much more tolerable.

I spend more time every day doing worthless things.  I use my hours stalking my old friends and gaping at who has gained weight or who has married or who has ten children and another on the way than I do thinking about important thoughts or talking to those I love about the state of our respective worlds.  It is easier to turn the computer on and to turn my mind off than to live vigilantly and deliberately.  It is easier for me to be part of a mock world than to venture forth and say hi to my neighbor.

Being honest is so difficult.  Not honest in the biblical sense of telling the truth about having eaten the last cookie from the jar, but in the sense that seeing reality as it is becomes more difficult as one ages.  We are all storytellers; we see something happen in the world and internalize it in our minds and that is the fiction that we choose to live.  When I was younger, however, I was less scared of the things I perceived.  I was more liable to look someone in the eye and tell them precisely what I saw, fictional storytelling or not.

When I was in Africa and I was torn apart by the rage I felt at organized religion for decimating the indigenous tribes, I wrote vehemently and passionately, journaling with tears pouring from my eyes at the injustices I had seen.  I sat inside a tent in the middle of the Maasai Mara, my world inalterably changed by the experience I was having and I simply felt it.  I cried until there were no tears left and I listened to "The Arrival" until it put me to sleep almost every night I was there.  I was livid.  I was seething.  The childlike glee with which I had approached the world for 21 years prior was disappearing.  I was becoming something new.  Altered.  Permanently.  For better or worse.  But I was, in the least, very much alive to the newer version of myself.

In the wake of the shootings in Aurora, a gun threat at work, and an absolutely joyous celebration with good family, I have written precisely zero letters to document or process my world.  I have sat in the passengers seat and simply allowed life to happen to me.

I am edging dangerously close to a stereotype in saying that I "allowed life to happen to me."  This is something people say to one another all the time in coffee houses.  It is vague and lacks meaning and is probably most often muttered by self-help coaches.  It is an avoidance of saying something with merit or value.  It is a filler.

What we should say instead of such a meaningless phrase, is that which digs at us most deeply.  We should decry the shootings in Aurora as a beyond awful event, as something that rips at the fundamental fabric of the way most of us see the world.  We should decry the death of so many young people as utterly, terribly heart breaking.  We should look with pity in one moment and rage in the next at the shooter and try with all that we have not to hate him and not to want to kill him with our bare hands and not to want to put him against a wall and shoot each limb individually and watch as he suffers so that the world will hold some form of karmic justice.  And we should not, in a moment of enlightenment (however brief these moments are), be ashamed to admit that there is room for empathy for a human being so tortured and sad and alone that he would go so far as he did on that Friday morning.  It should be okay to go from hatred to love to anger to deep sadness in a matter of moments.

What I should say, instead of saying nothing, is that incidents like that remind me of my own mortality.  They remind me of the fact that I might not wake up tomorrow.  That, despite my youth, I am still vulnerable.  And, if nothing else, I should admit that sometimes there is not order and there is not justice for those who are good.  Sometimes things just don't make sense.  And although there is often overwhelming beauty here, there is also the potential for heartbreaking tragedy.  Gut-wrenching, life-altering pain that leaves the loved ones of victims on a path completely altered from the one they presumed they were walking.  There is room for all these things in life, it is simply nice to believe that perhaps, the events that leave us altered for the better happen more often.

What I would like to learn to do again is to be honest.  To write what I think, without shame or embarrassment.  As I have gotten older, it has been hard to give an opinion on any event because my world has become so gray.  I used to be more black and white, to cling to my beliefs vehemently.  Now, though, I can see a picture in a hundred different ways over the course of five minutes.  I am less certain than ever about truth.  Less certain than I have ever been that it exists at all.  And if there is no truth, how can one share what one sees?

Perhaps even more frighteningly, if there is no truth, is there meaning?