Resurrection

One afternoon when I was in college I had a long talk with a girl I'd been dating. Or thought I'd been dating. Or had been apparently very confused friends with. I suppose we'd been hanging out for a little more than a month, which was plenty of time for me to become attached. We'd gone to the park and out to eat. Had hung out at my folks' house, where I lived at the time. I'd had girlfriends before and this relationship certainly had enough of the symptoms to lead me to believe that I had another one. The whole incident would teach me that just because a girl puts her tongue in your mouth doesn't mean she likes you and I decided that if the world was ever ready for a small hardback edition of Ben's Book of Wisdom, this would be Number One, centered nicely on the page and without irony:

"Just because a girl puts her tongue in your mouth
Doesn't mean she likes you."

Now, it's embarrassing enough to admit that there was a time when I could so clearly imagine quoting myself. It's even more embarrassing to admit that I found out from several marginal acquaintances that young lady in question, (who had been strangely less affectionate in recent days -- I leaned to kiss her good-bye in the car one night, as I had a dozen or so times before and always with reciprocity, and she offered me her cheek; I'm slow, but I'm not stupid,) had been out several times in the past week with another guy, which explained a lot, but wasn't very encouraging. It also begged the question, (when) is she going to mention it to me?

It became pretty clear that she wasn't going to say anything at all, but just act goofy and standoffish, as if the whole thing never happened, and hope that I'd just drop it and go away. Well if there's one thing I'm no good at, it's dropping it. I approached her one afternoon in the hallway -- it was a place and a time at which we used to meet regularly to hang out, but rather than waiting for me, she was standing with a group of friends laughing (I was sure they were laughing at me) as if there were no reason at all to expect Anyone Special to show up there looking for her (which apparently, there wasn't). When I approached she offered me a flippant, "Hi," to prove to her friends just how passe I was. I squinted through her lightly-offered meanness and said, "Can we talk?"

"Sure," she said, with equal flippancy, and we started walking.

What started out as a directionless walk so that we could talk revealed itself as one last journey together to the parking lot and my car, more out of habit, I'm sure, than of a desire on either side to end up in my car together. (Didn't it prove though, I demanded later, and silently, that something had indeed happened between us -- two people don't just auto-pilot to some guy's car for no reason, do they?) We rode to my folks house -- a ten minute ride -- and by the time we got there, I had as close to the whole story as I ever got. Pretty simple really. She liked the other guy better. I was convinced for a long time that it was because he took her to better places, but the fact is, she just preferred him to me. That's much harder to live with.

She gave me all the standard lines; the one that killed me was, "You're a great guy." Not what you want to hear. Then what's the problem? I wanted to ask her, and maybe I did. At any rate, I was smart enough even then to know that this isn't the kind of thing you talk someone out of and after we'd talked long enough at the house for me to be as maudlin as I could, (she seemed content to let me get it out of my system,) we got back in the car, (a blue '86 Olds Calais).
When we got back to campus I dropped her in front of her dorm, leaving her, no doubt, with either some biting piece of sarcasm designed to show her just how much pain she'd caused or some pitiful mumbled gratitude for the previous weeks. It's either sadness or euphoria. At any rate I drove to a secluded part of the parking lot and absolutely came apart. Bawled like a little girl. Or like a twenty year old college student who just wants someone to love him. Sobbing, shaking, chest heaving, breathing uncontrolled, snot everywhere.

And then I happened to catch my face in the rear-view mirror. It was awful. Embarrassing. Messy. Weak-looking. Out of control. Not cool. Not cool at all. I decided in that instant -- right there on the spot -- that I was done crying. Not just over this particular episode either, but forever. It became a kind of a mission for me. A movie would touch me and I'd beat down the feelings. A friend would share something painful and if the part of me that could cry woke up, I'd attack it again. Over and over, until it was dead. It took years, but by the time I was married, I had successfully killed that part of myself, (which I don't recommend).

I don't remember now what motivated me to change. Undoubtedly it was connected to the safety of the love of a Good Woman (which I'm certain I appreciate more for having suffered through the Other Thing), but I don't remember what the specific catalyst was. Maybe it was watching Titanic -- the timing is about right -- which still makes me weep every time I see it (yeah, I know...). Whatever it was, somewhere along the line something in me began to be okay with being Alive again. Problem was, I didn't know how anymore. I'd spent so much energy for so long trying to kill it that it's taken years to resurrect it. Years and movies and books and music and conversations. To this day, one of my tests of a movie is whether or not it "gets me." Quickest way to my Favorites list is to make me weep. I'm a sucker for the melodramatic, not because of its inherent artistic value, but because it continues to help me to be Alive again -- to undo the damage I did to myself.

I have a friend who seems to think that reading books that the world calls "fiction," (that's a word we don't use much around here,) and watching movies is some kind of distraction from Life, by which I think he means it's a distraction from wallowing in some sort of Calvinistic feelings of guilt. (Along the lines of the statue they erected to honor Maude Flanders when she died -- "She taught us the joy of shame and the shame of joy" -- but I digress.) But for me it's been just the opposite. I'm more Alive than I was before and one of the benefits of being an actual person Alive in the world, (and I have to be careful not to let it become the goal in itself,) is that I'm more available for the people around me.

We're talking a lot about grief around here in recent weeks. People we love die. Some we can see coming, some have already gone and we're still reeling. For some of us, it's the death of a marriage, or of a belief system that we'd grown comfortable with. There's lots of emotion near the surface among us lately, (although it's not all unpleasant by a long-shot,) and you can do what you want, but these days I'm inclined to take it out and handle it. To get a little dirty. My friend David says that grief is a real thing that refuses to be ignored -- and it seems to me like we might as well go ahead and engage it.

And apparently those who mourn are blessed too. Not because they mourn, but by virtue of their Living in this Kingdom. This Kingdom where Life is the priority and where it shows itself in ways that are myriad and not always lots of fun. Kahlil Gibran's Prophet says, "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain," and he's right. And in that sense, joy and sorrow are the same thing. And if you're looking for an umbrella label to go over both of them, which I don't recommend, you could do a lot worse than "Life."

That passage from The Prophet reminded Ruthie and me, independent of one another, of the movie Shadowlands (another one that "gets me"). Near the end, Joy's cancer is in remission and she and her husband Jack have taken a vacation to a special place and there she reminds him that it won't last -- that she's going to die. He tells her he doesn't want to talk about it; that he's happy and doesn't think they should spoil what time they have together, and she tells him, "It doesn't spoil it -- it makes it real." "The pain then," she tells him, "is part of the happiness now. That's the deal." And he kisses her in the rain.

And I don't know now, all these words later, what any of this has to do with a sort-of girlfriend who sort-of broke up with me twelve years ago. Except that Life is the point. And Life isn't Life when you're isolated emotionally from the people around you. And that you can't participate emotionally in the Lives of the people around you (meaning you can't really Love) if you can't participate emotionally in your own Life. And that for all the damage that I did to myself in an attempt to escape from that particular humiliation, Resurrection is a real thing.

Grief carves room for joy. That's the deal.