A Heady Start to a Day

I began my morning with watching a movie called Shooting Dogs, the antithesis of Hotel Rwanda. Instead of surving, 2,500 Rwandans who sought safety at a school/UN base met their death in slaughter when the UN troops stationed there were pulled back.

The film ended with stills of people working on the project, from third director to wardrobe assistant, and notations listing how many family members each of them lost in the genocide that was never really called a genocide until the slaughters ended and corpses were counted.

In keeping with stills loaded with history, my living room was coincidentally littered with the dozen or so photo albums I have that were my mother's and my family's, things I'm to put away today after having to remove them all from my entertainment armoire when I switched TVs with my brother on Friday night (long story there). Against my better judgment, I flipped through one or two of the books and suddenly was awash with that muddied sense of loss coupled with "where are they now" wonder that comes from years gone by without contact with people of old.

It's so hard to process sometimes all the memories and people we pass by in life, and it's harder still to realize in the present just how distant the faces around us might become in the years ahead of us... how little we hang on to those around us as time slips past us all. Sometimes the memories are dominated with betrayals and lies, and that, too, is a hard thing to process when you're staring into a smiling face clouded with ignorance of the things to come.

Beyond the photo albums, though, lie even more haunting connections to my past I need to delve into and purge. My recently set goals include finally going through my storage unit so that I may get rid of those things holding me down and reckon with the things I've been trying to avoid. Paperwork, mementoes, oddities, these things all clutter my life right now, and they're things I need to finally get past and get over.

Coming to terms with the life that's left you behind is a hard thing to do, and doing it at the wrong time can hurt you more than it'll heal. The last time I began sifting through things, the first thing I came upon was the eulogy I wrote for and delivered at my mother's funeral. I came upon a few more things immediately thereafter, including my mother's journal, and the first page I flipped to happened to be one that spoke of her great unhappiness and her lack of desire to continue "the good fight" that encompasses most of our lives. Needless to say, I entered a period of fuctedness that consumed me for the next couple of weeks and ebbed into the months that followed. I wasn't ready to go there, and I certainly didn't need to know how unhappy my mother was in the years before her death.

But I'd like to think I'm strong enough to go there now. I'd like to think I need to know, I need to move past it. I'd like to think I'm ready for a future and strong enough to endure my own past. But am I? I won't know until really dive into all that clutter. The reality is, every little thing holds a memory, a tenable tie to my past. Every little thing poses a challenge, a psychotherapy exercise in and of itself.

The thing is, though, that the future is here. It has been here for every day I've been waking and breathing, yet I haven't really able to accept that because I've not really allowed my past to fall away from me yet.

Perhaps now it's finally time to do just that.

It ain't, however, gonna be good times. This is going to be a hard few weeks as I tackle piece after piece after piece of the life that was in realization of the life that never is gonna be. When I get to the other side, though, I know I'll have a better understanding of myself and how I've come to be who I am. Shrug. And maybe who I still want to be.

I hate housecleaning, man, but this shit really takes the cake. Sigh.

(Ellen Burstyn, the incredible actress, wrote an autobiography called "Lessons in Becoming Myself", and it's times like these I'm consciously aware I'm becoming more of the myself I want to be, as hard as some periods of change may be and all. We never really stop becoming ourselves, and this journey never really gets easier. It is, however, always interesting.)