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You know the saying this too shall pass, well sometimes I feel as if I have lived a thousand lives just inside a week and they are all in the construct of my mind. No really. It’s like I feel exhausted from the journey I’ve been on that culminated yesterday late afternoon in me going through some photographs of my mother for a memorial book I’m trying to put together and coming across one of her putting lipstick on me for a Purim festival – I was wearing a Ms. America banner (don’t ask) – and I just broke down and sobbed on the floor until my tears were falling all over the photographs and I had to move away. I went downstairs and laid down on the bed and just wanted to take the poison pill.

Epiphany #1 – Mom’s gone. Blech.

So next Come to Jesus Moment, I’m in yoga, and I’m not in my usual good mood for yoga, and it’s because I’ve got to negotiate this heart monitor – do you know how hard it is to hang upside down with wires strapped to you and a box that is supposed to clip on your waistband? – well I don’t want to complain because it is not like I had a heart attack it’s more they are going to try to see if they can do something about the intermittent speeding up of my heart – try to rewire me – why the hell am I complaining about anything? This is all going through my mind when Aaron showed us this Alan Watt’s video.

I’ve been (as usual for me) trying to go from point N (which is where I think I am here at 51) to point X – I’m trying to see ahead to that point and to make sure that the ground is high, the loved ones are safe, the house is standing (I feel as strung out as Heidi does with her pensive brow as she worries about all of us 24/7 and can only really quit worrying when we are all in the same room). Then I see this little boy walk up to me this morning playing his drumstick like a trombone and really getting down:

Epiphany #2 – I forgot we are making music and dancing along the way.

Then last night, we were watching The Dead, what a fabulous film that is, the performances, the singing, the directing – all just first rate. It was the third time I’ve seen the movie and it’s been a while since the last time, but it was the first time T had seen it. That moment when he has his Come to Jesus, his epiphany, that this woman he loves who he has felt certain he was the only thing on her mind because he is always the one taking responsibility for everything, he learns that she harbors the regret, the tears, the sadness of losing her first love, a boy who died at 17, and realizes that life is much more expansive than he believed until that moment. “While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him with another” (179). And yet it is about the death of a part of her, the death that is a part of them, the death that is a part of him, and knowing his aunt will be dead soon and so too the tradition of their Thanksgiving meal together. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (182). And while this epiphany does not bring happiness like other writings of Joyce, this is an epiphany about death and its place in our lives both figuratively and real, and how appropriate to have had all these Come to Jesus moments right now as we approach the all Hallow’s eve where the dead will walk alongside the living for one brief period of time.

Epiphany #3 – Death is at the end of the road, so don’t hurry forward.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2010 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.