Favorite Memories of Jim

August 26, 2011 by scillagrace

In the Galasso family, we have a birthday tradition. When we are all gathered together for the birthday meal, we go around the table, and each person relates his or her favorite memory of the birthday person. When I was with Emily last Sunday, she wouldn’t let me leave until she had told me her favorite memory of me. I had almost forgotten this ritual, and I’m so glad she didn’t. Today would have been Jim’s 51st birthday. We would be celebrating our combined 100th birthday. (We went to a couple’s 100th birthday party once…huge affair with fireworks and everything!) Well, in Thich Nhat Hahn’s words, it is another Continuation Day. Jim continues in all kinds of ways on this earth. Ripples of his deeds, his attitude, his progeny, his molecules and other whatnot are still around.

Jim Galasso

So here is a favorite memory of Jim that came to me on my birthday this past Sunday. Steve and I were at the Ravinia music festival in Chicago. We had what they call “lawn seats”, which means we were picnicking on the grounds around the pavilion where we could hear the music on the loudspeakers and see the band (Lyle Lovett and his Large Band) on the jumbo screen. In other words, the cheap seats. It’s a great family set up. People bring their kids, their food, their lawn chairs and everyone picnics in their own style. Right in front of us was a family with 2 daughters and a newborn son. I watched the father lie down flat on their picnic blanket and place his little squirming boy on top of his chest. His daughters were hovering around touching the baby, but it was clear that Dad was not giving up his position of baby bed. I looked long at them. I thought of how obvious it was that the father was enjoying having a son, although he might have been just as proud and affectionate with his infant daughters. And, of course, I thought of Jim. With little infant Josh on his huge barrel chest, he looked just like that. Happy, comfortable, proud, protective.

Daddy moments

Why is that one of my favorites? Because I loved seeing him take deep pleasure in his life, in things that wholly involved him. In these moments there is suffering, there is sacrifice, there is emotion and responsibility and joy. He didn’t often have words to articulate all that was stirred up in him, but he would look up at me with a tear in his eye, and I’d know what he felt. I think that was when he was closest to touching the water, to experiencing the ultimate dimension of reality.

So now it’s your turn. What’s your favorite memory of Jim?

Happiness Is

August 25, 2011 by scillagrace

A couple of days before my 5th birthday, I got the chance to perform on a stage for the first time. It was in a talent review put on by the Wabaningo Club of the Sylvan Beach neighborhood association. That was where my grandmother owned a beach cottage on Lake Michigan. I rehearsed the song “Happiness Is….” from the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and performed it with 13 other little kids, including my sister, a second cousin, and the two daughters of my parent’s friends, the Pulvers. I know these details because I found the program online in the Wab Club’s archives. All I remember is standing on the stage and looking out at people’s faces, smiling at me. I saw a photo of this group performance hanging on the wall of the Pulvers’ cottage in 2007, 40 years later. I stuck out. I was a step in front of the whole line up, my eager face displaying a huge, open mouth. I guess I was kind of a ham.

The songs lists a bunch of cute, juvenile reasons for happiness. Two kinds of ice cream, five different crayons, getting along — “everything and anything at all that’s loved by you”. It rather assumes that things outside of you are what will make you happy. I bought into this idea pretty thoroughly, and I know a lot of others who did (and do), too. My list included having approval, good grades, someone who loves me, kids who are successful, good health, and a bunch of other stuff. I would get anxious, upset, and sometimes downright terrified if I felt that any of these conditions might end. In moments of loss, when something that had made me happy changed, I would often hear people comfort me by saying, “God loves you. It’s OK.” But again, that felt like something outside of me that I could lose, another idea of happiness that made me fret about whether I possessed it or not.

In a videotaped speech of Anthony de Mello’s, I heard about the idea of “attachment” and how we suffer from it. We suffer in the loss, the impermanence of our attachments. I’ve been thinking about this for about 10 years now. I think back on how the attachments I had to certain ways of being affected my parenting. We went through a lot of suffering as a family. I felt so angry that we couldn’t seem to do things according to my expectations. I rejected the way things were and tried to fix them. I asked God to fix them. And we kept suffering. Slowly, I began to loosen my grip. Finally, I prayed that I would be able to accept things as they are and be strong enough to accept the things that were to come, even though I was terrified of what that might be. Yes, Jim died. That was what I was fearing the most. Interestingly, when that became a reality instead of a fear, some of the suffering was relieved. More suffering was relieved when I began to look at other realities with less judgment and more acceptance. I am still working on the practice of non-attachment and the understanding of happiness. Here’s a quote that puts it quite simply:

“The Kingdom of God is also said to be like a treasure that someone finds and hides in a field. Then, in his joy, he sells all he has and buys that field. If you are capable of touching that treasure, you know that nothing can be compared to it. It is the source of true joy, true peace, and true happiness. Once you have touched it, you realize that all the things you have considered to be conditions for your happiness are nothing. They may even be obstacles for your own happiness, and you can get rid of them without regret. We are all looking for the conditions for our own happiness, and we know what things have made us suffer. But we have not yet seen or touched the treasure of happiness. When we touch it, even once, we know that we have the capacity of letting go of everything else.

“That treasure of happiness, the Kingdom of Heaven, may be called the ultimate dimension of reality. When you see only waves, you might miss the water. But if you are mindful, you will be able to touch the water within the waves as well. Once you are capable of touching the water, you will not mind the coming and going of the waves. You are no longer concerned about the birth and the death of the wave. You are no longer afraid. You are no longer upset about the beginning or the end of the wave, or that the wave is higher or lower, more or less beautiful. You are capable of letting these ideas go because you have already touched the water.” — Thich Nhat Hahn Living Buddha, Living Christ

Steve at Lake Michigan, on the shore opposite the cottage

Anthony de Mello quoted Kabir, an Eastern poet, saying, “I laughed when they told me the fish in the water was thirsty.” I keep thinking about that one…

Claiming Rights of Passage

August 24, 2011 by scillagrace

St. Luke’s columbarium

A few years ago, I went to an exhibit on mummies at the Milwaukee Public Museum. It was fascinating. Listening to the whispered comments and questions of other patrons was fascinating as well. We have a very scattered cultural approach to death, with so many various ways of marking the rite of passage, including not really marking it at all. Our American culture, as a whole, has been dominated by technology to the point that important parts of our lives are relegated to “experts” and taken out of our hands completely. My mother fought against this trend in the late 50s when she insisted on breastfeeding her babies instead of allowing the “experts” to convince her that artificial formula on an artificial schedule was better for them. Birth experiences have become sterilized, institutionalized, and anesthetized as well in the mainstream. My 4 were all born in a hospital under the HMO system (but not under any pain killers!) because in my 20s, I wasn’t brave enough to seek more creative options. However, my sister birthed one of her children at home, and I once assisted a friend who had a home birth. It’s not impossible to choose to take full responsibility in this event. Death is another part of life that more and more people deal with by proxy. Of course, the hospice movement is a wonderful example of the purposeful effort to maintain the grace and dignity of this stage of life by bringing it back into the home, away from institutions. I recently watched an Ingmar Bergman movie set at the turn of the century, called Cries & Whispers (well, it’s actually called something in Swedish, but that’s the English title). This intense family drama deals with the death of a spinster sister from cancer. The action all takes place at home, in this case an elegant manor. The doctor’s largest role is in an affair with one of the sisters, in flashback. When I think of the family drama of my husband’s death, experts and technology played a huge part. Unfortunately, that became a distraction from entering into the rite of passage, from experiencing the more intimate aspects of the dynamics that were changing my family. What I mean to say is that it enabled denial.

The last photo of Jim; coming out of surgery Feb. 5

What does it mean to choose to take responsibility for my life? Not to delegate the more painful or complicated bits to an “expert”, not to live by proxy or by representative? In which situations do I most often abdicate my ability to decide a course of action? Financial, political, medical, social, spiritual, emotional, physical. I am only beginning to wake up and ask myself these questions. Steve often puts it to me this way: in every situation, you have at least 3 options. 1) Run away and hide 2) Try to change the situation 3) Change yourself.

This is a good time for me to think about aging, about how I want to live and address the changes that are happening now and will continue to happen. What do I want? I want to experience life in a more authentic way, not behind a duck blind or a proxy, not behind a curtain of denial or dogma, not by avoiding discomfort or hard work. I want to make decisions about who I am and how to live proactively. How do I embody this? At this point, I am still figuring out who I am and want to be and recognizing places where that has been dictated and I have responded without looking deeper. My father and my husband took great care of me. I want to learn to do that myself. I often dream about Jim returning as if he’d never died. Last night, I had a powerful dream about him, set in the house I sold, with my young children around. My consciousness struggled with it; I knew that the house was emptied and I’d moved. I couldn’t understand why the furniture was back and the place looked so “lived in”. I couldn’t understand why Jim was there. He told me he was going out to work because he wanted to support me and the kids. In a choked whisper, I closed the door behind him and said, “Don’t come back.” I woke up crying. Talking about this dream with Steve, I realized that I do want him to come back and float through my subconscious and consciousness without confusing me, without affirming me or correcting me, just visiting. I suppose when I gain the confidence to affirm and care for myself, my dreams will change.