Thursday, January 18, 2007

From Grey's Anatomy to the great wheel

I just finished watching this week's "Grey's Anatomy," the very hot series on ABC.

The father of one of the primary characters (George) died following surgery: they took him off life support, with his family standing around his bed, touching him. And Christina (another character, not known for her empathy) told George that he now belonged to the dead dad's club -- one that you're not in until you're in, and you wish you weren't in it. When George told her he didn't know how to live in a world that no longer had his dad in it, she replied, "That doesn't change."

It made me cry. I know how that feels. And my daddy died following surgery, and we also took him off life support, although I was 2000 miles away and connected to my mother and brother only by phone and heart when he died, although I flew there later that day. So it hit big time with me tonight.

I know it's just a story on a popular TV show. I cry at movies, at sappy Hallmark commercials, at sad books or stories in magazines -- and TV programs. One of the reasons the show is so popular is that the characters are not perfect, and they arouse empathy as they struggle through relationships and failures and fears and joy. Their emotions and experiences resonate with most of us -- one of the reasons that show is so successful, I think.

I miss my parents tonight. I wish I could pick up the phone and listen again to my dad tell me about -- oh, just tell me about anything. When I'd talk to my folks each Sunday, first Mother would tell me what she'd been doing, how she was feeling, who she'd played cards with that week, the bits and pieces of life. Then Daddy would get on the phone and we'd often talk about politics: national, sometimes state or local, and sometimes he'd really get on his soapbox and marvel at the stupidity of this or that. I didn't care what he was saying. I just cared that he was saying it: I'd close my eyes and just soak up his voice talking, storing as much as I could of that sound in my head. Especially after he died, I'd listen that same way to my mother. I could see her expressions in my mind's eye as she spoke-- I knew how her face looked when she was animated, or when she was tired, or worried, or discouraged.

Oh, I know it's all part of the great wheel of life, that it turns slowly from birth until death, and while our stories are different, the basic evolution is the same for each of us. We're born. We live, love, laugh, sing, dance, cry. We touch others' lives and they touch ours, and nothing stays the same. Our actions affect not only ourselves but the lives of everyone we love who also loves us. And we die. And the wheel keeps turning, again, over and over through the ages.

We all have that in common despite our vast differences. We are not alone in our loneliness, in our sadness, or with our leaky faces, for each one of us experiences these in the context of our individual stories. I cry for your pain and sadness out of my knowledge of how it felt for me. I wrap my arms around you not so much to comfort but to let you know you're not the first or only person to be filled with such grief or pain, and that you are not alone in it.

We are all connected, we humans. And it's when we realize this and communicate on these very basic levels that we can finally accept where we are on that great wheel and move ahead into grace.

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