The Costs of a Life Denied

[N.B. – I tend to pay attention to my dreams. I believe the unconscious always has something to tell us that we need to know. Dreaming is an important way that it communicates with us.

I often record and reflect on my dreams. But I am particularly attuned to the voice that often whispers in my ear upon my awakening. It is those messages with which I often begin my day in reflection.

Early this week, I awoke with the following in my head and on my heart. It comes in the wake of a painful funeral for a dear friend. The voice was insistent: “Write it down!” And so I have.]

What are the costs of a life in its fullness denied, a life in which bitter grief must be constantly swallowed, in ever increasing, toxic doses, a life in which one’s very soul must be betrayed, over and over? What is the loss to the world of a life rejected, of a human being required to live a lie, to manufacture a life on the terms of others, inevitably at the cost to one’s most precious truths, indeed at the expense of one's very soul?

When tender souls are forced onto Procrustean Beds, where the parts that don’t fit the demands of the petty tyrants of the world are amputated with blunt axes of disapproval, disaffirmation, delegitimization, leaving bloody wounds which never really heal - what happens to the parts that are cut off?

Do they simply atrophy, drying up to blow away as if they never existed? Or do they slip deep within, deep below the surface, hiding behind smiling faces which can safely be shown in public, and there bide their time until they can no longer be held in the prisons of repression to which they were confined? What happens to those rarely whispered secrets of loves denied, dreams lost, lives rejected?   

Do they spring themselves upon these wounded heroes carrying dark secrets in deadly forms? Do they unexpectedly come up for air, erupting to the surface in behaviors almost immediately regretted, in systematic self-harm that over a time takes a toll? Do they return in the form of heart attacks which seem to come from nowhere, in massive strokes which immobilize even the socially acceptable façade we have been living, in dark cancerous tumors of internalized grief which eat us alive from the inside out?

When the end comes, at their funerals, are the secrets really ever kept? Is the shame they bore for so long isolated solely to its bearer with no sense of wrongdoing on the part of those who shamed them? Do the preachers pretend that the cirrhotic elephants in the room do not exist?

Do their words serve their own interests, pitching theological obscurities and vague words of reassurance which are ultimately almost always words of self-affirmation, while avoiding at all costs the actual human life that has been sacrificed on the altar of social respectability? Will there be generalized eulogies, self-serving assertions cast in tribal salvation schema - pitches for afterlives conditioned upon the buying into group think - schema which insensitive officiants inflict upon the grieving without their permission?

And when all is completed, the last amen said, the final hymn sung, the urn bearing the ashes processed down the central aisle, will those who came out of social obligation to pay respects never afforded in person to the human being they never really knew head to the obligatory receptions? Will those whose demands these now ended lives were always required to serve say to one another, “I had no idea s/he was in such pain. I never knew.”

Of course, it is a confabulation that all willingly share. Because they did know. They were there from the inception of this pathology that swallowed up this life in its fullness, a fullness they could not handle, a fullness their own well-proscribed, socially acceptable lives of ethical mediocrity resented. And so they systematically killed that which their own limitations could not handle in their sacrificial victim as best they could, putting him, putting her - but most importantly putting them - out of their misery.

Over finger foods and punch they will assuage their consciences, blaming the victim, ascribing moral weakness to a life that was heroically lived on terms foreign to its own nature, a life within which waged an internal war in which only Thanatos could ultimately prove victorious.  They would never know that the ocean of booze, the mountain of pills and the endless plates of food gulped down was simply the cost of keeping an army of demons at bay, angry demons spawned by a life in its fullness denied, gifts rejected, demons that would eventually demand their due.

After the last shrimp has been consumed, the last glass of tepid punch drunk, the last carefully considered greeting exchanged, they will sign the book that closes yet another completed transaction, completing that final chapter of their history.

Then they will depart.

They will walk away consciously denying the heroic struggle that has just ended, a life that dealt with more pain than most will ever know, a hero whose courage dwarfs their own existential mediocrity. They will not think too long about the jagged wounds in the lives of the families of blood and families of choice left behind. They will simply walk away to resume lives that in many ways are already far more dead than the ashes just carried from the sanctuary for internment.

  

Post Scriptum

Writing is the means by which those of us who pour out our souls on paper come to grips with our anger and - if we patiently wait long enough - embrace our deep grief. Writing is the means by which we seek healing, the surrendering of burdens we have carried all of our lives. Writing is how we reclaim our own humanity, our own lives denied.

Writing is the means by which we admit to the injuries that caused those deep wounds and left ugly scars on our souls. Writing is the place where we take off the party gloves, pull no punches, refuse to honor polite pretenses, perpetuate no more lies of convenience.

Writing is how we let go. 

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 © Harry Coverston 2019

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