Anne Giles Clelland

More Cake

"I read your blog post... So if there is no purpose to life...do we get to eat more cake?"
- Caprice, in an in-message to me on She Chooses, quoted with permission

"...kids, be free, be whatever you are, do whatever you want to do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody."
- Tourist Lady, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

I continue to struggle with the inevitable questions about the meaning of life after seeing loved ones die.  Have "a higher purpose than self," "Make the world a better place, "Save the world," "Do good."  Ohh, I just feel so tired...

When I read the message from Caprice, a big fill-in-the-blank came to me:

If life had no purpose, I would ____________.

If life had no purpose, I would:

• Waste (radical!) the little dried bits in the Lipton French Onion Soup packet by sifting them out, add the hard-onion-bit-free powder to sour cream, and savor that delicious dip with Lay's potato chips.
• Do another sprint triathlon.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to take me to five sprint triathlons within a four-hour drive so I can qualify for placement in the Virginia Triathlon Series with a big, fat 54 inked on my calf (although I will only be 53; I am not a fan of age-up rules).
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to drive me around a lot.
• Get another cat.
• Without having opened their lids or gone piece-by-piece through their contents to remember and feel and think, hire someone to come to my house and haul the boxes and boxes of the meticulously selected, organized, archived paper record of my life to the recycling dump.
• Host salons and gatherings and talks and symposia and summits, something cool every week!
• Get a part-time gig as a group therapist.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to drive me to see the people instead of sending them email.
• Hire the Hooptie Ride to pick up me and my friends for lunch at Our Daily Bread.
• Start a "$50K at 50 Foundation" and give $50K to people who start companies at 50 years old.
• Still think that attempting to answer "What's it all about, Alfie?" gives my life its deepest meaning.

Today, I am 53 years old.  That's a good list.

I always have to gather my strength to go to this video on YouTube to copy its embed code.  But a good list needs a good cat.  She was a very, very good cat.

What's Where

Mrs. Pollet asked her fifth grade students at Margaret Beeks Elementary School to make dolls of what they wanted to be when they grew up.  My doll was a writer.  With a scarf.

My writing is:

• handwritten on paper in many filing cabinets and white storage boxes.
• typewritten in manuscripts in white storage boxes.
• in print, as listed on my CV.
• on a blog I wrote from May, 2008 to April, 2009, The Anne Show
• in probably 1/2 of the almost 1000 posts on Inside VT KnowledgeWorks.
• in probably 3/4 of the 1500+ posts on Handshake 2.0.
• in a category on the She Chooses blog.
• in a workplace advice column for Valley Business FRONT, compiled in this category on Handshake 2.0.
• on this site, annegilesclelland.com

Line Segment

Begin with the end in mind.
- Stephen Covey

Suffering comes from wishing things were different.
- Paraphrase of The Buddha I read or heard

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas

I lack the ability to comfort myself.

The timeline of the last five years of my life is a line segment, a subset of what my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Pollet called a “ray.”  I can see it in my elementary school math book:  rounded off at its left side with the little black dot of my birth, my five-year timeline a thin elongated barbell in the middle of it, then the line extending to the right in an infinite series of points, arrow tip straight into the infinity of my future, until my death, when it would become all line segment.

“I read your timeline,” one person said to me, “and I just wanted to give you a hug.”  “Next year will be better,” another person said.  “Just think,” another person said.  “It can’t get any worse!”

Ay, there’s the rub.  Next year may or may not be better.  Next year could be worse. 

Over most of the events that happened in the past five years, I had no control. If what does or doesn’t happen is not within my power, I can no more make the next points in my little line segment of a life better than I can make them worse.  I can be optimistic or pessimistic to no avail.  I can make thoughtful, careful choices to reduce risk.  But life will be what it is.

What I want is to be able to handle whatever happens, no matter how heinous or how tragic.  I want to be able to give myself a hug, and more:  I want to be able to hold myself my whole life.

Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
- Maria, "The Sound of Music"

In psychology, the ability to regulate one’s own emotions from within, especially to comfort oneself during emotional or physical pain, is termed “self-soothing.”

From none of the adults in my family would I have learned self-soothing.  How could they teach what they were not taught?  I’ve watched two of them die within the last four months.  They suffered and we suffered without ceasing.

Resistance is futile.
The Borg

On one’s deathbed, all the swords and knives one has used to fend off the truths of one’s life become ineffectual.  One no longer has the strength to wield them.

“Are you having any insights?” I asked my mother a few days before her death, begging this intelligent, defiant woman to make meaning for me of any of what was happening.  She shook her head no.  I feel a child’s rage at her for not answering me and an adult’s perplexity.

On my deathbed, every truth I have not addressed will be there with me, sitting intertwined in a heavy heap on my chest, staring at me with powerful eyes as I struggle to lift my chest to take a breath.

No.

No, I say.

I will address my truths.  The points I most resist, I will examine.  I will make something from nothing.  I will learn to hold myself so well and so naturally that when I take my last breath, regardless of what I am feeling - rage, pain, relief, joy, whatever - with my last bit of strength, it will be my own arms around my chest I feel.

Whose Idea Was This?

Write as if you were dying.
- Annie Dillard

Birth. Growth. Decline. Death.

Who came up with that system? It is ridiculous.

When I look at the timeline of the past five years of my life, the deaths predominate. Of the beings I observed at their deaths or nearly, all were suffering. For the people whose deaths happened in my town, I have no words.

Of the two people whose deaths I observed most intimately, my mother’s, and then three months later, my grandmother’s, both lived their last moments in their beds, on their backs, mouths open, eyes half-open.  It was terrible for them, terrible to witness.

If my life is not foreshortened by accident, I, too, will decline through illness or old age and suffer until I will be on my back, jaw hanging, eyes staring.

What could possibly be the purpose, meaning or value to this?

I am a student of existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom’s work.  He writes, “...the only true absolute is that there are no absolutes,” and “If there are no absolutes, then nothing is more important than anything else, and everything is a matter of indifference.”

In other words, life has no meaning.

Great.

My mother died at 78, her parents in their 50s, my father’s father in his 80s, my father's mother at 101, and my father is a healthy, if-stunned-after-losing-his-wife-and-mother-within-about-four-months-of-each-other 78.  I’ll be 53 in two weeks.  Let’s say I have another 25 years left.

Twenty-five years of life ahead without meaning. Full of a timeline of deaths, ending with my own.

This is a ridiculous system.

Okay. Fine.

If life has no meaning, the lesson from the timeline is that what happens in a life happens.  I look at that list and envision a croquet mallet pounding my little wicket self closer and closer to the ground.  Although I exerted it mightily, my power was not enough to make any of the events on that timeline not happen.  Existentially, maybe they had no real meaning.  Every moment of those five years was lived by me and each one was of profound, intense, acute personal meaning to me.  Neuro-bio-chemicial-physio only?  Whatever.  I felt it.

What’s missing from the timeline is joys. I had a few. As they were building, though, there was that croquet mallet again. The frequency and amplitude of the wavelengths of the hits challenged my joy. As I was dressing a few days ago, I threw my arms up over my head. No sound, no movement had triggered the motion. Instinctively, I was fending off blows.

So, the task of the next twenty-five years is to reduce energy given to trying to control life (over which I am mostly powerless) and to increase energy given to handling what happens (I would like to offer a mild protest that the “what happens” is currently in a hard-to-handle quantity) in life (which has no meaning).

Great.

Timeline

• Mother falls and breaks hip, has hip replacement, has heart attack, gets pneumonia, Blacksburg, Virginia, January 2006
• Put house on the market, Tampa, Florida, January 2006
• Finish master’s degree in counseling, July 2006
• Leave Tampa home of twenty-three years to move to Blacksburg, July 2006
• In lockdown with eighth graders while fellow Blacksburg High School graduate escapes from prison and kills two, August 2006
• Called to a meeting to learn that fellow teacher and family friend has been arrested for molesting children for 30 years, September 2006
• Meet nice guy on my 48th birthday, December 30, 2006
• Eighth grade student at new school in school system of which I am a graduate enters my classroom after the lesson has begun, walks by me, and pushes me, February, 2007
• In lockdown for approximately eight hours with approximately twenty eighth grade students at a school a few miles from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, while a fellow Hokie shoots fellow Hokies and their teachers and himself, April 16, 2007
• A champion of love and truth, denying darkness, nice guy asks me to marry him, April 16, 2007
• Electricity goes out so parents come to my house for water and warmth, mother bathes, falls in bathtub, rips open leg wound, April 17, 2007
• Marry nice guy, June 16, 2007
• Eighth grade student positions himself so only I can see and hear, looks me straight in the eye, and says in a very low voice, “I’m going to shoot you,” September, 2007
• Leave quarter century teaching career, November 7, 2007
• Start writing blog for VT KnowledgeWorks, November 30, 2007
• First sprint triathlon, May, 2008
• Start Handshake 2.0, July 28, 2008
• Start company, Handshake Media, Incorporated, August, 2008
• Nice guy’s father dies, April, 2009
• Feel as if I am reading my own and my town’s autobiography in Wally Lamb’s novel about Columbine, The Hour I First Believed, March 2009
• Parotid surgery, February, 2010
• Step-grandmother dies, April 2010
• Start new company with big dreams and a team, September, 2010
• Put beloved cat to sleep, November 20, 2010
• Get new cat, May 2011
• Learn new cat has incurable, auto-immune disorder, May 2011
• Last sprint triathlon, June, 2011
• Mother dies, August 27, 2011
• Female surgery, September 13, 2011
• Mentor of five years tells me she has cancer, September, 2011
• Read writing on the wall at start-up company competition, October 15, 2011
• End new company with dashed dreams and farewell to team, October, 2011
• Do nothing at all for four days for the first time in half a century, St. Petersburg Beach, November, 2011
• Shooting at Virginia Tech, Thursday, December 8, 2011
• Retinal hemorrhage, Monday, December 12, 2011
• Grandmother dies, Tuesday, December 13, 2011
• Mentor survives cancer surgery, Tuesday, December 13, 2011
• Progressive vision challenge named as possibility by eye specialist, Wednesday, December 14, 2011
• Close The Anne Show, Thursday, December 15, 2011
• Write this timeline, Friday, December 16, 2011