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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-12-10
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi6gY3XKDFk
I am thrilled to be here today what a great group of speakers and ideas I'm a writer so I'll be reading to you from an essay called with out and it's %HESITATION from a selection of essays I've written from my own life that really look at the polls of births and deaths of the pools of existence and how those two states kind of near one another
and allowed to appreciate the time we have in between called widowed one will life feel like life again I'm wondering my daughter and I have just come in from shoveling the front walk and I've gone to the bathroom to use it and to have some time alone as I said I'm thinking about loss and love my constant mental undercurrents ever since my partner passed away two
years ago from a last and I found myself stunned to be raising our small daughter alone I'm wondering specifically if I will ever experience real love again %HESITATION of my relationships will feel like one lover getting me from point a to point B. until the final point of that I'm wondering now about a man I like I just sent him an email but now I'm sure
I said too much and if he ever did like me after radicular that by being too honest now if he likes me at all it is probably just as some kind of pedantic motherly friend do you wanna play matching game my daughter calls into me she's five and loves making up games okay I say a matching game under the table beside the radiator sure have not
gotten up yet and it gets even better than that she says then she's leaning against the door the same way I used to when my mother would go into the bathroom to escape my endless questions I made it up myself you made the cards yes I wash my hands and come out are you sure there's a match for all of them I ask well I hope
so she says she crawls under the table and I crawl after her crouching down and bending my neck uncomfortably well that's what I'm hoping anyway that there's a match for everyone she's muttering to herself as she lays out the cards Pacino some may have gotten lost we have a heavy table cloth on the table and have to use play the game with the help of a
flashlight my daughter's eyes are shining in for the first few minutes were playing I feel tenderly alert again almost as if I'm in one of those spot let moments of being watched that was how life with her father always felt to me a weekend conscious as if the three of us existed in the triangle of site in our true seeing of one another swung a sap
and a heightened awareness maybe I think love is another dimension because it is reflective predicated on really seen the other the seeing externalize as the others inner self and makes it real love makes us more real but now I think if I am being watched at all it is only by my own excitement my slender hope that someone may be with us again someday and I've
missed it so much this feeling of another scene asked them suddenly about to spill over why are you crying again my daughter asked %HESITATION you know I say I'm distracted in my daughter's alert so she makes all the matches and then I'm thinking this is a bad sign a very bad sign maybe I've had all the matches I will ever have out of sympathy my daughter
lets me pick up the very last match just as I'd feared theirs alone card that has lost its match for ever my partner got sick when our daughter was too and suffered from a last for the next year and a half before he died with a lesser asymmetrical lateral sclerosis the nerve cells stop sending signals to the muscles so the victim loses the ability to do
something every day dying relentlessly incrementally while his mind remains intact first Richard had a sore foot than a week knee months after that he could not walk then he could not lift himself to a sitting position then he could not use his arms to play guitar raises spoon or feed himself he died suffocating like all a LS victims when the paralysis spread to his torso and
his muscles could no longer open his long through this long decline I cared for him and had to come to understand the essence of love free of expectations devoid of a practical future as he lost the ability to partner parent move and speak I had to commune with his presence his essential being rather than any personality based on what he could do and this uncommon understanding
of love has thrown everything else off balance for me I am so aware of the other side of life that I feel a symmetrical in my relation to others or maybe what I feel is just a rarer symmetry as I experienced life always in relation to death as I encounter what is always in relation to what it is not my daughter has just invented another matching
game and wants to go back under the table to play it it has three times as many cards in the spinner she's made out of coffee filters and a toothpick one more hour until bed time it all goes very slowly it takes a long time with this many cards haphazardly arranged under a table and I'm weary in the way that only a single mother can be
weary a single grieving mother with no relatives in town and no adult versions except for one monthly splurge on a baby sitter to see friends somehow for a minute I stop my self pitying and resigned myself to the fact that this is just the game right now and once I accept this I begin to do very well I pick up four matches in a row as
if somehow I know just where the right numbers are I get so many matches that I basically just bow out at the and to let my daughter pick up the rest I figure I have gotten enough there is a common fallacy about life and death in our culture we think that we will die when we have had enough when we have lived enough life an accomplished
what we meant to accomplish the fact is not always happen when we really love other people and life itself we have never happened Richard had not had enough of his life and I am still in my thirties I really have not had enough throughout my grief I've had the idea that if I just keep following my own deepest interests I will someday meet another love this
theory led me to take my daughter into the wilderness of Billy's over our winter break we stayed in a little thatched roof hut beside a river in a rain forest and I was happy when we got back to the states I was talking with my sister in law who is encouraging me to create an online dating profile and just put myself out there make a list
of what you need she said you what someone around your age professional educated someone in the same city not necessarily not okay well she said she was genuinely trying to help I was thinking maybe I'd meet someone in Billy's I said longingly you were up in the mountains with my and subsistence farmers so I placed a jar in Tennessee the poet Wallace Stevens wrote the wilderness
rose up to it and sprawled around no longer while it took dominion everywhere the jar was gray and bear it was a jar like what you put the ashes but it could have been anything the my needs an idea to pool around something to offset and begin to organize it's inchoate thicket and in my case it's sadness Richard's absence is the jar in my inner Tennessee
the thing that focuses on colonizes my grief the wilderness of mind and feeling need such a thing I think sort of the way the self needs a beloved in order to know itself not all selves surely there are some people so involved are self sufficient that they can be reflected only in their journeys in their work but the self does I remember when our daughter was
smaller and Richard was not set sometimes I would be drying her off after her bath or reading her story before bed and I'd look up and he would be standing there in the doorway just watching us like he was trying to memorize acts fuzzy was he was a bear fuzzy was he had no hair my daughter's chanting in the bath now fuzzy was he was a
bunny fuzzy was he had no honey fuzzy was he was a chick fuzzy was he had no fuzzy was he was a check but he was he had no mama out what rhymes with Chet the other hard thing about single parenting is that there's no one to laugh she's on a wily campaign to stay up later every time I try to capture a little wet body
she starts saying one more trick just one more trick he's most excited about the dead man's flow in which she lies on her back slightly under water and sees how long she can hold her breath I look at her nearly taking up the length of the top now how I wish she could he could see how tall she's gotten how beautiful she is and then I
think of how long it's been since I've had since anyone has touched I can't imagine a man waiting this long to be with another person how long can I go on holding my breath and yet how will I learn to swim in a new element and sex and relationship now will surely be after her bath my daughter cannot decide between a book on Crowe magnon man
and Harold and the purple cran so we start on both and while I'm reading Harold she insists on getting up to find a purple Crandall hold you are cutting I ever I called out after her what's a kid my favorite she asked someone is always figuring out how to get what they want in your case bargaining in order to stay up a little bit later bargaining
I think one of the stages when you'll do anything anything just to live a little longer or just have them with you a little bit longer %HESITATION that I'm actually the exact opposite of a can neither she says I never break the rules I never get in trouble I only do what I'm supposed to do and now she's grinning so widely in persuasively that I can
see she is one of those people who will create her own reality and get the other people around her to believe it just like he did but as Harold looked down over the other side he slipped and there wasn't any other side of the mountain he was falling in thin air but luckily he kept his wits and his purple cran he made a balloon and he
grabbed onto it yesterday I was talking with my sister in law on the phone who is an excellent actually she explained that during pregnancy the body opens more capillaries and this increased blood flow actually enlarges the heart so she became a better runner after she became a mother that's how I feel I say like now after experiencing mothering caregiving death and grief my heart just has
more capacity I was chatting away waiting for my daughter to get out of school standing just inside the big reflective doors and the brighter light of early spring had begun to skid and shine off of everything I watched all the fathers lining up talking a little checking their phones and I remembered a dream I'd had the night before someone I could not see his face picked
my daughter up and kissed her they were laughing she was squirming to get down and they were familiar and happy I was a few steps behind watching and when I wrote woke I realized how much I've wanted this see her adored by someone else as much as I needed that for me I've needed it for her maybe we stand in the atrium of the next dimension
