On the death of a dear colleague

Today I went to a memorial service and a wake for a dear colleague. He died suddenly at age 55. I am so aware today of how precious each moment of life is. It is my hope that I can take this experience into the future and improve how I live my life.

I want to love more and fear less. It seems that some people are just born with a gift of knowing how to love. My colleague was one of those people. I wish I had that gift! I have to work at it--I have bad habits of shutting down, running away, or going unconsciously through life.

I almost didn't go to the service today and I'm so grateful that I went, because it opened my heart. Although I had worked with my colleague for two years, there were many things I didn't know about him. The service was so beautiful and it was clearly so true to who he was.

Music was a huge component of the memorial, and they played a lot of his favorite songs, each eliciting a different kind of mood. I was so touched. It really helped me feel that I knew him better. Afterwards there was a wake at a local pub where people drank and ate some of his favorite foods. The gatherings today were so unassuming and real, like the personality of my colleague. This is really truly the best memorial I have been to, and my first wake. I left sad to have lost a friend, but happy to have acknowledged his death in the way he would have wanted, and happy to have connected with others to share memories and common human bonds.

Some special things happened for me today. There was another colleague there who worked very closely with my colleague who died. This second colleague and I have had significant conflicts in the past and it has felt very bad to me, as I hate having conflictual relationships. Anyway, he saw me at the wake. I went to shake his hand in condolence, and he said my name and opened his arms up and gave me a great big bear hug, and thanked me for coming. To me, this was a miracle, that he and I could meet on this level and forget everything else, all the animosity and hostility of the past, and we could just see each other as two human beings who loved somebody who died...it was so powerful.

I am so thankful that this man was open enough to share his grief and humanity with me. I am so thankful that he was able to see me as a person who cared about his friend, and let go of our bad history. I am thankful that I was able to let go of our history and allow this tender man who stood before me to be something other than whatever it was I had written him off as before.

When I was studying psychology, I learned about what is called the fundamental attribution error. I have always remembered that. Basically, it means when somebody does something you don't like, you attribute their behavior to them as a person, rather than the situation, or other factors that may have played into it. For example, when somebody cuts you off on the freeway, you might think they're a jerk. But ever notice how when you cut someone off on the freeway, it's because you didn't see them, or because you have to get into that lane or else you'll have overshot your mark, or whatever.

I make that mistake all the time, and I made it with this man, only seeing his behavior on the surface and judging him for it in the past, forgetting about the difficult environment that we work in and the impact that has on people who work there year after year. Forgetting to consider that there might be more to him, and maybe I just never got to see it before.

I took the initiative to introduce myself to my deceased colleague's wife, and tell her how much I appreciated all she put into the service, and how it helped me feel I had known him better, and how it was helping me through my grief. She was clearly touched by this and it appeared to help her too, to know that she helped someone else.

I came home and started a list of goals I have for my life, with certain very detailed objectives to each goal. The list isn't done yet, but it's off to a great start. It's simple things, a lot of it related to daily living and how my daily living interferes with having fulfilling and happy relationships. For example, one of my goals is to have my house be clean enough for me not to feel bad if a friend stops by unannounced. That is normally a relationship interfering behavior I have--my house is so messy I literally don't want anyone to come in. In general, I'd like to enjoy living in a clean house--but the most important part of why I want to work on my house is because it influences me to push others away (and equally, probably un-attracts them if I do allow them in) which is something I want to change in my life.

Honestly, I can't say I've been doing so well with the bakery issue. But I can honestly say, there have been times when I've done much worse in the past. There are different ways to go about it, and the more love I can let in, the less room there will be for the bakery. It is hard to take something away without having something to replace it with. So I've been working on the love piece.

Give and receive

The dance between giving and receiving is one of the hardest things about relationships for me. This might sound crazy, but it took me until relatively recently to realize that I enjoyed helping my friends and that they enjoyed helping me. It is so important to have both energy coming in your life and energy going out!

In the past, I sequestered myself away. I tried to not ask anyone for anything. When something unavoidable came up, I had incredible feelings of guilt and shame for having to ask for help. Part of this was that I wasn't offering to help others. It was my MO, having grown up in a family where there never was enough love or energy to go around. I always felt I had to protect what resources I had. So I had nothing going out and nothing going in. Ask any organism, that is not a healthy way to live!

Conversely, at other times, I expected the world from other people, and all the years of unexpressed need would crest and crash like a tidal wave. I would become furious when others did not respond with what I thought I deserved, with what I thought they "should" do for me.

These days I have started letting my guard down a little with friends. I offer to help them sometimes, and I accept their requests for help when I can. In turn, I ask for and receive help when they can. And I try not to have unrealistic expectations.

Leaving the bakery

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with baked goods. A warm brownie with melting ice cream on top is not so far in divinity from a kiss, if you close your eyes and pretend really hard.

For me, the wires between "love" and "bakery" got really confused. I ended up with a lot of bakery and not a lot of love. Many times, I ended up with bakery instead of love. Baked goods are easy. You can go to the store and buy them any time of day or night. You can make them in the privacy of your own home. You can go to a restaurant and be presented with a dizzying array of choices. Baked goods never get mad at you, reject you, ask you to give anything back, or bring you face to face with painful parts of yourself that you didn't even know were there.

For a long time--years and decades--I didn't realize that there was a problem at all with choosing bakery over love. I didn't even realize that's what I was doing. I convinced myself that there's nothing wrong with it as long as I wasn't fat. When became fat, I did my best to ignore it, telling myself that it didn't matter. And when I had little glimpses of the reality of what I was really doing, I felt so much pain that I tried to ignore it. I solved that problem like every other: by going in pursuit of more baked goods.

One day I woke up and realized that I was 37 years old, I had few close friends, very little love in my life, and had never been in a committed romantic relationship. I spent my time hiding who I was from myself and others. Sometimes you grow up in a family that doesn't quite get it right about teaching you how to love and be loved in the world. It's not anybody's fault, it's just the way it is. And it leaves a big hole inside. I papered layers upon layers of mental and physical insulation over that, so no one would know how inadequate I felt inside about my ability to love others and my feelings that I did not deserve to be loved.

I've learned that there are many things wrong with pretending that baked goods are any kind of substitute for love. Here are a few of the biggest ones. First of all, it's just fundamentally dishonest. It denies the true beauty and at times, essential messiness of life, and that is deadening to the spirit.

Then there are the times when you realize your resources are grossly inadequate for a challenge you face. For me, this has come up in the form of a medical situation. I'm scheduled for a simple laparoscopic surgery. I have never had surgery before, and I'm pretty scared. My parents don't live close by, and I would not want to ask my sister to come because she has a small child. I really want someone to take me who I feel a deep connection with, as this is very comforting to me. Because of the way love is in my family and the way I want to give and receive love, I don't feel that I will get that connection by asking one of my parents to take me. I found myself with a short list of friends to choose from, and they are all working that day. Thankfully, I have a friend who is retired, and she agreed to take me. This begs the point: a cheesecake can't drive me to surgery and comfort me while I wait. Cookies are no substitute for knowing that someone who really, really loves me is waiting anxiously to find out how it went.

This blog is about leaving the safety of the bakery. I hope you will join me, because I can't do this alone.