Poetry of Pizza ran from February to March of 2010 in the Cal Rep Theater.
Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,
That's a nice opener, isn't it? I think I'll start using that, now. It adds a little more potency to the opening. Anyway, I've got another play-related post for you. This one is multi-dimensional, just like last night's was. Do you remember any moment in your life when things clicked, and your life was taken in a different direction? It may have been a big moment, where some dramatic event turned your life in a 180. Sometimes, though, there are small moments, where you just do one thing, and that one thing changed the way you look at life. After that, everything begins to shift. Two years ago, today, in fact, going to see the play The Poetry of Pizza did that for me.
I remember very clearly the night I went to go see this play, 2 years ago. It was a Wednesday night, March 3, 2010. Yes, I do remember the days of the week that most things happen. Why I know this is a whole different story. Like I was saying, though, I remember that very clearly, because that was the first play I saw as a student in Theater Arts. That evening, I was excited to go down to this theater, located on the permanently-docked Queen Mary. I remember getting going early, having eagerly anticipated this time out. Back then, I lived a much more solitary existence.
Now, I didn't know what to expect from this play. However, it turned out that this play grabbed two parts of me that I didn't know could go together. First off, the action in this play happens in 1998, three years before, well, you know what happened. I remember that time period. Back then, the only people who tweeted were birds, and the only facebook you could find was the one your grandparents were always showing you. Ah, but enough of my waxing nostalgic.
Anyway, Sarah Middleton, who was played by the woman I was studying under, is a 40-something, jaded professor of fine poetic works who has just relocated to Copenhagen. She is under the persistant guidance of her American friends, and the constant eye of a seedy Danish professor. One day, she walks into a pizzeria owned by a colorful group of Kurdish refugees. Sarah finds one in particular, Soran, who is an artist when it comes to these pizzas. When Sarah samples one of these delights, she is taken with this man.
Now, when she talks to him again, she finds out his troubled back story. Even though she is ten years older than he is, as Soran puts it he "feels older than his 34 years." It turns out he and his friends fled from Northern Iraq (an area called "Kurdistan" that encompasses parts of Iraq, Iran and Turkey) when Saddam Hussein began carrying out a murder campaign by poison gas attacks, and many other gruesome methods. This changes Sarah's understanding of Soran's depth. He has not been dragged into the pit of cynicism or nihilism, in spite of the terrible things he has witnessed in life.
As the two grow closer together, a variety of characters, American, Danish, and Kurdish, play out many bizarre antics, Seinfeld-ian in their humor and vulnerability. Sadly, one day, Soran asks Sarah, one day, to shave her, well, bush, as per Kurdish cultural custom. Scared of this, Sarah and Soran mutually decide they are just too different from each other to make it. Their friends are seen telling them to just "let it go." They both feel a hole in their hearts. In the end, Soran and Sarah decide they love each other so much, working through their differences is worth it to them. In the last scene, the two are getting married in the Kurdish custom, and Sarah samples a very special slice of pizza. All the other characters, and evenly split cast of men and women, discover each other, and none of them are lonely.
Now, normally, this kind of "happy" ending does not work for me. It just leaves some part of the human experience out most of the time. Here, however, it was not blindly overlooking life. It was very life-affirming, and heartwarming. It was something I thought, "Well, that could never happen in real life." Maybe it could, though. People often believe that you need an ending that is as dreary and grey as possible, that takes any hope in your heart, and just squashes it, in order to get people to think. To me, this is not always true. I think The Poetry of Pizza really made that warmth in spite of the darkness and the division apparent.
Now, the woman you see in the photo at the top, was my first teacher at this school that I go to now. She told us that the man who had acted opposite her as Soran had lived in Kosovo back when the War and genocide were still going on in the late '90's. He didn't have to stretch too far to figure out his motivations as a character. Anyway, I only began to realize later how this play had subtly affected me. Theater suddenly became a place of community, of humanity, where you could explore all the pains and heartaches going on in the world, and tell truths in no uncertain terms, but with all the compassion toward a person standing exposed, vulnerable, on the stage. That night, I came to understand what the theater was really about, for me.
I'd like to show you a tribute drawing I did for this play myself, a few months later:
Sarah Middleton boards a flight from the U.S. to Denmark, shortly before the opening of The Poetry of Pizza.
You may notice I have a lot of aircraft and flying machines as subjects in my art. When I was younger, I was simply fascinated by air travel, and dedicated many a visual work to airplanes, helicopters, and such. Anyway, Sarah's looking out into the plane is meant to connote the beginning of a journey into the unknown. It is supposed to be slightly dated-looking, but close to our time, and reminiscent of memories I had of that period.
So my question is this: do works of art (especially plays, books, and movies) have to be dark in tone to convey a meaningful message? Or could it be (at the risk of asking a rhetorical question) that some happy discoveries in plays and films can change our understanding of life, and shift our sense of what is possible to do? I want to finish this post on that note. I'm sorry it took longer to get done than I anticipated; I was fighting off a fever yesterday and today. I will be back up to speed soon, and hopefully, I'll get some time to blog. Thanks for listening.
As you may know, today marks the 10th anniversary since Daniel Pearl's death. Pearl was a Wall Street Journal international correspondent, who broke many stories around the world, including an incident where a US airstrike on a supposed weapons factory in Sudan actually hit an aspirin factory. In early 2002, he was sent to Pakistan to search for al qaeda moles in the Pakistani government, was subsequently abducted by one, held for demands from al qaeda, and then murdered by beheading.
When I learned of this act in depth, it was the barbarism of the acts that made me so mad about it. It was a feeling of simultaneous anger and disgust at the act. You know how he was killed? He was decapitated (head cut off), then chopped into ten pieces, and thrown in a ditch someplace in Pakistan. What other word is there for an act like that but pure animal savagery. It's just a horrible thing to do to anyone of any nationality. When I hear about groups like al qaeda carrying out acts like this against people doing their job, I almost understand the kind of guttural anger that drives people like Dick Cheney to want to bomb countries out of existence, or Rick Perry to have criminals executed, even if they are in fact innocent of murders.
It's not that I would ever do these things, or condone them, in any sense, it's just that sometimes, events in the international arena of news sometimes make you so upset that you do get to that point. You do get that level of intense anger, terror, despair about your species, cynicism, a thirst for vengeance. It can be (and sometimes has been) so overwhelming that it scares you. It scares even me how much of that emotion I have sometimes.
This is not the first time I have given issues of an international scope much thought. I came of age, spent my preteens and teens, in a world shadowed by the spector of terrorism. On the morning 9/11 occurred, I was 11 years old, overwhelmed at starting the 6th grade. So it isn't like I've had much choice in what I've become aware of. In past decades, like the 80's or 90's, you could get away with having little or no opinion in international strife and conflicts, because it didn't have a tangible effect on people's lives here in the US. On that Tuesday morning in September 2001, that perception ended abruptly and shockingly.
Since that day, I've felt like there has been a progressively more urgent nature to what happens to people in other countries. So this issue has been on my mind a lot over the years, even though I am still very young. Since I came across this information on Daniel Pearl, I was looking for a way, in my art, to deal with it. I know that won't have an effect, but it will help me express how I feel about this whole issue. Hopefully, just my sharing it with you will have some small effect.
On the one hand, as I said, I do have that anger and fear, but on the other, I do care about other nations, countries and cultures. I want to protect the people of America and the West, but I also don't want to see people on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran, shredded, incinerated, then written off as "collateral damage." Sadly, a flipside of our American optimism is this our blindness to the damage our foreign policies, and wars, can cause. If we are an exceptional country, surely we could never kill someone who didn't deserve it. So I get that there are bad people abroad, but I also think we need to take a look at our own soul.
For a while, I racked my brain to try to come up with a way to express this. The phrase "terrorism hurts everybody" went through my mind, but I wanted to come up with a picture that represented it. That is how I express what I find through art best. I wanted to draw up an image that got at the universality of having life ripped from someone you care about. I got the idea to do this drawing.
I was inspired to do this from the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing. On the night of December 21, 1988, the plane, Pan Am 103, was blown up as it was heading from London to New York City. Everybody on the plane (259 people) was killed horrifically, and when the plane hit the ground, it destroyed several houses in the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 11 people in Lockerbie were killed. The attack was carried out by two Libyan Intelligence agents, one of whom was imprisoned, later released and returned to Libya. There is also good evidence, from official sources, that it was planned within the Libyan government.
Again, the horrible, terrifying way those people were ripped from their lives is gut wrenching. Hearing of it makes it all the more distressing that the perpetrators "got away" and one was sent back home. Again, I had dark thoughts about what I would like do to inflict pain on the people resposible, only to try to take them back soon after. In one account I read, they reported that some christmas presents that the plane was carrying back to the US lay smashed in Lockerbie. That heartbreaking image really stuck with me.
So I decided to make this image as broadly applicable as I could. I wanted it to be about the feeling of a loved one ripped from life. Just the shock, horror, and pain, is something that unites us all. I decided to make this a jarring image of the keychain of a close love falling out of the side of the plane into the darkness. I included the jettisoned christmas present alongside it. This makes it about what terrorism really costs us: people we love, care about, or know. People who don't deserve to be a victim of political or religious hostility. Thus, it applies beyond just the bombing of Flight 103, or terrorism from the Middle East.
It becomes about us all. What do we lose from terrorism? We lose fellow human beings, we lose humanity. By the way, the majority of victims of Islamic terrorism are themselves Muslims. 30 of the victims of September 11th (a full 1% of them) were Muslims, including people on the flights to Los Angeles, and Firefighters, Police Officers, and Paramedics in New York.
Listen to this beautiful video, done by Queen Rania of Jordan, about victims of terrorism who live in the Middle East and pratice Islam.
This inspired me to make this more of a universal statement. That's where I came up with the statement "Terrorism Hurts Everybody." While focusing on this "clash of civilizations" that has claimed many lives, we lose sight of those things in common that give us our humanity. We need, therefore, to reclaim this sense of common experience across borders or cultures. We need to understand that when one act of violence is carried out, someone always suffers, lives with pain for weeks, months, years afterward.
To return to my starting point, Daniel Pearl was killed because he was doing his job. He was doing his work one day, and then he got killed in this horrible way. The same could be said of nearly all other victims of contemporary terrorism. It's just that his job was to highlight goings-on in the world few of us ever encounter. His job may be one of the most crucial in this world.
Thankfully, his death was not for nothing. Now our world is getting more and more interconnected, in an economic sense, in a communal sense, in a cultural sense, in an ethical sense. This is made possible by technology like the laptop I am using right now, and the IPhone I currently own. What is diclosed in Washington DC, can now be passed on to journalists in Europe, and can launch an uprising in the Middle East.
The good thing about this interconnectedness is that it makes it much harder for us to kill indiscriminately. At the same time that technology is bringing us farther apart, it is bringing us closer together. Now our humanity is being brought to bear, as cultures around the world are not as far apart as they used to be. I do not believe this is the end-all-be-all of what needs to happen on Earth, but I do think this is the beginning. The beginning of a journey that needs to happen.
Well, more on the subject of 9/11 in the next post. I was thrilled to finally get to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close last Saturday night. I would have blogged about it sooner, but for the last few days, I have been tied up with homework, already, yes. I'll have that for you tomorrow.
As You Like It, as performed by CSULB's University Players (Fall 2011).
Hi there,
I've gone back to class today. This is both good news and bad news. First, it is good news because I will be able to interact more, and thus I will have more material for this blog. My daily interactions with people, and with new discoveries, are what power my creative work, and thus this blog. Over the last year and a half, I have gotten to enjoy going to college. It was like, at that time, it suddenly clicked like "Oh, so that's how this whole thing works, and that's what everyone enjoys about this." This was the ability to relate, connect with other people. I began branching out, and enjoying it.
The bad news, however, is that with all the work, I will not have as much time open for this blog. As I have gotten older, I have had steadily less and less time to devote to my drawings and other work. I have gotten more space in college, in between classes, to read and write stuff to myself. One thing about college is that you can have as much as four or five hours in between classes. This has given me some blocks of time where I can exercise my own gifts of expression.
The highlight of my day was going back to my theater class I am taking. I don't know whether to spell it thea-ter or thea-tre, like the old English spelling. Anyway, this was a course called "performance and rehearsal." What this means is that we, the actors, will prepare our scenes and material, and then, the second half of class, a group of directors (undergrads joining us from another class) will enter, and we work with them, we get their notes on the scene.
I'll tell you, when I got there, I got excited to see my friends that I knew there. Half the reason I enjoy being in the theater department is the kind of people that I have met there. Most of the time before I got involved in theater, my encounters with people on campus were passing. I couldn't really connect with anyone. In most of the lecture hall classes (most lower-division classes required are in lectures), you don't have any more interaction with the person next to you than "Is anyone sitting here?" So, outside of a few club meetings I went to, I had few long-term interactions with people where I went. Certainly, I hadn't had anything that moved my life.
I have only been involved in Theater and acting activity for a short two years now. In that two-year time span, my life and the way I live it have had a sea change. This very blog is evidence of that change. At the end of the Fall 2009 semester, I needed 3 fine arts units, so I was given a choice between Studio Art, which seemed like a natural choice, and Intro to Acting. I forget exactly what it was, but something in me was telling me that I should take the acting. So I signed up for it for the Spring of 2010, even though I had no idea how I would survive the first week.
When I went in, we began work off impulse and visualization. Again, the memory is slightly cloudy to me now, but it clicked with me. All the activities we did were to get us interacting, not just for its own sake, but to realize what drove our actions. About three weeks into the class, it started to become the thing. It crept in as the thing I looked forward to doing, come Monday and Wednesday afternoon. It slowly began to filter out into my understanding of others, too. When I viewed people living their lives as characters on a stage, it inspired much more of a connection from me to them. I could see people honestly, and with empathy.
Once I decided to go into the classes that the majors in Theater went into, everything began to shift. I was no longer the same guy I was before. So, over the past year, I have been adapting to my approach to the way I live my life. This was what I meant when I said that 2011 was "The Year of Living Creatively." It meant applying the way I look at acting, and the collaboration of roles, to the way I have interacted with the people I knew and met, with the knowledge that I find, and with what I knew to be true. Slowly, I have been learning to look at the things I used to avoid, to deny, to look away from.
However much I have come to love the theater, there are things about all this that make me nervous. First, I am worried about becoming just the caricature people paint of actors. That is, the prima donnas who only know how to make themselves look good. The fear of it has largely disappeared for me. I assuage myself by remembering that there are prima donnas in every field who have no appreciation for anything that is not themselves. Also, when you know and care for people that are doing it, the stereotypes lose their importance.
Also, there is this fear about commiting totally to a life in the theater. Even with this wonderful thing that has entered my life, I feel this combination of beign trapped, locked into one path (after all, what are you gonna do with a theater BA besides work in theater?), and feeling like this commitment is too much, too soon. I still have lots of things I want to do in this world. It isn't that I have no idea what I want to do, it's that I have so many ideas of things I want to do. Call me the stereotypical male, here, but I've got some commitment issues.
Another issue is the money. Now, you probably know of the term "starving artist." People in the arts do not make a lot of money, and they have very sporadic periods of work. In the case of actors, they always have to be looking for the next role, unless they have some long-term contract and even then, it's tentative. The only way such a career would be recognized as valid was if the actor got famous and rich. So that's a sad commentary on how we treat the arts. They're useless to the society at large unless you can make lots of money and become famous. As a result, the people that tend to make it big in acting are the most competitive, type-A personalities. Unfortunate, since there are many people that have that gift, that have some message in their being that needs to be heard, that aren't great at making it in this type of world.
So what can I do? I am torn between the world that I knew, the world of safe career paths, of clear trajectories, of clear problems and solutions, and that of creativities, where each person I meet isn't just a person, or a caricature, or just a cog in some big machine. Here, it is as if each person has their own micro world that they carry with them, that they share with their friends, lovers, and family. There are things about the world I knew that draw me in, as there are things about this new world that do. It seems that this new view of the world has been with me all along, just waiting for the right influences to cultivate it.
I have currently come up with the idea to major in communication studies, and minor in theater arts. Part of me feels like this is a lame-ass compromise, but I really love both departments, and it feels to me as if that is the deal that will work best. I really do love the communications department. I'll tell you why, simply because I had one lecture class there my freshman year (three years ago), and it was just damn fun and informative. I could have listened to the professor all day. It had a similar affect, albeit on a more subdued scale, as learning how to act. Now, the field of communications is much more broad, in that it can be communications in business, advertising, counseling, organizations, and culture.
I honestly believe that if people knew how to communicate better, the quantity of suffering in the world would decrease greatly. Oddly enough, the theater experience, because it is about an experience, is about communicating too. It is about showing the truth of you, the actor, and the director and the crew have pieces of their truths, their worlds, which the theater needs to operate. The whole thing is happening right in front of the audience. So you have that experience of the actors interacting with each other, elements of the play interacting, and them all interacting with the audience's feedback.
So theater relies on effectively communicating. It involves picking up the tempo of these interactions, which is what drives the audience's interest in the production. It allows the audience to look at the story, the setting, or the characters, think back to it and say, "Hey, remember that thing? You remember it? That just blew you away, didn't it?" It is in these experiences that we grow, that we become better and richer, as human beings in our understanding of each other and this world. It is that experience that I want to give people, in whatever field I go into, whether it's the theater, or something else. As my first acting teacher told me, "It'll never be a waste."
My perception of time unfolding has also changed since I began studying acting. Before, I went to school with the idea that I would some day earn a degree, and then some time after that, I would get a job, which would one day lead to a career. Now, it is as if each semester, every week, every day, has become something significant, alive, important in and of itself. I can feel the change happen. This can be frightening, because so much change is jarring, but there is something wonderful about the discovery. I still don't have a good idea where I'll be in the next five, ten years, but that's not that bad anymore. That's why I sign off each post with "keep wondering, folks," because being able to keep discovering keeps you feeling engaged. I think everybody should have a chance to do that in life.
Well, I've got a few ideas in the works, but like I said, I've got more schoolwork ahead of me now. I'll blog whenever I can, and we'll have a good time. I really look forward to being able to write on this blog. I'm really excited about the direction this is going.
Well, our family got some bad news this morning. Our cat, Fuzz, had been having health problems. She had been drooling, less energetic, she ate and drank much less, and her breath really stank. She was not able to clean herself. We knew we had to take her to the vet, but we assumed that it was just a mouth infection that was bothering her. We thought that we would take her to the vet, they would get her rotted teeth worked on, and then she would get some of her spunk back.
Even yesterday, the doctor sounded semi-optimistic about her condition. He did offer the possibility that there might be a tumor in her throat, but that seemed unlikely at the time. He gave her an antibiotic (along with a fluid injection, since she was dehydrated), and when she came home, we observed that she seemed more alert, and with a little more energy. I watched her, looking at her food dish last night, expecting that she'd likely have a teeth extraction, and then we'd have her back here, somewhat healthy again.
This morning, around 8:30, the vet called. He told me that they were going to stick some apparatus in Fuzz's mouth to get the infectious stuff out. She had a tumor so swollen that they couldn't even get the machine in her throat. When I asked him he told me definitely that there was nothing they could do about the tumor at this point. This was really jarring to hear.
After all this time, Fuzz's time was essentially over. The best thing to do at this point, they told me, since she was already under anasthaesia, was to let her go to sleep. After talking with my Mom, we decided that this was for the best. Otherwise, they said, the tumor would get so bad Fuzz would choke to death slowly. At least this way, she could go peacefully and without pain.
This morning, Fuzz, a female with silver fur, passed away. We don't know exactly how old she was, but I estimated that she must have been about eight or nine years old. This is because the vet doing the tests a while back told us she was about five years old, and that was four years ago. So In her young years, she had been a stray cat. She had been abandoned in an old apartment. Our neighbor, a home repair contractor, took her in, and she lived next door until we took her in, about a year after that.
In the vet's waiting room yesterday, I said to my Dad, and to her, that I remember the first time I met Fuzz. Back then, I didn't know what her name was. We never figured out if she had had a name, or what it was, so we settled on the name "Fuzz," as in "the fuzz," or the police. Anyway, I was sitting out on the front steps one friday night in September of 2005. It was dusk, and I was waiting for Dad to arrive home from some trip. Anyway, I had some new warm-ups on, and then this little cat came up to me. She just started meowing at me, I talked to her, just hoping she wouldn't go to the bathroom on my clothes.
At that time, we were having mouse problems. Mice were getting into our food, crapping all in the kitchen, and making a mess. Fuzz kept hanging out in our front yard. Time went on, and in the early winter of 2006, around February, we began floating the idea of adopting this little cat, to take care of the mouse issue, even though I insisted on being gentle with the mice. We talked with the neighbors, and they said they would like us to take care of her. So, in March of 2006, thereabouts, she began staying at our house. A few months later, after they moved, she became "officially" ours. Fuzz caught a couple of mice, and the rest "got the message."
I have always had a soft spot in my heart for animals, but more than anything, for dogs and cats. Pets can provide you a dimension of companionship that people cannot. An animal won't give you an endless amount of drama, they won't judge you, they won't maliciously use you or manipulate you, and when you come home from an exhausting day, they will listen to you unconditionally, letting you blow your frustration away. It is well-known that a dog will display an eager, happy and enthusiatic attitude (I used to own a sheppard dog named Lucy when I was little). I used to joke that cats always look like they're annoyed or pissed at you.
However, if you spend enough time studying a cat, as I did with Fuzz, you can recognize signs of affection. For instance, if you find a cat head-butting you softly, that is their way of scent-marking you, of making you "theirs." In Fuzz's case, she was a very outgoing cat. When someone would come to the house, Fuzz would first rub her body up against them, then when they sat down, Fuzz would jump on their lap. She had this thing she would do with us, especially me, where she would jump on my lap , then kneed her paws slowly into me. Sometimes she would step on my crotch, which would really hurt.
It might seem odd that a guy in his teens and twenties would be so attached to a cat, but Fuzz was not just any cat. Over the six years that I knew her, I developed a special bond with Fuzz. In fact, some researchers have found great social benefits to having a pet. At the time we adopted her, I was fifteen. As a teenager, I was very awkward, and with my peers in high school, I was very tongue-tied, and often I would make a fool out of myself. I didn't trust myself around people my own age, since I believed that if they knew who I really was, they would think I was weird and be repulsed.
But when I came home, Fuzz would jump on my lap, and I'd just sit or lay on the couch for a while. I didn't have to edit myself, or be conscious of my word around Fuzz. I'd just lightly tell her what I felt. Fuzz was with me all through my victories in school, and running, and in my heartbreaks, trials, and periods of darkness. When I had my days where I was scared, scared to travel, scared of getting sick, scared to be with other people, scared to be alone, Fuzz was always there, listening.
All of my work had to be approved by Fuzz. Her favorite method of approval was sitting on the work.
We laughed and joked about Fuzz's antics, such as her charging at an open paper bag. She loved running along the top of the fence next to our house. A few nights, I would walk out front, and hear her meowing, not knowing where she was. Then I'd look on the roof, and she'd be calling at me. In her younger years, she was great at hunting. Any rodent, small bird, or insect was fair game for her. Many times, we would hear some ugly meow, and find Fuzz out front fighting some other neighborhood cat.
Of course, Fuzz had her own ways. The phrase "herding cats" is no exaggeration. We used to joke that we didn't own Fuzz, she owned us. It was, in fact, her house she was letting us live in. The running gag I used to do with her was talking to her, then responding in her words, with a tough-chick voice. It was our little ventriloquist act. For example, I would say "What can I do for you, Fuzz?" Then I'd answer, as her voice "Give me the food I deserve, damn it!" I loved messing with her that way, because I loved her.
Even though we liked to joke about what a prima donna she was, she was really social and outgoing to people. She was a popular fixture in this household. She would come up to you as you were working on some paper or book, sit right down on it, and then just look up at you. Even as I became more in my element with other people, I introduced them to Fuzz when they came to my home.
Today, I have cried a few times thinking about Fuzz. I think about the quizzical look on her face. It is a look of wonder, of unfettered curiosity. It struck me, now more than ever, that a cat is not bound by any of the restrictions people have. People seem to me to be doing their thing, in their habit practices, ignoring everything outside of that. Fuzz never did that.
I realized today that this has been my first deeply personal experience with grieving. This isn't my first ever loss. Two years ago, my Grandmother passed away at the age of 86, and my aforementioned dog Lucy had to be put down when I was 14. However, neither of those really hit me quite the way this one has. Today, I seem to have returned to my six-year-old self; everything seeming too big for me, making me sad inside. However, I learned that I am not alone. Research reports also show that people who own pets, children and adults alike, view the death of a pet as the death of a friend.
So, I've been experimenting with the way to grieve and honor Fuzz's memory. Over the years, I have used many modes of facing humiliation and heartbreak. I decided that I wouldmake today as quiet a day as possible, since few people would begrudge my taking a slow day to grieve a dear pet's passing. I decided to make no apologies for this, swearing off, for a moment, the feeling that I should be doing more. Then I thought, that's the way Fuzz lived all her life. She wasn't feeling like she should do more, and kicking herself for not doing it. She always did just enough for her.
I am going on so long with this entry because all the memories are coming back. All of today, I have been thinking of things I have seen Fuzz do over the years. People, it seems, have widely varied ways of grieving and honoring the passed. I, for one, get very sad, but I do not want to totally "get over it," because that would mean they would be lost, forgotten. I do not want this.
As I said, I have tried many ways of dealing with feelings of letdown or loss. When I was little, I used to cry a lot. Then, in my teen years, I used to keep soldiering on. Now, I know that there is an aspect of most things that happen that is neither bad nor good. To me, days aren't particularly bad or good, there are bad and good parts to them. As I took a walk this morning, I kept thinking of this song:
I thought of Fuzz, knocking on heaven's door now. This made me really tear up. I imagine that Fuzz is going off to some wonderful metaphysical cat afterlife, where she can chase laserpointers, hunt, nap, and claw people's laps to her heart's content. I hope she's gone on to a sort of "cat heaven." This is what I thought of, with tears in my eyes this morning, shortly after the call came from the vet. I imagined her going on up, arriving, and knocking on heaven's door, then being shown in to her new home.
The rest of today, with my family, we were not only talking about the sudden nature of this sad news. We were also remembering all the fun we had with Fuzz. We would say "Remember the time she was up on the roof, meowing down at us?" "Remember how she used to get really mad at us after we came back from our trips?" This morning, even as I was deeply sad about Fuzz's loss, I had a warm feeling in my heart about all the wonderful time we had together.
As I type this, I am between streams of tears. I find it impossible not to cry on a day like this. However, I do not think today was a bad day, or a good day. It was just another day. To Fuzz, it was just another day. It was the day she went to her Home, that she was set free, in a paradoxical way. All of today, I did not want to forget about Fuzz, even though it was painful to think about her. As I said, I did not want to forget her, to lose her memory, I want to honor and cherish that sliver of time we were given together. I find it painful to cry, but I know crying is necessary here.
So what course will this grief take for me? I don't know. Maybe I'll be sad, feel a little angry, a little guilty for not having taken better care of Fuzz's health, maybe I'll just feel like this grief is a huge, dark force that is inundating me, that I have no power to stop. I might have to face all of this. I guess I'll just have to let the grief run its course. Not that it will evaporate entirely, I would not even want that. As my Dad said, the worst part to him is that after someone dies, their life gets farther in the past, and is less prominent. I will always remember the value Fuzz had in this household.
In our family, Fuzz became a popular fixture. Despite her crazy, sometimes frustrating, antics, we kept caring for her. I considered today that we might have given her a real, caring home where before, she had none. I grieve, but at the same time, I feel a warmth from the memories, and the spirit, of Fuzz. I have felt waves today of both deep, deep sadness, and warm joy for her life.
My real hope is that even though Fuzz is physically gone, and her identity subsumed to the Great Unknown in the Universe, that the spirit, the soul, the driving forces of Fuzz remain always alive and well. This includes living without regret, without prejudice, without resentment or hatred. Living in this way is part of the Fuzz Memorial Project, of which this blog will become an integral part, effective immediately. Even though Fuzz's lifespan on Earth may have ended, we can choose to honor the spirit that she embodied. You can do that by loving, caring and living with no regret. I will have more news on the Fuzz Memorial Project to come.
