Photo by Lopolo

Published June 14, 2015

About a week ago, a friend and I were talking about feelings, and how difficult they can be to embrace. It’s hard to let them simply be, and we think we have to do something about them, or wait for them to disappear, never to return.

These are thoughts we have about what we perceive as negative feelings; it’s never the ones that bring us joy. We’re glad to keep those, and we invite them to return often. We search for new ways to bring them back to us.

The conversation prompted me to think about something that happened years ago when a small group celebrated my grandmother’s birthday. She was well into her 80s, and although we didn’t know it at the time, she had only a short time left to live. When we gathered to sing to her around a cake with candles burning, she started crying and talking about visions she had of a daughter who had died many years before, 15 months after her birth. The atmosphere in the room sharply shifted. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath, and not like a person who is about to blow out candles on a birthday cake.

“Those are tears of joy!” her daughter, my mother, said with all the force of wishing it so.

Someone else said something I later described in my writing as equally in denial. Looking back, I don’t know if that’s the best way to describe it, but it was obvious the moment was too real for some in the room. They found a way to will the momentum in a more comfortable direction, and that was that. Those feelings were put away, and I never saw them again.

I was angry at the time, but I never said anything. Here was this woman, who was a knot of life experience, pain, scars, and who knows what else, who was all balled up into herself for as long as I’d known her, and now she was letting some of the knots loosen, some of the emotion out, and we just couldn’t let her. I wonder where she went with that.

I’ve wondered often, since then, how much of her is in me.

Five years earlier, when she could still go for a short walk, to get at least some exercise, she’d move slowly along the sidewalk, seeming to me to be almost spectral, an apparition. To myself and to my then-wife, I named that apparition The Tragic Cajun Woman, a term I used more endearingly than one might think. She had a hard life. She lost a 15-month-old child to illness. She lost a husband to mental illness. She worked hard, as did her children, picking cotton in the summer in the unrelenting heat and humidity of south Louisiana.

What did I know about a hard life? Compared to her, nothing. One day she was in the car when my mom picked me up at my high school, and it was obvious I was in a bad mood. My grandmother asked me if it was about a girl. I can’t remember what I said, but I remember her answer, in form and function.

“Life is a fight,” she barked, nearly grunting and spitting the words to me, as if every bit of physical energy she could muster to deliver the words would help them sink in. “You have to keep fighting.”

Wow. That doesn’t sound like much fun, I thought.

When we’re young and naive and spoiled, and blissfully unaware of being all of that, we miss so much of the value in the wisdom of experience, from those who have lived and seen what we have not. When I was 20, attending seminary, I slept that first night on the old bed in my room, a thin mattress between me and the hardwood base. In line in the refectory the next day for lunch, I told the person in front of me how uncomfortable I’d been trying to sleep.

“You’ve never been uncomfortable a day in your life,” a monk who was passing by at the time said to me, catching me off guard.

Of course, he was right. And so was my grandmother, The Tragic Cajun Woman, a few years earlier when she told me that life is a fight. Sometimes the fight is against our feelings. Sometimes the struggle is against fighting our feelings.

In the times when I’ve wondered why I’m in my head so much, and why I have such a hard time leaving it, I’ve asked myself whether I’m afraid to feel, or just so good at it when I do, I fear I’ll never leave <em>that</em> place?

Remembering that birthday party in the mid-1990s, I recognize and am embarrassed by how judgmental I was of others over their reactions to my grandmother’s outpouring of feelings. That day, I was in a state of awareness that’s hard to describe, yet I can find the words to say I was comfortable with being in the moment, even if that moment was becoming more uncomfortable with each passing second. I was ready for the flood of feelings, perhaps craving it in some way after years of being conditioned to knowing they were safely bottled.

Not everyone, I think, is at that place at the same time. Truer still, I’ve had far more moments of pushing down the feelings than I’ve had of letting them be. What I felt that day, the readiness for whatever might come, was the exception, not the norm. It occurs to me now that I’d been primed for it by a wonderful teacher in the ways of mindfulness, a grounded soul whose lessons were taking root, even if I hadn’t been fully aware of that taking place. If there was frustration and anger in me over the lack of letting go in the room, the fear of allowing my grandmother to express her emotions and not have them mislabeled or shoved aside, it no doubt owed greatly to the part of me that was acutely rebelling against my own denial, and perhaps against the way the world is our co-conspirator in that art. In fact, it is often our leader. There are whole industries based on helping us push away our feelings and keep them at bay as long as we can.

My friend and I surely will return to the topic of feelings soon enough. I wonder if I’ll react the way I did before, initially engaging on an authentic level of empathy, and then switching to humor to take the conversation to another place. I told her about a comedian whose act I saw decades ago. Ron Crick played guitar for much of his best material, and he caught the audience by surprise when he played a perfect “Stairway to Heaven” intro. About 50 seconds in, when the final chord before the lyrics lingers, suspended in time until we hear “There’s a lady who’s sure …,” instead of singing those words, Crick unexpectedly sang, “Feelings.”

You know, from that song. The first word. “Feelings …”

Try it. Play the first 50 seconds of “Stairway to Heaven,” and then just before the words begin, mute the volume and sing, “Feelings …”

It made my friend laugh, and that’s a good feeling. In my expert way of over-thinking things, though, I wonder if that was simply my own way of shoving aside a serious conversation about feelings by using humor. I’m at some kind of Ninja level with that, let me tell you, and I can show you the teachers’ comments on my report grades from grade school as evidence that I was adept at an early age.

Because of that conversation with my friend, I’m thinking about my grandmother more, and about the things we had in common that I wasn’t aware of when I was young and naive and unaware of just how much you have to keep fighting in this life.

I’ll reconnect with my friend soon and check on her. Whatever she is feeling today, I hope she is at peace with it, and I’m unapologetic about hoping it’s a good feeling. Even if it’s not, it’s my wish that she’ll accept it as part of who she is, a warm, gentle, sharing friend with a soul that nurtures and nudges and gifts at its own speed, and in ways I hope she knows probably owe much to those pesky feelings of hers.