An Ending and A Beginning

June 8, 2006

I never suffered from allergies until 2 years ago. I’d lived in the desert for many years and scoffed at those who sniffed and snuffled their way through April and May, when the Sonoran landscape was putting on it’s sublime show of flora. I don’t know how that all changed, perhaps it was karma of some sort, but suddenly I realized that what I had was not a cold, but allergies. Ack!

So when I headed off to my Great Aunt Janet’s Memorial Service last weekend, the right side of my head had been blocked for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably closer to 6 weeks off and on, mostly on. Being the type who eschews the modern solution of over-medicating, I hadn’t shelled out the big bucks necessary to chemically suppress the body’s natural reaction to the pollen in the air. Instead I was hoping that my immune system would eventually remember how it coped before.

Abbie says that the male gender is often guilty of ‘stuffing their emotions’. I can certainly plead guilty to that, as I’ve been properly indoctrinated in the art of the stiff upper lip. So imagine the validation that came to that theory when, while sitting in the Methodist Church in Indio, California, listening to the testimonials, the tears started to edge down my cheeks – and lo and behold – I realized I could breathe again! I suppose some part of me had convinced myself that the advance warning of my wonderful Aunt’s demise had made it easier for me to accept it once the news finally came, but I realized that wasn’t true. It still stung and left the same knot in my gut that all the other funerals I’d been to had, if not worse. You see, as I get older, the people dying around me are closer and closer, so it hurts more knowing that they aren’t physically here anymore. I had been trying to fill the impending void with all the good memories I had of her and the thought that she had led a full life, but the void yawned as big as ever before me as I sat with Kleenex clenched tightly in fist, watching as one person after another tried not to break down while espousing all of Janet’s great qualities as a person. Most tellingly, each of them hoped that they could find the same grace, courage and work ethic in their own lives.

It didn’t help that there was the added tension of family rifts hovering around us, but thankfully everyone had the grace to stand together for our moment of mourning in unison. It wasn’t The Waltons, but it wasn’t a soap opera either. Janet’s magnetism at least had extended beyond her lifetime and brought these people together, some of whom had not shared a room or kind word in many long years.

The next day Abbie proclaimed her belief that just as nature recycles all physical matter, surely it must do the same with spiritual matter. Don’t all religions carry a message of reincarnation or life beyond the grave? We also like to believe that those who pass on before us act as stewards as we continue our own lives, shepherding us along our individual paths of enlightenment.

Probably the most placating thing I observed was the spark in my niece Ashley’s eye that proclaimed that the line of spunky Swingle women was not lost, but continues on into the future.