Here Comes the Sun

Shattered. That word suddenly ceased to be a cliche for me several years ago. I came to understand that grief wasn't simply about being disconnected, unhitched, cut off from one who had just died and other losses, but also being disconnected from pretty much the whole world. The whole world as I knew it had broken up, no longer existed. What I came to know about "shattered" was not so much the fragments with unfamiliar edges, but the space, the gaps, the void between the pieces.

That sense of being disconnected had a time dimension--it was hard to imagine the future. I didn't completely recognize present reality and the future was even harder to compute.  I would tell people this, and I don't think they believed me--because, after all, I went to work and did things and seemed normal enough. I knew how to be practical, functional. And maternal love put a bubble around my  sons--they would be okay and I'd make sure it was so. But on some level, it was hard for me to imagine a future for the rest of us.

Feeling largely disconnected somehow had implications for thinking and valuing. For a while it was hard to make conceptual connections that mattered, to find those relationships between and among A and B and C, those right relationships, that add up to meaningful thoughts--to thoughts that matter.

Shattered wasn't the only word that resonated. So did other words that ceased to be cliches for me: Unhinged, unraveled, unplugged, broken.

So, without boring you with the details of that strange state of mind, I can simply say that I worked on improving it, bit by bit, day by day for a long time. Focusing on just one beautiful thing every day-- journaling a bit and running and meditating and being in nature. I did other things, too, but certainly those. Reading. If the familiar was totally unfamiliar, unreal, I thought I would literally go somewhere unfamiliar to seek the familiar.

That seeking of the familiar in the unfamiliar is just one of many reasons I'm here in China. (First of all, I believe in the value of cultural exchanges and of my particular program; I also wanted to ply my trade in a different context. So, those programmatic and professional reasons were paramount. But I also had personal reasons, especially this one.) And I discovered that I could indeed find bits and pieces of the familiar in this unfamiliar world. I could see bits of the word "resilience" in the ferns and ivies sprouting everywhere from inhospitable walls of limestone. I could see bits of the word "resilience" in a people who have a long history of suffering. Some have dared to make a comparison between the Holocaust and the Sino-Japanese War, which resulted in millions of casualties. You just find a way to go on. But I found the words "joy" and "life" in the children's songs on a Chinese CD a student gave me to help me learn Chinese. The "joy" in those little Chinese voices, totally butchering the one English song they attempted (the alphabet song), sparked memories of singing to my sons once upon a time. Seeing a little rosy-cheeked face watching me intently from the basket she's being carried in upon someone's back. Seeing a little toddler skipping along and suddenly squatting--those split bottom pants are handy, eliminating the need for diapers--all this sparked joyous memories. It goes on.

So, for a while I felt like I was getting better, little by little--perhaps I wasn't "there" but was certainly better--but more recently it's been dawning on me that I really do feel about as whole and grounded and connected to my world and beloveds as I ever have. I feel in right relationship with the pieces of  my being and world and present and past--about as whole as whole is going to be, knowing that we all live our lives in various states of disrepair.

So these were my thoughts as I swung my legs out from under the quilts on Monday--waking up in a very cold room, knowing it was my dead husband's birthday, and thinking how shattered I had felt for so long. But I was feeling like, no, I don't feel shattered any more, those glass fragments have really fused into something else. I was just picturing a stained glass window of a rising sun, trite as that might sound, as I walked over and clicked on my laptop.

 

There I found an email from my friend Ann with a link to a flashmob YouTube video filmed in an unemployment office in Spain. Listen yourself to their rendition of "Here Comes the Sun." I couldn't have been in a more receptive mood. http://youtu.be/kS709ZyZ_YU

(And, once again, just what does a sun look like? I might find out in a month, when I go to Yunnan Province, literally "south of the clouds" and far from Beijing. I will indeed go to Yunnan, where the sun does shine and the sky is blue and the air is breathable.)

Credits for the images:

Shattered: 

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http://images.google.com.hk/imgres?q=shattered+glass&num=10&hl=zh-CN&newwindow=1&safe=strict&tbo=d&biw=1039&bih=639&tbm=isch&tbnid=Zx-WD_ZlmJee4M:&imgrefurl=http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2011/02/14/shattered-chromosomes-cause-cancer-chaos/&docid=kwRTxPoDtoSNRM&imgurl=http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/shattered_glass.jpg%253Fw%253D300&w=1600&h=1200&ei=G5jzULuzBKHImQXYyoCQDQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=1&sig=108949288615991249508&page=1&tbnh=133&tbnw=188&start=0&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:10,s:0,i:109&tx=928&ty=293

Stained glass:

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