Heave and smile
I didn’t want to write anything about this at all and I’ve deleted the entry twice now. It feels a bit false and voyeuristic to mourn celebrity.
This morning, I read a piece by Penelope Trunk where she writes of her fascination with suicide. I am not fascinated with suicide. I say, perhaps simply, that we should live until we don’t and not go at our own hands. But Trunk writes poignantly and straightforwardly, she almost convinces me:
It’s true. I am fascinated by suicide: Why don’t more people kill themselves? Life is very hard. And there is no sane reason to believe it will, at some point, get easier. So why do we keep going? I don’t know. This fascinates me.
This morning, Alexander McQueen killed himself.
McQueen was my first encounter with couture – with fashion, really. His art had whimsy and it was curious. It was maniacal and fantastic and kind of strange, but never just because. His clothes made me heave and smile in one go. At his best he took me somewhere else to think and stare at my too-plain shoes.
I’m not fascinated, but I want to understand. Maybe they’re the same thing, in the end.
[all images via]
Reconciliation with the angels
Maritsa died yesterday. She was an amazing woman.
Suffice to say, her death is not mine to to share. What I will share is that she’s been my family since before I was a notion, my third grandmother, a spectacularly elegant lady who left, not suddenly, but too soon.
I’m having a difficult time of it. More so than I imagined, and despite my stoic mask. And not because it’s hard to lose beautiful human beings (though it is), or because I didn’t say a proper goodbye, or for some other easy platitude with which to mask my grief.
Rather, I’m battling an angel on my shoulder.
Maritsa was a deeply religious woman. She observed the Orthodox fast – she lived and breathed the church – her daughter married a priest - she sprinkled basil water in the deepest recesses of all the homes of all the people she loved – she died, I am sure, at deep-seated peace with her God.
I make no secret that religion troubles me. It does. Strangely, though, her reverence and devotion never troubled me in any great way.
Last night, I hung up my phone on an oddly-quiet College streetcar, having just been told by my mom that Maritsa died that morning. And my mind, without filter or regard, said a silent she’s with the angels and I crossed my heart – Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
Amen.
And I just lost it.
I’ve spent the better part of the last 24 hours wrapped in a troubling cognitive dissonance. I can’t bring myself to be dogmatic about this beautiful woman’s death. I start to think it’s okay if I want her to be with the angels, that I want to imagine Maritsa her heaven without it reeking of hypocrisy. There isn’t any reason for me to even wrestle with this. I will heal, as we humans do – I will placate the screaming angel on my shoulder.
There’s this wonderful line from Dickinson: Parting is all we know of heaven. I’m parsing its meaning to suit my story (don’t we all do this with poetry?) but I think it fits. That is, this is my first real-world brush with a religious heaven. The word is otherwise so storybook, ephemeral, tossed loosely into pop lyrics; but when it’s the destination of someone I hold dear to my heart, parting is all I know of this place. It helps to quiet the dissonance the teeniest bit.
Without thesis or reason, today I extend a piece of bread to the angel on my shoulder and all the others. I hope they’ve received Maritsa. I hope she’s at grace.
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