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.

An Appreciation of my Wife on her 60th Birthday

Kathleen was born in 1960, the first-born of a third generation English/Irish couple scratching out a living in the gritty suburbs of Boston. Her mother and father were young parents who never possessed adequate parental skills to properly nurture their children.

In public her parents tried to present the picture of a perfect family; but behind closed doors it was a different story. They were routinely cruel to their children, inflicting harsh punishments for minor infractions. They were driven by their own selfish desires, letting the needs of their children take a backseat.

Despite the dysfunctional home and parental episodes of verbal and physical abuse, Kate was fortunately also exposed to glimmers of light: grandparents who lived nearby to look after her when things got out of hand at home; a favorite aunt who would spoil her; treasured books that helped her to imagine a life different than the one she was living; younger siblings to protect and bond with; and a catholic elementary school education that gave her the moral foundation to understand the difference between right and wrong.

Her parent’s disowned Kate after she graduated from High School because she refused to continue letting them bully her or acquiesce to their unreasonable demands on her life.

With no family support, she managed to get by with jobs as a checkout girl at the Supermarket and as a snack distributor. She shared a tiny apartment and went to school at night when she could afford it – eventually graduating from Bentley University with her business degree.

When she got married her parents expressed their disapproval by refusing to attend the wedding and by strong-arming most of her relatives to boycott the wedding as well.

Nevertheless she persisted, integrating well into her husband’s family – who gladly embraced her, loving and treating her like a daughter. She learned important lessons about how to be a loving parent from her father and mother in law that she never acquired from her own parents.

Someone had once told Kate that in this life you can either choose to be a victim or a survivor; and she was determined to be a survivor – refusing to let her past misfortunes define her or rob her of present and future joy.

It is said that when a child is born, the mother is born again also. Kate got a chance to be born again – being blessed with two daughters and a son over a period of 4 years. She vowed not to let history repeat itself, insisting that she would be a different kind of mother to her children than her mother was to her.

She succeeded in this vow by focusing on her family, working long hours to create a beautiful home and doing everything in her power to make sure her children had everything they needed. She sacrificed personal and professional goals to ensure the well-being of her children and to support her husband’s rising career.

When the marriage broke apart after almost 20 years, Kate was devastated. Overnight she became a single mother of two teenage daughters and a teenage son, struggling to pay, on a greatly reduced income, all the bills that came with maintaining the lifestyle to which her children were accustomed.

She did what she could to cut expenses and protect the children’s lives as much as possible from the turmoil and disruption that typically comes when parents divorce. Though the husband and wife relationship ended up in failure, Kate did her best for the sake of her children to ensure that the mother and father roles would be a success.

It was during this time that Kate and I began dating. We found each other via an online dating app, but were surprised to learn how much we actually had in common. We were both the same age, we lived in adjacent towns, our kids attended the same Catholic school and we were both grieving from the sudden death of our imagined lifetime dreams.

We met for a bicycle ride on our first date and I was intrigued by her honesty and seeming lack of effort to impress me with her clothes or appearance. She told me right up front that I should run away from her because she had three teenage children and an ex-husband that was a cop.

Her honesty came as a refreshing change compared to my other limited dating experiences and even after one brief date I could tell there was something substantial about her under the surface that called for a second date.

I enjoyed discovering over subsequent dates the beautiful qualities about her that were just waiting to come out – her intelligence; her sense of humor; her compassion for others; and her selflessness in trying to protect and provide for her children.

I saw in Kate a unique blend of toughness and tenderness that was very appealing. She shows her personal toughness by her refusal to be defeated by the obstacles and adversities that life throws at her; but at the same time she is very tender and compassionate with the people she encounters who need love, understanding and a helping hand.

I often wonder how it is that some people can grow up in dysfunctional families and live through life changing hurts but still bounce back from those adverse conditions to live happy and fulfilling lives. I so admire my wife for being one of those people who are blessed with that kind of supernatural resilience.

It seems to be a divine gift or maybe the answer to a prayer like the one Emily Dickinson made when she was struggling with the vagaries of her life:

“Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind – Thy windy will to bear!”

Emily Dickinson from the poem “Besides the Autumn Poets Sing”

The Lord granted Kate with a sunny disposition for sure. It is not in her nature to dwell on her troubles and disappointments or to wallow in self pity. Her tendency is to see the good in other people and to take actions that will lead to a hopeful future.

Somehow she has turned the lost battles of her life into fuel that has helped her to grow more understanding, more spiritual, more forgiving and more generous. She has managed with divine help I suppose to transform all her afflictions into a blessing. What others in her life intended for evil, she has turned into good.

She is a living testament to the adage that we are not the product of what we were, but the possibility of what we can be.

If power is defined as the ability to do good for others, then Kate has been a powerful force in the world by enriching countless lives. Her heart is happiest when she is performing acts of kindness that make life better for other people, especially her children, step-children, grandchildren, husband, siblings, nieces, nephews and community friends.

Even her job as a hospice liaison is spent comforting and assisting patients and families who are overwhelmed by the emotions of planning end-of life care for their loved ones. She was an angel to my extended family as she guided my father through his last days with dignity; and now helps my mother gracefully age-in-place in the home that she loves.

If it’s true that a life is made by what we give, then Kate has truly lived a wonderful life – and the lives of the people she has touched are so much richer for her being a part of it. Every time I hear the lovely lilt of her laughter I am reminded how much I love her and how fortunate I am to call her my wife.

So I toast my wife as she celebrates her 60^th birthday and begins what the Chinese like to call “the beginning of your second life“. I pray that the youth of her old age will be filled with love and happiness and that this blessing of her Irish ancestors will come true for her.

May joy and peace surround you,
Contentment latch your door,
And happiness be with you now,
And bless you evermore.