"This one goes out to the ones I love."
That's how the song goes, and that's where this post is going.
TIME:
November 18th, 1999. That would be my birthday (not birthdate...), I was living in Los Angeles and writing two columns for two different publications. In the next two months, I had no idea that my life would change so dramatically.
Around 7 p.m. PST, before caller-id was the norm, I picked up the phone. On the other end was a friend of mine calling to inform me that my dear friend Mitchell had just committed suicide. The method was gruesome, but in some respects exactly how he would have wanted to go. This is not a debate about suicide. It's about answering the phone and taking that call.
Nearly one-and-a-half months later, my mother called me while I was in Washington D.C., visiting friends before I was to pick up my sister and niece and drive - from Washington, through Virginia and all the way to Memphis. The call, from my mother, shocked our world. She had lung cancer, and we needed to get to the hospital quickly. It was not a fun Christmas, as it was intended to be. But it was extremely special.
SPACE:
We all need space in our lives. To breathe, to dream, to lose ourselves - and to find ourselves. Proximity does not equal closeness.
From both distressing calls, space mattered. One was 45 miles away, and another was about 19 hours away, driving as fast as we could to get there. "There" was, and remains, important. I wasn't in San Diego when the police report was written, nor caught the warning signs to possibly help my friend. I call it "smiling for the phone". 45 minutes, and yet a lifetime away. I was there, as was my sister and my niece, when - after driving all night - we rescued my mother in the middle of the night from a Memphis hospital. On Christmas Eve - no, make that Christmas Day, just a little before sunrise.
It was an act of teamwork and dedication that is only rivaled by my mother dying in my arms 9 months later, and my partner right by my side in a hospital room in Virginia. On that particular night, the nurse, in a most wonderful Southern way, said "Well, she was there for you when you came into life, and you were here for her when she departed." Words of wisdom. And then she said we should take the time to grieve, and gave us space to do that.
PERSPECTIVE:
We all need perspective. We have no idea how our actions, much less our reactions, affect those around us.
And yet, we are human. It sometimes takes years for us to understand our actions, or those actions and reactions of those around us, that "hit us in the gut." We do it to ourselves, and we do it to those around us. Usually not knowing the repercussions of our actions, and the reactions that follow. A ripple in the water caused by a stone we skipped across the water continues a wave that hits things, animals, people and the shores around us. And we were simply skipping a stone across the water.
And yet, life goes on. After years and years of seeing, touching and loving the ones we are with, we sometimes still don't understand everything they have been through, are possibly going through at this moment in time and space, or their perspective. Why do we do that? Because we are human.
//
In the end, Love is all we have.
I know this is a bit past Valentine's Day, but I never let time get in my way of saying, and feeling, what I want to transmit to my family, my friends and the planet.
For if we don't take the time, how can we possibly have the time to take?
For everyone in my universe, as well as those in yours, please remember: Time, Space and Perspective are important. In all of our lives.
And Love trumps them all.
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