Letters
Fr. James Aloysius Shea O’Brien, SJ passed on the 23rd of December 2023. Our memorial page for him is here. I have been writing him letters since. This is one.
To my dear friend Jim,
The thing I did yesterday took me all the hours I could sit upright and this morning left me feeling like I'd been smashed by a truck.
A very big truck.
I couldn't not do it though. I couldn't bear the thought of failing to do it.
I have a massive feeling-sense of what you went through before you stepped away from the physical plane. I feel intensely about your challenges, my own, and what so many others are enduring. That's a lot of adversity… a lot of debility… to process.
I know you know my struggle in whether it's appropriate to resent needless, wasteful damage and death.
The world isn't perfect.
We also have tremendous power in it.
And we experience the things that happen.
Also, I'm not dead yet. And a lot of my colleagues aren't dead yet.
Knowing you're not dead either, it reminds me of a few things.
It didn't feel right, you stepping away at that time. It was wrong for so many reasons. I know it wasn't your choice either.
It doesn't feel right, me making peace with stepping away from this plane now, my own self.
It would be wrong for so many reasons. It's not my choice.
And I'm not sure what will happen.
I've been writing letters to you since December in my bodily experience and only typing them since January. I think.
Each time I know I must share some part of it, I know I can't, because we're not supposed to talk about death.
To speak on it must invite further suffering and hardship, right? I don't know others' convoluted navigations of it. I know that many people are afraid to talk about it except in the most carefully sanitized ways.
"Sanitized." "Sane." There's a strange frame.
It can seem superstitious; overscrupulous. And a kind of self-harming, too, to be unable to access any relevant language for the experience.
Something understandable about the avoidance of pain… and unwise at the same time.
Yet, not entirely without basis. There's also an inherent wisdom in it.
When we haven't been taught to talk well about a powerful and challenging subject, we don't want to talk clumsily or inappropriately about it.
We do know words are magic.
But like all small and large, young and old, new or adult children on this planet… to dare practice and be gentle with one another is the only way for us to learn how to most responsibly and honorably go about it.
When someone does die, and they are spoken of… there is an undeniable energy that unfolds from those events.
The ways we know one another and remember one another are potent.
Across some incomprehensible void, still we are connected. Together of the collective; material and immaterial.
The body's recognition that life so expansively continues on outside these finite forms, it's barely verbalizable.
Peoples of the world have invented many languages for it. All full of mystery, all tarrying on or about the threshold of known reality.
The wind touches in, caressing a cheek or the soles of our feet. We cannot travel on into that ancient secret until the proper time for it.
And once we go, we cannot turn back.
Though as it turns out, and as we've found… that cusp can be broader, more viscous… more tenacious than we knew.
My dialogues with you through this past decade, for years before you departed, included so many words about that needless, wasteful damage and death; about all the people we know now being tormented.
Your presence with it heartened me. You confronted fearsome realizations, anchoring in grace and peace. When you made mistakes, you returned to try again. You steadied awareness of what we can achieve when we stay with the challenges to tend one another. Easing the way.
The vibration you held was clear and consistent. Your care and recognition for myself and my family; my colleagues and loved ones. Your respect for them and all of us. So rare in the world: Your courageous striving on their and our behalf.
And then you crossed.
Tears had already frequently been shed. And now again, and wracked with grief in deep love for our friend, we wept.
Here, the territory was different. The resonance in community relationship became a bridge between the known and unknown — even more than it had been.
Awareness deepened and expanded.
I have fought so hard for so long not to go.
Now you've gone, and yet you're still so fully present.
I don't know how to reckon with it.
I don't expect anyone really does.
Did you finish what you came to finish?
Have I finished what I've come to finish?
Are my 43 years now… and the 96 you spent in a body on this planet… arbitrary markers with little meaning as to the completeness of our missions?
I don't think any of us can know, at any moment.
We experience the things that happen.
Grief should not always only be private.
Grief is shared because love is shared; because love is something we must share.
The connectivity of grief and love, in sharing, grows and roots shared language for it. For life and for death… and for life again.
Many do not have the privilege or physical capacity to keep their grief process private… because shared love is so profoundly needed.
I have been grateful for the ways you've understood that. We're piloting through so many complex fears, discomforts, and distortions here on this planet.
And with them, miraculous blessings.
I feel for myself my own recognition and forgiveness, braving to free the grief open, sharing letters I had written to you only privately.
Sharing that love with a prayer that it can power all of us.
I've got to be brave to survive this. Chutzpah to share them. (Aren't we supposed not to talk about it?)
Maybe others will forgive me for venturing to broach the subject.
If they don't, I don't have to wonder long what you'd have said.
You were always very kind to me about all of this.
You knew something about the very core of it.
There is a song that comes through the murk and struggle. The remembrance is a familiar refrain.
What powers of life do live within experiences of death!
A surge, a miracle, in the desire to exclaim it.
What we choose to express, when we experience what happens, carries us forward through it.
How do we bring ourselves to the practice of saying what we know must be said?
…especially when we know our words are magic?
What nourishes?
What strengthens?
Where do we find the trust we build in ourselves, for ourselves, so that we can prevail through impossible circumstance… to begin to build that trust with one another?
And compound true care and beauty in the world together?
I wonder if you knew you were teaching me so much about this.
Love to you, Jim.
Thank you for the conversation.
I am feeling the draw to death these past days and I am also feeling the joy of being alive and I acknowledge myself as no where as close to that edge as I imagine you are. A lovely float on the lake yesterday watching the light make turtle shell cymatics on the bottom of the lake. I wanted to be on the water and fill my eyes with it after a blistering attack of ripping, rending, rage in the morning followed by a full on ugly cry. I didn't realize I would bump into people I know at the beach and have to socialize a bit, experience the awkward divide and feel conquered by it some more. What do you say to someone mourning their young boys growing into their masculinity. "Don't worry, if you got them vaccinated they're pretty much neutered by now anyway?"
Charlie towed me on my paddleboard behind him on his , as I flopped diagonally across the board, toes trailing in the water on one side, hat brim and elbows dipping on the other, feeling the water on my board through my body. I was deeply content and refreshed. And still in and out of a major episode of "I'd rather not be here; I'd rather not do this anymore." at not quite the same time...but squeezing in on it.
It is a confusing juxtaposition leading into a "what's wrong with me", exposition. There's a feeling of giving up that's way more sucky than surrender and very strong all the same. I feel invited to do violence, inclined to self destruct and very motivated to give up. And perhaps it's time to give up. Give up all the ways and all the time and all the money and all the effort and all the self abandonment I seem to believe is required in order to be worthy of anyone's time or attention, to be of service to the world based on the belief that I need to earn a place at the table or I'm not worth the air I breathe.
I'm out of breath, I've never been much of an earner and I'm ready to take an axe to the table. I feel like I'm drowning in all the expression I have not allowed to pass my lips lest I do harm.
How does crying about the harm being done help? How does not crying about the harm being done not help? How does crying about the harm being done, not help? How does not crying about the harm help? Is the suffering I'm experiencing evidence of my own disfunction, am I displaying my loyalty to the victim flag or being a healthy human with valid emotional experiences and expression. I'm so angry and full of rage I'm shitting on the beauty I'm creating. How does shitting on the beauty I'm creating help or hurt? Maybe it just offers a more robust scent, flavour and visual that enables me to feel connected to something in a world of negation and corruption.