Words that caught us: If we notice more deeply, we'll know a thing's meaning to us, before it's gone

 

I don’t like eulogies.

And I bet you don’t like them either.

They mostly feel hollow, incomplete

And misplaced.

 

Hollow because we almost always

Don’t notice enough.

 

Incomplete because words alone

Cannot do justice to what we’ve lost.

 

Misplaced because, what is it for, really?

In whose benefit is it,

Other than for our own consolation?

 

Would it not be better if all we say and do

In eulogies,

Was said and done before the loss?

 

For some reason, everything goes up in value

When it is lost;

Especially when we didn’t notice, value

And appreciate as much as we should have.

 

Is it possible to notice things and people more deeply –

To understand and appreciate their value,

In words and deed,

And save ourselves the hollowness and incompleteness

We experience in losing someone or something

We didn’t fully notice, value and appreciate?

 

What or who would you feel the greatest loss for,

If they/it were no more today?

What can you do to notice, value

And appreciate them/it more, today?

 

A couple of friends have called to tell me

That they admired how I moaned my dad.

Some have said they loved the positive energy,

And balanced perspective I gave to a complex,

Dominant and controversial man.

 

This little disclosure is done specially for them, and you.

My relationship with dad was somewhat complicated.

So, when I knew and understood what was happening to him,

I set out deliberately to make peace with me (you read that right) –

I had come to accept that he wasn’t about to change one bit,

And if anything was to change, it had to be in me,

By me and for me.

 

And so, by the time dad left us,

I had been reading, reflecting

And writing privately about him, old age and death, for over a year –

I wrote of his influences on me,

What I liked about him,

The discomforts I had with him,

What I had learned and picked from him,

The many areas I was but a chip of the old block,

The importance of fathers and the evolving role of a man in society,

And about the struggles we all have in facing and accepting death.

 

I found this lived experience deeply cathartic and healing.  

I was not done, and I probably will never be completely done

In these reflections,

But I’m glad I did it,

Because by the time he was done here,

I had come to a beautiful realization:

That he was born into the world at a difficult time in history;

That he had overcome great odds to be where he was;

That he had achieved more in his lifetime than I probably ever will;

That he had lived a full and entertaining life;

That unlike many of us, he had managed

To retain his curiosity, to the very end;

That he had distilled for himself some habits and beliefs

That worked and got him results,

And that in so doing, he was very much a creature

Of his environment and nurture;

That, in the end, people are neither good nor bad –

These are onerous value judgments,

Born out of our own unfounded,

And, mostly, unreasonable expectations of them –

That he was just a man, a child of God, who, like all of us,

Had tried his best, to make sense of this gift we call life.

 

No, I’m not saying I did it right,

Or that you should do as I did.

 

All I’m saying is that these reflections

Gave me profound peace, calm and comfort;

They gave me a medium to notice, know,

Value and appreciate what he was,

When he was still with us.

 

There is immense value in deep noticing.

Learn to ‘look at your fish’!

Please?

 

*This reflection was inspired by Caitie Notes titled “What sadness can teach’ (transcript below) and the classic essay on observation by Samuel H. Scudder (1837-1911) titled ‘Look at your fish’. Thanks to James Clear for pointing me towards Samuel Scudder's Essay.

"What sadness can teach: They spent all morning cutting down the maple across the street. Three stories. I’d guess that tree was three stories tall.  And keeper of untold stories. The gray squirrels who built their nests in the crook of her branches. The goldfinches, orioles, sapsuckers who rested on her limbs. The countless people who walked beneath her shade, breathed in her exhaled oxygen. In Mali, it is said that when an elder dies, the community loses a library.  I kept on watching the chainsaws out my window. This limb falling to earth, then that limb, then the trunk going down, down, down.  The wood they picked up from the ground and throw in the truck bed was tender, healthy. It looked alive.  I’m surprised by how this saddens me. I’d never once thought about that maple before. And here I am writing its eulogy; a quiet piece of the landscape I didn’t appreciate until it was gone.  But no. The moral isn’t quite that.  Sadness means I care. And sadness is instructive; something that matters to us is at stake.  So one of sadnesses teachings: If we notice more deeply, we will know a thing’s meaning to us before it is gone. And it won’t be at the eulogy that we realize how much we cared for it.