Last Monday I wrote about my trip to spread my mother's ashes.
Before I did it, I was concentrating only on the logistics of the trip itself—how to get there, where to stay, what time to be where, how to get home.
I got an unexpected bonus. I learned something I wish I had learned along ago, but it may be that before now I just wasn't ready for this life lesson.
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or even if the person you're "mourning" is still alive,
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I have friends who talk a lot about needing "support" before they can do anything difficult. For decades I had no idea what they meant by that. "Support"? What does that mean?
What good can it possibly do for someone to just be there with you while you are facing something challenging? You still have to do it by yourself. Isn't another person just in the way? I have a hard enough time dealing with my own self in complicated or demanding situations without having to take another person into account.
The paradox is that I know that support is important when I am the one PROVIDING the support! I know that just being present is sometimes the very best thing you can do when someone is going through hardship, even when (or especially when) there is nothing you can do to make it better.
And I have in the past experienced support on a personal level that meant the world to me. A friend who sat in the emergency room with me for hours during a horrendous bout of intestinal cramping. My dearest friend who came and stayed with me for a whole week while I was completing a four day professional exam. My sister who brought me home after a medical procedure and stayed with me until I was able to fall asleep.
But it is not in my nature to seek out support, no matter how hard the task. My first instinct, my default assumption is always: better to get through this alone if possible.
So my original idea was to go to Baltimore on the overnight train, get myself to and from the racetrack using car service, and come back on the late train the same night.
I had no intention of involving anyone else. This was going to be an only child production: go alone, do it alone, come back alone, process alone. It seemed like the most efficient way to plan and carry out the trip.
Besides, getting big things done alone has been the story of my life. I've had so many big moments and difficult accomplishments and hard emotions I've had to process alone. It's just the place I always start.
This time, circumstances intervened to lead me to some different choices, and it was magical.
Almost miraculous.
It started when a friend I've known since eighth grade (!) offered to to drive me down there. She couldn't stay for the Sunday afternoon ceremony because of needing to get back to Boston for Monday morning commitments, but she offered to drive me from Boston to Baltimore, just for the company of the trip.
The debate raged in my head.
"Thank her, but say no. If you go alone you can be flexible and change plans if necessary without worrying about inconveniencing anyone else."
"Say yes. It will be good to have company. She will keep you in the present moment so that you don't get too weepy and risk changing your mind."
"Say NO! Suppose you DO want to change your mind! Then you will have inconvienced no one but yourself."
"Say YES. She knew your mother. She is a direct tie to the part of childhood where you remember going to the racetrack with your mom."
"SAY NO! This is something you always planned to do alone!"
"Say yes. Because this is something you always planned to do alone.
But you shouldn't."
The Yes Voice won that battle. I agreed to accept my dear friend's transportation offer.
But once I started thinking outside myself, I realized there would be friends and relatives who might be annoyed if I came down there on a hit and run basis, staying only a few hours without even telling them I was there.
So I told one cousin I was coming. She said she wished she could be there but she couldn't get away-- was I was going to make a videotape?
A videotape? But that would mean having someone else with me while I did it, and that was not part of the plan. I could ask the racetrack personnel if they would hold my cell phone. But no, the official who arranged things for me would not be there. No one but a security guard.
Maybe I should ask someone to be there with me.
Then the dam broke. I ended up asking one relative to pick me up at the track and then drive me to stay at another relative's house Sunday so I wouldn't have to come back Sunday night on the train. This turned into him actually being with me for the ceremony and making the videotape on my phone that my other cousin wanted.
Then we got stuck in heavy "back from the beach" traffic but had a great time talking and listening to music.
When I finally got to my cousin's house we went out for a great dinner and then she put me in her beautiful guest room. I slept really late Monday, and Monday afternoon I met a friend I've known since THIRD grade (!) for dinner near the train station before taking the late train back. It was a whole weekend of connecting and reconnecting.
The trip that was supposed to be "another only child production" turned into an experience of co-ordinated support that seemed to arrange itself with very little input on my part. I did a difficult thing involving hours and hours of travel and three different cities without needing to be alone for any sustained part of it until the Monday night train trip home.
During the trip home, falling asleep as the train gently rocked me back and forth, "the lonelies" set back in, and it hurt more than usual. I had had a taste of what it was like to be surrounded by help and love and support.
I started kicking myself—why didn't I arrange my life to have experiences like that more often?
I've avoided asking for help in the past, and by the time I was desperate enough to ask for help I was devastated if anyone said no. Sometimes people have to say no. The trick is that you have enough people in your life to be able to ask someone else. But I never managed to put that kind of network together.
I've gone a lot of years without asking. I struggled though things as best I can without asking for help or support just because that is what I have always done.
But this time I didn't have to beg, I only had to ask. People seemed willing and even eager to support me.
Maybe loneliness has been my default state long enough.
The weekend was a revelation. Maybe the only thing standing in between my current life of struggling to make my peace with solitude, and a life filled with supportive loving friends and family, is my willingness to let people in. My ability to ask for what I need. My ability to even realize that I need it, or at least want it, or at least realize I have a choice--I don't have to live without it.
What would it take to stop assuming that doing everything alone was my default state? How would that change me?
In the two weeks since I got back I have continued to marvel at the myriad blessings of the trip. Laughing and relaxing and just being with some of my oldest friends. The simple joys of being with family. Just when did I start holding myself apart from these experiences, and why? Is it too late to reverse course?
I assure you, I had no idea that this trip of releasing the ashes would also release a whole new way of thinking about what the last section of my life might be.
I will continue actively wrestling with this in the weeks and months to come. It is an exciting step on the grief journey--maybe even the first step on the post-grief journey. A reconstructing my life journey. Or maybe even, at this age, constructing my life for the first time.
This new way of thinking is definitely a long-term work in progress...