“Not if you don't want it to be…”
“You said that maybe it's over / Not if you don't want it to be / For once in your life, / here's your miracle / Stand up and fight
(This is it) / Make no mistake where you are”
“This is It”-Kenny Loggins, 1979
“If this is it / Please let me know / If this ain't love / You'd better let me go”
“If This Is It” -Huey Lewis, 1983
For Meg and Catherine
“Make no mistake where you are” is always the assignment. It’s not the sort of thing you can type into a Chat Bot and hope for a “life hack.” It’s a step beyond intoning “tree, rabbit, garbage truck” when you are having a panic attack; it’s actually assessing “the condition your condition is in,” when your to-do list won’t magically make anything happen, and you wonder if you could suddenly go mad, and everyone but you would know what was happening.
A year ago this week, my dear, complicated, always relentlessly present friend Meg passed away.
It is interesting that “this is it,” as a phrase, oddly describes both actual presence and its presumptive recent end.
2.
For me, the guitar solo at the start of “If This Is It” absolutely captures the simultaneously joyful and rueful feeling that attends the endless “here we go again…” of the human experience we are variously heir to, regardless of good or bad circumstances.
Against my own cynicism and pain aversion, I agree with Toni Morrison when she offered this thought at the 2004 Wellesley Commencement: “I didn’t ask to be born, as they say. I beg to differ with you. Yes, you did! In fact, you insisted upon it. It’s too easy, you know, too ordinary, too common to not be born. So your presence here on Earth is a very large part your doing.”
It is perhaps no accident that an act of mourning Meg, just less than one year gone, through words would be laden with references and song.
She was a very referential person, who tended to use the past and its artifacts as a central prism with which to both warily and joyfully assess the present.
She curated artifacts: when we used to vacation with friends in Upstate New York right around this time of year a number of years ago, she would arrive with her creepy haunted doll, a fake fur bathrobe, the karaoke machine and many other souvenirs of previous vacations in Tannersville. They were articles of ritual, nostalgia and re-manifestation.
We shared a sense that neither of us showed up in this world, willingly or not, with the standard apparati of normal people. We were (and I stubbornly remain) remarkably gifted in some ways, and utterly emotionally unprepared and hapless in others.
The same person who would jump with both feet into gathering and directing a Zoom theater ensemble during quarantine, which would then hubristically perform a staged reading of King Lear right out of the gate, also once had a weeklong meltdown over a broken refrigerator.
Everything had an unfiltered immediacy for her, which I share, and it isn’t the easiest way to live, but if you wanted something done, she was definitely your first phone call.
She would show up to assist a friend of a friend in a jam on a dime because inevitably it would involve solving a situation, which would involve two of her favorite things: planning and execution.
3.
Toni Morrison also had this to say in her 2004 Wellesley Commencement address: “…because there is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.”
And Meg managed to do that in the shorter than usual time provided. She achieved what that “difficult beauty” would mean for her particular adulthood.
She passed away about a year ago, and although she is of course nominally gone, when I listen to Micheal McDonald sing “You said that maybe it's over / Not if you don't want it to be,” I am reminded she doesn’t really feel that far away these days, and I sometimes feel that she is more present to me now, than when she was just a text away. Mourning is not just a process of letting go, but also of letting stay: of gathering up everything you recall sharing with a person before their death, and then asking the big questions of that particular harvest of impressions and memories. To ask: “Where did we intersect?” “When did we uplift each other?” “When did we fail each other?” “When did we most generously invite each other to become more fully ourselves?” “Where did we find most comfort in the dance between our subjectivities?”
As I’ve written before, I believe that if someone means a great deal to you in the course of their life, when they leave this earth physically, you need to honestly ask what their work was in this world, and as far as you are able to continue that work you must.
In the course of my editing this essay (I missed two typos in the last one), another dear friend from my generation also passed away just today, and she epitomized the importance of this. When her mother passed away from dementia, she immediately got to work on dementia advocacy, changing careers to do so.
We never know how long we have, but if you put yourself to the work that will honor the departed, you are not just left in alone in loss, but rather, you have the opportunity to expand the scope of your own work here in this world, always so in need of repair, and they will still walk beside you, because it’s not over…
“ / Not if you don't want it to be. / “