Eros and Thanatos

I was born into the arms of death.  We all are, cosmically speaking.  We are mortal beings.  I’m just saying that in that precious, impressionable first year of life, I felt the bony breast and cold breath of Mother Death.  And I learned to snuggle into her arms.

Luckily, I was rescued from death at the one year mark.  Human babies are so dependent that without good care we can’t make it.  I remember seeing a calf born, finding its feet, and mother’s milk.  Calves nibble grass in their first few days of life, and have a fully functioning grass-based digestive system in three months.  We humans need parents for years and years.  My dad still looks after me.

Joanne Magruder always loved babies and young kids, though I have to footnote here that when she was deep in the creepy cult phase, she failed to show up for my sister Marie when she had baby Douglas, who was and is certainly a very cute and gifted child (now in the third decade, I believe).  I felt safe and secure with Joanne, such that I think I might have turned the corner to normal attachment patterns IF…

If she hadn’t padded up and down the hall between my youngest sister’s room and the master bedroom in the hour after my father and Ann left our driveway in the ‘89 Toyota Corolla on their way to Ann’s freshman year at Grinnell. I might not have immediately noticed that MOM was leaving again.  When she was done with her obligation to kids (in her mind), she bugged out and went on a dubious mission of self enlightenment.  She abandoned us.  

So, I was abandoned by my birth mom, felt abandoned by three or four foster placements, then was adopted and for eighteen or nineteen years felt quite secure, and then was abandoned by mom again.  My sense that the world was a safe place was stunted, and I danced on the edge of that precipice at times during my life.  Luckily, I had one very consistent parent—Dad.  My parents got back together for the last half a dozen years of my mother’s living, and I dwelt with them as I finished my divinity degree and started hospice work.  

I loved the magical world of humming along with five gallons of explosively flammable fuel between my knees, a frenetic pile of spinning aluminum and steel containing 9,000 explosions per minute under the fuel, while rubber balloons stretched over aluminum hoops tensioned by steel spokes maintaining a physical friction connection with an unpredictably bumpy, wet, greasy, gravelly or unpaved entity called the “road.” This was the perfect world for a person who has lived between the spheres of life and death.  A profound sense of being alive, accompanied by a real risk of death. Life without death was like a yin-yang of one color.

And… She was there, Death, on the pillion seat, her bony arms pressing into me as she hugged herself to my vital body, pressed her bony hips against my muscular buttocks, and leaned fearlessly with me into the curves, her calfskin boots (remember the calf?) making our legs into a pair of nested S’s.  Skill and knowledge, perfect attention and adamantine will kept me on the Road, in Life, until one day Death put her hands over my eyes.  She laughed aloud as the Road lost hold of my machine and I hurtled to Earth.  For days, I nestled into her bony breast again, and felt her cold breath on my coma blank face.  

“I’m not dead yet!” Shouts the man in the Monty Python skit about the plague.  “I’m not dead yet!”  They bop him on the head so that he is plenty dead, and trundle on.

I was bopped on my helmeted head.  I still can’t remember…well, I can’t tell you what, because I don’t remember it.  I was pretty happy, cheerful, and even a bit charming during my hospital rehab, when my memory was worse than it is today.  I didn’t know where I was, or why though much of the left side and my left eye didn’t work.  I’d go on a wheel (walk) on the hospital grounds, and Mica would roll me inside again where I’d sit for a while, and then say, “I know!  Let’s go for a walk outside!”  I’d forgotten we’d just been, but I knew that I liked to go on walks with my love in the sun, amongst the growing things, up to the lamppost and back. 

Happy, cheerful me is getting to be a little bit harder to hold onto these days.  I fasted/abstained from radio and television news for almost a year, which helped me to be in a positive frame of mind—highly recommended.  Then there was an election.  I understand the world much better now, and the day to day appointments, chores, etc. take up more of my headspace than they did just after the wreck.  I’m taking my violin today for new strings.  Maybe playing the fiddle will help to connect more ruptured synapses in my noodle.  Anyway, it can’t hurt (except Mica’s ears).  

But here’s the awareness that weighs me down this morning, that I’ve carried for many years, that I was prepared for by the circumstances of my birth, and years of sitting at dying bedsides, where the heart and not the mind is the needed center.  We stand on the cusp of a radical discontinuity of biology, ecology, and society.  We are cradled in those cold arms, against the bony breast of Thanatos.  We are leaned all the way over and the back tire is starting to slip. How can we downshift, pin the throttle, push the left side handlebar forward, and lean hard to that side as we heel over onto the shoulder of the tire, give ourselves to the centrifugal forces of momentum and gravity, as a prayer to make it around this nasty bend called “Global Climate Collapse”?