My Eyes So Soft

Yesterday was all about the past for me.  While sorting through one of my "junk drawers" I came across an index card with a name and telephone number on it.  Bub and Lou Ann  were friends and classmates when we spent a year in Portland, Oregon, a long, long time ago. It was Lou Ann's name on the card I found.  I had heard that Bub, her husband, had died a few years ago.  I dialed the number on the card, and Lou Ann answered out in Tacoma, Washington.  We immediately recognized each other's voices, but agreed that if we were to meet on the street we probably wouldn't know each other.  After a quick summary of our lives since that memorable year we spent together as students and friends, she gave me Dick and Peggy's telephone number.  Dick and Peggy were also part of that learning experience in Oregon.  I called their number, and had a delightful conversation with both of them.  Yet another reason to make a trip to the Pacific Northwest this spring.  My conversations with them filled me with nostalgia and happy memories of a time in our life when Gwen and I enjoyed  a great adventure along with our young family of John and Jeanne.

I'd been thinking about something Fr. Ben said in church recently: "We can't change the past, but we can change our relationship to it." When I was studying  in Portland, I heard a lecture by a psychiatrist named George Saslow, and he said something quite similar:  "We are products of our past, not prisoners of it."  Now, what does all that mean in my life today?  Obviously, I can't change the past.  Gwen fought the cancer for as long and as hard as she could.  I cared for and loved her the best way I knew how to do.  On November 12, 2010, at 8:40 p. m. she died.  I am a product of all that and so much more, but I need not be a prisoner of it. 


 She is gone, and I am here.  In spite of the diabetes and the cancer, she enjoyed life to its fullest for as long as she could.  She was proud of and loved with all her heart each one of our children.  Her three grandchildren held a special place in her heart and life.  She cared for and about everyone she knew. That's the legacy she leaves me, and I try each day to  maintain and cherish it. Is that a change in perspective?  Is that a change in my relationship to the past?  I can best describe it as an emerging understanding.  I don't know yet where it will eventually take me.  Steve, a friend I've met in the bereavement group I attend, sent me this poem.  It is powerful and it moves me and describes so well what those of us who have lost a spouse experience every single day as we struggle with our relationship to the past:

My Eyes So Soft

Don't

Surrender

Your loneliness so quickly.

Let it cut more

Deep.

Let it ferment and season you

As few human

Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight

Has made my eyes so soft,

My voice so

Tender.

My need of God

Absolutely

Clear.

Hafiz, 14^th C. Persia

  

Someone will always be missing in my heart, dear.  Help me continue to listen to life with soft eyes.