Dancing Our Sorrow Away

When I was in College, the Jackson Browne album “Late for the Sky” was in heavy rotation on my apartment turntable. The album’s introspective songs had a certain appeal to a young man growing up and just starting to make his way in the world because they asked big questions about the purpose of life and how to think about all the tricky emotions that come with adulthood.

His song “For a Dancer” acknowledges one of the sad truths about life: that one day everyone and everything we love will be gone. Knowing this, Jackson sings that we owe it to those we love to make a joyful sound with our lives while we are here – and to do our best to spread seeds that will blossom long after we are gone.

Listen on Youtube to: Jackson Browne: “For a Dancer”

The final verse of the song reminds us that we all know people who have had a positive impact on our life (a teacher, coach, parent, friend) and who helped us to become who we are. Those people did great things for us, usually without knowing it. We are likewise called, Jackson sings, to have a positive impact on the lives we touch – even though we may never live to see the fruit of our labors.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
That you’ll never know

Jackson Browne “For a Dancer“

The song was written as a moving meditation on the death of Browne’s friend; who died in a fire at a young age. Browne explained that his friend was an interesting guy; a great dancer; a great tailor who would make his friend’s clothes; an ice skater who skated for the Ice Follies. “He was a Renaissance man and when I wrote him the song – I was trying to express the idea that your life is a dance”.

I like that image of our life as a dance and that we never know when it will be our last time on the stage. When I think of dancing, I think of being uninhibited, of letting my body react to the beat of the music, and of sharing a joyful personal moment with my dance partner.

When you are busy dancing, you are not worrying about your troubles, or the problems that that you will face tomorrow. Dancing is one of life’s rare human rituals; a moment of pure expression when you are able to forget about your ultimate fate and just focus on making a joyful noise.

A recent Youtube video created by the School of Life Company echoed a similar philosophy about the benefit of living life in the moment. The video was a commentary on the cultural expression “…rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic“, that is often used by people when they want to convey the futility or meaninglessness of a task.

Those familiar with the fate of the Titanic know that the hull was damaged and that the ship was destined to sink; so for the passengers on that ship to concern themselves with the position of the deck chairs is a failure on their part to recognize the true hopelessness of their situation.

Our life situation can become a little like passengers on a doomed liner. Our larger hopes in life have not come to fruition. We have come to see that our career won’t ever flourish; our relationships will always be less than ideal; we’ve passed our peak in terms of looks; our bodies begin to fall prey to ever more humiliating illnesses; society is becoming more dysfunctional than ever and political progress looks highly improbable.

It can start to feel like our ship is going down and that it would be silly trying to improve our condition, let alone find pleasure and distraction in our daily life. It would be to live in denial of the facts. Our instinct instead is to become pessimistic and gloomy about our ultimate end.

However, there is a crucial element which makes our predicament different from that of the passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic. Those passengers only had a few hours to contemplate their fate before the ship broke apart and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Our ship is going down too, but much more slowly. It’s as if the captain has let it be known that our ship is sinking and we can’t be rescued… but it will likely be a decade or more before we meet our final fate.

So, though we can’t be saved, though the end will be grim, we still have options as how to use our remaining time. We are involved in a catastrophe, but there are better and worse ways of passing the time and filling our days. Under those different circumstances, expending thought and effort on ‘rearranging the deck chairs‘ is no longer ridiculous at all, it becomes a logical step; one that can be turned into a higher calling.

When the larger hopes for our lives become impossible, we can learn to grow inventive around lesser, but still real, options for the time that remains. Keeping cheerful and engaged, in spite of everything, can bring some light through the dark storm clouds that you know are ahead.

Consider, for example, that you are on a very gradually sinking luxury liner in the early 20th century, you might every evening strive to put on a dinner jacket, dance the Foxtrot to the music of a string quartet, sing a cheerful song or settle into the ship’s library to read a good book – even as the water begins to pool at your ankles.

Or you might try to engage in a friendly game of shuffleboard on the slightly tilting deck; or decide to drop-in on a wild party in Steerage; help to comfort some despairing fellow travelers; or just try to have a deep and comforting conversation with a new friend – even though you can hear the sound of dishes smashing somewhere in a galley down below.

Of course your life would – from the big picture perspective – still remain a thorough disaster; but you might find that you were at least starting to enjoy yourself.

This kind of attitude and inventiveness is precisely what is need to help us cope with our state. Can we invest the days we have left with meaning even though everything is, overall, entirely dark? Our culture teaches us to focus on our big hopes, on how we can aim for everything going right. We crave a loving marriage, deeply satisfying and richly rewarding work, a stellar reputation, an ideal body and positive social change. What remains when those things are not attainable – when love will always be tricky, politics compromised, or the crowd hostile?

What is our equivalent to seeking the best spot for a deckchair on a sinking Ocean Liner? If marriage is far less blissful than we’d imagined, perhaps we can turn to friendship; if society won’t accord us the dignity we deserve, perhaps we can find a group of fellow outcasts; if our careers have irretrievably faltered, perhaps we can turn to new interests or hobbies; if political progress turns out to be perennially blocked and the news is always sour, we might absorb ourselves in nature or history.

In doing this, we would be turning to what our society might dismiss as Plan-B’s (what you do when you can’t do the things you really want to do). But there’s nothing wrong with that! It just may turn out that the secondary, lesser, lighter, reasons for living are, in fact, more substantial and enjoyable than we imagined.

And after a while we might come to think that they are what we should have been focused on all along – only it has taken a seeming disaster to get us to realize how central they should always have been.

My mother has always been a model to me of this kind of inventive thinking and an example of someone who has always been able to discover new things to do when she can no longer do the things she loves doing.

Now in her 94th year, she has good reasons to be gloomy about her present condition. Her ship has been slowly sinking over the last two decades. She is the last surviving member of her large, close knit, family; she lost her beloved husband after 66 years of marriage; she reads about the passing of friends and acquaintances almost every day in the obituaries; she has lived through several strokes and cardiac operations to place stents in her arteries; she struggles with gradual loss of hearing, eyesight, teeth and memory as well as the humiliating indignities of incontinence and lack of mobility that come with aging.

Despite these life difficulties, it is not in my mother’s nature to be gloomy. She laments what she has lost, yet she finds a reason to be optimistic about her situation and to be happy with the things that she can do. Here are some of the ways my mother has learned to stay cheerful, smiling and engaged in her diminished old age:

• She has learned to navigate an iPad so she can keep track of the Facebook lives of her eight children and dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
• She has become a late-in life sports fan, following with anticipation the exploits of her favorite New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox teams.
• She volunteers for her Church prayer line ministry, spending time each day praying for those in her parish who are in most need.
• She visits her husband’s grave regularly to sit in contemplation and tend to the flowers and plants.
• She tries to include some form of bodily exercise every day. Short walks with her walker outside on nice days, elderly chair exercises, rubber band stretching exercises.
• She communicates with her smart speaker to listen to music or hear the news (even though she worries about Alexa eavesdropping on her conversations).
• She stays engaged by reading books and bingeing her favorite TV shows.
• She visits French Youtube language web sites so she can enjoy hearing and practicing the French language that she grew up speaking.
• She has become the project manager of her house, assigning her children work to do around the house that she has historically done in the past and overseeing it to make sure it is done to her standards.
• She takes short field trips with her children to places from her past and shares happy memories of the people and events that shaped her life.

I co-share caretaker duties with my siblings and I feel blessed to spend one or two days every week with my mother. It has been a privilege for me to watch how she accommodates the frailties of old age without sacrificing her spirit. She knows the end is near, but she is not afraid; and until the end comes she is determined to wake up with a reason for living – and make sure the deck chairs are properly arranged on the deck.

May we too always find a way to dance our sorrows away.

“Of our greatest acts we are ignorant”

My parents took their Catholic faith seriously and they felt it was their sacred duty and obligation to make certain all eight of their children celebrated the Catholic sacraments and attended religious education classes. They hoped this would instill in them a strong foundation of faith and become a rock of support that they could lean on throughout their life.

For the ritual of the sacrament of Baptism, the Church asks parents to choose Godparents for their child. Godparents represent the community of faith at the baptism and their basic function is to step in and serve as proxies for the parents if they are unable to provide for the child’s religious training.

Some children are fortunate to be blessed with one or more Godparents who expand their role well beyond this basic function. I was one of those children. It was my good fortune that my mother chose my uncle Rheo to be my Godfather.

His relationship with me did not end after the baptism ceremony – it was only the beginning. He became an important part of my life and a model to me of Christian living, showing me by his words, actions and friendship what it meant to be a good man.

Rheo Gilbert Meunier 1923 – 1984

Uncle Rheo was one of my mother’s 6 brothers. She grew up with him in the 1920’s and 30’s working on a small family farm during the hard days of the Great Depression.

He left school after completing the sixth grade in order to spend more time helping his father with all the farm work. He grew into a strong, handsome and strapping young man from all his strenuous labor.

He was part of the Greatest Generation, enlisting in the Navy in 1942 when he was 19 years old and serving four years for his country during World War II; seeing action in the North Atlantic and doing tours patrolling the Suez Canal and Russian coast.

When he returned from the war he was able to acquire a good job at the Municipal Light Company in Templeton Massachusetts as an electrician. He ended up working there for 36 years – eventually rising through the ranks to the position of Foreman.

It was while on the job early in his career when he experienced a tragic accident. He was strapped high on a telephone pole trying to repair a downed wire when the pole snapped in half crashing to the ground with Rheo still attached. That he managed to survive this event was a testament to his strength and determination.

He gradually recovered and regained all his strength and athleticism but he did suffer some permanent damage to his lower extremities that would bother him his whole life and make it impossible for him to ever have children.  Although I remember him dating quite frequently, he never married, and I often wondered if it was because he didn’t want to deny his wife the blessings of having children.

It was not in his nature to complain about his unfortunate circumstances though, or let those circumstances drive him to depression. Despite his situation we always saw him smiling, laughing, energetic and full of life. He was a man of action with plenty of money to buy toys like convertible sport cars, motorcycles, cabin cruiser boats and snowmobiles; and to take skiing vacations in the Swiss Alps, scuba diving excursions in Hawaii, fishing expeditions to Cape Cod and river rafting & hiking adventures in Colorado.

Despite his James Bond lifestyle that we admired so much he always had time to spend with his extended family. He made it a point to stop in and visit with each of his seven brothers and sisters every few weeks just to stay in touch with their lives and to show interest in the activities of his 34 nephews and nieces. He once told my mother that he loved his nephews and nieces so much, he didn’t need to have children of his own.

And his nephews and nieces adored him too. He was a giant in their eyes – telling them interesting stories about his travels, sharing with them his talent for yodeling, and taking them on exciting adventures and outings.

He also generously volunteered to lend a hand whenever people needed help. I remember him coming to our house one day when I was a young boy to help install electrical wiring that was needed at our house. I shadowed him while he went about his work patiently explaining to me what he was doing and showing me all the tools he was using and how they worked. I was fascinated and think the experience kindled in me my interest in electricity and electronics that led to my later career as an engineer.

When his father passed away, Rheo became the primary caretaker of his mother, and since he did not have any family he agreed to live with her, support her and take care of her so that she could continue to stay in the home she so loved.

It his 60th year a tragic series of successive events occurred that contributed to his death from a sudden and massive heart attack. The first event occurred on Christmas Eve night in 1983 while he was out working helping to restore some power outages in the town. His Mother was at home when she accidentally started a fire while trying to cook a ham for the family holiday dinner. His mother perished while trying to put out the fire and Rheo lost his mother, his home and most of his earthly possessions that night.

Then, in the space of two month’s time, Rheo’s brother-in-law passed away, his best friend lost his business to a fire and the Camp he owned in Cape Cod also was destroyed by an unexplained fire. The stress was too much for his heart to take – he had a fatal heart attack in March of 1984.

The packed Church and military honors bestowed on him at his funeral showed how he was loved and respected by his community and family. I was honored to be one of the pallbearers selected to carry his casket; beside seven of his other beloved nephews.

Although he was a religious man and regularly attended Sunday Mass at his local church, he never lectured me about religion or preached to me about God. However I learned so much about morality from what I saw him do. Whenever he saw me he would make it a point to sit with me, look into my eyes and take a genuine interest in learning about what was happening in my life. On my birthdays he would give me a birthday card and some money or a cool gift; on Easter he would give me my own chocolate bunny to enjoy!

Beyond that, he would make it a point to spend time with me at various times during the year. Rides in his convertible car with the top down to get ice cream, snowmobile rides through his snowy woods and ocean fishing trips in his cabin cruiser boat. He was a perfect role model for a young boy growing up and learning about the world. Being with him was like a field trip to see the practical application of faith put into action.

Even in death, his generous spirit was still being revealed as he had saved a significant sum of money and he specified in his will that the money should be split evenly between his brothers and sisters. My parents were grateful that they were able to safely invest the inheritance they received from him so that they would not have to worry about running out of money in their golden years.

One of the most precious gifts I ever received was my uncle Rheo’s gold Swiss watch which my mother was able to obtain and give to me after he passed away. I treasured that watch for many years and would always wear it on special occasions and think of him. I decided to give this watch as a gift to my young nephew Rheo (named after his Great Uncle ) when he celebrated his sacrament of Confirmation because I could see in him a glimmer of the same spirit that drove his namesake great uncle.

Emily Dickinson once wrote the words: “Of our greatest acts we are ignorant” to a friend who was unaware that his interest in her had saved her life. I don’t think my Uncle ever thought he was doing anything great and was probably ignorant of the positive impact he had on my life.

I am sorry that because of my uncle’s sudden death I never got the opportunity to tell him about the great acts he did for me, how important he was in my life and how grateful I was for all that I had learned from him.

I hope you take the time while you still can to tell the people you love how much they mean to you and that we all, like my dear uncle Rheo, invest the effort to perform great acts that will similarly touch the lives of all the people in our life.