Smoking With Tony…Part 3

As I was driving home from that traumatic visit with my husband that I spoke about in the last post, I was listening to a playlist that I had made for Tony’s Celebration of Life.  It has 80 songs on it that were taken from my larger playlist and were meaningful in various ways as I put it together for Tony. I had been listening to that playlist for the last week or so, as I was getting ready for burying Tony’s ashes.  The songs on that particular playlist were important to me as I was going through the initial shock and grief of Tony’s death. Music has always been my solace and these songs spoke to my soul.  When I got home, I brought the playlist into the garage with me and continued to listen to it as I waited for Alice and started to smoke. As I listened to the music and smoked, I could feel the weight leaving my shoulders and experienced a peace settling into my soul.

As Alice drove into my driveway and parked, I could tell she was listening to her music and finishing up the song that was playing.  As I waited for her to come in, I thought to myself, “Alice, welcome to my spiritual experience, I hope you’re ready for this.”

That evening, Alice and I talked a lot and I explained to her a little bit about how I was feeling before she arrived.  I felt myself opening up to the spiritual experience even more.  What I call a “spiritual experience” is a sense of peace in my soul, opening myself up to more to the possibilities of digesting the experience and becoming more receptive to not just hearing, but really listening to the world around me and take in what makes sense to me. I’m usually of the mindset that I am in charge, and although I hear what’s being said or happening, I’m not always open to taking it into my soul.  I’ve experienced these spiritual awakening’s from time to time during my sobriety as I faced difficult situations, but that night was a whole new level for me.  I literally felt as if I was opening up like a flower opens up, ready to take in what life has to offer.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years as I was dealing with the chronic pain, my husband’s end of life and Tony’s death considering where I was spiritually and what I really believed in.  I grew up in the Baptist religion and believed everything I was taught as a child.  In my teens, I began to see the hypocrisy in the way people in the church were preaching and how they implemented their “rules” of a Christian life.  I didn’t like what I was seeing and somewhere around age 16, I started rebelling and denouncing organized religion for myself.  It didn’t make sense to me in my world.  During my drinking and disorganized life, I had come to the conclusion that there was a God, but that there wasn’t a God in my life.  When I got sober in AA in my early 20’s, the first three steps, admitting I was powerless over alcohol and my life had become unmanageable, came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity and turn my will and life over to the care of a God of my understanding were what got me started on my spiritual journey.  So, at that time, the God of my understanding was the God I learned about in church as a child.  I still wasn’t buying the tenets of organized religion, but was desperate enough to buy into that.

That was the basis for getting sober and guided me through the last 40 years or so.  But I had come to the point where I was questioning what I believed and wondering if there was more to this whole spiritual thing.  I was already opening up and digesting the information I was seeking and started to come to some conclusions as to what it really meant to me.  This has been an ongoing process for some time and I’m pretty sure I’m not done yet.  I’m continuing to learn and understand what makes sense in my heart.

The really interesting thing for me in all this, is that it didn’t stop there.  As I approached my aunt’s funeral and Tony’s burial, I felt more alive and was not dreading the weekend so much and I really felt a change in how I looked at things.  I was no longer so anxious about spending all that time with Tony’s fiancé (I struggle with understanding her view on life and love) and although we bonded as we walked through the six weeks when Tony was in the hospital and his funeral, I wasn’t really ready to spend 3 days with her and wondered how that was going to change the dynamics of being with my family and grieving our losses.  I figured I would just let it be and focus on being with my family.  She was going to be who she was and it wasn’t my responsibility to monitor her words or actions.  For me, it was all about the grieving process for my aunt and Tony and that was my focus.  Amazingly that part of the trip up north for the funeral and burial wasn’t nearly as challenging as I had thought it could be.  When I let go, my annoyance disappeared and a pleasant time was had by all.  She started pitching in to help with the many things I couldn’t help with due to my bad hip and being on crutches and her help was appreciated by all.

Another interesting thing happened that weekend.  As I mentioned previously, I’m not big on organized religion.  As I’ve attended weddings and funerals over the years, I usually tune out when the pastor or priest starts their sermon.  I’ve never been interested in what they have to say, and it all seems to be wrapped up in the religion I don’t believe in anymore.  This time, after I gave the eulogy and listened to the song that had been chosen (The Only Scars in Heaven), once again my soul opened up and I actually listened to what the pastor had to say.  I was still filtering some of his words, because I wasn’t sure I bought into it all, but I listened to the message.  Interestingly enough, the message was meaningful when I quit picking apart the religious part and listened.  He talked about the “dash” on every tombstone and referenced the poem written by Linda Ellis called The Dash.  I won’t recap what the poem says, you can look it up online. Essentially, the pastor’s message was about how we live the dash between our birth and our death.  He kept relating it to the Bible, but I still heard the message.  Living your dash is really about how you live and love, not about what you gain in material things.  The challenge for us is to reflect on how we’re living our dash and what we might want to change to make our lives more meaningful for ourselves and others and the legacy of living that dash the best I can.

At this point in my life, the message was a good reminder about my real purpose in life and redirects my focus to living and loving and away from the things causing me pain.  It’s not about getting through what I’m going through, but more about what I’m going to do in the next part of my life’s journey.  Being a part of the Chick and Alice team is giving me the opportunity to better myself and share my healing journey with others.  A perfect opportunity to put the words into practice.

People often talk about living God’s will.  My opinion only…There is not a “God” up there directing my life and choosing what happens in my life or how successful I’m going to be.  For me, it’s not about what career, how much money I make, what kind of home or other possessions I can acquire, but I believe God’s will for me is to live life to it’s fullest, ever mindful of what I can bring to myself and others in joy and peace.  The rest of it is up to me to decide about what I do and how I’m going to go about it.  I always have the choice about what I will participate in and only I am accountable for my life, nobody else.

Back to that weekend.  The entire weekend was truly a joy to be a part of with family, even though the occasion was not a happy one.  All who could be there, were including the brother that I had been estranged from for 18 years until my dad’s funeral two years ago, and my other son, who was unable to make his brother’s funeral.  I cried my heart out when we buried Tony’s ashes.  I did not feel the peace that I did at my dad’s funeral when I was able to really let him go.  He had lived a full life and was at peace, believed in heaven and I knew he was over the pain and darkness of chronic depression.  I don’t think I can ever let Tony go.  He is also over the pain and darkness of the disease of alcoholism, but in my heart, it wasn’t time for him to go yet.  He didn’t reach his bottom until it was too late and he was already dying.  He no longer had the chance to change his life and find his peace.  It was truly a tragedy of active alcoholism.  But he did cross the line before he died, and accepted the fact that his drinking had literally made his life unmanageable.  But, that Sunday on my way home, listening to his playlist, I realized that burying his ashes was a very painful, but necessary process to walk through and it finalized his passing to a degree.  I think I can move on with my hurting heart, knowing he is really gone and I must live my dash the best I can.

I wrote most of the above post earlier today before I had to take care of some basic things…such as my pedicure.   Following my pedicure I came home and had a interesting conversation with the woman who been cleaning my house on a regular basis for several years now.  We have mutual friends and have come to know each other fairly well by now.  Her mother is in Assisted Living, but is still making some pretty bizarre decisions for herself.  As we shared what we were each going through right now I came to fully realize the steps I had been taking lately and the lessons I’ve learned over the past few years had brought me to the other side of hell and I’m ready to be myself again.  Last weeks after burying Tony’s ashes, I felt like maybe I could move on, but today I discovered a bit of my real self has really come back.  I can feel it in my heart, I hear it in my thought process and I see it in the way I interacted with the Clearview Works team in our weekly on-line meeting tonight and the conversation with a close friend afterwards, who told me she was glad to see it, too.  This doesn’t mean I’m done with grieving or trauma in my life as my husband and I walk through his end of life and I continue my life.  It does mean to me, though, that I have a renewed energy for what’s to come.  I don’t know where the next part of my journey will bring me, or if it will be the last part of my life’s journey.  I do know deep in my soul that I am ready to go.  Hopefully, I can take all these life’s lessons with me and live the rest of my dash even better than what I’ve lived before.  Good thing I learned early that I should strive for progress, not perfection, don’t want that anyway.  Perfection would be just too boring.    My imperfect life is what I’ve been living and learning my lessons from.  I kinda like it and I love who I am today as a result.  I don’t wish for a different life, I just want to keep getting better at living the life I have.

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