compassion | Neal Lemery

Making Sense, Making Peace

Today is yet another day of this chaotic week. The national news is overrun with bombings, shootings, explosions, and controversial political decisions over guns.
In Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, there are more bombings, more attacks, more deaths. American troops are now in Jordan, staging for humanitarian aid in Syria, but also a rocket’s path away from that civil war.
We are so interconnected, so aware now of such violence, such chaos and uncertainty. Our technology and our mass media culture now brings such events into our living rooms, into our pants pockets, as we seem to be compelled to check on the state of the world in a spare moment.
I turn off the TV. I can’t stand the instant news, the hours of rehashing, and dramatizing, and speculation. My blood pressure goes up, and there’s a knot in my stomach. My sense of powerlessness and frustration gets tossed into the energies of the commentators, the marketers of “crisis” and “terror” and catastrophe.
A friend of mine tells me that he gets anxious about a lot of things in life, that he’s a worry wort, and has to consciously avoid “catatrophizing” much of life’s concerns. When I watch the “instant news” channel, it seems like a flash mob of “catastrophizers”.
That is not how I want to live my life, and to get through my day, and be a healthy human being. I have decided not to be part of that “flash mob”, and I click off the offending noise and chaos that has filled my living room.
I soak up the peace, when the TV goes silent. I look around for a bit of beauty, maybe pick up my guitar and strum a song. But, the craziness of the events in Boston and all the rest of the news still tightens up my shoulders, still nags at me.
Yet, how do I respond? How do I react? It is not like I can change the outcome of bombs in Boston, or the national epidemic of gun-related homicides in this country, or even the violence in my own community.
Or can I? Certainly I have a big voice in how I go about my life, and I would like to think I have a big impact on people in my family, my neighborhood, even the emotional atmosphere of the line at the grocery store, or the post office, or the place I had lunch with a friend yesterday.
I’m just one guy. But, I do interact with others during the day. I have conversations, I conduct a little business, I say hi to folks I know around town. I put stuff up on Facebook and my blog. I chat with the guy who fills up my gas tank, and tell him thanks, and ask how he’s doing. And, then, I really listen to what he has to say. We connect, and we have a real conversation. And, that doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. It’s part of my job as a member of my community.
In all of that, I can set an example, and I can give out a sense of compassion and peaceful living, and I can listen. My little efforts may not change the world overnight, and the Nobel Peace Prize committee may not be reading all of my blog posts and finding out my phone number.
But, I can create a little peace in this world, and that little bit of peace can spread out, and be the ripple in the pond of how we all interact.
Yesterday, I joked and laughed with an old friend, and we gave each other some ideas on how we each can grow and change, and become more skilled in the arts of peacemaking, listening, and compassion. I’m going to try out some new things, and I found a class that would help me be a better member of the community, of being of better service to others.
I’m planting my garden, I’m playing my guitar, I’m sending a poem to several young men to give them some inspiration, and let them know, again, that I care about them, and that they have amazing possibilities in their lives.
Last night, one of the young men I’m mentoring in prison called. He’s getting out soon, and will, for the first time in his life, be out in the world, looking for a job, and being a healthy member of society. He’s worried about all the changes, and all the responsibility. And, he’s worried about how he’s going to manage all of that, and to deal with a lot of his anger that has been simmering in his soul most of his life.
He isn’t one to come right out and talk about his worries, and his anxiety, but it is there, right below the surface.
So, we talked, and he told me more about himself, and what he is doing to prepare for being in the world, and the things he’s looking forward to. It wasn’t a deep, soul changing conversation, but it was a conversation. I listened. I cared. I told him I worry about him and that I’d be with him on that day the prison door slams behind him and he can make his own way in the world.
I could hear in his voice that not too many people listen to him, or even care that he is getting out of prison soon. But, I cared, and I listened. And, when we ended our call, I could tell he’d unwound, he felt better about himself and he felt he mattered to someone. We have a deeper friendship now. We have a better connection.
One phone call may not heal the pain that Boston is going through, or stop someone from planning to detonate a bomb in the middle of a sporting event, and kill and maim innocent people.
But, maybe, just maybe, that phone call, that listening, that caring will move a young man away a bit from the anger and rage that simmers in a young man, and give him hope to seek a life of compassion, and usefulness, and even joy.
Knowing that someone cares, that someone listens to him might be what he needs to be able to vent his rage and his anger through his art or his music, or in going for a long run along the river, instead of making a pressure cooker bomb and setting it off in the middle of his community.
And, maybe, that is a bit of peacemaking that I can bring to the world today.

–Neal Lemery April 19, 2012

We have a complicated relationship, and we go way back.

Suicide and the way to early death of young men and women have hit me hard in my life, and I still haven’t found a way to work through it very well, or to make much sense of it, either.

I’ve sat with a young man who was a son to me, when he was suicidal, spending the night holding him, and talking to him, and working through his pain and his hopelessness. When dawn finally came, he was better, and decided he wanted to live. That night took everything out of me, as I used every bit of love and compassion and reason and faith and hope to get him to decide to live, and to tell him that he mattered, that he was important and that life was sacred and good.

I’ve had long talks with a close friend in high school, as he raged about his father beating him, and neglecting him, and not loving him, and how angry he was about all that, and how he just wanted to end it all. Long talks by the camp fire, where truth was spoken and the meaning of life was discussed, and I thought we’d really gotten to the core of it all.

But, we didn’t. And, years later, he came out to me, telling me he was gay and that his sexuality was at the core of his rage with his father, and feeling unloved by his father just made life all the more unbearable.

I learned you never know how deep the wound is that people have to deal with, and struggle with, what the real reasons are that people finally decide that life may not be worth living.

I like to think that if I had known all of the worries, and all of the doubts, we’d been able to figure it all out and “fix” it, around that campfire when we were seventeen. But, probably not. I can’t seem to do that at sixty, and hopefully I’m a bit wiser and smarter now. I’m left with wondering, and not knowing. A lot of the not knowing.

Maybe if we’d been able to say “I don’t know, but walk with me a bit,” that would have been enough.

People ending their lives is not all that rare, but there is a code of silence. We have rarely honestly talked about this part of life, these holes that suddenly open up in our social fabric. Yet, we dance around it, not really speaking truth, not dealing with this subject. Perhaps there are no words to say. That silence is part of the craziness.

In our culture and not too long in the past, a person who ended their own life couldn’t be buried in the church cemetery, which was inside of the fenced in church yard. Their grave was outside of the fence, their lives literally rejected and separated from their spiritual community, and from God.

The code of silence, and shame, and guilt was there for all to see, those feelings literally fenced out of where we were supposed to experience God in our lives, where our pain and our humanity were respected, where we could be embraced by unconditional love.

That rule, that law of our culture is still there for all to see, the graves of the “saved” souls, the children of God, and then, outside of the fence, there are the graves of the suicides, the “eternally damned”.

Oh, we aren’t so explicit now, using the fence around the church yard to make our judgements. Yet, we do judge, and we express our adjudications of shame and guilt.

We follow this rule, this law in so many other ways. We stigmatize and shame, and often ignore depression, other mental illness, and addiction, and the impact of violence and not loving our kids enough, or soldiers trying to come back from war. We make sure people can self medicate with booze, and dope, and lots of prescription meds, and we judge those “solutions” as OK, but when people can’t seem to “get it together”, we put them outside of the fence, and get quiet about it all.

And, when a pop star or other public figure commits suicide, we are quick to pounce, looking for flaws and defects. We are quick to find the defining reason: drugs, love, or the microscope of public infatuation with their lives. We like the simple, quick, and not so very truthful answers. Real life is messier than that, but it doesn’t sell tabloids and it doesn’t draw a television audience. We also don”t have to look at our own doubts, our own actions, and how we as a culture still use that fence.

I held a teenager in my arms one morning, in his bedroom, as he told me about shooting himself in the head, as his father held him, trying to talk him out of it. He showed me the scar on his cheek, and the three missing teeth, and the place on his skull where the bullet came out.

It was a miracle he lived, and it was a miracle we could talk about it in his bedroom, sitting on the bed where his dad had begged him not to do it, and couldn’t pry the rifle out of his hands, until he had pulled the trigger.

We gave voice to all those feelings, and all that pain that morning, dealt with the poison, and did some healing. We moved on, not forgetting, but dealing with the feelings he had; we had some honesty, and dealt with his pain and doubts. We went deep, talking about life and love and who we really are, and what really goes on when we are at the bottom and can’t see the light above us, or the hand reaching out to us.

A teenager close to me died, choosing a gun to deal with his worries, and his doubts. People close to him had a lot of theories and there were a lot of stories, a lot of explanations, and a bit of blaming others. There were the usual suspects: drugs, love, anger, rage of not being loved, not having a safe, respected place to be in, not getting enough love.

Those popular stories might be true, or several of them, or maybe there was something else, too. I’ll never know. He is gone and didn’t tell us why he left us. Perhaps it all hurt too much to talk about and to stay around and muck through it all.
We will never know his truth, and where he was at when he pulled the trigger.

Suicide takes away the answers and the conversations and just dealing with stuff, with family and with friends, and people who love you. We are left with just the questions, and the guilt and the wondering, the “coulda, woulda, shouldas”.

Two other teenaged boys, boys I was close to, and they so very close to their buddy who shot himself, lived in the same town. It came my job to be with them in the next week, and maybe keep them away from the guns and the drug dealers and killing themselves. I took them to the funeral home to see the body and to pray and say goodbyes. I held them and sat with them at night in the park, the park they’d played in with their buddy, where we shivered on a snowy bench talking about life and crying.

Some folks thought it was part of making sense of it all, but there was no sense to be made of any of it.

And, as some families do, no one talks about him anymore. It is like he disappeared forever, and wasn’t part of our lives. But he was and he is. A lot of people put him in the ground outside of the church yard.

I will always miss him and I will always think of the insanity of a sixteen year old boy kicked out of his house on a snowy night, and finding a gun and blowing his brains out, all alone and cold and feeling unloved.

I’ve stood on that same street corner, where he died, in the cold and the night, and the answers don’t come. Even after nearly thirty years, they don’t come, and the wind still blows cold, cold and lonely.

Crazy.

“His death was a single moment for him, but an endless, unforgiving moment for me, for us, for every encounter from then forward with others — and every encounter with myself.” (Kim Stafford, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared, p 165).

I know of that loneliness, that pain, that unanswerable, unconsolable ache that fills one’s chest. And, all the questions and the not so good answers that people say. Suicide is craziness, about the biggest kind of craziness there is.

Suicide is just craziness, without any real answers and without any magic wand that makes all the crap of that go away.

I think I know, and yet I don’t. Not really.

We still bury people outside of the fence, at least mentally, separate and distant from the “rest of us”, away from community. Perhaps, in that distance, there is safety, there is the sense of not having to confront those painful, ugly questions about despair, and hopelessness, and death.

If we ignore it, it will go away.

But, it doesn’t. Life isn’t that simple, and when depression and suicide slam down on us, in its ugly suddenness, we don’t have good answers.

When I lose a friend, a relative, or anyone who has been a part of of my life, I need to grieve, too, for they have been in my life and then then they are gone. A person’s death and the grief I feel when someone near to me dies is part of the hole that I have in my heart. We all have holes, you know. We all struggle in life to figure out our holes, and to try to fill them up with goodness and love, and to find some sort of peace and meaning in our lives. Life is messy and awkward, and the work with our holes is sweaty, hard work.

We all have holes, we all have hard, dirty work we are doing to sort through things, to move ahead, and live our lives.

And we need to keep everyone we love inside of the church yard, so we can remember them and hold them close. And, they need to hold us close, too.

3/26/2013