Eighteen years ago my daughter got married at Mount Timpanogos in Utah. It was a very, very hot day and because "Timp" was the IN Temple for BYU students that year, the only slot that was available for the sealing--Mormon-speak for the marriage ceremony--was at 5 p.m., when it was still very hot and the temple was mobbed. We were lucky that the photographer managed to get shots without swarms of people around.
The wedding photos show us all lined up for the official photograph in front of the Temple, sweating in our wedding gear, R wearing his weird cowboy shirt and odd tie in a sea of suits with the Mormon standard white shirts and ties. I think I will just share this one, with the four of us, Richard and I a little stunned.
It would have been so nice had we had the wedding in Canada, with friends and family from our own side. Instead, it was in Utah, where neither set of parents lived but which was where the bride and groom wanted it to be. CJ's family, whom we met for the first time on the day of the wedding, came out in force as they lived much closer than our side of the family did, in California and in Utah. Still, with my family mostly deceased, I had the feeling in the Temple that they WERE there, witnessing in spirit if not in body.
Still, my late mother-in-law made it down from Alberta, bless her, and my maternal cousin, Kathleen, traveled all the way from Montreal. We had, of course, sent her a wedding invitation, never expecting she would come as, in those days, she wasn't one for traveling. So, when she called me up and said she was coming I was surprised. I felt I had to tell her that she wouldn't actually "witness" the wedding itself as Mormon temple weddings are restricted to Mormons who hold temple recommends. But she reassured me that she actually knew that, a work colleague had explained it to her. But she felt it was important that someone from "our" side of the family came. And in the end, as she was my only relative there, it meant a lot.
Family and friends DO mean a lot; it's taken me many years to realize just how much. I knew, that terrible year of 1968, when four of my family died and one moved hundreds of miles away, to the U.S., that my life had been shattered. But with such enormous loss comes a kind of numbness, a kind of "I can't process anything more so I am just shutting down." A fear of making new relationships because of a fear of further loss. It's difficult to express.
Recently, I have been reading about mindfulness, quite popular recently. It comes from the Buddhist tradition of noticing what we are thinking and feeling, of pulling the mind back when it goes on auto pilot. There's a Buddhist saying:
- What we cannot hold, we cannot process.
- What we cannot process, we cannot transform.
- What we cannot transform, haunts us.
I couldn't "hold" all that grief in 1968. I just somehow shut down, in a way that I can't even explain today. Yes, I still went through the motions of life. I sought pleasure where I could find it even when that pleasure was painful. I survived even when I had no clue what I was doing. I remember telling my father once, when we were in the midst of one of our arguments, that I didn't know who "I" was and I didn't think I would ever know as long as I lived under his roof. But that wasn't really the solution, moving out. He wasn't the one preventing me from discovering who I was. It would take many years to learn that and even now, at 68, I still consider myself a work in progress.
As I reflect on the 52 years between that horrible year where my life went sideways, to the 41 years since Laurie's birth forced me to re-evaluate how I had been living my life, the 22 years since my own marriage again forced a re-evaluation and the 18 years since Laurie's marriage, 16 years since my first grandchild's birth . . . I realize that as the Buddhists say, life IS constantly changing and the feelings that we have about our life, our situation, are fleeting even if, at the time, it seems those feelings will be there forever. Pain and even love, those emotions/feelings come and go, come and go. "We" call them back in our subconscious, often to our detriment.
Golly, this is deep stuff and as I write it, I realize that I am still trying to understand how it all works--this deep stuff anyway. I was chatting with a dog-walking friend this morning, Jeanie, and saying that in this time of pandemic, I feel a kind of responsibility, as the senior generation, to tell the younger folk that this too shall pass, that generations previous faced similar, and worse challenges and we all came through. It's hard to do while we are isolated and locked away. Jeanie, in her wisdom, said we start with our nearest and dearest, being present for them, presenting a calm and happy face to them. Not burdening them overmuch but simply being there....
Good words to chew over on this hot Arizona day.
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