Tad's birthday came and went. He would have been 45 years old. I posted to Facebook hoping people would respond with a wave of love but not much happened. Though his FB profile still exists, it doesn't show up when I want to add him to a post - so his circle didn't really see it.
Funny how we do that calculation: imagining what would have been: what if the Eiffel Tower hadn't been built? What if I had fallen for that person instead of this one? What if German had become the official language of the US?
We humans are no doubt the only species able to do this: use our brains to conjure up an image of the present as if the past hadn't really occurred. This incredible pre-frontal gymnastic no doubt causes us a lot of unnecessary harm as well.
My life today is grounded in the present with almost no more forays into the painful past and not a few into possible futures which I mostly picture as happy and fulfilling.
Buying Tad's house is the first of these projects. I am not always sure what is good for me but I keep noticing that my life is better when I am in his garden, sitting in his living room, petting his cat, chatting with the neighbors in his mobile home park -- all of which have become mine. It seems like a natural next step to offer to buy it. Happily the owners are quite open to the idea and would finance it for me since I have no money per se. Usually my fantasy of a perfect life doesn't include mobile home living but I see now that has changed.
I have also begun considering returning to work. Yesterday I interviewed for a government job. I am not sure I want to work for the government or am ready to work a full time job but the idea is pleasant to ponder.
This government job of course offers the wonderful cushion of generous benefits but appears to take away all the pleasures I enjoy in being a psychotherapist: going deep, working in peaceful settings, choosing one's clients. The fact that the interview was in a room that was inaccessible to me and no one was able to direct me coupled with the fact that the job itself looks absolutely nothing like the want ad both lead me to believe that I will not work for them. It's a mindset so far from mine.
I was recently invited to become part of an advisory group for a University of California research lab that is being created. While there I discovered that folks with my rather strange health condition tend to die earlier than others. They didn't give age ranges but needless to say it was a quick yank into an uncertain future, a rather unwelcome notion to ponder as I have been drenched in these various projects that have me looking forward - possibly over a few decades.
Hence I find myself wondering the age-old question: follow the material comfort or follow the passion? And if I am going to live ten more years the answer to this question is much different than if I am going to live thirty-five?
Finally there is the fact that I am in a new, promising relationship with a loving and kind man. Younger than me and full of dreams he exudes hope for the future. He envisions building a career for himself, maybe having a family in Santa Cruz with me. Even though my time with Tad has taught me that people can disappear in an instant - I see myself pulled from the present moment and enjoying the pleasure of imagining a future with him.
(At times a heightened sense of duty slaps me down - telling me that I am not doing Tad a favor, that I am not respecting him nor his family's grief.)
While hiking down a canyon of the San Lorenzo River yesterday, I stopped on a certain flat boulder squeezed between two rushing rapids. I looked around me and took in the sounds, the smell of the bubbling river, the towering trees and dying logs. Cesar came up behind me and said wisely: "This is why dying people cry. It's so difficult to say good-bye to this much beauty." Little did he know that I was weeping, remembering the other times I had sat on that very rock speaking to the vastness.
Once --before Tad died-- I sat there squinting my eyes and picturing his soul flying above the river, up through the redwoods and out into the sky. Days before his actual death I wonder if I wasn't hastening his departure somehow.
Now that I think about it -and it's extraordinary that this never occurred to me before - I am so lucky (we are so lucky) that Tad was actually mentally present until the last twenty or so minutes of his life. I am so grateful that the morning of his death he was able to ask for breakfast, to tell me he was going to stay in bed a little longer and to say to me with a loving smile "I don't think I am long for this world - am I?".
I don't believe in God or spirits or souls. I do believe in these incredible brains --that we are fortunate enough to have running our machinery. In the same way they can imagine realities that might have been I sense that they see things beyond three dimensions in ways that are mysterious. This keeps me ever fascinated by human beings and what incredible things that happen when they come together.
