“If you didn’t know him when he was alive, you never will.”

— 

Brenda, Six Feet Under, Season One Episode Six (s01e06) “The Room”

This quote is so false it’s hard to believe.  I’ve started watching Six Feet Under recently because I’ve had so many people recommend it to me.  So far it hasn’t lived up to the hype, but it’s far from boring either – well it started out kind of boring but it’s getting a little better now.  I’m still giving it a chance.  The story is about a family that runs a funeral parlor, and their father dies.  One of their girlfriends says the above at one point, about their father.

But this quote, is definitely false.  While I can’t say I didn’t know my dad before he died, I can say there are entire sides to him I didn’t know about, or didn’t know very well.  And those sides?  I’m getting to know better and better the longer he’s been dead.  Because the effect he had on the world didn’t go away when he died, and you can read the effect someone had on the world, you can learn new things about a person, there’s all kinds of things you can pick up on after someone dies that you didn’t know before they died.  You don’t have to interact with someone directly as a living human being in order to get to know them better.  Sometimes their presence as a living human being even gets in the way of you knowing certain things that only become obvious after they die.

So if you lose a loved one without getting to know them first, or without knowing them as much as you’d like, that’s always going to suck, and there will always be questions you won’t be able to ask them anymore.  But there will also always be more things you can find out about them, even if they’re not around to talk to.  And sometimes that can even take the form of getting to know someone for the first time after they’re dead.

Necklaces:  Redwoods, and my dad’s beard in a floating locket.

Everything is connected, in weird ways.

And I’ve always been good at finding those connections, instinctively, and finding connections most people don’t find, and therefore interacting with the world in a very unusual way from the moment I entered it.

And I knew I’d gotten some of this from my mother, who sometimes does similar things.  But I didn’t realize I’d gotten a lot of it from my father as well.  I didn’t even begin to suspect, until he was dying and began to say things that indicated he was well capable of seeing these odd connections between things himself.

But after he died, he had my mom send me a lot of his things.  Shirts, rocks, a backpack, hats, beard clippings.

And I was able to see him more clearly than ever by looking at the way all these objects connected with each other, all centering on who he was.

And I was able to see that he was able to see such connections between objects himself.  And I was able to see that he spoke Rock, and Tree, and Mountain, and lots of other languages I speak, and that he’d hinted at being able to speak before, but not so strongly as he did after he died.

And through all these things I feel like I can connect with what he is now, which is… something that reminds me of Gandalf, after he’d fought the Balrog and won and been taken out of the world and put back into it again in a new form.  I don’t understand it, I wouldn’t have believed it before I saw it, and I’m not the only one to have noticed it.  (I tend to try to confirm perceptions like this by asking specific questions of other people, because it’s too easy to fall prey to wishful thinking if you’re the only one perceiving something.)

I feel like I know him better now, and am constantly connected with him now, and his love is always there, and my love is always there for him, and mourning isn’t as bad as people made it out to be, it’s actually been quite beautiful sometimes.  And yet I fear to say that, because I don’t want to sound like everyone ought to mourn the way I mourn, or everyone ought to be as happy as I am, or something like that.  I don’t mean that at all.  I’ve been told that people like me were originally thought to be in some kind of denial because we didn’t “mourn properly”, and then later they realized it’s actually one of many very healthy ways of handling grief and not a dysfunction at all.  (And apparently it’s often connected to having strong spiritual or religious convictions that help you put death in context.)

I feel like the hardest part was before he died, weirdly enough.  My stress level was through the roof, and it only started leveling off after he died. 

But towards the end, he was doing exactly what we’d talked about – trying to immerse himself in love, which is the only antidote to fear when death is involved.  We all tried really hard to love each other as much as we could, no matter how stressed out we were.  That was the one thing we could give to each other as he was dying.  And he became incredibly good at perceiving love in others, as well as giving it.  Towards the end he couldn’t talk well, so we just stared at each other through Skype, and I made purry cat noises at him.  He once said that anything I had left to say to him, he could see in my eyes, so I didn’t need to type it all out.  I still wrote him a letter towards the end.  Writing that letter was hard, it really did feel like throwing a rock in a deep lake and walking away forever, knowing I’d never be around when the rock hit the bottom.

But then after he died… he went away for a few days, but then he was still around.  I could feel him still being around, outside of time somewhere, in Gandalf mode.  (I always did tell him he had Gandalf eyebrows.  But in temperament he was more of a Radagast, I think.  More connected with living things of all kinds.)  I knew that everyone sort of exists outside of time in a way that can’t be destroyed, but I never understood what that could mean for after death until I saw it.

And people ask me questions about their loved ones sometimes when I talk about these things.  I don’t know anything about anyone else’s loved ones.  I barely understand how it worked for my father.  I just know something happened, and he’s still here, but different, and that’s kind of amazing.  I don’t care if anyone else believes me or not, it’s a personal thing.  It just… is what it is, and I have no particular explanations or wisdom or anything about this.  I’m just relieved that I can still continue a relationship with him, still continue getting to know him, including sides of himself he didn’t show as much when he was alive, but that shine really brightly after his death, now that he has nothing more to fear.  And that love and absence of fear is amazing.  I hope I die half as well as he did.

And they were right, grief is a form of love – whether it feels good or awful at the time, you can’t grieve without loving.

Orange (A letter to my late father)

I didn’t like orange
Until I got your orange shirts
Now, my favorite of your shirts are orange
Because I didn’t like orange.
So I didn’t associate orange with myself
But to wear your orange shirts
And see that orange looked good on me
I could find the part of you
That you left inside of me

natalunasans:

un-rare:

huntinthedwellin98:

un-rare:

let’s stop seeing sex as the biggest thing you can do to show someone you love them

everyone knows that the real way to show someone you love them is to find them a really cool rock. not a diamond. just a neat rock that you think they will enjoy

honestly ? you’re so right

withasmoothroundstone

The geology of love.

jspark3000:

When you return to God after a long time away, He doesn’t judge nor keep score. In fact, it’s His very acceptance that will restore you back to intimacy again. His very grace heals you back to Himself.

“Live in a small house but live life with a big heart.”

— Apparently it’s an old saying.  It reminds me of my great-grandmother.  She had a house smaller than my apartment and a heart that filled the entire house and then some.  You knew she had to be tough as nails with the things she’d been through, but when  you interacted with her she had this sweet, quintessentially Hufflepuff personality where hospitality was everything and she loved making other people feel loved.

Seems my (and others’) experiences aren’t so unusual after all…

“Universally” by Phideaux.   Lyrics:

“Now is the time I choose to go – it is my time I know
For a voyage like a dream from the days spent you and me”
Yes I have yes I heard yes I know you must go
Yes I love you yes I’ll always be your friend through the grave
So I take you out to sea, ashes for the universe
Universally, universally, universally, universally
Now you are free, where am I now?
Baby, a rain came tonight and it seemed you’d returned
Down the river’s way
Baby I’m running from the room – I get right inside the garden
Try to find you – try to find you… I wander to the ground, to the ground
My soil – it is you – our garden stems from you, from you
My soil – you are true – I garner strength to carry on from you
My soil – my bloom – from sea you flew
To mist from sky your kiss arrived
And so the awareness of you in the darkness gets me high
My heart in the darkness gets me through, the darkness gets me high, in the darkness, my heart, in the darkness, in the darkness, in the darkness, gets me through, in the dark, in the dark, in the darkness, in the darkness, in the darkness, gets me high, in the dark, in the darkness, my heart, in the darkness, in the darkness, gets me through, in the dark, in the dark, in the dark

“

Mrs. Whatsit went tumbling backward with the chair onto the floor, sandwich held high in one old claw.  Water poured out the boot and ran out on the floor and the big braided rug.

“Oh dearie me,” Mrs. Whatsit said, lying on her back in the overturned chair, her feet in the air, one in a red and white striped sock, the other one still booted.

Mrs. Murry got to her feet, “Are you all right, Mrs. Whatsit?”

“If you have some liniment I’ll put it on my dignity,” Mrs. Whatsit said, still supine.  “I think it’s sprained.  A little oil of cloves mixed well with garlic is rather good."  And she took a large bite of sandwich.

"Do please get up, Charles said.  "I don’t like to see you lying there that way.  You’re carrying things too far.”

“Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?”

”

— 

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle In Time

I can really relate to that passage right now.  Yesterday, I had to walk two blocks, and part of the walk is a hill.  It’s steep, and uphill or downhill it’s dangerous to me without crutches.  But I was managing it with a cane, because I’d forgot about the crutches until I got to it.c

So I went there, had the meeting, and left for home.  I’d gotten up and down the hill once just fine.  I was almost home.  Then I realized that I’d left my purse in the room upstairs.  I couldn’t call anyone to come get it.  My cell phone got canceled for reasons unknown that I have to look into now that I have money again.  So I turned around to go back to get my purse, and stepped right off a high wooden curb into thin air.  And then hard onto my hands and knees on the pavement of a parking lot.  First time I’ve skinned my knee since I was a kid.  (I did fall on the ground, I just never fell while balancing or climbing.  Sort of like Viktor Krum was graceful in the air and clumsy and ungainly on the ground.  My falls rarely caused much injury though.  My body was durable.)

Sprained dignity is totally what this fall was about.  I didn’t hurt anything badly.  I feel a little banged up but not much worse than I already felt.  I did feel really crappy when I got home, and took the limit of Tylenol that I’m humanly allowed without damaging my liver, but after that I’ve felt mostly fine.

But I remember lying on the ground wondering how I was going to get up.  I’d saved my iPad from dying, so that was good.  I wondered if I should type something out on the iPad and scream for help, or whether I should work out a way to get up.  I strongly preferred working out a way to get up.  I knew there were lots of people standing around in the parking lot, and i didn’t want to chance being helped up by, say, the teenage boy who had “ironically” yelled “hey BABY!” as I passed.

(Yes, I know that when they yell that at a fat short ‘woman’ with facial hair, a cane, suspenders, a checked shirt, a hat, and a big red backpack, slowly picking hir way down a hill with hir head hunched over staring at the ground in front of hir, they’re not voicing attraction in any way.  It doesn’t bother me much anymore, although I did entertain brief, semi-amusing fantasies of whaling on them with my cane, just to see how they’d react.)

Anyway I figured out a way to pull myself up the curb.  And from there my cane did the rest.  Canes are very useful things.

Walking up the hill again was agony.  I felt like if I put one foot wrong on the gravel I’d fall.  I used to be able to enter into a relationship with something like a hill, feeling it out kinesthetically, almost effortlessly, like a mountain goat.  One time I even echopraxically climbed up a rock right after a teacher who had told us not to bother trying because none of us could do it.  I didn’t even think before following him up the same route without effort at all.  Then even though all the other kids – all of them boys, which made him even less likely to believe that this 12-year-old ‘girl’ with not much upper body strength and no special gym class or sports accomplishments,

I got up there though, and I got my purse.  On the way down the hill, though, I felt like I needed help.  I was wearing my oxygen.  I’m supposed to always wear oxygen when I walk, and I needed it.  I was getting light-headed, and spacey, and the last thing I needed to do was space out and slide down the rest of the hill on my face. 

So I asked my dad for help.

I said something along the lines of, “I know this is far from the hiking trips we used to take, but it feels about as strenuous as one of the harder parts of the shorter hikes maybe.  And I really need help or I’m going to fall on my face.”

And every time my mind wandered, I heard his voice in my head clear as a bell, saying “caaaareful, now,” the same way he’d have said it in real life, unexpectedly too.  And he said it all the way down the hill, then I rested on a couch outside the loading area of the second-hand store (everything’s overflowing because the college students are leaving and it’s a university town), then he made sure I got off the couch before I just stayed there forever.  Then I made it home just fine, and was so happy I thanked him a zillion times.

He reminds me of Gandalf, after all the mess with the Balrog was over.  Like all the bad parts removed, turned into something powerfully good beyond my understanding, but still undeniably who he is, his personality, his essence is still there. 

I can’t say I understand a lot now, but I understand more of what happens after death for the luckiest people, than I understood before.  It’s now my endeavor to meet him there one day.  And as far as I know the only way to do that is to embrace love early and often and to follow it where it leads no matter how hard the road, because however hard the road seems, it’s better than what seems like the easy way at the time.  Unfortunately I’ve still got a rather massive ego problem, like most people, so I want to take the easy way out at every turn.  But every time I try I’m reminded that short cuts make long delays and all that.  The easy way out is the hardest way forward.  The hardest way is easiest, if we’d only ever fully recognize that.

I think I read something like that in the Tao Te Ching once, that book is amazing for condensing truth into as few words as possible.

Anyway, I don’t expect anyone else to believe my experiences, I would have trouble believing them myself if they didn’t match so well to what other people who knew him are saying. And if they weren’t so vivid and unexpected.  Whatever’s going on, I think it’s beyond normal cognitive understanding.

This is about cyberbullying.  Really important points made – she really got to the heart of what it feels like to be targeted online vs. offline.  I was deliberately set up for cyberbullying in a similar but less drastic way than she was, many years ago, and there are still consequences for me in terms of lost friends, lost communities, lost sense of having any privacy at all for the stupid things I said as a teenager, lost a lot of things.  

Although I think it ultimately made me a stronger person, nobody should have to go through that and the stress levels were unbelievable and possibly triggered the near-total collapse of my health that same year.  (Autoimmune diseases can be made worse or even triggered into existence by extreme stress.)  A collapse of my health that I hid for over a year, telling only close friends how bad it had gotten, allowing people to believe I’d just chosen to disappear from a lot of online places, while frantically trying to post enough online to make it look like I was still healthy, even when I could not get out of bed on my own I was still making an effort to post on at least one webforum so people would think nothing was wrong, because I was so afraid of showing vulnerability, and so afraid of yet again being accused of “faking diseases habitually” since I had no clear diagnosis at the time.  

But they did get diagnosed:  Myasthenia gravis, gastroparesis and associated aspiration pneumonia, and severe adrenal insufficiency, all confirmed by tests and scans that literally can’t be faked.  And yet people online still accuse me of faking even those, because that was the content of the cyberbullying, accusations of faking conditions that were not faked at all, just because they were pointing out parts of my past that I’d never actually hidden, I’d been talking about them all along, but few people had read enough of my writing to know that before people started claiming I was faking things. 

And they used the fact that I’d gone along with conditions I didn’t have to survive the psychiatric system as a teenager, as “proof” that I like faking things.  Seriosly WTF, that’s just not okay, especially since some of these bullies were the same bullies who convinced me I had some of htese conditions in the first place and urged me to act as if I did, so they could watch me.  They’re actually mentioned in my psych records as people I should have no contact with because of the things they were doing to my head – somehow they didn’t like it when I posted that information.

Anyway, this is a really important video, it says that the antidote to cyberbullying is compassion, and that posting compassionate comments can turn around the potentially life-threatening level of humiliation that people experience when cyberbullied.  And she also makes the point, much forgotten on tumblr, that everyone does stupid shit when they’re young, but only some people are dragged into the public eye either online or offline because of it, and that’s gotten more frequent as social media have gotten bigger.  There’s entire cultures of bullying online now.  Lots of them.  Lots of places.  Including right here on tumblr.  And someone has to stand up to it, to counteract what she refers to as the bystander effect, where people think everyone else is going to do something about it so nobody does anything about it.  And seriously she’s right about compassionate comments helping.

Unfortunately sometimes bullies – the really sadistic ones usually, the ones who plan it out in cold blood — will claim to be the victim of their targets.  That’s what my cyberbully did to me.  Before I even understood what was happening, she claimed I’d been stalking her and stealing her life story, probably to make money from and get famous by.  It turned out she had a long track record in the autistic community of picking out autistic people, almost all women or DFAB, and targeting them with such accusations.  She was basically run out of the community on a rail back around 2000, and laid low for 8 years before popping up at random claiming to hae changed and become a better person, and constantly wanting to talk to me more and more, asking lots of detailed personal questions that in retrospect showed way too much knowledge of my life already (even at the time she put my teeth on edge the moment she came into the chatroom, it was like getting blasted with hatred), and then using it all against me in the end, including going to the lengths of deliberately contacting former bullies I’d mentioned online, in order to involve them in this project.  

These are people who used to utterly and totally endorse the idea that I was autistic, back when it was just another way to say I was broken in some way, crazy, whatever.  But when it became more fun to say I wasn’t autistic, afer talking to this woman, they suddenly started telling people I’d never shown the slightest sign of autism.  Even though one of them used to host my autism website and post articles of mine all over the web without permission, talking about how insightful they were into autistic thinking, just to annoy me.  I haven’t actually talked to these bullies in over 15 years, haven’t seen them in closer to 20 years, and yet they still have this desire to be involved in cyberbullying me.  I’ve moved on with my life since I knew them, they apparently haven’t since they knew me, because I rarely think about them except when writing articleslike this, but they think about me an awful lot given the amount they’ve tried to fuck up my life.  One of them even impersonated a reporter to try to get people to give them private information about me.  (The reporter was Not Amused.  Pissing off reporters is generally not a good move, either.)

Anyway… I’ve never been the subject of a TV scandal, but I’ve certainly been the subject of a manufactured Internet scandal, and it really fucking sucks, and it sucks worse when your bully is claiming to be your victim and playing up her vulnerability, while you can’t show any vulnerability for fear of being targeted worse.  She posted my address online and told people what she thought my staff hours were, so that they could come and kill me outside of staff hours.  We instituted all kinds of security at that point, but I was still scared for my life, especially when I became too physically weak to call for help or fight off an attacker.  So I couldn’t say that I was that weak, and I had to pretend everything was fine as my life fell apart around me.  I had to pretend i was eating enough, sleeping enough, able to move properly, etc.  People knew I was now in a powerchair when I stated showing up to events in one, but they didn’t know how bad it had gotten, I didn’t let them.  Not until I determined it was safe.  

Meanwhile my bully was whining about how every single thing I did – and she would delineate them all in great detail on a blog she started for this purpose - was supposedly in imitation of her, and how thin she had gotten as a result of how I supposedly made her stop eating (she probably went on a diet or something… she used the fact that I was fat against me so many times it was horrible, but when this started there was only 20 pounds difference between us – she always added about 100 pounds to my weight and many inches to my height when she described me, claiming I was even lying when I said I was 5′2″, like how could I lie about that, you just… can’t)..  And weirdly enough some people actually believed what looked to me like transparent bullshitting and deliberate histrionics designed to make people feel sorry for her (she even bragged, in private, about how she could evoke that reaction in people on purpose and how good it made her feel to do so, because she could get away with anything, including attacking people, by being “the poor little severely retarded multi-handicapped woman”).  Some people I wouldn’t expect to believe a stranger over someone they’d known for years.  That was the hardest part was not having the ability to be in the autistic community without some people harassing me “on behalf” of my bully.  Being in that community is a thing most people take for granted, most of them are not targeted for major cyberbullying campaigns within the community, and most of them can enter and leave it freely at will without being stalked and harassed everywhere they go except for places that deliberately shut out bullies.

And that was my life for many years, it’s gotten better, but being a target sucks and we have to do something about it on a larger scale or people who don’t manage to salvage their lives will commit suicide in large numbers.  And she’s right that humiliation is a more strongly felt emotion than either happiness or anger.  I felt like there was  giant eyeball trained o me and I was this tiny animal huddling in a corner.  But I couldn’t show weakness, meanwhile my bully was making a pastime out of showing fake weakness to get sympathy about nonexistent actions on my part.  This is why I loved that book Rilla of Ingleside, where there’s a woman who makes a huge public display of emotions she isn’t really feeling that strongly, while Rilla is hiding her emotions about the exact same situation (so that she won’t cause worry to her relatives who are at war by publicly freaking out about them being at war) – and because Rilla is hiding her emotions, this other person spreads gossip throughout the town that Rilla is cold-hearted and has no feelings at all for the people she knows, including her boyfriend and brothers, who are fighting in World War I.  

But that’s the thing.  She spread that news throughout the town.  As Monica Lewinsky points out, cyberbullying spreads malicious gossip throughout the planet and then makes it so it is forever on the Internet and anyone can find it, potentially forever.  So people who have never known me can google me and find out that I’m supposedly a big fraud, and some of them will believe it, and this will influence their behavior towards me, which influences my life.  I’ve llearned to live with it but the bottom line is nobody should have to live with this.  Nobody.  I’ve seen people fall in to the trap of thinking some people do deserve it, and that “deserving” people deserve whatever they/we (if they put me in that category and they sometimes do) get.   

And yes, love and compassion are the only answer in the end, as in so many other areas of life.  Love and compassion not just felt as feelings, not even necessarily feelings at all, but rather acted on as fundamental aspects of how we interact with the world.

Total happiness is finding a shirt that still smells a lot like my dad.

“But while there’s songs to sing
My girls to love
Peace in the valley
That’s is everything
That I will ever need”

— Tony Carey, “Peace in the Valley”

This one won’t embed, so I’m sending it as a link, and lyrics.

https://youtu.be/xEqXhnfW_hY

@feliscorvus

Not everything Planet P Project does is strictly science fiction.  This one is personal, I’m sure, taken from the singer’s own experience with cancer.  It hits home in all the right places for anyone who’s gone through a long illness where the outcome of life or death is up in the air.  It also reminds me of my relationship with Anne (especially as it plays out in medical crises) – although Tony Carey is clearly making it a romantic relationship, my relationship with Anne is no less intense or loving for being platonic, and everything he says in the song applies to us.  And I imagine something similar went on and is continuing to go on between my parents as they deal with life-threatening illnesses.  (Just because my dad’s dead doesn’t mean he’s lost any connection with my mother but the physical one, and that’s almost the least important part of a relationship like theirs.)

So it won’t embed, so you have to go watch the song on YouTube.  But I’ll post the lyrics here, again from memory:

When I was just lyin’ there
Poison in my blood runnin’ everywhere
I could feel you
I could feel you

I didn’t see the lightning
Didn’t hear the thunder
Three little words
And the rug pulled under me
But I feel you
I stillI feel you

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
I could see you
So I’m alive

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
I will be with you
Until we die

Now all I’m missing is a little bit of hair
But other than that baby I’m all there
And I’m there for you
I’m there for you

Lookin’ out the window at a hundred rainy days
All I can say is I was never afraid
Cause you were there for me
You were there for me

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
I can see you
So I’m alive

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
I will be with you
Until we die

And if the same thing happened to one of you
I’d be out of my mind, I’d probably be wasted too
I don’t know if I could be as strong as you
Through the long blue
Till the light shone through
Hallelujah

I will be with you
I will be with you till we die
I will be with you
With you till we die

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
I can see you
Baby I’m alive

Hallelujah
Hey, I can see you
So I’m alive

I never know how to explain this sort of thing to other people.

I’m lying in bed, crocheting something, and listening to my Kindle read out loud a book called Failure is Not An Option, about being in Mission Control during the early days of the American space program.

And I realize that I’m not alone.  My dad’s here with me, and he’s just as interested in all this as I am.  There’s no sense of him communicating with me, and no sense that he needs to – or even that he should, to put it more bluntly.  Just being there is enough.  But it’s a very distinct sort of presence, it’s a kind that’s thoroughly uninvasive (invasive presences claiming to be dead relatives are a bad, bad sign) and that has not even announced itself to me – I only noticed it because I know how to look for things like that.  He would probably be just as okay with it if I hadn’t noticed, and he would never have pushed his way into my awareness just because he wanted to.  But the fact that he occasionally hangs around is cool.  (And only made possible, ironically, by the fact that when he first died he walked into it knowing he might never get a chance to hang around any of us again, and that this was the risk he took in getting dissolved into love.  But it’s only through getting dissolved into love that you can ever hang around your loved ones as yourself.  It’s hard to explain, because reality gets very weird in these areas and we don’t really have language set up to deal with it.)

Anyway, hi Ron, and I wish i could’ve sat and listened to this with you while you were alive.  But at least the chance hasn’t totally gone away.  I thought of you when I downloaded the book, but I didn’t expect you to show up.