Steppin’ Out
As my Father has sagely observed, “no one asks to be born.” Whatever ontological understanding you apply to the passage from “the forceps to the stone,” (“Hejira,” Joni Mitchell) this given remains: if you make it here onto this earth, your time here is finite.
I had started an essay a few weeks ago about my difficulty in comprehending just how many people of my parents generation will be passing on to the something or nothing that follows death in the next decade, but then the second person of my generation in our family to pass passed away and then a friend died as well, and I naturally began to think about how we reckon with the loss of loved ones in general…
In 2003, the first year I lived in Chicago, my Great-Aunt died, whose Grandchild passed away just a few weeks ago and I clearly remember how heartbroken I was, even though she had lived past one hundred. She was staunch, brilliant and very funny. I still have her Larousse French Dictionary, a beautiful edition given to me by her daughter, the oldest member of my Dad’s generation.
Although, by age 17 I had lost all of my beloved Grandparents, even six years later when Dossie passed away, I hadn’t really taught myself how to grieve in any constructive fashion.
So it took an even more hard-hitting loss and a a slow reckoning over a number of the ensuing years for me to to force myself to finally sit down and play a chess match with “the idea” of death, and how to come to terms with it, even if little by little.
When I lost my Mom eight years ago, I had to finally start on that work. It was unavoidable. While I could console myself with the idea that at least she had missed the Trump presidency, what I needed to do was to teach myself how to grieve the loss of her in the particular. What traditions could I continue? What lessons had she taught me that I needed to take more to heart? What were the most important legacies she left, and how could I give them oxygen and space to still have impact on the the world?
This reckoning with grief takes time: the first year, it was mostly about breath work to avoid dips into despair and panic attacks, but as my friends and family of my generation negotiate middle age, and the loss of their own parents, one small consolation is that I can offer actual empathy. It doesn’t bring back the single best person I’ve ever known, but it helps me find ways to continue her practice of loving attention towards others.
A lot of art hinges on the essential paradoxes of human life, because we, like Jesus in the old hymn, are “born just to die.”And, of course, what does one as an artist do in the face of the unknowable, unbearable and even the trauma of day to day in Covid 2.0? Try to “do language,” as Toni Morrison wrote, to try to invite meaning into the darkened chamber in which we sometimes sit, transfixed by the grimmer realities of life.
I consider the term “carpe diem.” My cousin who we lost recently really did, in all the best senses of the word, in devotion to family, friends and taking joy in life. Taking joy in life is truly a good way to thank circumstances for the good, and thumb your nose at the inevitable bad. A lot of life is finding new chicken recipes and trying to get out of bed every day, but there is also olive oil, cheese and charcuterie and family and fiends and wine, and he loved all of the above.
The afternoon of my most recent birthday included time writing letters of condolence to my cousin’s siblings. While I was writing, Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” came on, and it felt like music sometimes feels in a Scorcese movie, a jarring contrast, but at the same time, quite oddly apropos, we don’t know what comes after we step out, but we know we’re going to “step out” eventually, nonetheless.
And if someone has brought you joy to carry you through this world, as my cousin did, as my Great-Aunt did, as my grandparents did, as my mother did, and as my friend who died just this past week did, that joy is still there to share. Do it in their honor…