Thank You for the Rainbows: Remembrance (And Instructions. HA!)

The recent passing of a member of my church family -- the giggling, gossiping, generous and already-sorely-missed Katie, who never once flinched when I told her I was gay and then presented me with a Book of Common Prayer that had a cover made of rainbow-colored yarn and the observation that, "You know, whoever made this probably didn't have this in mind, but take it, it suits you." -- has me up late thinking about death.

Morbid, I know. And yet.

Actually, I've been up a lot lately thinking about death: my regular, generally unfounded forays into panic have, over the past several months, coalesced into a huge, seething ball of death anxiety. I even have a CD by an artist called Pocket Vinyl called Death Anxiety, which actually helps with the death anxiety because the guy who wrote it has his own huge, seething ball of the stuff. I don't know what to do about the death anxiety, but I have many an idea of what I do and do not want to be done with my body after I am indeed dead. Yes, I will be writing it down. Yes, I will be consulting an attorney and making a living will to go along with my unpleasant-to-think-about-but-definitely-necessary Mental Health Advanced Directive -- and finding out if some of these things I want are even possible. But the Internet is forever and it helps me to ping things off other people, so here it is: The Grand List of Dos and Donts for Dead Tif.

1. I DO NOT WANT TO BE EMBALMED. It is not, in fact, the law here. I looked it up. You can place me in a sealed casket or stick me in your walk-in freezer. I don't care. JUST DON'T LET THEM EMBALM ME. I have come to realize that it isn't death that bothers me as much as it is the thought of what modern mortuary science does to your body after you're dead. I mean, I'll be dead, so ostensibly I won't care, but please, please, PLEASE, for the love of all things holy, don't let anyone lay me out on a cold metal slab and replace my blood with chemicals. It's macabre. I can't deal with it. Which brings me to a second and then a third point:

2. I hope that when I die, whenever that is, there is someone who loves me enough to perform for me the burial rites the way they were done before all the impersonal expanses of glinting metal came to dominate our medical culture. Someone who loves me enough to wash me by hand and then wrap me in a shroud. Even if I'm going to be cremated and planted in a biodegradable urn and then become a tree, because I saw you can do that now, and I really, really like the idea. I would prefer to be consigned to the flames with dignity. (Side note: screw white; make that damn shroud so purple it hurts.)

3. If I do end up with the regular casket-and-burial deal, no one gets to come gawk at my corpse. I suppose I could skip this item because I'm not being embalmed so after 24 hours you wouldn't be able to look at me because I'd already be sealed up in a box or keeping your venison company in the deep-freeze, but seriously. Corpse-gawking? That's macabre, too. The only persons who get to see my dead body are the folks who do my laying out.

4. Concerning attire: Everyone is to wear something obviously purple. No half-assing it. No, "But my underwear are purple!" That will not do. You MUST. WEAR. PURPLE. I insist. I will know.

5. Concerning music: do not let anyone pipe in sappy acoustic versions of my favorite songs. There will be a list included with my will -- play those songs. And turn those fuckers up. Enjoy them. Sappy acoustic versions of my jams will cause a disturbance in the universal flow of which I will then be a part, and I will come back to haunt the deejay mercilessly for an undisclosed period of time.

6. If I should happen to expire of some disability-related malady, there is to be no inspiration porn at my service. If I inspired you in some way you're allowed to talk about that, but one teary, "And now she's free to run forever..." and the part of the universal flow that is Tif might have to smack you upside the head.

7. Much as I love my Episcopal church family and enjoy being Christopagan (That's a real term! It's so exciting! It has nothing to do with Columbus!) in their company, I do not want an Episcopal burial service. I don't want much of a Christian service at all, though my favorite hymn is "Come Thou Fount (Of Every Blessing), and you're welcome to belt that out as many times as you please. I've been researching pagan funeral rites, and they are BEAUTIFUL. That's what I want. ("May there be peace in the North...") I'll include a set of instructions with my will and tweak it so that it can be done even if I don't know four pagans for the Four Elements when I die. (All of my pagan friends are contemporaries, so unless I die next week -- which I don't want to do and don't plan on doing, so don't worry your pretty little minds over that -- I might be screwed if I only set up for four.) If the thought of a non-Christian or Pagan service bothers you, I'm sorry you feel that way and I still love you, but don't come to my funeral. Say goodbye some other way of your own choosing.

It might sound like a lot of work, and maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Having never had to care for the dead in this manner, I do not know. But if you, reading this, are alive when I am not and see me laid to rest, wear purple. Blast my favorite songs. Sing "Come Thou Fount". And if for reasons of my not being pumped full of preservatives there is no time for a chapel service, have a memorial service. Hell, just throw a party in somebody's basement. If you remember me, I'll be there. Energy never dies -- I'll be part of the earth, part of the wind, part of the rain, an Ash tree, maybe, but I'll be there. My being will simply (profoundly!) have been swept into the rhythms of the natural world, to help other life have its chance to live.

And that's pretty cool.

You are missed, Miss Katie. Thank you for the rainbows.

A Bridge Over Untroubled Water: Sunset on Lake Pontchartrain, and other beauteous things

It's 2 a.m. and I'm still awake, because apparently I'm in one of those special cycles wherein anything that makes me a functional human being -- like sleep -- gets kicked to the curb. My brain is breaking up with me. Everything I own is in the box to the left.

Anyway, since I can't sleep, I figured I might as well wax poetic about the sunset on Lake Pontchartrain. We went down South, see, to finalize Pip's adoption (by "we" I mean Mama, Dad, Pip, and of course myself) and by some sheer miracle of timing, we happened to hit the bridge over the lake just as the sun started to go down.

The bridge over Lake Pontchartrain is over 20 miles long, and the lake itself is some 630 square miles. Drive a few miles out, and it's like being in a Buick LaCrosse in the middle of the ocean: everywhere you look, nothing but water stretching away to the horizon. Looking at it, I finally understood how the early explorers thought the world was flat. The water just goes on and on forever.

The colors of that sunset on the surface of the lake! The light! The purple and orange and velvety blue sky so close I felt like I could reach up through the roof of the car and touch the it, and come away with a masterpiece of wet paint on my hands. The huge red eye of the sun hanging suspended over the surface, looking for all the world like it was about to drop quietly into the water and disappear... oh. Oh. I can't even describe it right. I can't do it justice, how it made me feel: excited and awed and deeply moved, bouncing in my seat like a small child, but silent, with my nose against the window. I've never seen anything like it before. I may never see anything like it again. It was... breathtaking.

I'd ride all the way to Louisiana just to see it again. It's worth a trip in itself.

We didn't get to see much in our whirlwind tour of the South: we were in New Orleans for a court appearance, and then we swung by my Mama's folks out in Georgia, and then we had to head home so working lives could resume on schedule. I wanted to drag my feet and look at everything, but alas, there was no time. It's nice, though, how just the experience of sharing rooms in little hotels with the 3 people one loves most and catching breakfast together in random diners before driving on is it's own little piece of everything. Sitting on a hotel bed eating a shrimp po'boy late at night while the palmetto bugs scream is a memory I will always keep. So is the childlike glee with which I encountered Spanish moss, palm trees, and pine cones bigger around than a baseball. (I brought one home with me.)

And then, of course, there was the adoption finalization in itself: not a legal hurdle or a fight to keep Paul, as some people have thought, but a proceeding to terminate the rights of his birth parents and so officially recognize Paul as adopted for life by my Mama and Dad, and to legally change his name. It was quick and painless. The only tears shed were tears of happiness. I was in the courtroom while the judge read the decree, and I cried at the beauty of the whole thing: the fact of Paul being born, and being real and alive and miraculous, and of coming home to us so we can love and nurture him and help him as he grows; at those words, "adopted for life." Tears slipped down my face. My Mama cried. So did Dad, though he'll likely deny it if you ask him. Something about it was so incredibly moving. Something about it felt, to me, like so many pieces to an eternal puzzle dropped neatly into place, right where they were supposed to go. It felt... right. Pip has felt right since the moment I laid eyes on him, and this was just a confirmation of that rightness. I was glad I got to be there for it. So very glad.

And now I'm so very tired. We'll see if Tiffany.Writes. Down. actually helped. Tiffany wrote down. G'night.

Back in the Saddle: Tif Blogs Again!

It has been nearly a year since I, Caged Bird, have posted ANYTHING. I need to get back in the habit. I've thought about it on and off, but the longer I waited the more I had to say, and the more I had to say the less I wanted to say it. It fed itself: the endless loop of Not-Wanting.

Blogging is nice, though. Therapeutic. I know at least one person reads what I post, so it's my way of pinging out signals more... wordy than what would normally be put in a Facebook status (Though I tend to be wordy there, too.) It's weird to say that this is a more personal method, given that it's on the Internet and despite my privacy settings, any hacker with 2 brain cells to put together could read everything I type, but it feels more personal. Hello. I am conversing with you from across the table.

It would be impossible -- even if I wanted to tackle it, which I don't -- to apprise you of everything that has happened in the past almost-year, but it has flown. My brother, alias Pip, will be a year old in a few months. He's 99th percentile on everything having anything to do with the growth chart: height, weight, head circumference. It's like having a 2 year old with one tooth in his head. My job now is to nanny him each day while my Mom and Dad work, which is an arrangement that makes me ridiculously happy. It's hard work, but for once in my life I am perfectly content with something. This child lights my life. I was feeling more than a little aimless before he came along: disabled and apparently unemployable, very little structure to my days, groping around for reasons to get out of bed. I majored in Social Work because I wanted to do something with my life that matters, but 70-some job applications and only a handful of interviews -- and 0 offers for employment -- later, I felt like wasn't mattering to anyone. Barely to myself, even. I was more depressed than I was letting on.

And then, Pip. BANG! Everything opened up. It has been such a privilege to watch him grow and develop almost daily for the past 10 months. He makes me so happy, with his frizzy little 'fro and his big brown eyes and that mega-watt smile.  He's old enough now to instigate games of peek-a-boo, to indicate that he wants to be tickled, to open his arms and come at me full tilt like a barreling train. It's been 10 months, and sometimes I still hold him and cry at the sheer miracle of him. He's my favorite person.

Everything else in life is pretty much the same, although it's also completely different because he's here. It was a natural absorption, a perfect fit, our Pip into the pattern of our lives. He belongs with us. We belong with him. It's that simple, and that amazing.

I turned 30 in December. Jude-cat will be 9 toward the end of July. I bought my first piece of brand-new furniture at the end of last year. It barely fits in my tiny apartment, but it's my couch with 2 reclining ends, and I'm proud of it. People on poverty-level incomes buying their own couches is equal to the upper middle class acquiring McMansions. I have acquired a reclining McMansion. Go me.

I'm currently waiting on and going through a battery of tests to figure out why my ankles won't stop swelling, which just screams "Heart trouble!" and has me feeling even more neurotic than usual, but other than that, life has a pleasant routine: I spend the days with Pip, and in the evenings I either go for a latte, with book, or stow away outside under a tree, also with book. I want to read 120 this year. I'm trying to fit more mindful appreciation of the present moment into my everyday life, and it really has opened up my whole world. Before mindfulness, I was just this anxious creature all boxed up inside myself in a little cell of not-noticing. It occurred to me, earlier this Spring when I stopped to listen to the birds sing, that I'd never purposely stopped to listen to the birds sing. This seems sad to me now. The world takes on a magical new depth when you set out to appreciate life on purpose, and not just get through it. The mundane can become fascinating -- I spent a long time, just the other day, marveling at the way a robin hops. Maybe it sounds silly, but you really should try it: just a few minutes here and there to stop and tune in to your life, your experience, your surroundings, can make so much difference in the way you see things -- or, like in my case, can even determine whether you ever see them or not. Or hear them.

Now that I sound like a New Age guru (I do yoga now too; cover your face and lament), I'll sign off for the time being. But expect to keep hearing (seeing?) from me. I have remembered why I keep a blog: because I like it.